Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan was born on August 11, 1967, in Newark, New Jersey, and began practicing martial arts at age 13, earning a black belt in Taekwondo within two years. He became the Massachusetts full-contact Taekwondo champion for four consecutive years and, by age 19, won the US Open Taekwondo Championship as lightweight champion, defeating middleweight and heavyweight title-holders to claim the Grand Championship. Rogan transitioned to stand-up comedy in the late 1980s and segued into acting by the mid-1990s, landing a role on the Fox sitcom Hardball in 1994 and then as Joe Garrelli on NBC's NewsRadio from 1995 to 1999. In 1997, he entered UFC broadcasting as a backstage interviewer at UFC 12: Judgement Day, initially unpaid for his first 15 events in exchange for tickets, before becoming a paid ringside color commentator starting with UFC 37.5 in 2002. Rogan hosted the reality TV show Fear Factor from 2001 to 2006, boosting his mainstream recognition. He launched The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in December 2009, featuring long-form, unfiltered conversations with guests from comedy, science, politics, and more, which grew massively popular with millions of downloads per episode.