The Surprising Way Joe Rogan Got Through So Many Seasons Of Fear Factor

The stuff Fear Factor contestants were forced to cram down their gullets was hard to watch from a safe distance on your couch at home (hopefully not during dinner time). As So Yummy so tastefully remembered, there was the time they were forced to eat blended rats, the time they had to eat roadkill, and the times (plural) they had to eat live African cave-dwelling spiders, camel spiders, and other creatures fanged from your nightmares. Of course, none of those top the "donkey juice" they were made to quaff on that one episode that was too disgusting to air when the show tried to make a comeback in 2011.

It's quite obvious how the contestants got through such traumatic events: years of intensive psychotherapy targeting the deeply tangled roots of their ingrained materialism. The rest of us could just change the channel and vow to never watch humanity debase itself like that ever again — until we inevitably did. But how did host Joe Rogan make it through seven seasons of standing next to people gagging up stuff that should never have gone near a human mouth in the first place?

In 2011, when Joe Rogan was about to embark on an even raunchier reboot of the show he'd hosted for six seasons in the first decade of the 21st century, he did an interview with comedian Marc Maron on his podcast WTF. According to Vulture, he admitted to Maron that hosting Fear Factor those first six seasons was no walk in the park. "There were a lot of times I didn't enjoy [hosting] at all," he said. "While I was doing it, I was making fun of it."

So just how did he make it through so many seasons of bringing shameless degradation directly to the living rooms of decent (can we really be called that after Fear Factor?) American families? "The first season I did sober," he said. But then he apparently realized that wasn't going to be possible from there on out. "The second through the sixth season, I was high as f*** ... for 90 percent of the episodes." Actually, after having gotten to know Joe Rogan better over the years, that's really not too surprising.

He also defended the show as something classically American. "The show was hot dogs. Are hot dogs bad for you? Well, you shouldn't eat them all day every day. But sometimes I want a steak, and sometimes I want a f****** hot dog." Can't argue with him there.