Why Joe Rogan’s friends think a Canadian rapper and CBC host is trying to take them down - National Post

Copy URL Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Manage Account Sign Out Loading subscription options Subscribe$20 for 1 year By Stuart Thomson November 13, 2026 at 6:18 a.m. Last Updated: November 13, 2026 at 9:22 a.m. This might sound insane, but there’s a theory kicking around that a Canadian rapper and CBC radio host is running a secret, state-backed operation to topple Joe Rogan’s comedy empire.

First, the facts: It’s undeniably true that someone in Canada is running a highly successful YouTube channel called The Elephant Graveyard that punctures the mystique that has built up around Rogan, one of the world’s most successful and influential podcasters.

The channel posts videos with the production values of a Netflix documentary and the most recent 90-minute episode has racked up over six million views. If that video, titled How Comedy Drowned in a Radioactive Cesspool of Corruption and Depravity, got those numbers on Netflix, it would be battling with David Attenborough’s A Gorilla Story, for a spot on the top 15 documentaries of 2026.

Understandably, it’s driving the comedians implicated in the “Rogansphere” absolutely insane.

And that’s where Canadian rapper Buck 65, also known as Rich Terfry, the host of the CBC Radio 2’s The Drive, comes in.

If you’re familiar with Terfry’s strangely compelling gravelly voice you’ll understand why a theory sprung up on Reddit that he is narrating the videos on The Elephant Graveyard YouTube channel. It sure sounds like him. Even the man himself agrees.

“I went to the page and picked a video at random, hit play, and was immediately struck myself, like, ‘oh wow, that does sound like my voice’,” said Terfry, in an interview with National Post.

That was about two or three years ago, Terfry estimates, right around the time The Elephant Graveyard was unlocking the formula for viral dyspeptic comedy analysis. After some modest success with short videos about the comedy scene that rarely topped five-figure viewer numbers, the channel unveiled a new and ambitious type of video.

It was mostly a curiosity for Terfry at the time, but it was spooky enough that he says he had a meeting with higher-ups at the CBC to warn them and raise the possibility that it was an AI-generated voice that was trained on his radio show. For the next two years, he only thought about it when someone sent him an incredulous text message about this weird YouTube channel that sounded just like him.

The Buck 65 theory would have been confined to the darkest corner of the internet if it hadn’t been for American comedian Kurt Metzger, who co-hosts a conspiracy and mystery-focused podcast with Duncan Trussell, one of Rogan’s longtime friends.

While appearing on an entirely different online comedic politics show called the Jimmy Dore Show, Metzger went public with the allegations.

“Why would a Canadian give a sh-t about Joe Rogan and the Rogansphere? It doesn’t make any sense … (unless) you’re a CBC radio guy and a lame rapper named Buck 65,” said Metzger on an episode of the show in September.

“I did the research too on this, he’s a buck 19 here in America, due to the conversion rate.”

But why would a Canadian rapper go to all that trouble to attack these comedians? Metzger had a theory on that, too.

“Canada’s afraid of populism, right-wing populism,” he said on the Jimmy Dore podcast.

Metzger goes on, with an explanation that involves his hypothesis that it’s part of a strategy of the Canadian government. The explanation is fragmented enough that it sounds suspiciously like a man half-remembering a recent Google search.

“You know the Trudeau? That government? That’s the Carney administration? You know the whole deal… They’re paying for cultural…,” he says, before digressing into a rant about a Canadian video game development company based in Montreal.

Metzger, admittedly, is no one’s idea of a reliable narrator.

He called Buck 65 a “state-backed loser,” which appears to be both a reference to his day job as a CBC radio host and a nod to a darker theory, where Canada has weaponized its rappers to strike at the soft underbelly of the populist right in the United States — namely, its Trump-adjacent comedians in the Rogansphere.

To recap, Metzger, a comedian who hosts a conspiracy-focused comedy podcast touted a conspiracy theory about a Canadian rapper running a YouTube channel devoted to conspiracy theories about Joe Rogan, who has dabbled in conspiracy theories for years on his own podcast.

As a symbol of our times, it’s almost too perfect.

We’ve now reached a world of infinite, almost custom-tailored conspiracies. The conventional conspiracy nuts, who go on about the moon landing being fake or the JFK assassination, are now embarrassingly simplistic. Those guys are doing algebra in a world of quantum conspiracies.

Now we’re talking about Jeffrey Epstein, pizzagate, Bill Gates, Bilderbergs, Rothschilds, the World Economic Forum, and how the election that your guy lost was stolen by the other guy (the one you hate). It’s crackpot Mad Libs, where the nouns and verbs are almost interchangeable as long as provocative music plays under the voiceover.

It’s also a microcosm of our endlessly fractured and niche media environment, which has been a boon to enthusiasts of anything. You can watch an endless trove of content about lock-picking, hiking, soap-making, cleaning, journalling, video games and almost anything else you can think of. You can also go down some wild rabbit holes.

The Elephant Graveyard’s productions are masterpieces of the conspiratorial style. They obsessively map Rogan’s tenuous connections to people like Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased child sex offender, and Peter Thiel, the tech founder and all-around right-wing bogeyman. And more convincingly, the videos make the case that Rogan has created a self-sustaining ecosystem of comedy success, where being part of the gang is vastly more important than being funny.

Rogan’s hugely successful podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, has built a roster of comedians whose careers have gone meteoric simply because they made an appearance on the show. Dozens of comedians have moved to Austin, Tex. — Rogan’s home base — where they run their own podcasts and cross-pollinate the episodes with appearances by their friends. The epicentre of it all is Rogan’s club, the Comedy Mothership, where heckling is banned and audience members’ phones are sealed in pouches at the door so they can’t record the comedians.

With his usual dramatic flair, the mystery host of The Elephant Graveyard calls the whole scene an “anti-reality doomsday cult.”

Metzger is undeniably part of that crew — although, as an Emmy winner and a very funny comedian, he’s certainly not someone who needed Rogan’s blessing to boost his career. His own conspiracy podcast is produced by YMH Studios, an Austin-based production company that features a roster of Rogansphere comedians, including his co-host Trussell. Metzger has made more than 10 appearances on the Joe Rogan Experience, including one in October.

Rogan’s comedy empire now supports a secondary economy of reaction videos racking up huge YouTube monetization dollars. And, like any influential artist, whoever does really host The Elephant Graveyard has inspired copycats. YouTube is jammed to the brim with comedy-clip accounts posting short videos of jokes, reacting to comedy podcasts and, in a fast-growing new category, crapping all over the comedians themselves.

While Taylor Swift’s fans sell friendship bracelets and girl-power sweaters outside her shows and on Etsy, the parasitic economy attached to the Rogan empire sells snark, humour and paranoid conspiracies about some of the most famous comedians in the world. And nobody does it better than The Elephant Graveyard.

But is the man behind it really Buck 65? Like Fox Mulder on the X-Files, it’s hard not to want to believe.

The Elephant Graveyard narrator’s voice, which is a dead ringer for Buck 65’s, is the first piece of circumstantial evidence, but it’s the references to Canadiana that build the case. At one point, the narrator uses the Quebec expletive “tabernak,” which is the kind of thing Terfry would do during a show. The narrator also references the Ontario licence plate slogan, “yours to discover” at one point, and he definitely seems to live in Toronto. He has that subtle Ontario accent that’s hard to describe, but is probably best exemplified by the comedian Tom Green.

And, as if he were a serial killer tired of running, Buck 65 released a song this year called Elephant Graveyard. (That’s right. He named the song after the actual title of the YouTube channel pulling in millions of views trashing the most powerful man in comedy.)

On Reddit, it was taken as a sign that the man himself was confirming the theory. It must really be him spending endless hours editing YouTube documentaries, while also hosting a daily radio show and maintaining a rap career.

But, asked directly if he’s involved, Terfry unequivocally denies it.

“No, no, it’s nothing to do with me at all,” he said.

He acknowledges that he may be speaking to people who won’t be swayed by a simple denial and that there’s a particular kind of conspiratorial mind that will see his disavowal as the next best thing to confirmation.

“But then, I don’t know. If I was the guy, isn’t that what he would say if he was trying to keep the heat off him?” he said.

“It’s not the easiest thing in the world to prove you’re not something, you know what I mean? It’s easy to prove who you are: you show someone your passport. But it’s trickier to prove who you aren’t,” he said.

Making it worse is that Terfry is a thoroughly offline person who said he has learned about this strange episode mostly through giddy and concerned messages from his friends. On the weekend that the Rogan video dropped, he was competing in separate play-off runs with his two softball teams, playing six games over two days. It wasn’t until Sunday night that he came home to dozens of breathless messages about his new starring role in the resistance to the Rogansphere.

“It’s just a strange thing. Here I am just sort of living my life, raking leaves and playing beer-league softball. And then you just get this crazy, weird package dropped in your lap all of a sudden that you have to deal with. And I’m getting 50 phone calls a day and all this craziness that I certainly didn’t ask for,” he said.

One friend of his, the American rapper Sage Francis, has a degree in journalism and took it upon himself to debunk the story. He called up Terfry and interviewed him, asking him if he categorically denies running The Elephant Graveyard channel, and then, satisfied with the response, went out to spread the word.

In response to Metzger’s accusations on social media, Francis wrote a message to the American comedian trying to correct the record.

“In all sincerity, I’m good friends with Buck 65. Been so since 1999. Although Elephant speaks in a similar timber (sic) and accent, as do a lot of Canadians I’ve found, this is not Buck,” wrote Francis, in response to a post from Metzger.

“People often hit Buck 65 up about how his voice sounds like the Elephant Graveyard guy. So he named a song after it as a joke. That’s the short and tall of it,” wrote Francis.

Like any good conspiracy theory, the most likely explanation is a total letdown. Some people just don’t want to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was just a really good shot.

Some of the more self-aware comedians have even commented on the symbiotic nature of the hate-channels that churn through the YouTube algorithm, pushing viewers back and forth between their comedy and the reaction videos.

Listed next to the most recent Elephant Graveyard video, in the recommended videos column, sits the high-water mark of Austin comedy and the Rogansphere: Shane Gillis Live in Austin. It’s the first comedy special by one of the most popular comedians in the world, published five years ago and boasting 58 million views. Elephant Graveyard’s video laying waste to the Austin comedy scene, which revolves around Rogan and his crew, has 5.7 million views. It’s easy math: the secondary economy pulls in about 10 per cent of the primary one.

We used to consume conspiracy theories about presidents, lunar landings and shadowy bodies that ruled the world. Now, people are making a good living spinning sinister narratives about a podcaster. You could see it as an indictment of our times, the proof that as our screens got smaller, so did our ideas, obsessions and ambitions.

But Rogan has his own theory about the backlash. He likes telling his audience about a conversation he had with an “online philosopher,” who warned him that what he had created in Austin was too good to last. It was a “walled garden,” where everyone on the inside was having too much fun. It would drive the people exiled on the outskirts crazy.

Rogan has known for years that, before long, the outsiders would start hurling rocks into the garden or, even worse, clambering over the walls. It won’t be lost on the world’s biggest podcaster that the endlessly democratizing effect of new media, which allowed him to build an empire with a microphone and a laptop, has spawned the barbarians that are now storming the gates of his citadel.

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