Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host and comedian, wasn’t always the ice bath enthusiast we know today. Throughout a number of episodes early in the run of of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan shared his deep passion for Bikram yoga, also known as hot yoga.
Rogan extolled the virtues of this intense practice, describing it as “the way to go” for both physical and mental benefits. The 90-minute sessions, conducted in a sweltering 105-degree environment, consist of 26 specific postures and two breathing exercises. Rogan emphasized the structured nature of the practice, noting that practitioners know exactly what to expect in each session.
The comedian’s dedication to Bikram yoga was evident as he detailed his preference for early morning classes on an empty stomach. He praised the practice for its ability to improve balance, flexibility, and joint strength, while also highlighting its meditative aspects.
Back then, Rogan would promote kooky products like the fleshlight and wasn’t covertly trying to cash in on every one of his fads.
This got me sufficiently curious to think about actually trying it despite my prejudices towards yoga. But like so many of these fads, It was all built on a rotten foundation.
Bikram Choudhury’s Catastrophic Injury and How He Claimed He Healed Himself
Bikram Choudhury built his empire on a compelling origin story of injury and self-healing. According to Choudhury, his journey began in 1964 when he was a champion weightlifter in India, poised to compete in the Olympics. Just days before the competition, disaster struck.
“Seven days before, in training camp, my catcher, you know who catch the barbell, drop the 465 pound on my left leg,” Choudhury claimed in interviews. He described his leg as “crushed, hundred, thousand pieces. Dust.”
Doctors allegedly told the young athlete he would never walk again and recommended amputation. But Choudhury says he refused, instead turning to his yoga guru Bishnu Ghosh for help.
“Everybody said I have to cut my leg off,” Choudhury recounted. But through an intensive yoga practice guided by Ghosh, he claims to have miraculously healed his shattered knee in just six months.
This tale of overcoming catastrophic injury through the power of yoga became central to Choudhury’s mystique as he built his hot yoga empire. He vowed to dedicate his life to spreading yoga globally, telling his guru: “The rest of my life. I’ll go around the world and I am to fix bad knees and bad legs.”
While the veracity of Choudhury’s injury story is difficult to verify, it undoubtedly played a key role in establishing his credentials as a yoga master with seemingly supernatural healing abilities. The narrative of a champion athlete saved from disability by yoga’s restorative powers held immense appeal as Choudhury marketed his practice to American audiences.
Bikram Choudhury built the Hot Yoga movement by faking his accolades
Bikram Choudhury, the controversial founder of hot yoga, built his multi-million dollar empire on a foundation of exaggerated and likely fabricated credentials.
Many of Choudhury’s claims about his background and achievements in India appear to be false or greatly embellished. These include assertions that he was a three-time national yoga champion in India as a youth and an Olympic-caliber weightlifter.
Choudhury arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and quickly gained a following among Hollywood celebrities with his intense, heated yoga classes. He promoted himself as a yoga prodigy who had been personally trained from childhood by renowned yoga master Bishnu Ghosh.
However, there is no evidence to support Choudhury’s claims of competitive yoga titles or weightlifting records in India. His connection to Ghosh also seems tenuous at best.
Instead, Choudhury appears to have reinvented himself upon arriving in America, crafting an origin story that appealed to Western audiences seeking exotic Eastern wisdom. He leveraged connections to stars like Shirley MacLaine to gain credibility and media attention.
The investigation suggests Choudhury recognized early on that exaggerating his qualifications and mystique would help him stand out in the competitive Los Angeles wellness scene. By the late 1970s, he had fully embraced his guru persona, complete with a best-selling book and growing yoga empire.
Bikram Choudhury used Influencer marketing and Leveraged Star Power to Build an Empire
Through his charisma, celebrity connections, and innovative hot yoga technique, Bikram quickly rose to fame as the “yoga master to the stars” in Beverly Hills.
Bikram’s journey to stardom began when he opened his first studio in Beverly Hills in 1973. His intense, physically demanding yoga classes in a heated room attracted Hollywood elite like Shirley MacLaine, Raquel Welch, and Quincy Jones. Bikram shrewdly leveraged these high-profile clients to gain media attention and build his reputation.
The yoga guru cultivated an aura of authenticity by claiming to be a yoga prodigy from India who had studied under renowned masters. He crafted a compelling rags-to-riches narrative about his journey from the streets of Calcutta to Beverly Hills. This origin story, combined with his celebrity clientele, made Bikram irresistible to the media.
Shirley MacLaine played a pivotal role in Bikram’s rise, introducing him to her celebrity network and helping him navigate American business practices. With her support, Bikram began appearing on popular TV shows and gracing magazine covers, further expanding his fame and following.
Bikram’s yoga classes stood out for their intensity and his unorthodox teaching style. He would prowl the room in a Speedo, barking instructions and critiques at students. This tough-love approach was a far cry from the gentle, spiritual yoga popular at the time. Many found Bikram’s methods harsh but effective.
As his popularity grew, Bikram began to claim ownership of his yoga sequence, ultimately publishing a book titled “Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class” in 1978. This marked the official branding of his yoga style and laid the foundation for his expanding empire.
By the 1990s, yoga was exploding in popularity across America. Bikram was perfectly positioned to ride this wave, having spent years cultivating his image as yoga royalty. His empire grew rapidly as he began franchising his hot yoga studios across the country.
Can you actually copyright sequences in which yoga poses are performed?
The legal battle between Bikram Choudhury and Raquel Welch in the 1980s raised an intriguing question about intellectual property rights in yoga: Can specific sequences of yoga poses be copyrighted?
Bikram sued actress Raquel Welch for copyright infringement over her fitness video that featured his signature 26-pose sequence performed in a heated room. While the details of the settlement remain private, the lawsuit apparently resulted in a substantial payout that allowed Bikram to purchase a lavish home in Beverly Hills.
This case highlighted the tension between yoga’s ancient spiritual traditions and modern attempts to claim ownership over particular styles or sequences. Traditionally, yoga was freely shared knowledge passed down through lineages of teachers. But as yoga became a lucrative industry in the West, some instructors sought to protect their unique approaches as intellectual property.
The U.S. Copyright Office has since clarified its stance, stating in 2012 that yoga poses and their sequences are not copyrightable. They are considered facts or ideas rather than creative expression. However, descriptions, photographs, and videos of yoga sequences can be protected by copyright.
Bikram’s aggressive approach to protecting his yoga empire through litigation foreshadowed later controversies. While he helped popularize yoga in America, his attempts to claim ownership over ancient poses and breathing techniques troubled many in the yoga community who viewed this as antithetical to yoga’s core principles.
What’s the actual truth about Choudhury’s background?
According to yoga experts with deep roots in India, many elements of Bikram yoga existed long before Choudhury. Kavya Dutta, whose family has strong connections to yoga’s history in Calcutta, says the sequence Bikram claims to have created was remarkably similar to poses her grandmother taught her as a child.
“Hot yoga” itself wasn’t new either. Dutta points out that Indian yogis have long practiced meditation surrounded by rings of fire. The combination of heat and yoga postures predates Bikram by centuries.
Even Bikram’s innovative fusion of yoga and physical culture appears to have been pioneered by his own guru, Bishnu Ghosh, decades earlier. At his college in Calcutta, Ghosh combined yoga with bodybuilding and stunts to create spectacular shows that spread yoga’s popularity.
While Bikram took credit for marrying Eastern and Western practices, it was actually Ghosh who first blended yoga with physical culture and understood the importance of showmanship in attracting students.
Bikram’s real innovation seems to have been standardizing and franchising yoga instruction on a massive scale. By creating a fixed dialogue for teachers to recite and strict rules for studio owners to follow, Bikram enabled his style of yoga to spread rapidly across the U.S. and globally.
However, many of Bikram’s more grandiose claims about his background – from winning Olympic medals to teaching yoga to the Beatles – have been definitively debunked. The truth of Bikram’s origins appears to be far less dramatic than the mythology he created.
Sadly the demise of Bikram Choudhury couldn’t really be separated from the Bikram Yoga
The downfall of Bikram Choudhury has proven inseparable from the practice he created and popularized. As allegations of SA and misconduct surfaced against Choudhury, the yoga community he built was forced to reckon with his actions and their own complicity.
Multiple women came forward with accusations of SA against Choudhury, shattering the image many had of him as a revered yoga guru. The revelations sent waves through the tight-knit Bikram Yoga community, dividing practitioners and teachers into those who defended Choudhury, those who had long suspected his behavior, and those caught in between.
For many devoted students and teachers, separating Bikram the man from Bikram the yoga proved impossible. Studio owners grappled with whether to keep Choudhury’s name on their businesses or distance themselves entirely. The very foundations of the practice were called into question as the community wrestled with how complicit they had been in enabling Choudhury’s alleged abuses.
Some, like studio owner Tiffany Friedman, felt they had to walk away entirely. “If I continue to participate in something that is harmful to even one person, then I couldn’t do it,” she explained in comments to 30 for 30: Bikram podcast. Others struggled to reconcile the healing power of the yoga with the harm caused by its creator.
The scandal exposed how Choudhury had cultivated a culture of unquestioning devotion that normalized inappropriate behavior. As Liz Winfield, a former insider turned advocate for victims put it, “This is normalizing the abnormal behaviors. But everybody was caught up in it.”
Ultimately, Choudhury fled the country facing multiple lawsuits and a warrant for his arrest. While he continues to lead teacher trainings abroad, his yoga empire in the U.S. crumbled. That final spike on the Google trends chart indicates the timeline of Netflix releasing a middling documentary about the troubling accusations against him.
Joe Rogan Was Quick to Dump Hot Yoga Upon Learning How Strange Choudhury Was
On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Tom Papa and host Joe Rogan had a hilarious discussion about Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga.
Rogan, who practices hot yoga himself, was stunned to learn about Choudhury’s outlandish behavior and legal troubles. The podcast host couldn’t contain his laughter as he and Papa reviewed clips from an HBO interview where Choudhury made odd claims.
In the interview, the 70-year-old yoga guru boasted that “5,000 women a day want to sleep with him” and that “people would pay $1 million for a drop of his sp*rm.” Rogan and Papa were in disbelief at Choudhury’s grandiose statements and inflated sense of self-importance.
The comedians also touched on the more serious allegations against Choudhury, including misconduct claims from former students.
Ultimately, Rogan and Papa found the absurdity of Choudhury’s claims to be comedy gold, with Rogan particularly tickled by the interviewer’s deadpan reactions to the yoga master’s outrageous statements.
The paralels between Choudhury and Wim Hof
A decade ago, you couldn’t walk through any urban neighborhood without spotting a Bikram Yoga studio, its windows fogged from the signature 104-degree heat within. Today, that same wellness-seeking crowd might be found gathering around ice baths, following the gospel of the “Iceman” Wim Hof. The rise and fall of these temperature-based wellness movements offers a stark reminder of how quickly empires can crumble when their charismatic founders face serious allegations.
The stories of Bikram Choudhury and Wim Hof share an almost poetic symmetry. Where Choudhury preached transformation through extreme heat, Hof evangelized the power of extreme cold. Both men built global followings with promises of physical and mental transformation, backed by personal stories that seemed almost mythical in scope. Both created certification programs, trained disciples, and watched their methods spread across continents.
But beneath the surface of these wellness empires, troubling narratives were brewing. Choudhury’s fall from grace came through multiple SA allegations, eventually leading to his flight from the United States. Now, Hof faces his own moment of reckoning, with serious allegations of domestic violence from his former partner and children. Questions about his first wife’s death in 1995 have resurfaced, casting a shadow over the origin story that helped launch his method.
Yet there’s a crucial difference in how these scandals have affected their respective movements. When Choudhury fell, he took Bikram Yoga down with him. The practice was inseparable from its founder – his name, his personality, his strict control over teacher certification. Studios closed, practitioners sought alternatives, and the once-booming hot yoga trend cooled considerably.
The ice bath movement, however, seems more resilient to its founder’s troubles.
While Hof might have popularized cold therapy, the practice has found new champions in figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman. These influencers have transformed cold exposure from a niche practice into a mainstream wellness trend, complete with luxury ice bath manufacturers selling $20,000 tubs to eager consumers.
This evolution suggests a shift in how wellness movements operate in the social media age. While Bikram Yoga remained tethered to its founder’s studio model, ice baths have diversified into a broader industry with multiple stakeholders and advocates. The practice has developed enough independent momentum and scientific backing to potentially outlive its controversial pioneer.
Still, these parallel stories raise uncomfortable questions about the wellness industry’s recurring pattern of elevated, then disgraced, guru figures.
Source notes
The hands down best source for everything surrounding the rise and fall of Bikram Choudhury is the 30 for 30 documentary podcast. It is closely followed by Netflix documentary which focuses more on claims of abuse and doesn’t do enough to outline a clear story. There are also several books on the matter that have informed my opinions on these matters.