The multi-year licensing agreement could be worth upwards of US$100 million based on the podcast’s performance metrics and other factors, a source told The Wall Street Journal when the deal was announced.

“The Joe Rogan Experience” is downloaded almost 200 million times per month and brought in US$30 million last year, making the comedian and UFC commentator the highest-paid podcaster of 2019, according to Forbes.

Rogan’s podcast guests have included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Senator Bernie Sanders, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, actor Robert Downey Jnr, and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Spotify hopes podcast deals with likes of Joe Rogan will get new audience

Rogan, whose eclectic career has spanned various industries from comedy to martial arts, is no stranger to controversy.

He has been criticised for hosting guests such as alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Jones – who has called the Sandy Hook mass shooting at a school in the US state of Connecticut in 2012 a hoax – on his podcast twice.

Rogan has also been accused of making transphobic and racist comments. Here’s what we know about Rogan’s life, career, and new deal with Spotify.

“The Joe Rogan Experience” officially moved to Spotify after he signed an exclusive deal with the music streaming platform in May.

After news of the deal was announced, Spotify shares spiked by 11 per cent. Rogan’s podcast has been the most-searched podcast on Spotify since at least early 2019, despite the fact that it was not yet available on the platform, the company revealed in May.

On the day the Spotify deal was announced, Rogan wrote on Instagram that his podcast will remain free. “It will be the exact same show,” he said. “It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now.”

Rogan’s YouTube channel, where all 11 years of his podcast have been released, will no longer host full episodes starting in September, but short clips will still be uploaded to YouTube.

In a meeting last week, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek addressed concerns raised by some employees that certain episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” were transphobic, Vice reported.

The meeting came after Rogan joked on one of his episodes that Caitlyn Jenner’s trans identity was inspired by the Kardashian women. After the episode’s release, Jenner called Rogan a “transphobic ass”, in an interview with TMZ.

Also last week, Rogan apologised for repeating a false claim that “left-wing activists” had been arrested for setting forest fires in Oregon – reports the FBI had already debunked.

“I need to make an apology and a retraction,” Rogan said in a video posted to his Instagram account. “I said something on the podcast with Douglas Murray about people getting arrested for lighting fires, and I got duped. It’s wrong.”

Rogan’s eclectic career path has seen him work as stand-up comedian, actor, UFC commentator, Fear Factor host, construction worker, and a driver for a private investigator. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Rogan had a somewhat nomadic childhood. His parents divorced when he was five, and he and his mother spent time in San Francisco and Florida before settling in Newton, Massachusetts.

It was in Massachusetts that Rogan first took up martial arts. Rogan started practising martial arts at age 13, which he said in a 2014 interview with SB Nation was “the best decision I ever made”.

He added that martial arts “gave me not just confidence, but also a different perspective of myself and what I was capable of. I knew that I could do something I was terrified of and that was really difficult, and that I could excel at it. It was a big deal for me.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, Rogan worked as a stand-up comedian in Boston and New York before moving to Los Angeles and starting a career in TV. On the side, Rogan taught martial arts at Boston University, drove limousines, did some construction work, and even got a gig as a driver for a private investigator who got his license revoked after a DUI, Rogan said on his podcast.

Rogan moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and landed his first major acting role in the Fox sitcom Hardball. He also starred in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio from 1995 to 1999. Rogan hosted Fear Factor, the game show that challenged contestants to compete in physically and mentally challenging stunts, from 2001 to 2006.

He’s done stand-up comedy specials for both Netflix and Comedy Central and was slated to do several US shows in April, May, and June 2020, but they were rescheduled for the fall, according to his website. Rogan has said he talks about “all sorts of things” in his comedy routines. “I talk about drugs and life and sex, the mysteries of space, and the way we look at the world,” he said in a 2008 interview with The Boston Globe.

Rogan’s interest in comedy began when his parents took him to see legendary comedian Richard Pryor when he was about 13 years old.

“I was looking around the theatre at people falling out of their chairs, slapping the chairs in front of them, and I’m thinking, ‘How is this guy doing this? He’s just talking’,” he said in a 2006 interview with UFC. “And that experience profoundly influenced me. That was the first exposure I ever had to stand-up comedy.”

Rogan started working at the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) in the late 1990s, doing backstage and post-fight interviews for the martial arts promotion company. By 2002, he had started doing commentary.

“He’s educated more people in mixed martial arts than anybody ever,” UFC president Dana White told Rolling Stone magazine in 2015. “He’s the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting.”

Rogan launched his podcast in December 2009. Today, “The Joe Rogan Experience” consistently ranks at the top of Apple’s Top 100 Podcasts. As Devin Gordon wrote for The Atlantic last year, Rogan is particularly appealing to many American men.

Rogan is “a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-oesophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that,” Gordon wrote. “I respond to that. The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain.”

On his podcast, Rogan is known for putting his guests at ease and getting them to speak candidly. In September 2019, Rogan famously got Elon Musk to smoke marijuana and the Tesla founder opened up about his childhood.

But Rogan has faced his fair share of controversy, from hosting Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones on his podcast – twice – to comparing a black neighbourhood to Planet of the Apes. And on his podcast in 2013, Rogan referred to mixed martial artist Fallon Fox, a transgender woman, as a man.

A Spotify spokesperson declined to comment on Rogan’s controversies but noted that all music and podcasts on Spotify are subject to their content guidelines.

Despite not fighting professionally, Rogan maintains an intense training regimen. In addition to his workout regiment, Rogan is known for his unconventional diet and enthusiasm for cognitive-enhancing supplements and psychedelic drugs.

The podcaster is a self-professed fan of DMT, an illegal hallucinogenic drug with effects similar to LSD and magic mushrooms. In his Rolling Stone interview, Rogan said his experiences with DMT were difficult to put into words.

“It’s a f***ing billion roller coasters, plus aliens,” he told the magazine. “It is whatever it is. I don’t know what it is. A chemical gateway to another dimension? A portal of souls you can tap into? I don’t see any negative to it.”

Rogan has also said on his podcast that he would rather vote for Donald Trump than Joe Biden because he believes Biden is struggling with dementia. He added that “it’s not an endorsement of Trump”.

Rogan has been married to model-turned-producer Jessica Ditzel since 2009 and has a golden retriever named Marshall. The couple reportedly live in Bell Canyon, Los Angeles, in a home Rogan bought for US$5 million in 2018.