Joe Rogan is the biggest podcaster in the world. He signed a $250 million extension with Spotify earlier this year, the largest in the history of the industry, and apparently had even Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden lobbying to be on his podcast.

And while many think his success has come out of nowhere, and was largely down to luck his ‘News Radio’ co-star Maura Tierney disagrees. Rogan, of course, was a regular television fixture in his pre-JRE days, serving as the host of the cult-classic ‘Fear Factor’ and doing minor parts in sitcoms.

One of them was ‘News Radio’, where he appeared as a tough, blue collar character. And Maura Tierney believes all of the qualities that made the UFC commentator such a successful podcaster (including his  proclivity for conspiracy theories) were present in Rogan even two and a half decades ago when they were sharing the screen on the sitcom.

“Yeah I think so. We didn’t know what a podcast was. This was 25 years ago. But Joe was very outspoken always. His stand-up was really outspoken. They sort of also infused in his character a little bit of a conspiracy theorist thing that came from Joe. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. So where he is at now does not surprise me. And he’s funny,” Tierney told CNN’s Chris Wallace in a recent interview.

Notably, the actress revealed that Rogan’s character on the show was a conspiracy theorist, which was inspired by Joe Rogan’s real life belief in conspiracies. And while he is not as big a conspiracy theorist as he used to be, he still has a proclivity for them.

Rogan nearly got canceled during Covid for allegedly spreading conspiracies

While the podcast host was a conspiracy enthusiast when he was young, when he used to believe that the moon landing had been faked among other things, he has evolved a lot since then. While these theories are relatively harmless for the most part, he did land into hot water for his platforming of fringe views regarding vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This led a group of medical professionals and scientists to write a letter demanding Spotify take action against Rogan for spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories around the topic, fearing it may lead to making the wrong medical decisions and putting their lives at risk.

When Spotify refused to do so, prominent artists such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their catalogs from the platform. However, Rogan was able to weather the storm and both Young and Mitchell have returned to the streaming platform. Rogan’s fondness for conspiracy theories has certainly landed him in trouble and given him a bad name in many circles, bad habits, as they say, die hard.