His brash, incredulous, wild-eyed stage persona, tackling subjects from Bigfoot to self-satisfied vegans and the inherent weirdness of attempting to enact the role of human being on a vast rock hurtling through infinity, is a world away from the relaxed manner he adopts during his podcast recordings, sat back in a Cypress Hill T-shirt against a brick wall bearing pictures of Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix. Persuaded by friends to try his hand at stand-up comedy, Rogan took to the stage at the notorious Stitches club in Boston in 1988, enjoyed it and commenced a career as a comic, taking inspiration from the likes of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Sam Kinnison, betraying a taste for convention-baiting even then. I just f***ing drifted.”īy the time he retired from competitive martial arts at 21 for a brief stint at Boston University, Rogan had won the US Open Championship taekwondo tournament as a lightweight and been full-contact state champion for four consecutive years, also instructing others in the discipline. “Superterrified of being someone who people just go, ‘Oh, look at that f***ing loser.’ You know? I was always thinking that the other kids were going to turn on me at any moment. “I was terrified of being a loser,” he told Rolling Stone. The podcaster describes suffering from an unshakeable sense of alienation as a youth, despite never wanting for friends, and took up first karate and then taekwondo after a humiliating encounter with a bully in high school, which prompted him to vow never to be unable to defend himself again. Speaking to Rolling Stone ’s Erik Hedegaard in 2015, Rogan remembered his policeman father as “a very violent, very scary guy”, who, the host contends, would have turned his son into a psychopath had he continued to play a role in raising him, hence the adult Rogan’s decision never to seek to re-establish contact. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, in August 1967 and is of Italian-Irish stock, his parents separating when he was a child and Rogan subsequently relocating with his mother first to San Francisco, California, then to Gainesville, Florida, and finally to suburban Boston, Massachusetts, as a teenager. The host has come a long way since he first launched The Joe Rogan Experience with friend Brian Redban way back on Christmas Eve 2009. Recent appearances by Dr Peter McCullough and the aforementioned Dr Malone, two men with a track-record of pushing improbable theories concerning the pandemic and its origins, have raised further questions about how Rogan wields his power, given the immense popularity of his show.

Rogan has since raised eyebrows by suggesting that ID cards containing proof of vaccination status take America “one step closer” to dictatorship and by announcing that he had taken ivermectin, a deworming medicine also used to treat livestock, when he himself contracted Covid in September, subsequently attacking CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta over the network’s coverage of his actions.

It’s refreshing!” one YouTube commenter wrote beneath a clip of their exchange, as clear an insight into his appeal as you could wish for. “I really appreciate that Joe is willing to have conversations with people with whom he disagrees and that he’s respectful in his discussions. While that disclaimer largely shrugged off responsibility for his considerable influence, Rogan did, to his credit, subsequently invite Dr Rhonda Patrick back onto the show to explicitly debunk prevalent vaccine-denier falsehoods. But I’m not a respected source of information even for me!” We just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. “I’m a f***ing moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian.

Drunk driving podcaster