Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | October 17, 2025
During an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience yesterday, Joe Rogan turned what was supposed to be a conversation with Bryan Callen into a full-on character assassination of Marc Maron, conveniently waiting until after Maron ended his podcast earlier this week to do so.
Over the course of several minutes, Rogan insisted that Maron is “pathologically jealous,” “mentally ill,” and incapable of introspection, recycling a familiar narrative about any comedian who has ever turned on Rogan. According to Rogan, Maron’s greatest flaw is that he can’t handle other people’s success. “He was friends with Mitch Hedberg,” Rogan said. “Then Mitch blew up, and he couldn’t be friends with him anymore. Same thing with Louis CK. Same thing with me.”
Bryan Callen tried to, uh, intellectualize the tirade, suggesting that Maron might be reacting to Rogan’s “hyper-masculine energy” or unresolved trauma from his past. But Rogan dismissed the idea again. “You’re talking about introspection,” he said. “He doesn’t have that.”
Despite calling Maron out for his lack of introspection, the only way that Rogan or anyone else knows about the jealousy streak in Maron’s past is because Maron has repeatedly admitted it, owned up to it, and discussed it at length, including just yesterday regarding his past jealousy of Jon Stewart and two weeks ago regarding his falling out with Louis CK.
If anything, Maron is too introspective.
Rogan also suggested that Maron only liked him during the years when WTF was bigger than The Joe Rogan Experience, and that everything changed once Rogan’s Spotify deal made him the most popular podcaster. “He started talking sh** about me long before all this Trump stuff,” Rogan said. “This Trump stuff is just the most recent iteration of this bizarre thing he does with people.”
For all his talk about jealousy, though, the rant sounded a lot like projection. Rogan devoted an extraordinary amount of time to Maron, calling him a liar for telling Howie Mandel he didn’t have issues with other comedians, and accused him of alienating Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, and Tony Hinchcliffe, and even mocked Maron’s audience as “sad people” who “buy single tickets.”
A lot of Rogan’s criticism, interestingly, was echoed by his minions on the Andrew Schulz podcast yesterday, where Schulz also criticized other comedians for daring to criticize Rogan. Rogan has unleashed the cult. Shulz even repeated the jabs about Maron’s audience on his podcast.
At one point, Rogan also brought up Theo Von, whom Maron mocked in his special over the summer. “That sent Theo into a real spiral,” Rogan said, referencing Theo Von’s recent mental health issues. (Theo Von, for his part, has never publicly attributed his issues to Maron — he said it was because he quit his meds and because of the ICE recruitment video).
Rogan even took time to mock WTF’s format, calling Maron’s introspective monologues at the top of his show “self-indulgent rants” (point conceded, although late in his run, they were mostly about his cats), and pointing out Reddit threads where fans post timestamps to skip them. “Nobody wants to hear it,” Rogan said. Because what most people want to hear about, apparently, is conspiracy theories and cage-fighting.
“But the root of it all is not real,” Rogan said, suggesting that Maron’s whole schtick is performative, a frequent attack he uses against people who actually hold firmly to their beliefs.
“It’s not that he cares so much that he wants everyone to do the right thing. That’s not it. He’s upset that all these people are getting attention. He’s upset that all these. It’s very childish, but he’ll make it look like, you know, he’s the righteous side, the left, the progressives. He’s the voice now and he’s gonna f**king, you know, we got work to do. We gotta get these fascists out. No, it’s. It’s. But it’s about him getting more attention. That’s what it ultimately is all about.”
Which is why he … quit his podcast? For more attention?
“And I’m not mad at him. And if I saw him and I talked to him, we were cool, I’d give him a hug,” Rogan concluded before going on a tirade about trans people. (Seriously).
If there’s any jealousy at play here, it might not belong to Marc Maron. WTF helped invent the modern podcast format, the one Rogan now uses to air his grievances to millions (to the dismay of many). For a guy so obsessed with being number one, Rogan still seems haunted by the man who got there first and was apparently afraid to call him out until Maron went off the air.
I will also note that Rogan did agree that Maron’s criticisms of comedians who went to Riyadh are legitimate, but that Maron needs to be funnier when making those points.
