Joe Rogan’s time as Fear Factor host often had him fearing for contestant’s lives.
Rogan was the game show’s first host when it launched on TV in 2001 and he continued to work on the show for seven years, until it was dropped by NBC.
The show, which saw contestants take part in a series of dares and stunts while competing for a cash prize, is believed to have earned the UFC commentator around $15 million during the 148 episodes he recorded.
Some of the gruesome challenges and high-risk stunts included consuming an entire bowlful of a dead rat that had been blended into a smoothie style drink.
One team member had to sit in a bathtub full of leeches in an episode as their partners had the goal of sucking the worms off them.
During season six, one episode had contestants tasked with drinking pint amounts of both urine and semen from donkeys.
NBC’s parent company Comcast demanded the episode, which supposedly caused the show to be cancelled, not be aired on TV and a rerun was put in its place.
All of these sound pretty frightening, right? But, none of these came close enough to making host Rogan as scared as when contestants had to ride real, live, 2,000 lb angry bulls.
“The one that scared the s*** out of me the most was bull riding. We had people ride bulls. It was the only time I told contestants: ‘Don’t do it’,” Rogan said on an episode of his podcast in 2019.
He recalled telling them it was ultimately up to them and pointed out that there are people who actually ride bulls.
“I said ‘But you don’t know how to ride a bull. We’re not teaching you how to ride a bull. You’re not going through classes. You’re not slowly, but surely building up your techniques.
“You’re just going to ride a bull. Right. Don’t do that.
“And we had this girl, she was like 98 pounds. She got launched off the back of this bull. And these people went f****** flying like that thing’s kicking.
“Barely misses them when it’s kicking. I mean, they’re wearing helmets and s***. The fall, the way she felt like that, that is like getting hit in the back of the head with the world.
“She was tough as s***. But I felt and everybody did, in that one we got lucky. I feel like we rolled the dice because if they stomp you, they lacerate livers and crush spleens, and they can stomp you.”
The 57-year-old also thought contestants were going to die in a separate episode.
“With those shows, what happens is you get used to one thing and so you have to do something that’s bigger and better the next year,” Rogan explained.
“And so when we came back, I felt uncomfortable with a lot of the s***. They know how to do it. Like these stunt guys are top of the food chain. But they were doing some sketchy s***.
“[For] one of them we had these people chained to a tree with bungee cords that were attached to a helicopter.
“OK, and they had to figure out the right locks to unlock the bungee cord [and] the straps that keep them to the tree.
“Then as soon as they do, they undo the strap and they go f****** shooting out into space, into the centre of this gigantic canyon and they’re bouncing underneath this helicopter.
“I remember thinking like: ‘Yeah, we could do this a thousand times. One of them, someone’s going to die’. Of course, one of them, someone’s going to die and it might be the next one.
“We got lucky, dude. I really feel like we got lucky. I really, really honestly, 100 per cent feel like we got lucky.”
