Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers need to walk around with a disclaimer at all times

For the hoteps of all races and ethnicities, Saturday was a great day. The day when finally an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience was released with Aaron Rodgers as the guest. In recent years, Rodgers has been on some type of quest to discover the meaning of life. We’re all looking for clarity to life’s unanswered questions, but it has been quite a ride to watch Rodgers become the spiritual advisor that one of your high school buddies latched onto at a kegger while you were at college.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, people like Rodgers always had good weed, an awesome bong, and all the seasons of “That 70s Show” and “Family Guy” on DVD. Their theories on how the powers that be have pulled the wool over your eyes and turned you into a drone made sense just long enough to get a happy feeling in your chest and a craving for the nearest drive thru.

When Rodgers mentioned last year on “The Pat McAfee Show” that Rogan provided him counsel about how to deal with COVID, it was only a matter of time before Rodgers ended up in the former Fear Factor host’s podcast studio.

I was disappointed from the start with Rodgers and Rogan. They were smoking cigars. Rodgers has already been open about his experience with ayahuasca during the offseason. Really Rodgers, you’re going to be public about indulging in psychedelics and then not smoke weed on a podcast in which that’s half the point, knowing that the NFL doesn’t test out of season. Either spark up a blunt or don’t, but cigars as a replacement, what a poser.

Rodgers has not received the COVID vaccine. When he tested positive for the virus last season, people went back to his comments when he’d been asked about the vaccine that summer and realized that he was less than forthright. He said that he had been “immunized,” and admitted both on McAfee’s podcast and now Rogan’s that he was going to let that word ride as long as he wasn’t pressed any further.

Being that Rodgers has said he took Rogan’s advice seriously about ivermectin as a legitimate medical source, of course their discussion would be interesting even though it needed a disclaimer that stated, “anything taken as fact that is discussed in this episode will be done so at listeners’ peril.”

That’s not to say Rodgers and Rogan failed to make any cogent point. They talked for three hours. I do understand why they’re hesitant to take the United States government at its word, especially when it comes to medicine. The government is absolutely culpable in the opioid crisis. American doctors prescribed way more opioid-strength pain medication than they should have and started a crack-cocaine type epidemic in which mainstream America believed those drug-addicted faces to be a bit more friendly than the ones from the Bronx and South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s.

I fully understand not always taking what the government says at face value, but as tragic as the opioid crisis has been, according to the CDC from 1999-2019, 500,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses, and per the same organization, over one million Americans have died from COVID in about ¼ of that amount of time.

COVID is not the result of addiction, it is an airborne pandemic. We watched “I am Legend” and played “Resident Evil” before it became a movie. The COVID pandemic did not wipe out the planet in the same way those fictional ones did, but it has resulted in the death of nearly six-and-a-half million people worldwide. It was a collection of the best scientists in the world that put their heads together to make these vaccines and be called “Miracle Workers” by Time Magazine.

Yet Rogan and Rodgers want to discuss “vaccine injuries,” and “comorbidities” — a term in which there is no consensus of an exact definition according to the National Library of Medicine. They both erroneously claimed during the episode that the public was led to believe that once vaccinated against COVID it was impossible to contract or spread the virus.

Rogan even spoke positively about a previous guest on his podcast, Dr. Peter McCullough, who has promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in lieu of the COVID vaccine, even though the FDA has stated that neither treatment is effective.

It’s more than halfway through 2022, and Rogan, who once claimed that he’s a “fucking moron” when pressed by the White House about some of his statements about vaccines, is still championing COVID treatments that go against real scientists who put together the vaccine that has drastically slowed down the death rate of a catastrophic disease.

For those, who like me, remember those simple pothead discussions of decades past, this podcast is at times a fun listen. Still, while enjoyable, it’s littered with misinformation. That misinformation doesn’t matter while watching a rerun of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis playing hard to get with each other, but when making a judgment on how to deal with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, one would hope two influential personalities would speak just a little bit more responsibly.