On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan talked about the idea that nicotine, and even cigarette smoking itself, might not be all that bad for you.
It started with Rogan dismissing the science around nicotine a*diction. “I think it’s highly genetic,” he said. “I think a*diction is very genetic because people keep telling me that cigarettes are a*dictive and that nicotine is a*dictive.”
That framing, genetic exceptionalism as a reason to wave away public health consensus, is a long-running rhetorical tool used to discourage people from taking nicotine dependence seriously. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is unambiguous: nicotine is one of the most ad*ictive elements known, regardless of genetic variation.
Rogan then told his guest he had texted someone saying “It’s time to start smoking again,” before reading aloud from a summary of cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Steven Gundry’s widely criticized claims.
The summary described Gundry arguing that “smoking, specifically nicotine, can have real benefits when paired with the right lifestyle,” that in parts of Sardinia “95% of men smoke and live longer than the women,” and that “nicotine acts as a powerful mitochondrial uncoupler.”
Rogan’s response to the expert criticism cited in that same summary was to dismiss it outright: “They’re not taking into consideration what he said about food.”
The experts he was brushing aside have noted that cherry-picking long-lived smokers from blue zone populations without controlling for diet, physical activity, genetics, or social cohesion is not science.
Rogan continued. “I think there’s something to nicotine,” he said, before later adding, “They have nootropic benefits like they do enhance your cognitive performance. Nicotine does. And there are a lot of people that swear by them like for creativity and stuff.”
He cited Stephen King, claiming the author “had a really hard time like getting his synapses to fire the same way” after quitting. While nicotine has shown modest short-term effects on attention in some studies, those effects are largely a correction of withdrawal symptoms in regular users, not a net cognitive gain for new ones.
Brian Simpson had a heart attack three months before this conversation. He noted, almost in passing, that quitting cigarettes was easy because of it. That admission sat awkwardly alongside an extended segment defending smoking, an irony that seemed to go completely unnoticed by Rogan.
