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Home » Transcript of Antonio Brown on Joe Rogan Podcast #2286

Transcript of Antonio Brown on Joe Rogan Podcast #2286

Read the full transcript of former professional football player, and entrepreneur Antonio Brown’s interview on Joe Rogan Experience #2286, [Mar 7, 2025].   

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Meeting and Social Media Presence

[JOE ROGAN:] Bro, good to see you. What’s going on, man?

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Pleasure to man. Good to see you, baby.

[JOE ROGAN:] Papa, look at that ring. Holy shit. Good to see you. Pleasure to meet you. You’re the most fun follow on Twitter by far. Excuse me. X.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Thank you.

[JOE ROGAN:] Whatever they want to call it. You’re the most fun.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Thank you, man. You made my job easy, you know, all the entertainment you give me.

[JOE ROGAN:] How did you decide to start doing this? How did you… first of all, were you always as funny?

[ANTONIO BROWN:] I would like to think so.

[JOE ROGAN:] But, like, your social media presence, like I forget it. I think Tony Hinchcliffe told me about you. He’s like, “Dude, you have to follow Antonio Brown. You must – he’s the most must follow on the Internet.” I’m like, really? And then I go to your page, and I’m dying laughing. We’re sharing it around the green room with the comedy stuff. And then when I won crack of the day, I was like, yes.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Yes. Of the year. Cracker of the year. That’s right. I try to use X as a good platform to bring laughter, making, you know, bringing humor back and comedy, making people feel good.

[JOE ROGAN:] Well, you can get wild.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Yeah. I get a little wild sometimes.

[JOE ROGAN:] You can get wild on X. You can get a little wild on X. Well, Twitter, they would’ve got rid of you a long time ago. You would’ve been canceled. They probably would’ve got rid of me too if Elon didn’t buy Twitter.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Yeah. We thanks Elon Musk for giving us that platform to be able to be expressive, you know, to bring comedy back, bringing entertainment.

[JOE ROGAN:] Just ridiculous shit. Have some fun again.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Have some fun again.

[JOE ROGAN:] What happened? Everybody tightened up for, like, five years. It was really tight.

The Origin of CTESPN

[JOE ROGAN:] How did you come up with hashtag CTESPN? Because that’s my favorite.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] I feel like when I stopped playing football and I walked off the field, people was like, this guy’s crazy. Like, he’s retarded now and then he’s illiterate. So, you know, I was like, you know what? Maybe I could rebrand CTESPN with giving people perspective of different challenges people face and great individuals, how they overcome adversity, and just kind of share and tune perspective of how people is getting through trauma. Now no matter if you’re a football player, I mean, what it’s like for you, you started UFC.

[JOE ROGAN:] The reality of head trauma is something that we’re, like, as a society, we’re just embracing over the last ten, twenty years. Like, it wasn’t for that concussion movie. I think that opened up a lot of people’s eyes.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] That Will Smith movie?

[JOE ROGAN:] Yes. And the story of that doctor finding how many people have, like, significant brain trauma from football.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] So for me, I try to use it because this is a serious standpoint. A lot of ex-players and players have actually been diagnosed and passed away from CTE. So for me, on a serious point of bringing awareness and bringing a reality standpoint of what athletes and people fighting or anyone in their daily lives facing from head trauma of just people writing them off, you know, and encouraging therapy, encouraging how do you get through tough situation and then making it funny. Because I feel like nowadays, if you do something crazy, people like, “Oh, yeah. That guy’s crazy.” So I was like, let’s just show why they crazy and CTESPN and show the cause of the craziness.

[JOE ROGAN:] There’s a real cause of the craziness. And we’re ignoring it as a society because we love football. We love MMA. We love boxing. So we just kind of overlook it with the entertainment. Keep moving. Keep hitting. I’m friends with a lot of dudes, so I get to see what they’re like after fights. You know? Like, everybody watches the fight. The fight’s amazing. And then, you know, you run into them after fights and have a conversation with them like, “Oh, man.” Their whole head’s swollen, can’t move their hands, you know, can’t walk, calves are blown out, knees messed up, ice here, this, there.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] It’s a challenge, man. It’s a real challenge.

[JOE ROGAN:] And when you started playing football, nobody even thought about it.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Because you just never think about the repercussions. You just think how I’ll make a better life.

[JOE ROGAN:] Well, back then, nobody even really knew that that was going to happen to football players. It was kind of a thing that they thought about with boxers. Rarely people talked about football players who aren’t doing so good.

[ANTONIO BROWN:] So I felt like CTESPN was brought back to recognize the awareness of high level people experiencing trauma and not being able to overcome that trauma because, you know, life’s changing you in a second. You’re playing football. You know it’s going to come to an end, and then what do you do next?

The Challenges of Post-Athletic Life

[JOE ROGAN:] That’s the hardest thing. Right? For pro athletes, you go from being a kid to all of a sudden, you are making millions of dollars. And you’re young. And you’re wild. And you’re not – it’s going to go away. And then all your friends are buying jewelry. And all your friends are buying Mercedes Benz and Bentleys and all this stuff, and you’re like, “Damn.” And I think the number was something like eighty-five percent of NFL players go bankrupt within x amount of years after retirement?

[ANTONIO BROWN:] Exactly.