There’s a certain kind of Conan fan who needs you to know that Conan did not start with Arnold. That the character was born in 1932, in the pages of Weird Tales, from the typewriter of a Texan named Robert E. Howard, and that everything since, from the Marvel comics to the movies to the memes, is downstream of those original stories.

Joe Rogan is that kind of fan.

The most-listened-to podcaster on the planet is, by his own declaration, a “super Conan nerd.” And once you start pulling that thread through the Joe Rogan Experience, it goes deeper than you’d expect–all the way down to the shape of the Octagon itself.

“Holy Shit! Those Were Books!”

Rogan’s Conan fandom starts where every serious Conan fandom starts: with Howard.

On the podcast, Rogan has pushed back repeatedly, and with visible irritation, on the idea that Conan is a comic book character or an ’80s movie invention. He talks about Howard building an entire world, the Hyborian Age, complete with its lore of usurpers and conquerors, decades before “world-building” became a Hollywood buzzword. Howard set his stories in a lost epoch between the sinking of Atlantis and recorded history, which let him raid every era he loved and, in doing so, practically invented sword and sorcery as a genre.

But if you want to see Rogan at maximum enthusiasm, get him talking about the Lancer paperbacks.

In the late 1960s, Howard’s stories were collected in a paperback series with cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. Rogan’s on-air tribute to those covers has become something close to scripture among fans: “…you’d buy the paperbacks, with the Frank Frazetta oil paintings on the covers! Holy Shit! Those were books!”

He’s not alone in the reverence. Robert Rodriguez told Rogan about visiting Frazetta’s personal studio and museum, marveling that Frazetta, unlike most illustrators of his era, kept ownership of his original oils. One of them, Conan the Buccaneer, later sold for $1.5 million. Zack Snyder, on his own JRE visit, talked about wanting to bring that raw illustrative style directly to the screen. Even in a conversation with futurist Ray Kurzweil about AI art, Frazetta came up, with the consensus landing at the point that you can prompt a machine “in the style of Frank Frazetta,” but you can’t replicate the man.

The Momoa Take

Believe it or not, Joe Rogan is a full-throated Momoa Conan defender. Now, it’s important to say that Rogan doesn’t defend the movie, so much as he mounts a full-throated defense of the casting: “Jason Momoa…he was the best Conan because he was the only Conan that looked like Conan really looked like. Conan was like super muscular, but he wasn’t a bodybuilder. He looked like a killer, he looked like a UFC fighter.”

Rogan’s comparison point is Jiří Procházka: the former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion known for his samurai ethos and terrifying finishing ability. “That kind of build,” Rogan says. “A big strong guy but not a bodybuilder.”

What’s funniest about this is that Rogan’s love of the Howard stories gives his claims significant credit. The Conan of the original stories is panther-like. He’s agile, cunning, and built for survival and slaughter rather than the posing dais. Schwarzenegger’s 1982 portrayal gave us an icon, no question, but massive and lumbering was never Howard’s Conan.

And while the most famous line from that film, Conan’s answer to “what is best in life?”, wasn’t even Howard, Rogan quotes it constantly anyway. Sometimes seriously. Sometimes by yelling “Elk meat and DMT!” from the back of the room.

The Octagon Is a Conan Fighting Pit.

In the early 1990s, when Art Davie and Rorion Gracie were designing what would become the UFC, they knew a boxing ring wouldn’t work because grapplers would go tumbling through the ropes. To crystallize a new creative vision and attract investors, they brought in a Hollywood heavyweight who happened to be a devoted fan of the Gracie family and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu student. That person was John Milius, the director of Conan the Barbarian.

Milius knew exactly what the arena should be. According to UFC co-founder Campbell McLaren, Milius told them: “No, you should fight in an octagon, the way Conan fought in a stone octagon in Conan The Barbarian.”

Well, actually, originally Millius wanted a recessed gladiatorial pit, like the one where a young Conan fights for his captors’ amusement in the film. He wanted the cage to lower from the ceiling after the fighters entered. He also wanted the arena surrounded by a moat filled with alligators and sharks.

The moat, surprisingly, did not survive the executive review process. Neither did the sunken pit since television cameras couldn’t shoot fighters pressed against solid walls. The design that emerged from the production team was an elevated platform wrapped in chain-link fencing. But the eight sides stayed, and among the founders, the consensus on where they came from is clear: Milius’s Conan pit.

This, of course, is funny because Joe Rogan has spent since 1997 commentating professional fights inside a structure that exists because the director of Conan the Barbarian insisted modern warriors should fight the way Conan did. 

So, if you think about it, every UFC broadcast is, architecturally speaking, a Hyborian Age revival.

The Trilogy That Got Away

One of the most tantalizing Conan conversations in JRE history came courtesy of Robert Rodriguez, who revealed the full shape of a Conan trilogy he planned and lost.

Rodriguez, sharing Rogan’s Frazetta obsession, wanted the films to “look exactly like the paintings.” In the early 2000s, the technology to do that didn’t exist, so he teamed up with James Cameron to develop it. The structure he described was modeled on the Bond franchise, letting one actor age with the character across a decade: a first film with Conan as a young, desperate thief; a second with Conan in his prime, a buccaneer leading armies; a third with an older, battle-hardened Conan finally seizing a crown and becoming king.

Around 2020, Rodriguez pitched them the trilogy with Cameron’s backing behind it Rogan’s reaction, live on air, was that of every Conan fan who’s ever heard about a great adaptation dying in development. Only, the difference was Joe Rogan is not every Conan fan. He is, by all accounts, Joe Rogan, a man with a very large rolodex. That’s why his response was: “Dude, let me call them. Let me get on the phone with Ted Sarandos. Let’s go make it.”

Whether that call ever happens, the takeaway from Rodriguez, Snyder, and Rogan alike is the same one the fans have been muttering for decades: the true spirit of Howard’s stories has still never been fully captured on film.

Which means the definitive Conan is still where it’s always been: in the books with the oil paintings on the covers.

Holy shit. Those were books.

But the screen isn’t done trying to compete!

With Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated Conan series on the way, Arnold set to return and finally conclude his Conan story, and more projects stirring in the Hyborian pipeline, the future of the Cimmerian is looking brighter than it has in decades.

Somewhere, the world’s biggest Conan nerd is very pleased.