A days in the life of Joe Rogan
Rolling Stone’s Erik Hedegaard spent a day in the life of commentator, entrepreneur, hunter, psychadelics devotee Joe Rogan, and then, silly bitch, tried to explain it all.
“He’s educated more people in mixed martial arts than anybody ever. He’s the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting.”
-UFC president Dana White
Rolling Stone contributor Erik Hedegaard spent a days with Joe Rogan, and then crafted an uneven piece. Rogan is a remarkably interesting human being; however, instead of that being enough, which it is, Hedegaard descended out of his depth, and into the whys. In short, Joe Rogan is more interesting than Erik Hedegaard’s fatuous pop psychology
Rogan has several interesting and lucrative jobs. He likes to train. He likes to get high. He likes to hunt. He has a wife, and children, and a super nice home. This is not some weird combination of characteristics that requires psychological analysis to make sense of. It is what pretty much everyone in the MMA space is striving for.
Still, it is a decent read, excerpted below.
In truth, his podcast is one of the greatest things going. It’s like a journey around the known universe, as well as the unknown, the suspected and the highly suspect. So far, there’ve been 705 episodes. He started it five years ago, with friend and fellow comic Brian Redban, 41, just the two of them smoking weed and chewing the fat, nothing much going on, no grand ambitions. Early guests were largely confined to friends from MMA and comedy. But then Rogan started to haul in the more far-flung: marijuana activists, former porn stars, believers in the sanctity of shrooms, four-hour-work-week proselytizers, rappers, former LAPD cops, outdoorsmen, futurists, neuroscientists, Egyptologists, Tommy Chong, triathlete vegans, whistle-blowers, mind coaches, insomniacs, experts on toxoplasmosis, comics with nicknames like the Machine, Neil deGrasse Tyson, former CIA operatives, a woman who lives in Kavik (197 miles north of the Arctic Circle), former UFC great Georges St-Pierre half admitting to alien abduction, and conspiracy theorists of all kinds (Bigfoot, UFOs, chemtrails, JFK, 9/11, the Apollo moon landing).
Not a lot of rhyme or reason there, but that’s just how Rogan likes it, and he does have his logic. “Everything we do or try to do, we try to do a better version of it all the time. We’re constantly looking to improve. It’s a big part of being a human being. And I think the podcast improves people, not only the people who listen to it, but me as well.”
Along the way, he will allow that he’s only a conduit for those smarter than himself and call himself a “silly bitch.” Regardless, he’s huge into self-improvement, especially of the self-dabbling kind. He shoots himself up with testosterone on a weekly basis — “It’s what fighters get in trouble for, but, obviously, I’m not competing. I just like the idea that I’m cheating old age and death, although, you know, you can’t cheat it forever”— as well as human growth hormone. If he’s dragging a little, he’ll pop a Nuvigil, a variant of the focus-improving drug that fighter pilots use. Most mornings, he preps for the day with a Vitamixed, sludgy blend of kale, spinach, celery, “a large hunk of ginger about the size of a child’s thumb,” four cloves of garlic, an apple and some coconut oil. Tastes like crud. “But after your body digests it,” he says, “you’re like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got a lot of stuff to work with here.’ “
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These days, the main driver of Rogan’s “personal evolution,” as he calls it, is his podcast, which he records inside a small office in a nondescript industrial park. It’s dimly lit, with mug shots on one wall, most notably of Jimi Hendrix. Brian Redban is here today, looking kind of disheveled, as well as comedian Nick DiPaolo, a mostly right-leaning longtime Rogan pal.
Then, over the next few hours, they talk about El Chapo’s great Mexican-jail escape. “Gotta give props where they are due,” Rogan says. “He executed that like a goddamn Clint Eastwood movie! How the fuck do you not respect that?” Liberia: “There’s an area where people just shit on the road. The shitway.” Moderation: “I have, like, a night a week where I just eat like a fucking slob in front of the TV.” Late-night cooking: “My favorite thing is grilling meat in my underwear. I want to protect my shaft and balls at the very least.” Cat-shit coffee: “This animal called the civet eats the coffee beans and then shits them out….The digestive enzymes are juice in the cat’s stomach that make it a smoother, smoother coffee.” And so on. A real scattershot assemblage, near the end of which Rogan says, “It just seems like there’s more wackiness going on right now in the world than any time I could ever remember. Does it seem like that? Like more hypocrisy, more contradiction, more chaos.”