In a sprawling conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience with comedian Carrot Top, the podcast host offered a fascinating archaeological perspective on life before the internet age. What emerged was a compelling portrait of how fundamentally different human existence was just four decades ago—and how that disconnection from information shaped an entire generation.
“People in 1980 were essentially wild animals who lived in houses,” Joe Rogan observed during the discussion. It’s a provocative statement, but one that captures something profound about that era. The comedian elaborated on this theme, explaining how people would simply leave their houses with keys, and nobody knew where anyone was at any given time. There were no answering machines, no cell phones, no way to track or contact someone once they walked out the door.
This wasn’t just an inconvenience, it represented a completely different mode of human existence. People operated with a level of autonomy and disconnection that seems almost unthinkable today. You were genuinely off the grid the moment you left home.
Perhaps more striking was Rogan’s assessment of how uninformed everyone was. “No one knew what was going on in the world. Everybody was completely uninformed,” he noted. Yet paradoxically, “everybody lived in bliss.”
This observation touches on something contemporary society grapples with constantly: the relationship between information access and happiness. In 1980, people only knew their immediate neighbors and communities. The number of famous people was tiny compared to today’s celebrity-saturated landscape. There was Elvis, a handful of rock stars, a few comedians like Richard Pryor, and some television personalities.
Without constant news cycles, social media outrage, and the overwhelming deluge of global information, people existed in what Rogan characterized as a more peaceful, if ignorant, state.
The conversation revealed another fascinating aspect of that era: people only knew how to behave from movies and television. In the absence of endless online content, tutorial videos, and social media modeling, these limited media sources served as the primary teachers of social norms and behavior outside of direct family and community influence.
Rogan and Carrot Top discussed how entertainment from that period—including a 1980 TV movie based on Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”—looks oddly artificial when viewed today. “It’s like oddly fake,” Rogan observed, noting how people seemed to be “aping what it’s like to be a grown-up” rather than having fully developed social models.
Rogan suggested we might view that era as “the adolescence of civilization.” People in 1980 were like “wild animals that have just been introduced to technology and they’re aping what it’s like to be a grown-up.”
Yet Rogan was careful to note that some things from that time remain superior, particularly certain music that emerged from artists who were completely unprecedented in their talent and originality.