Joe Rogan Experience #1877 - Jann Wenner

(drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) Thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you've done.

Thank you.

You have been a part of some wild changes in this country, my friend.

Well, I think... I start my life, my book out at a time in the '50s in the Eisenhower era where none of all of this, what we see today was conceivable. I mean, let alone carrying around telephones in your pocket or being able to talk to people, you know, on your wristwatch. But I came along in the '50s with the post-war baby boom, and it was the largest population cohort in American history and it became the most educated, the best educated, and also the wealthiest because America was going through this great boom of... financial boom after winning the war. Uh, and when we came of age in the early '60s, when people my... I turned 21 in whenever it was, (laughs) -

(laughs)

... mid '60s. So, I mean, um, as we grew up, we kind of discovered that America wasn't what we... they told us it was gonna be. You know, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which I believed in deeply, they didn't... it wasn't that way, you know. In fact, first off, we were running this segregation system, Jim Crow. I mean, Blacks, people, human beings were kept in the most worst circumstances and it was an outrage to see that. And then all these other things started to become apparent, the hypocrisy of the society we were in, and that's the stuff that Dylan was writing about. And boom, boom, boom, all of a sudden we're in a war. Our young, beautiful president is assassinated. Uh, the, the dreams we were told, the American dream, weren't quite true. We were... So, it created this crucible which made us further an even more unusual generation. I mean, a generation raised, unfortunately, to not trust the government and to think the government's doing wrong in Vietnam and all these things. It was disillusioning. So that's how we grew up and it made us more rebellious than ever, uh, and more skeptical, and in a certain way, deeply committed to human justice and human rights and, and to caring for people, and the things that I think became the dominant themes of my generation. And music, that desire to do good in the world, to make the world a better place.

It was a giant change in culture. I think the change in culture in the 1960s was, was one of the greatest changes in, in human history and such a shift from the '50s to the '60s. I mean, you know, I always... I attribute it to a lot of things, uh, the Vietnam era, uh, for sure the war, like, galvanized a lot of people to understand the dangers of not understanding really what's going on with, with the government and what, what the country's really all about. But also psychedelic drugs, which is really a huge part of it.