How Joe Rogan Went From UFC Announcer to 21st-Century Timothy Leary
"I've had trips where my sanity became slippery. But I don't see any negative in it," says Rogan
By Erik Hedegaard October 22, 2015
How did Joe Rogan go from over-the-top UFC color man to a 21st-century Timothy Leary? Paul Mobley
Maybe never in your life do you meet an individual like Joe Rogan. He's that singular, in a multivariate kind of way. For instance, most folks think of him only as the flapping-jawed, bug-eyed, hyperexcitable blow-by-blow commentator for all the Ultimate Fighting Championships' fights since 2002, given to innumerable "wows!" and "unbelieeeeveables!," all the while displaying a depth of mixed-martial-arts knowledge second to none and a totally side-splitting yet insightful way with words, as in the time he called a fighter's cut as deep as "a goat's vagina." In this regard, he's entirely sensational. "He's educated more people in mixed martial arts than anybody ever," says UFC president Dana White. "He's the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting." And you've got to love him for that, unless, of course, you hate him, which many do, but let's not get into that now, because he's a lot more than just a UFC frontman.
Today, Rogan's finishing a workout at his cool, sprawling pad in a gated community north of L.A., 22 egg-laying chickens clucking around somewhere out back. His face is shiny with sweat, his bald head, too. He's been pounding away for the better part of an hour inside his garage gym, mainly working on his switch kick, which is exceedingly powerful, knocking his trainer back a foot with every thump, a reminder that, even though he's 48, he was once a teenage martial-arts champion and black belt. He wipes his face with a towel. He's a thick guy, not on the tall side, with a few pale splotches of stress-related vitiligo on his hands and feet. From one angle, he looks like a typical lunkhead chowder-brain knuckle-dragger, which might make sense, given that he comes from a home busted up by violence in Newark, New Jersey. But for a ball cap often worn backward, however, that's not him. In an hour, he will go host his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which is downloaded 16 million times a month, making it one of the most popular in the nation, and discuss things like addiction, impulse-control issues and serotonin deficiencies, not smoking any weed beforehand, as he usually does, because today's topic is more serious. Then he'll head on over to a local cryotherapy center, get himself frozen for a few minutes at minus-270 degrees (or roughly the temperature of the dark side of the moon), and afterward say, "Oh, that was perfect!" In the evening, he'll wind up onstage in front of sold-out crowds at the Comedy Store and the Improv, because he's also a hardworking comedian with seven recordings to his credit.
And sometime soon, he'll find himself at a friend's house, half sprawled in the easiest of chairs, eyes shut, having just removed a smoking pipe from his mouth, breathing with purpose, while brilliant colors, shapes and swirls fall over him, rendering him helpless, until a few minutes later he is returned to Earth a happier man, a "more compassionate, more aware, more vulnerable" man, a better husband to his wife and father to his three kids, and so forth. Of all the psychedelics he's a fan of, his favorite is DMT, which Hunter S. Thompson once said was "like being shot out of a cannon." Rogan loves it, thinks everyone could benefit from it, often uses his podcast to fulminate positively on its various perception-enhancing benefits. He has been compared to Timothy Leary because of this, which he wouldn't know anything about, since he hates labels.
Right now, he's stepping around the cars in his garage — a sleek white SharkWerks-tuned Porsche 911 GT3 RS rests on the floor beneath a deep-silver '65 Corvette on a lift— to open a freezer and show what's inside. Dozens of small packages wrapped in brown paper and bagged in plastic.
He points at one of them.
"This is a moose heart," he says, happily. "I like moose. I like moose steaks, moose stew, and moose burgers are delicious." He closes that freezer, opens another. "This is from a wild pig. This is a sausage from something. This is more moose. This is deer. This is bear. And all this I killed myself." Stepping back, he says, "Yes, I get some grief for it. But you know what's unexpected to me? How little rational thought comes from vegans who own pets and feed them murdered animals. I'm like, 'Whoa, what the **** is going on here?'"
So, he's got lots of things going on besides being the voice of the UFC. Stack one thing up against another, however, and not much of it makes sense, which makes him some kind of stitched-together perplexity, maybe even a novelty.
Ronda Rousey and Joe Rogan during the UFC 184 weigh-in in L.A. on February 27th, 2015. Josh Hedges/Getty
"Yeah, man," he says later on, going inside his house and down a set of stairs. "Like, you're not supposed to be a psychedelic proponent and a cage-fighting commentator at the same time. Those two things joined are just too ****ing weird, you know? I mean, I don't get it. And I'm me. I just—" He stops talking, cuts that one thought short, finds another. "You know what you figure out in the middle of a trip? That all these assumptions and preconceived notions of who you are, they're all bull****. You're just an organism who is trying to find normalcy by repeating patterns." Unless, of course, you're him, in which case patterns are made to be broken. He doesn't say this about himself, though. But it is understood. A pattern-driven mind doesn't often stumble onto a goat's vagina. But his does.
In his basement, he flicks on a light. In front of him is a huge box, made out of stainless steel, big enough for him to fit inside, should he feel the need or desire.
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 *****." 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.' "
And where does his beloved dimethyltryptamine (a.k.a. DMT) come into play in all this?
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