The host of the world’s most popular podcast believes it’s time to move past the quarantine phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
On the Tuesday edition of his podcast, Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator Joe Rogan said people were ready to start making their own decisions about safety and freedom amid the infectious disease outbreak.
“We’re going to have to give people the freedom to make choices and to do what they want to do with their own life and their own health,” Rogan said. “Heart attacks are killing people as quickly as anything, right? Cancer is killing people as quickly as anything. Cigarettes kill a half a million people a year — there’s no government mandate that’s trying to get people to stop smoking cigarettes.”
Rogan clarified that cigarettes are a choice while infectious diseases are not but stressed that most people who die from the coronavirus are elderly or have compromised immune systems already.
“The vast majority of people that are going to get this … it’s not going to be fatal,” added Rogan. “We have to figure out how to protect the people that are high risk, but to quarantine the whole country, it just seems like maybe it was a good move to do initially, but we can’t sustain that, so now, we have to figure out how to move forward.”
Rogan’s podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, boasts more than 190 million downloads per month and is ranked the No. 1 podcast in the world, according to Apple. Speaking with chef Adam Perry Lang, Rogan said he was eager to see the restaurant business, which had been economically ravaged by restrictions because of the disease, reopen but is cautious as to what that might look like.
“What kind of government overreach are we going to have, where people are going to come in and police this?” Rogan said. “There’s no real science to that either by the way. They have a bunch of people jammed into a room, whether they’re 6 feet apart or not, you’re touching things, you’re breathing on each other. … I think you should allow people to do what they want to do.”
