The Joe Rogan Crowd Is Still a Public Health Threat

On Joe Rogan’s podcast today, the comedian Ron White revealed that in the last several weeks he performed two shows—one in Las Vegas, the other at Rogan’s club in Austin—while actively sick with Covid. Not only was he sick, he said, but he was sicker than he’d ever been, and spent the days after the Austin show puking his guts out. Even so, he spoke derisively about the doctor who insisted on testing him for Covid and then urged him not to do the shows. It’s 2025, after all; as Rogan says, Covid is just a little baby cold.

Find their conversation below. Particularly notable to me is the little dance Rogan plays, where he first says that Covid is bullshit, and then, upon hearing White describe his “brutal” experience with the virus, suggests that it must have been more than just Covid. I would usually contextualize this sort of thing with an argument about how Covid is still a nasty virus that can do serious damage, but thankfully White does this work for me. “My girlfriend raised two kids and she said she's never seen anybody puke as much as I did for two days,” he says. “It was fucking awful.” 

I will contextualize this segment, however, with the respective seating capacities at the venues where White performed: 3,200 at the The Chelsea in Vegas, 250 at the Fat Man, the room in the Comedy Mothership where Kill Tony records. That’s a lot of exposures to a virus that’s still killing people. Perhaps it’s still worth exercising some very baseline precautions, such as not performing for live audiences when you’re literally infectious. 

Keep reading afterward for Shane Gillis’s take on Trump’s tariffs. A little preview: he’s for them.

White: I’m feeling good finally. After my little bout with fucking Covid. 

Rogan: They got you. They got you with the new Covid. 

White: They got me with the new Covid. 

Rogan: I thought the new Covid was total bullshit. I thought it was like a baby cold. 

White: I had—my girlfriend raised two kids and she said she's never seen anybody puke as much as I did for two days. 

Rogan: Wow. 

White: And it was brutal. It was just bile and I don't even know if I've ever been that sick. [Unintelligible] that part of it a couple of days. 

Rogan: That's interesting. I wonder if you got multiple things at the same time. Do people usually puke a lot if they get Covid? Jamie, do you know? 

Jamie: I don't remember that being a symptom. 

Rogan: I don't remember having that either. You might've had a couple things at the same time. Because there was a bad flu going around too. 

White: Well, I went to Vegas early and I just thought I had a cold when I went and my doctor here gave me a shot of steroids and I felt way fucking better. I mean, I felt better everywhere. I was more flexible. I was like, fuck, I want to do steroids every goddamn day.

Rogan: What kind of steroid was it? 

White: I don't know. But whatever it was, man, I could touch the floor without bending my knees, without stretching at all. 

Rogan: Cortisone shot? 

White: I don't know. She said steroid and she gave it to me. I don't ask a lot of questions. 

Rogan: So you just felt loose? 

White: I felt loose and good. I played really good golf and then I got there and it started catching up with me. I had my girlfriend, I'm staying in the mansion down at MGM Grand, which is pretty sweet. I had that show just on Saturday. we got there on Wednesday and I'm like, "fuck it, I'm not going to make it." I felt it all starting to deteriorate. So I called this doctor—

Rogan: God, it was so bad you didn't think you were going to make it on Saturday?

White: I thought I would need another shot of steroids. So I called the doctor, had the hotel call a doctor, and I thought I was getting the doctor that was whatever it takes to get through the show. But that's not the doctor I got. The doctor I got was, "Let's test you for Covid." I'm like, "No, no, I don't have Covid." He said, "I won't charge you if it's negative," which didn't make any sense to me. And I said, "well, okay." 

And then it came up positive for Covid and he said, "see there, the T and the X and the thing?" And I said, "yeah, I see it. Let's do it again because I don't think I have Covid." So we did it again. Came up positive again. Not only would he not give me the Covid shot, he told me to quit taking the antibiotics I was already on and he did nothing except for call the CDC to tell them I had Covid. And they both said, "You cannot do the show." I'm like, "Wait a minute, you're the wrong doctor. I don't want the fucking 'retire today' shit, I want the "your drummer's a junkie, he's out of heroin. get him some fucking something to get him through this goddamn show.'"

Rogan: So they were telling you you can't do the show because you had a specific kind of a cold, a Covid cold. So if you had the flu, would he have stopped you from doing the show? 

White: I'd say absolutely not. 

Rogan: That's so weird. I don't think it would even come up. That's so weird because right now the deaths from Covid now are so low. The idea that this is still a pandemic and they still have to treat it differently than they do a cold. 

White: They do.

Rogan: Why?

White: Well, I was faced with, do I cancel a show? Well, that's not the same as St. Louis when they just moved the date and the people from St. Louis come back. This is Las Vegas. A lot of those people come specifically to see me because I don't do all those shows that I used to do. So if you want to come see it and that's a good place. And so it's a problem. It's a refund. You got to refund 'em all because those people are going to going to be there. 

Rogan: And they're bummed out. Most importantly, your fans are bummed out. 

White: Yeah, I've disappointed them. Everybody's here. Fuck, let's do the show. So I was just sitting there, I didn't know what to do. So I'm like, well, I'm just going to call MGM Grand and tell 'em what the fuck's going on. Let it be their call. And they were like, "so how do you feel?" I'm like, "I feel like I can make it through the show." And they're like, "well, I say, let's just go ahead and do it. It's a big room. You're not within six feet of anybody."

Rogan: It's 2025. 

White: It's 2025. 

Rogan: If you told me—you had did tell me you had Covid, and I gave you a big hug on Monday. I saw you on Monday when we did Kill Tony. 

White: Right. And that was fine.

Rogan: [Joking] You were a super spreader on Kill Tony. You son of a bitch. 

White: Big time. I'm an asshole. The biggest asshole ever. It would be so horrible—

Rogan: Nobody got sick! Nobody got sick.

White: I know. Nobody did. It's fucking—it wasn't until the next day that I got sick, that's when the vomiting started. Wasn't in Vegas. It was day two. It was Tuesday after Kill Tony. That's when I got sick. And it was fucking awful. I mean, for two days. Just awful. 

Rogan: Did you get another steroid shot? 

White: No. Nobody would give me one.

In a Patreon-exclusive episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast released earlier today, Shane Gillis makes an emotional if perhaps ill-timed case for a trade war with China. What can I even add? It’s no coincidence that he has a good Trump impression, nor that he uses it to say all the awful things he’s not supposed to say out of character. The guy is an out-and-out Trumpist, with all the clumsily reverse-engineered policy opinions and and racism-disguised-as-protectionism we’ve come to know and love from Trump supporters who don’t want the social stigma of being Trump supporters. Which doesn’t matter and isn’t worthy of critique, of course, because he’s just a comedian, which is why he devoted a lengthy section of his podcast to arguing for tariffs. Enjoy:

Gillis: I don't understand what the—I literally—look, maybe the tariffs are really bad. I don't know enough about any of it, but when I find out we're not even matching what other countries have already been doing to us. I don't understand how it can be bad. And best case is they get our tariff—when we put our tariffs out, they go, "oh fuck, here, we'll lower ours, just take yours off." Great. I can't figure out what the issue is. 

Matt McCusker: Yeah. The thing they're saying is it's going to make everything more expensive. 

LeMaire Lee (producer): Maybe they were like legacy deal tariffs. I don't know if— 

McCusker: We talking grandfathered in? 

Lee: I don't know anything about the old tariffs, but I know stuff, I've been paying little, I've been looking at the new tariffs on YouTube and stuff. 

McCusker: I'm all for mixing it up. It's like, let's just see what happens. Apparently the midterms are pretty soon, so they're trying to—

Lee: For the Senate? I think the Senate election is next year.

McCusker: Yeah. But I think they're hoping that it'll have a positive effect before that so that they won't get crushed in the midterms. 

Lee: Yeah. 

McCusker: So I'm down, I think we should do cool experiments, dude, I don't see what the fucking—

Gillis: I also don't even think it's a cool experiment. Just going, "dude, if you have a 50% tariff on us, we're gonna just do 25. See how you like it." And then maybe you go, "alright, we'll do less than 50," and we'll go, "alright, we'll get rid of ours, you get rid of yours." I don't understand—I don't get it.

McCusker: I don't understand when people call, they go, it's idiotic.  That's the thing I don't understand. People go, it's idiotic. It's like, why?

Lee: I don't think that's it though. That's not it. 

Gillis: It is it. 

Lee: No, that's not it. 

Gillis: I don't even think we've matched another country's tariffs. 

Lee: Well, we have 104% tariff on China. I don't know if that fucking—

McCusker: So motherfucking what? I think the idea is to put some pressure, I mean, again, people are going to say it's just so companies have to come to him and then blah, blah, blah. But then it's like, dude, what if we start making happy meal toys here? 

Lee: But why would they come here when they already have other things established everywhere else and it's already cheaper to make it there?

Gillis: Because there's no incentive until we give them incentive. 

Lee: We're just not going to have shit. 

Gillis: Okay. So that's this idea that I've also been running into where people are like, "yeah, America just doesn't make shit anymore." Do you know why we don't make shit anymore? Because of these types of tariffs. It's cheaper to use slave labor in another country than make it here. Which is why so many people in this country don't have a real fucking job, including us. You know what I mean? Nobody has a fucking job anymore. We're from Pennsylvania. That used to be where everything got made. And then we outsourced everything. And now you go around and everyone's just doing heroin in a shitty town. And that's fine? 

Lee: No. 

Gillis: So what do you want to do about it? 

Lee: I don't think tariffs is the way. 

Gillis: What is the way then? How are we going to bring manufacturing back to this country if we can't financially incentivize anyone to do that? You think people are just gonna, out of goodwill, be like, yeah, let's fire up the steel factories. 

Lee: I see what you're saying. I hear you. 

Gillis: If it costs just as much to make it in China as it does here, we're gonna have to make it here. We need to gain independence on manufacturing. We have to have it. Especially if they're gonna take Taiwan and they're going to take our precious chips and we got to make some fucking steel. We're gonna have to start making stuff here. 

Lee: We have a hundred billion dollar deal with Taiwan. 

Gillis: Yeah, deals hold up in wars. 

McCusker: Yeah. I'm all for it. I think it's a cool experiment. It's like, let's see what's up. See what happens. 

Gillis: I don't know. The same people that have been complaining that the global economy and “the system is fucked up” all of a sudden are diehards for the system that love the system and wish we kept it. And I don't understand that either. 

McCusker: Yeah. I saw a thing on Thomas Sowell saying that— 

Lee: Well, this is like, you ever been used to something and you're like, wait, I, I'm not ready for it to change 

McCusker: You didn't even know there was tariffs. I didn't know there was tariffs. 

Lee: I know. 

McCusker: How are you used to if you're not even didn't know— 

Lee: Because they exist. 

Gillis: So wait, we're just saying because we're already getting fucked by these other countries, we should just keep getting fucked by them?

Lee: I don't think we're getting fucked by the other countries. I think at first the tariffs were helping them, but then there was a point where everyone became more equal. Like, financially.

McCusker: What? It's not even close, bro. The GDPs are not, it's not even close. We're dominating. We're dominating China, bro. Been dominating China. 

The new season of Gillis's sitcom Tires premieres on Netflix next month.