Censuring The Joe Rogan Experience—a podcast whose eponymous host, a muscle-bound man most famous for providing MMA color commentary and pressuring people into eating bull testicles for money—has become an online cause célèbre in recent months after a group of 270 doctors penned an open letter to its distributor, Spotify, accusing the show of having “a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The letter took particular issue with a recent episode featuring guest Robert Malone, a biochemist who conducted a series of groundbreaking laboratory studies on cells using mRNA technology in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Malone is a pharmaceutical executive and lab researcher with no history of treating patients—he did not even complete his medical residency, according to his own CV. This did not stop him from floating wild, baseless claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, including that vaccine efficacy is a mirage attributed to “mass-formation psychosis” (despite Malone himself being vaccinated), and that hospitals are engaged in a grand conspiracy of misdiagnosing COVID-19 deaths in order to up their profits. He further compared the current public health climate to the rise of Nazism. Rogan not only provided Malone with a large platform and failed to push back on any of his pandemic conspiracies—which he has been banned from Twitter for constantly spreading—but appeared to agree with them. The episode was immediately removed from YouTube for violating its COVID-19 disinformation policy.
“As scientists, we face backlash and resistance as the public grows to distrust our research and expertise,” the doctors’ letter concluded. “As educators and science communicators, we are tasked with repairing the public’s damaged understanding of science and medicine. As physicians, we bear the arduous weight of a pandemic that has stretched our medical systems to their limits and only stands to be exacerbated by the anti-vaccination sentiment woven into this and other episodes of Rogan’s podcast.”
This is, of course, not the first time Rogan’s wildly popular podcast, which attracts up to 190 million downloads per month on Spotify, has signal-boosted potentially dangerous pandemic fictions. In late December, he welcomed Peter McCullough, a former cardiologist who’d been fired from the Baylor University Medical Center for spreading numerous COVID conspiracies—including his repeated endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a viable treatment—on his podcast. There, McCullough argued, against all reason, that the pandemic was a “planned event”; that masks do not offer any protection against COVID; that the virus cannot be spread by asymptomatic persons; that being infected with COVID offers you permanent immunity from the virus; and that vaccines are causing mass deaths that are being unreported. Again, Rogan, himself a vaccine skeptic who’s publicly endorsed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as alternative treatments for COVID, failed to counter these falsehoods.
In the wake of the doctors’ letter, a number of music artists, from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to India.Arie, removed their catalogs from Spotify in protest at Rogan’s reckless platforming of COVID lies.
Over the past week, however, criticism of Rogan and his podcast has reached a fever pitch, as a number of other videos re-emerged of the host engaged in a wide variety of offenses, from repeatedly saying the N-word to laughing hysterically as his pal Joey Diaz described coercing women into giving him blowjobs for stage time at The Comedy Store. (Rogan, who once bragged that he could perform oral sex on himself, retweeted Diaz’s defense of the clip when it first gained traction in 2020, calling his critics “cocksniffers.”).
That’s not all, of course. A clip went viral of Rogan on his podcast calling a movie theater filled with Black people “Planet of the Apes”:
<p><i>We’re gonna go see Planet of the Apes. So, I look at the iPhone app and it says, ‘OK, take me to this one.’ And the guy goes, OK. And I go, ‘Is that in a good neighborhood?’ And he goes [mimicking a foreign accent], ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah’—the guy barely speaks English. He takes us there. We get out and we’re giggling. ‘Oh, we’re going to see Planet of the Apes!’ We walk into Planet of the Apes. We walked into Africa, dude. We walked in the door and there was no white people. There was no white people. Planet of the Apes didn’t take place in Africa. That was a racist thing for me to say.</i></p>
Another widely shared clip featured Rogan, in response to a pod guest saying that he has a Black father and a white mother, saying:
<p><i>Powerful combination genetic-wise, right? You get the body of the Black man and then you get the mind of the white man all together in some strange combination. That doesn’t, by the way, mean that Black people don’t have brains. It’s a different brain…</i></p>
Spotify subsequently removed at least 113 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience from its platform, reportedly at Rogan’s behest, and Rogan released an apology video calling the N-word compilation “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly” and said that the mash-up was “taken out of context.” He alleged that he “never used [the N-word] to be racist” and that comparing Black people to Planet of the Apes was somehow not racist but merely “sounded terrible” and was “an idiotic thing to say,” adding, “I certainly would never want to offend someone for entertainment with something as stupid as racism.” (He did not address his other unmistakably racist comment about Black people having “a different brain.”)
Those familiar with Rogan’s podcast, and his history with the N-word, found the apology to be disingenuous at best—especially the portion about using racism as entertainment. After all, one of Rogan’s most notorious bits from his days as a stand-up concerned the N-word, and his desire to use it, as exhibited in his 2006 stand-up special Joe Rogan: Live:
<p><i>That’s a magic word: N*****. See? Even explaining that that’s a dangerous word—and saying the word? Everybody’s like, ‘Aww, this can start some shit!’ That’s how crazy that word is. Even explaining that it’s a word—is in fact a word—people go, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’ And only Black people are allowed to say it—and I respect that. I never say that word… unless I’m positive that there’s no Black people around. And then, even when I say it, I don’t say it in a racist way—I’m not racist at all—I say it just ’cause it sounds pretty cool. It’s not fair that you guys get to use that word.</i></p>
Granted, that special was released back in 2006, so it stands to reason that Rogan’s stance on the N-word could have evolved since then—if it weren’t for a clip from an Oct. 2017 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that boasted strikingly similar logic:
<p><i>When you say the N-word, you’re like saying like, here it cannot be spake. It cannot be uttered. It is a sacred word. It is a magic word. If you say it Candyman will come. You know, it’s very weird. It’s very weird that we’ve ever allowed that. It’s one thing… like, you could say ‘sp*c.’ No one’s gonna get mad, you know? Like, it’s not as racially charged, you know?</i></p>
Rogan then goaded his white guest into saying the N-word, and when he did, laughed loudly:
Throughout Rogan’s numerous controversies, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has stood by Rogan’s side. Ek’s unwavering allegiance to Rogan makes more sense when you consider their mutually beneficial relationship—specifically, how the former stand-up comic helped elevate Spotify to its status as the No. 1 podcasting space in the world.
Prior to Rogan’s $100 million signing, Spotify was struggling to keep up with its competition in the podcasting arena. According to a report in The Verge, Ek’s recent speech at a Spotify company town hall—audio of which was obtained by the publication—stressed how the marriage of Spotify and Rogan was a mutually beneficial one:
<p><i>Ek instead offered an impassioned pitch for why Rogan is critical to Spotify’s well-being. Despite Rogan’s show never being available on Spotify prior to its deal, the program was the most searched podcast on the platform, he says, and when the company decided to enter the podcasting industry, its catalog was “not that differentiated’’ from competitors. It had been struggling to make deals with “critical hardware partners like Amazon, Google, and even Tesla,” given that they were building “similar streaming services with essentially the same content.”</i><i>“To combat this, we needed to find leverage, and one way we could do this was in the form of exclusives,” he says. “To be frank, had we not made some of the choices we did, I am confident that our business wouldn’t be where it is today.” He says the company now operates the number one podcast app in the US.</i></p>
What’s been lost amid the hubbub over Rogan’s accommodation of COVID-19 conspiracies and racism is his persistent chumminess with those on the far- and alt-right.
Even prior to the recent removal of 113 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify had quietly erased many episodes featuring Rogan laughing, agreeing, and joking about with disreputable figures. Among these were InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was found liable for defamation after spreading lies about the Sandy Hook shooting being fake and terrorizing the child victims’ families; alt-right antisemite Owen Benjamin, a three-time guest who once said Hitler was trying to “clean Germany… of the parasites, of the fleas”; alt-righter Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, who was banned from Patreon for using “racial and homophobic slurs to degrade another individual”; white nationalist Stefan Molyneux (a repeat guest); alt-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos, a two-time guest, who got into hot water after condoning pedophilia on Rogan’s podcast; and Holocaust denier Charles C. Johnson, who posited on the pod that Black people have a genetic “proclivity to violence.”
Another repeat guest of Rogan’s was Gavin McInnes, the founder of the neo-fascist men’s rights group The Proud Boys, whose members once flashed white supremacist signs while vandalizing the Ashbury United Methodist Church—the oldest Black church in Washington, D.C.—in an act of pro-Trump solidarity, and had several of its members indicted following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Rogan has called McInnes “mostly fun” and “a cool libertarian.”
And McInnes’ appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience dramatically boosted recruitment in The Proud Boys, with McInnes himself admitting, “You wouldn’t believe how much that changed my life—that one podcast.”
Then again, McInnes and Rogan do appear to be on common ground when it comes to feminism. Rogan has railed against feminists too many times to count on Twitter (deleting a number of his more misogynistic tweets), promoted a men’s rights documentary, and even shared a “funny” (his words) YouTube video of McInnes delivering tips on how to troll feminists:
Rogan has also made an obsessive and disturbing number of transphobic comments on his podcast over the years, including calling transgender people a sign of “civilizations collapsing” and calling the trans community a “crazy radical cult.”
Spotify, meanwhile, does not appear the least bit interested in cutting ties with—or even censuring—Rogan, with Ek saying in a message to Spotify staff that while he was “deeply sorry” if anyone was offended by the ongoing controversy surrounding The Joe Rogan Experience, “I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer... We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope.”
