Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis Admitted What Big Tech Really Took From Young Men

Joe Rogan still talks about a night in Belfast around 2007 when nobody in the room owned a smartphone.

Now Rogan and comedian Shane Gillis say American men can never get that feeling back unless they log off.

The two comedians think Silicon Valley already took something from young men that no software update can restore.

Rogan Remembers a Night Nobody Filmed

Rogan told the story on his own podcast, sitting with Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir.

He described a bar in Belfast around 2007, before a single person in the room owned a smartphone.

Nobody was filming.

Nobody was checking likes between rounds.

Rogan said people just talked, laughed, and lived in the room instead of narrating it for strangers online.

"Phones ruined everything in terms of like, people's connection with each other," Rogan said.

Mark Normand piled on with a line that landed harder than any punchline that night.

"Cameras have ruined young people," Normand said, adding that young people simply "can't cut loose" anymore.

That is not nostalgia talking.

That is two grown men watching an entire generation of young guys forget how to be in a room with each other.

Gillis Says Scrolling Physically Makes Him Feel Sick

Rogan has made his own fix sound like discipline.

He told the guys he finally decided "enough is enough" and walked away from the doom scroll for good.

Shane Gillis described something rawer.

Gillis said he cannot force himself to scroll because it "genuinely makes me feel bad."

That is not a lifestyle choice.

That is a warning label.

A guy who built his entire career riffing in front of cameras is telling you the algorithm itself makes him sick.

Rogan's fix is even more old school than a rerun.

He is pushing flip phones as the ceiling, not the floor, for how much technology a man needs in his pocket.

The Media Would Rather Blame Guys Like Rogan Than the Phone Itself

For years the same outlets that ignore smartphone addiction have run entire pieces blaming "the manosphere" for what is happening to young men.

Podcasters and online personalities get the blame column.

The device in every teenager's pocket, built by engineers a few hundred miles from those same newsrooms, gets a pass.

Here is the part those outlets never print: the men who built that device do not let their own kids near it.

Silicon Valley executives have quietly banned smartphones and tablets in their own households for years, well past the age they hand identical devices to your kid through an app store.

They engineered a product to be habit forming, sold it to every household in America, and let a friendly press blame Joe Rogan for the fallout instead of the boardrooms that built it.

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Rogan and Gillis are describing the actual disease.

The manosphere panic pieces are a distraction from it.

The Flip Phone Comeback Is Already Here

Rogan and Gillis are not shouting into an empty room.

Gen Z is already ditching smartphones for flip phones in numbers nobody predicted two years ago.

Sales of retro dumbphones have climbed as young adults describe smartphones as something closer to an addiction than a tool.

Researcher Jonathan Haidt has spent years tracking the same pattern from the other direction, tying a spike in teen anxiety and isolation directly to the smartphone era.

Haidt's data lines up with what Rogan and Gillis are describing from a bar stool instead of a lab.

Young men are not weak for feeling wrecked by their phones.

They are reacting exactly the way the research says a normal brain reacts to a device built to hijack it.

Why This One Hits Different Than the Usual Phone Lecture

Every parent in America has already told their son to get off his phone.

That lecture rolls off a teenager like water off a duck.

Rogan and Gillis are not parents lecturing from the couch.

They are two of the most successful men in comedy telling other men the phone itself is the thing standing between them and an actual life.

That is a message a twenty-two-year-old will actually sit with.

Young men already trust these two more than they trust a surgeon general's warning label or a tech executive's apology tour.

Real masculinity was never about a highlight reel.

It was about showing up in a room, saying something funny, and not needing forty strangers to confirm it happened.

Rogan found it standing in a bar in Belfast years ago.

Gillis found it by accident when his own brain rejected the algorithm.

Every young man reading this already has a version of that same night buried somewhere in his own memory, back before he needed a phone to prove he was having fun.

Every young man reading this also probably shares the same reservations Rogan discussed about the establishment narrative on the Charlie Kirk murder case in another part of his conversation with Gillis, Normand, and Shaffir.

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Rogan, like a host of conservatives is “leaning towards Candace Owens… Whatever the spin is about Tyler Robinson, there’s some bullsh*t to it.”

That’s something you won’t hear on Fox News but if you’re fortunate enough to have a conservative grandson, or grandchildren at all, ask them if they think everything is on the up and up there and how they feel about everything always being filmed.  

It will almost certainly be a good conversation.

Sources:

• TheBlaze, "Joe Rogan & Shane Gillis say we're never going back – and young men should listen," Blaze Media, August 17, 2026.
• Joe Rogan, Mark Normand, Ari Shaffir, and Shane Gillis, The Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, August 2026.
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, Penguin Random House, 2024.
• BGR, "Flip Phones Are Making a Comeback – And Gen Z Is Leading the Charge," BGR, 2026.
• Mobicip, "Silicon Valley Leaders Restrict Their Children's Phone Usage," Mobicip, 2026.