Podcast host and UFC commentator Joe Rogan recently shared a video on his Instagram story that appeared to feature the late George Carlin delivering a monologue on identity, ideology, and the human tendency toward willful ignorance.
Carlin passed away in 2008, and the clip was almost certainly generated by artificial intelligence.
The video, which circulated quickly among fans of both Rogan and the legendary comedian, featured a voice bearing a striking resemblance to Carlin. In it, the AI-crafted persona tears into the psychology of people who wrap their entire sense of self around their belief systems.
“When your identity is your ideology, congratulations, you’ve officially screwed yourself,” the figure declares in the clip. “Because now it’s not just an idea, now it’s you. And when the idea gets challenged, you don’t hear disagreement, you hear an attack.”
The persona continues: “So what do you do? You build a bubble. A nice, soft, padded little bubble where everyone agrees with you, uses the same words, hat es the same people, and claps at the exact right moments. And you will defend that bubble at all costs, even if it makes you sound incredibly stu pid.”
“Facts don’t matter anymore. Logic’s gone. Humor? De ad,” the persona says. “Because admitting you’re wrong would mean admitting you are wrong, and that’s unacceptable. So you double down. Louder, angrier, dumber. And that’s how you end up defending nonsense like it’s sacred scripture. Not because it’s true, but because without it, you’d have to actually develop a personality.”
The alleged AI video is convincing enough that many viewers accepted it at face value. Rogan, who posted the clip without apparent skepticism, seems to have been among them.
The moment carries a particular irony given that Rogan has spent considerable time on his podcast warning audiences about precisely the kind of technology capable of producing this content.
During a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience alongside guest Evan Hafer, Rogan offered an increasingly alarmed account of where he believes artificial intelligence is heading.
“I think this is going to be the kind of astronomical change that has literally never taken place in civilization before,” Rogan said during the episode. “I don’t think it’s ever taken place at this level. I think it’s the invention of the internet times a million. I think it’s going to change everything.”
Rogan referenced an article by Matt Schumer, a writer departing an AI company, who compared the present moment to the earliest days of a global crisis that most people hadn’t yet grasped.
“He’s talking about how no one understands it. And the way this is going to change people is, he goes, this is very similar to the time where people were hearing stories about ‘Oh, there’s a virus in China.’ But no one knew exactly what was going to happen, how it was going to literally change humanity, change history,” Rogan explained.
He went on to describe the pace of AI development in terms most people would find difficult to process, discussing how one generation of the technology has already been used to build a more capable successor.
Rogan stated, “They had ChatGPT make a better version of itself. And they made this better version of itself. And this better version of itself can think things out. It doesn’t just do what you ask it to do. It thinks things out. It calculates. It makes apps instantaneously that would take developers months and months.”
Rogan himself seemed to acknowledge the gap between public awareness and the reality of what these systems can now do. “I know that most people that you run into on the street are completely ignorant. They think, ‘Oh, ChatGPT is fun. I ask you questions. It’s so much better than Google.’ I don’t think they know. I think unless you’re going on a deep dive, all this stuff is kind of esoteric,” he said.
