But but he has black people on his podcast thoughFalse commentary on left wing crimes but no mention of the right wing militias and rampant racist animals in Portland or Oregon.
Smh
Joe Rogan Just Landed a $100 Million Deal On Spotify
- Thread starter darth frosty
- Start date
Smh
I dont think Joe has ever claimed to be "smart" he has guess that I think are very smart, some quacks, some conspiracy theorist. He had some of the most interesting people on that I would have never known about like Hotep Jesus, Thaddues Russel and many others. Joe lets everyone come on and have a voice. They just pick out the parts they dont like. Also this guy is drunk and high every episode HELLO wtf
This is what I'm thinking. Outside of mma and comedy, he claims to be dumb as rocks, so brings on "smart and interesting" ppl for conversation.
I'm thinking they giving u 100M, that certainly comes with a lot of pressure for content. While u may want to "stay the same" there is no way you can. You'll try to do things that you don't ordinarily do. In his case try to be knowledgeable.
Btw I don't think he's funny. Humorous yes, but I've never laughed out loud at his jokes.
I agree with him that trans women should not be in women's sports. If that makes me transphobic too, so be it.
Prime Stern couldn't survive this era.
Yeah, time will tell. I'm guessing they think they can change him while keeping his audience. They already blocked some content, so I guess they figure they will be able to get away with more 'suggestions'. Joe's success came from interviewing everyone and allowing them to talk. Neil Degrasse , Elon Musk, Mike Tyson, Kevin Hart, etc. Far left just highlights the interviews they don't like. And that's to be expected. It's crazy to overlook IMHO.
I remember the controversy when BGOL was going mainstream. Folks argued the same shit. What makes BGOL is what makes BGOL. General public really ain't built for this shit and if we wanted twitter/facebook that's where we'd be. We just random people with no money in this. Spotify is a huge company. Hard to believe they didn't have the same talk we had with people pointing out Joe probably won't work as is and changing ruins the podcast.
Yea his stance on the Holy herb is cool..
But I feel some kind of way about hunters...
In an alternative reality all hunters will be hunted by animals
I mean I could understand during an apocolypse...
But this aint no gatdam apocolypse
I just can't see killing shit that wants to live...for sport
that crigga aint seeing nowhere near that money, his wife is thinkin about life
husband free with fifty milly in the bank....bitches become brand new
when they see that bag come through...
Probably some clause that if does something wrong he will get terminated from contract and not get full payment.. he not trying to miss that 25 mill a yr payment
Select Spotify employees ‘alienated’ following ‘transphobic’ content from Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan Spotify deal has some "alienated" employees questioning the platform’s commitment to content that is being called "transphobic."
www.mmamania.com
Spotify Employees Reportedly Raised Concerns Over Joe Rogan Podcasts Deemed Transphobic
Joe Rogan signed a mega-deal with Spotify earlier this year, which made the streaming giant the official home of his podcast 'The Joe Rogan Experience.'
'Joe Rogan Experience' Episodes Must Be Removed, Says Spotify Staff
Several Spotify employees are reportedly demanding the removal of additional 'Joe Rogan Experience' episodes featuring controversial guests.
www.digitalmusicnews.com
@ViCiouS
Joe Rogan Is Already a Headache for Spotify
By Nicholas Quah@nwquah
This article first ran in Hot Pod, an industry-leading trade newsletter about podcasting by Nick Quah.
Joe Rogan. Photo: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via
When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to an exclusive multi-year distribution deal earlier in the summer, the company’s stock price soared briefly, illustrating both the extent to which investors valued its bet on exclusives as well as Rogan’s unlikely standing as a legitimate media phenomenon.
But the move also prompted immediate questions about whether Spotify was prepared for what that media phenomenon brings with it. Sure, The Joe Rogan Experience commands an exceptionally large following and a growing currency of cultural influence, but Rogan’s radical free speech orientation and “freethinking” ideology have consistently courted controversy in the past. In particular, observers were curious to see how Spotify would navigate issues around misinformation and hate speech, the latter being a concept that Rogan himself has a history of actively interrogating in terms of its relationship with free speech.
Two things happened over the past week that hint at the battles to come. As discrete events, they don’t quite push the point just yet, but they do sketch out the broad shape of what Spotify will have to deal with as it negotiates a new identity and set of responsibilities that come with its modern programming efforts.
The first involves a brush with misinformation. On Thursday, The Joe Rogan Experience published an episode with Douglas Murray, the conservative British political commentator, in which Rogan repeated a claim, derived from a conspiracy theory, that “left-wing people” have been arrested for intentionally causing wildfires in Oregon. That conspiracy theory had already been debunked by several mainstream news sources by the episode’s publication, and while Rogan’s citation of the claim seemed to be more of an aside contributing to the flow of the episode’s conversation on Murray’s “madness of crowds” ideas, the whole thing nonetheless added up to a situation where a piece of misinformation — which might be inflammatory or harmful, depending on how you interpret the impact mechanics of misinformation — ended up being spread further by an extremely popular podcast that’s now being paid for, hosted, and distributed by a major audio streaming platform.
Rogan’s recitation of the conspiracy theory turned out to be inadvertent, and to his credit, Rogan issued an apology over his social media accounts the next day, explaining that he had been misled by an article that he had read.
Here’s the version of the statement that went out over Twitter:
This incident — along with the apology, which has been recognized as being somewhat rare for Rogan — drew a good deal of coverage, yielding write-ups by CNN Business, Business Insider, Vanity Fair, and the left-leaning media watchdog site Media Matters, among other places.
The fact that Rogan issued an apology appears to have nipped this specific incident in the bud for now, but it did nevertheless raise the question of what would have happened if the situation turned out to be a little more complicated. What if the claim was murkier, or less solidly debunked? Would Spotify have left the episode up? Would it have added contextualizing indicators on the platform? And what would Spotify’s stance be if public criticism were levied at greater intensity and volume against Rogan? Would it feel moved to defend Rogan, or seek to evoke some sort of distributor neutrality stance? The latter is a possible option, theoretically speaking. After all, Spotify does share a market with iHeartMedia, which distributes both Pete Buttigieg’s podcast and a galaxy of right-wing talk radio programming, including the misinformation-rich Rush Limbaugh. But there’s a certain quality to Spotify’s public visibility and narrative that suggests the distributor neutrality option might be more challenging for this decidedly more “modern” media company in the social context of 2020. I reckon, as we drift deeper into the muck, there’s a real possibility that it might get harder for people to square the Spotify that has an exclusive deal with the Obamas with the Spotify that has an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan.
It’s also worth noting that this whole situation about Joe Rogan and speech was one thing when The Joe Rogan Experience stood independent on the open podcast ecosystem, with Rogan shouldering the risks and costs of his speech by himself. As I understand it, that’s kinda part of his appeal to his listener base: the guy says what he wants, and he’ll own whatever that begets him. But now that he’s on this deal with Spotify — said to be worth over a hundred million dollars — you have to imagine that the calculus shifts at least a little bit. He’ll continue saying what he wants, sure, but the effects of that speech impacts a whole other entity now, and it seems like we’re increasingly looking at a scenario where either Rogan will bend to Spotify’s needs or Spotify will bend to Rogan’s needs. At this point, I’m not quite certain which is more likely, though if you gave me house money to bet with, I’d go with the latter.
(There’s a third wildcard outcome scenario, if you really wanna get five-dimensional chess here. Back when the Rogan deal was first announced, a reader wrote in suggesting a scene in which Spotify rides out the length of the deal, extracting as much value as it can while weathering whatever storms it will bring as much as possible, before letting The Joe Rogan Experience go. Kudos to that reader for the imagination, but I don’t think I’d go that far.
Anyway, all these questions carry over to the second thing that happened over the past week. Last Wednesday, Motherboard published a report that draws attention to what appears to be an emerging tension between Spotify’s workforce and its leadership over content substance. Citing three anonymized sources, the report highlighted a recent company town hall meeting in which some employees raised concerns and submitted questions over Rogan’s history with comments deemed transphobic. “Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leadership’s response in JRE conversations. What is your message to those employees?” one question read.
There have been several examples of Rogan making such comments over the years, but more recent instances include an episode earlier this summer that saw Rogan bringing on Abigail Shrier, whose book “Irreversible Damage” has been criticized for describing gender dysphoria as a “social contagion,” and another episode just last week, which featured Rogan making a crude joke about Caitlin Jenner and the Kardashians.
According to Motherboard, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek acknowledged that “a total of 10 meetings have been held with various groups and individuals to hear their respective concerns.” Ek additionally commented upon the specific Abigail Shrier guest spot: “Joe Rogan and the episode in question have been reviewed extensively. The fact that we aren’t changing our position doesn’t mean we aren’t listening. It just means we made a different judgment call.” (He also told employees not to leak the conversation to the media, but, uh, here we are.)
One has to imagine that this is only the first sparks of a much bigger fire, and there will almost certainly be many, many more judgment calls to come. The fundamental question, in my mind, is how exactly Spotify — the platform and the publisher — will try and define its relationship to its own content, and the extent to which it will take responsibility for it in the eyes of the audience, the public, and its own employees.
As we move forward in time, there are two specific things that I’d keep an eye on in relation to this thread. The first is whether Spotify will more clearly design a set of policies about speech on its platform, whether the platform will stick closely to it, and whether those policies will sit well with Rogan. The second thing is the growing labor movement within Spotify. Remember: three content divisions within Spotify — Gimlet Media, The Ringer, and Parcast — are now actively organizing in pursuit of building worker power within the institution, and there’s a pathway for that organizing purview to overlap with editorial and speech issues like this.
Spotify shook the podcast world when it went after the big rewards that exclusively signing The Joe Rogan Experience would bring. Now it’s time to see whether it can shoulder the risk.
One last thing… I’d be remiss if I moved on without bringing up the earlier story about certain Joe Rogan episodes being unexpectedly absent on the platform when the show was finally added to Spotify at the top of the month. Many of those missing episodes featured some of the show’s most controversial guests, like the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and this fact triggered some amount of conspiratorial speculation over platform censorship. To my knowledge, those episodes remain absent on Spotify, and there hasn’t appeared to be much clarity or movement on this particular issue since.
Joe Rogan Is Already a Headache for Spotify
By Nicholas Quah@nwquah
This article first ran in Hot Pod, an industry-leading trade newsletter about podcasting by Nick Quah.
Joe Rogan. Photo: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via
When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to an exclusive multi-year distribution deal earlier in the summer, the company’s stock price soared briefly, illustrating both the extent to which investors valued its bet on exclusives as well as Rogan’s unlikely standing as a legitimate media phenomenon.
But the move also prompted immediate questions about whether Spotify was prepared for what that media phenomenon brings with it. Sure, The Joe Rogan Experience commands an exceptionally large following and a growing currency of cultural influence, but Rogan’s radical free speech orientation and “freethinking” ideology have consistently courted controversy in the past. In particular, observers were curious to see how Spotify would navigate issues around misinformation and hate speech, the latter being a concept that Rogan himself has a history of actively interrogating in terms of its relationship with free speech.
Two things happened over the past week that hint at the battles to come. As discrete events, they don’t quite push the point just yet, but they do sketch out the broad shape of what Spotify will have to deal with as it negotiates a new identity and set of responsibilities that come with its modern programming efforts.
The first involves a brush with misinformation. On Thursday, The Joe Rogan Experience published an episode with Douglas Murray, the conservative British political commentator, in which Rogan repeated a claim, derived from a conspiracy theory, that “left-wing people” have been arrested for intentionally causing wildfires in Oregon. That conspiracy theory had already been debunked by several mainstream news sources by the episode’s publication, and while Rogan’s citation of the claim seemed to be more of an aside contributing to the flow of the episode’s conversation on Murray’s “madness of crowds” ideas, the whole thing nonetheless added up to a situation where a piece of misinformation — which might be inflammatory or harmful, depending on how you interpret the impact mechanics of misinformation — ended up being spread further by an extremely popular podcast that’s now being paid for, hosted, and distributed by a major audio streaming platform.
Rogan’s recitation of the conspiracy theory turned out to be inadvertent, and to his credit, Rogan issued an apology over his social media accounts the next day, explaining that he had been misled by an article that he had read.
Here’s the version of the statement that went out over Twitter:
This incident — along with the apology, which has been recognized as being somewhat rare for Rogan — drew a good deal of coverage, yielding write-ups by CNN Business, Business Insider, Vanity Fair, and the left-leaning media watchdog site Media Matters, among other places.
The fact that Rogan issued an apology appears to have nipped this specific incident in the bud for now, but it did nevertheless raise the question of what would have happened if the situation turned out to be a little more complicated. What if the claim was murkier, or less solidly debunked? Would Spotify have left the episode up? Would it have added contextualizing indicators on the platform? And what would Spotify’s stance be if public criticism were levied at greater intensity and volume against Rogan? Would it feel moved to defend Rogan, or seek to evoke some sort of distributor neutrality stance? The latter is a possible option, theoretically speaking. After all, Spotify does share a market with iHeartMedia, which distributes both Pete Buttigieg’s podcast and a galaxy of right-wing talk radio programming, including the misinformation-rich Rush Limbaugh. But there’s a certain quality to Spotify’s public visibility and narrative that suggests the distributor neutrality option might be more challenging for this decidedly more “modern” media company in the social context of 2020. I reckon, as we drift deeper into the muck, there’s a real possibility that it might get harder for people to square the Spotify that has an exclusive deal with the Obamas with the Spotify that has an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan.
It’s also worth noting that this whole situation about Joe Rogan and speech was one thing when The Joe Rogan Experience stood independent on the open podcast ecosystem, with Rogan shouldering the risks and costs of his speech by himself. As I understand it, that’s kinda part of his appeal to his listener base: the guy says what he wants, and he’ll own whatever that begets him. But now that he’s on this deal with Spotify — said to be worth over a hundred million dollars — you have to imagine that the calculus shifts at least a little bit. He’ll continue saying what he wants, sure, but the effects of that speech impacts a whole other entity now, and it seems like we’re increasingly looking at a scenario where either Rogan will bend to Spotify’s needs or Spotify will bend to Rogan’s needs. At this point, I’m not quite certain which is more likely, though if you gave me house money to bet with, I’d go with the latter.
(There’s a third wildcard outcome scenario, if you really wanna get five-dimensional chess here. Back when the Rogan deal was first announced, a reader wrote in suggesting a scene in which Spotify rides out the length of the deal, extracting as much value as it can while weathering whatever storms it will bring as much as possible, before letting The Joe Rogan Experience go. Kudos to that reader for the imagination, but I don’t think I’d go that far.
Anyway, all these questions carry over to the second thing that happened over the past week. Last Wednesday, Motherboard published a report that draws attention to what appears to be an emerging tension between Spotify’s workforce and its leadership over content substance. Citing three anonymized sources, the report highlighted a recent company town hall meeting in which some employees raised concerns and submitted questions over Rogan’s history with comments deemed transphobic. “Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leadership’s response in JRE conversations. What is your message to those employees?” one question read.
There have been several examples of Rogan making such comments over the years, but more recent instances include an episode earlier this summer that saw Rogan bringing on Abigail Shrier, whose book “Irreversible Damage” has been criticized for describing gender dysphoria as a “social contagion,” and another episode just last week, which featured Rogan making a crude joke about Caitlin Jenner and the Kardashians.
According to Motherboard, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek acknowledged that “a total of 10 meetings have been held with various groups and individuals to hear their respective concerns.” Ek additionally commented upon the specific Abigail Shrier guest spot: “Joe Rogan and the episode in question have been reviewed extensively. The fact that we aren’t changing our position doesn’t mean we aren’t listening. It just means we made a different judgment call.” (He also told employees not to leak the conversation to the media, but, uh, here we are.)
One has to imagine that this is only the first sparks of a much bigger fire, and there will almost certainly be many, many more judgment calls to come. The fundamental question, in my mind, is how exactly Spotify — the platform and the publisher — will try and define its relationship to its own content, and the extent to which it will take responsibility for it in the eyes of the audience, the public, and its own employees.
As we move forward in time, there are two specific things that I’d keep an eye on in relation to this thread. The first is whether Spotify will more clearly design a set of policies about speech on its platform, whether the platform will stick closely to it, and whether those policies will sit well with Rogan. The second thing is the growing labor movement within Spotify. Remember: three content divisions within Spotify — Gimlet Media, The Ringer, and Parcast — are now actively organizing in pursuit of building worker power within the institution, and there’s a pathway for that organizing purview to overlap with editorial and speech issues like this.
Spotify shook the podcast world when it went after the big rewards that exclusively signing The Joe Rogan Experience would bring. Now it’s time to see whether it can shoulder the risk.
One last thing… I’d be remiss if I moved on without bringing up the earlier story about certain Joe Rogan episodes being unexpectedly absent on the platform when the show was finally added to Spotify at the top of the month. Many of those missing episodes featured some of the show’s most controversial guests, like the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and this fact triggered some amount of conspiratorial speculation over platform censorship. To my knowledge, those episodes remain absent on Spotify, and there hasn’t appeared to be much clarity or movement on this particular issue since.
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512K Followers, 1,226 Following, 1,013 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Young Jamie (@jamievernon)
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Kanye West Confirms He's Doing Joe Rogan's Podcast, Posts FaceTime Pics
Ye and Joe Rogan are finally coming face-to-face ... and microphone to microphone.
www.tmz.com
Should Spotify Be Responsible for What Joe Rogan Does?
By Nicholas Quah@nwquah
This article first ran in Hot Pod, an industry-leading trade newsletter about podcasting by Nick Quah.
Photo: PowerfulJRE/YouTube
When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to a hundred million dollar exclusive distribution deal this summer, practically everyone wondered how the audio streaming platform would handle the next time Rogan brought on Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist whose provably false and harmful provocations got his ass de-platformed by several major tech companies — including Spotify itself — in 2018.
Rogan had proven willing to give Jones a platform a few times before, engaging the conspiracy theorist in a distinctly Roganian “you’ve said some crazy stuff before but you’ve also said some controversial stuff I think you were right about so it all evens out for me” style of discourse that typically allows Jones to get off a high volume of conspiracy claims with Rogan only contesting some of those claims to the extent he’s interested enough to do so.
It took just under two months since The Joe Rogan Experience officially debuted on Spotify for the show to vault the company into that exact controversy everyone knew was coming. Last Tuesday, the podcast dropped a three hour-long episode with Jones, in which the conspiracy theorist, accompanied by the comedian Tim Dillon, did all the things you’d expect from the face of Infowars. Here’s The Verge with a partial summary:
That trickiness likely informed Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s response to a question raised about the incident during the company’s earnings call last Thursday, which leaned heavily on the notion of policy consistency. “We obviously review all the content that goes up” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Joe Rogan or anyone else. We do apply those policies, but it’s important to note that this needs to be evenly applied, no matter if it’s an internal pressure or an external pressure as well, because otherwise we are a creative platform for lots of creators, and it’s important that they know what to expect from our platform. If we can’t do that, then there are other choices for creators to go to so that consistency is super important.”
That response, by the way, was foreshadowed in a BuzzFeed News report that came out the day before the earnings call, which contained leaked emails featuring the company’s chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, defending the show internally and providing talking points to Spotify management should they be made to publicly comment on the situation. One of those talking points was the aforementioned lean on content policy consistency.
Here’s the thing about this story for me: practically everybody knew in their bones that a Jones-Rogan situation was going to be inevitable under Spotify’s watch. So, why does it seem like the company didn’t entirely expect to handle something like this when they signed Rogan?
You can’t say the company didn’t have ample warning. In addition to Rogan’s entire track record, The Joe Rogan Experience gave Spotify two incidents around this general area the very month it debuted on the platform: the first is Rogan inadvertently reciting a debunked conspiracy theory about “left-wing people” being arrested for intentionally starting wildfires in Oregon, which he later apologized for, and the second is a guest spot by Abigail Shrier, whose book “Irreversible Damage” has been criticized for describing gender dysphoria as a “social contagion.” Furthermore, according to a Motherboard report, as a result of signing Rogan, Spotify started experiencing emerging tension with its workforce over content policy questions, which partly came through in a company town hall in which some employees raised concerns over Rogan’s history with comments considered transphobic. These things were light brushes compared to the Jones-Rogan situation, which presents the company with most extreme manifestation of this content moderation problem, but they nevertheless were signals that should’ve prompted Spotify to ramp up some process around pulling together a clear, consistent, and communicable content moderation policy as soon as humanly possible.
Let’s pull back for a second. Now, I don’t believe there’s any future in which Spotify does anything to rock the Joe Rogan boat. Don’t forget: Rogan is Spotify’s premiere signing in its push into podcasting, and as I’ve argued previously, The Joe Rogan Experience, whose intense popularity is uniquely significant for its capacity to draw new listeners onto the platform, is the piece that’s supposed to pull the company’s entire podcast bet together and take it to the next level. So, with that in mind, Spotify is more likely to tailor its content policy approach around Rogan’s needs than around anything else, because Spotify likely sees the upside of keeping Rogan happy being greater than the downsides he could bring to the business… even the risk of employee unrest, perhaps.
But however they land on content moderation, they have to land somewhere — and soon, too, because the Jones-Rogan situation is only one type of many, many big content risks the company will inevitably have to deal with in the days to come.
It’s often been asked of Spotify whether it’s a Netflix or a YouTube, with that inquiry generally being used as a way to think through how they should be held accountable for the content that flows through their pipes. That binary is false, I think, as the company has built its push into podcasting on the twin prongs of serving as a publisher of original content (substantiated by talent deals and various acquisitions) and serving as a platform (substantiated by acquiring the hosting platform Anchor). In other words, Spotify is effectively both Netflix and YouTube, and as such, they are exposed to being held accountable to either paradigm depending on the situation. In this specific context, they are responsible for The Joe Rogan Experience as a publisher in much the same way that… oh, I don’t know, YouTube is responsible for Cobra Kai. And someday — perhaps sooner than you might expect — they should be held responsible for hosting unambiguously bad or harmful actors on Anchor.
It’s a lot to think through, and for more insight, I thought I’d call up an expert source who’s been covering this type of stuff for years and years: Casey Newton.
The Same Movie, Over and Over Again: Platformer’s Casey Newton on Spotify
I’ve been following Casey Newton’s work for closely quite some time now, particularly over the past few years as he’s zeroed in on covering tech platforms and content moderation as a senior editor at The Verge. Among his many achievements there, he broke huge stories about the horrible working conditions for Facebook’s outsourced content moderators as part of his broader reporting on Facebook, and he also started a newsletter called The Interface that focused on the intersection of social media and democracy.
Newton recently left The Verge to launch Platformer, his own independent newsletter on Substack — which, by the way, is another platform that I personally believe should be held to the same kinds of platform-publisher questions nowadays — where he continues to stay on the beat. In case it isn’t crystal clear by now, podcasting falls well within this discussion these days, as perhaps they should always have been, and I figured Newton’s insight into Spotify’s predicament would be useful to set the frame for what’s to come.
***
Hot Pod: Based on your experience, what do you see when you look at Spotify’s situation over the past week?
Casey Newton: I think we’re in the early stages of seeing Spotify eventually come around to implementing many more restrictions on the content that even their own podcasts will include.
So, let’s back up for a second and talk about the bigger shift that we’ve been seeing in the tech industry more broadly. At the beginning of a tech platform, we mostly just see that company as infrastructure. It is a tool that helps put a thing into the world. The early days of Twitter, certainly. Substack is in that zone right now, though recent developments suggest that people are beginning to see it a little differently now.
That early stage is the Wild West. People will post whatever and the platform is barely going to investigate abuse because they see themselves as a tool and not responsible for the content of anything its users publish. As the years go on, these platforms get bigger and more powerful. As their audience share grows, we stop thinking of them as simple infrastructure and start thinking of them as true publishers who should be responsible for the content on their platforms.
This is all preamble to talk about where Spotify is right now. Before they started buying, licensing, and hosting podcasts, you could argue they were a podcast player like any other. Now, there are a lot of bad actor podcasts out there, and if one of them were on Spotify’s platform, they could argue they were just a tool for spreading the thing. We saw this with Alex Jones when they took him off the platform a few years ago.
For the most part, though, Spotify has been generally reluctant to intervene in things like this. They had the whole R. Kelly issue on the music side a few years ago, but they were able to just say: “Have your feelings about artists, but we believe in making a super broad range of content available and we’re not going to weigh in every time an artist does a bad thing, and we’re not going to necessarily remove them from playlists.
None of those music controversies ultimately went anywhere, and while there may have been angry blog posts and critical news reports, they haven’t been called before Congress or whatever. It hasn’t been a major scandal.
I think you’re going to start to see that turn with the Joe Rogan thing. This is their show pony. This is their biggest original content deal ever, and he is a problematic figure. In this Alex Jones situation, Rogan brought on somebody who has been de-platformed by many of the biggest platforms in the world. So I suspect this is the moment where Spotify is crossing over being understood as infrastructure towards being regarded as a publisher in a big way. Because they’re paying Joe Rogan’s salary, they’re responsible for him in a way that even YouTube is not responsible for hosting Joe Rogan, as he was just uploading videos there.
HP: What does it mean to be responsible for Rogan?
Newton: That’s a great question, and I think it mostly hinges on another question, which is: what should Spotify’s publishing standards be?
That should be a process that involves a lot of stakeholders and a lot of thought. They should be bringing in people who have worked on this issue for other platforms. They need to be gaming out scenarios. Of course, they could land in a bunch of places in that process — and, by the way, one of those places could be, “We don’t care if our podcast hosts bring on people who have been deplatformed elsewhere, we’re going to enable more speech than any other platform, and here’s why.” They can say that, and it feels like they basically tried out that argument on the earnings call this week.
I’ve seen this play out so many times before, and I feel like I’m watching the first act of a movie I’ve already seen. Now, the second act of that movie is: there will be more controversies about more podcasts, and then there will be a series of articles laying out the most problematic podcasts on Spotify and how much is being paid for each of them, and then there’s a continuous drumbeat of leaks from inside Spotify. Some employees quit, some employees write Medium posts about why they quit and how toxic the environment has become, and then Spotify comes out and says, “We hear you, we’re going to adopt some real community standards now, here are the new rules going forward.”
Of course, maybe that won’t happen. But right now, I don’t see a world in which it doesn’t.
HP: I get the sense from what you’re saying that there are two layers to dig through here. The first is Spotify not yet having a coherent content policy that can be consistently applied across their various business lines. The second layer, which is perhaps more the heart of it, is how it feels like Spotify still hasn’t really committed to the reality of the situation they got when they pushed into podcasting both as a publisher and a platform. There’s a bit of wanting to have its cake and eat it too: “We’re for all sorts of speech, but we’re still the friendly Swedes in the room.” Having seen this movie several times before, what’s the appropriate move for a platform at this point in the story?
Newton: I think platforms would do well to approach these problems with humility, especially at this early stage. It should be okay for them to say: “We’re relatively early in our journey as a publisher that is acquiring and promoting podcasts under our own name, we understand that there are valid questions about the kinds of podcasts are being distributed on our platform, and we want to think about what the rules should be for that so we can adequately communicate them.”
I would start there. You could look at what Zoom did earlier this summer when they experienced all that crazy growth during the pandemic and journalists started uncovering all these problems: encryption issues, security holes, so on. Then Zoom said, “You know, you’re right, we were not prepared for this level of scrutiny, we’re going to take the next ninety days, we’re not going to ship a new feature, we’re going to bring in a bunch of security consultants and stress test the platform, and then we’ll go back to making new features after we figure all that out.”
And that’s exactly what they did. They later publicized what they found and the changes they made, and I would argue that Zoom is on better footing now than before they undertook that process.
I’ve been sort of laughing as I’ve watched Spotify’s early responses to its situation, because all those responses seem to suggest that they think they’re only going to get this problem once. Like, “if we can just get through the controversy around this one Joe Rogan episode, we can put this issue to rest forever.” That’s just not what’s going to happen here.
HP: Who would be the key player within Spotify to watch on this specific issue moving forward?
Newton: So, the kinds of folks within big companies who typically work on problems like this… well, they go by many names, and there still isn’t really a consistent name for this team, but the name you hear the most is “Trust and Safety.”
The weird thing about Trust and Safety is that it’s a baby industry. There wasn’t a professional trade association for employees working in Trust and Safety until this year. It was founded by this woman named Clara Tsao, who is a really interesting thinker. One of the big points that she’s made over the years is that one of the reasons these [content policy] issues have been so acute is that it’s not even seen as a proper career path for people. If you want to be in the business of managing content policies inside platforms, the path to do so is really murky.
Content moderation is usually a backwater. It’s usually the first thing a tech founder will give up as soon as they can, because the tradeoffs are hard and people will be unhappy no matter the decision you take.
My sense is that Spotify doesn’t really have a Trust and Safety team or equivalent. I’m sure they have people working on these issues, but the question is whether they are empowered. I believe there hasn’t been real community standards set for podcasters on the platform just yet. Will they undertake a real process to carve out actual community standards? Because over the long run, they’re not going to find it workable for Daniel Ek to keep responding on earnings calls to a quarter’s worth of complaints about that.
HP: Does it bother you to keep seeing this story play out over and over again?
Newton: Nah, it just makes me excited. I feel like I ended up in this weird niche as a journalist where I’m always writing about these same issues, and I’m happy to repeat myself, you know? I don’t actually have to do a lot of work. It’s just, “We’re in act one now, class, anybody wants to guess what happens next?”
For this Jones-Rogan situation, I’m not really that bothered. I think Jones has actually been effectively de-platformed, and yeah, Rogan has said some anti-trans stuff that’s gross and upsetting, but I wouldn’t put Joe Rogan on my top ten list of worst content problems on the internet. There are other ones that have definitely bothered me way more, a lot of it on Facebook.
But I was talking with someone a few years ago — I won’t say his name, but he’s a billionaire tech founder — and he was saying, “You guys really aren’t studying podcasts enough.” He brought up people like Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson, and he said, “People are spending four or five hours a week with these guys, and most journalists aren’t listening to these podcasts, so there are these huge surging currents of thought in America that are really underexplored.”
And I started thinking about that for myself. A podcast I’ve listened to for over ten years now is the Savage Lovecast, and I’m now at a point where all my opinions about sex and relationships are just Dan Savage’s opinions. That is one situation where I thought I had really firm opinions about certain things, but over ten years, Dan just wore me down, and now all my opinions are basically his opinions.
Now, I believe his opinions are good, and if he’s radicalized me about anything, it’s just to be, like, a good and loving partner, you know? But if you apply that framework to listeners of these other kinds of podcasts… The scariest stuff here isn’t when a podcast host has a bad guest on, but when you get somebody with a genuinely pernicious ideology podcasting that maybe starts out being really innocuous but gets really dark over time. That’s a much harder problem for a platform like Spotify to solve, because you don’t want them policing thought, but what happens when you get something like a Stefan Molyneux? What happens when you have certain kinds of people banned on YouTube, and they start becoming the next generation of popular podcasts on Anchor? Will Spotify intervene there?
That, I think, is the bigger and more interesting question.
By Nicholas Quah@nwquah
This article first ran in Hot Pod, an industry-leading trade newsletter about podcasting by Nick Quah.
Photo: PowerfulJRE/YouTube
When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to a hundred million dollar exclusive distribution deal this summer, practically everyone wondered how the audio streaming platform would handle the next time Rogan brought on Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist whose provably false and harmful provocations got his ass de-platformed by several major tech companies — including Spotify itself — in 2018.
Rogan had proven willing to give Jones a platform a few times before, engaging the conspiracy theorist in a distinctly Roganian “you’ve said some crazy stuff before but you’ve also said some controversial stuff I think you were right about so it all evens out for me” style of discourse that typically allows Jones to get off a high volume of conspiracy claims with Rogan only contesting some of those claims to the extent he’s interested enough to do so.
It took just under two months since The Joe Rogan Experience officially debuted on Spotify for the show to vault the company into that exact controversy everyone knew was coming. Last Tuesday, the podcast dropped a three hour-long episode with Jones, in which the conspiracy theorist, accompanied by the comedian Tim Dillon, did all the things you’d expect from the face of Infowars. Here’s The Verge with a partial summary:
The episode drew a ton of criticism and negative coverage, as you would expect, but as The Verge points out, Rogan did again engage in some form of fact-checking, which does somewhat complicate the narrative around this specific situation, since Rogan advocates could argue (justifiably, I guess) that this isn’t simply a case where Jones was given free rein to spread misinformation. Indeed, the logic system does get a little tricky for those who wish to structurally push back against Rogan here: Spotify denying Rogan the ability to give Jones an appearance means that news organizations would not theoretically be free to engage Jones in a “properly” fact-checked podcast appearance should they wish to do so and still get distributed on the platform. Meanwhile, leaning on a framework where only news organizations get to do such things on the platform means that someone has to designate who gets to be a news organization on Spotify, which can be a dicey proposition.
That trickiness likely informed Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s response to a question raised about the incident during the company’s earnings call last Thursday, which leaned heavily on the notion of policy consistency. “We obviously review all the content that goes up” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Joe Rogan or anyone else. We do apply those policies, but it’s important to note that this needs to be evenly applied, no matter if it’s an internal pressure or an external pressure as well, because otherwise we are a creative platform for lots of creators, and it’s important that they know what to expect from our platform. If we can’t do that, then there are other choices for creators to go to so that consistency is super important.”
That response, by the way, was foreshadowed in a BuzzFeed News report that came out the day before the earnings call, which contained leaked emails featuring the company’s chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, defending the show internally and providing talking points to Spotify management should they be made to publicly comment on the situation. One of those talking points was the aforementioned lean on content policy consistency.
Here’s the thing about this story for me: practically everybody knew in their bones that a Jones-Rogan situation was going to be inevitable under Spotify’s watch. So, why does it seem like the company didn’t entirely expect to handle something like this when they signed Rogan?
You can’t say the company didn’t have ample warning. In addition to Rogan’s entire track record, The Joe Rogan Experience gave Spotify two incidents around this general area the very month it debuted on the platform: the first is Rogan inadvertently reciting a debunked conspiracy theory about “left-wing people” being arrested for intentionally starting wildfires in Oregon, which he later apologized for, and the second is a guest spot by Abigail Shrier, whose book “Irreversible Damage” has been criticized for describing gender dysphoria as a “social contagion.” Furthermore, according to a Motherboard report, as a result of signing Rogan, Spotify started experiencing emerging tension with its workforce over content policy questions, which partly came through in a company town hall in which some employees raised concerns over Rogan’s history with comments considered transphobic. These things were light brushes compared to the Jones-Rogan situation, which presents the company with most extreme manifestation of this content moderation problem, but they nevertheless were signals that should’ve prompted Spotify to ramp up some process around pulling together a clear, consistent, and communicable content moderation policy as soon as humanly possible.
Let’s pull back for a second. Now, I don’t believe there’s any future in which Spotify does anything to rock the Joe Rogan boat. Don’t forget: Rogan is Spotify’s premiere signing in its push into podcasting, and as I’ve argued previously, The Joe Rogan Experience, whose intense popularity is uniquely significant for its capacity to draw new listeners onto the platform, is the piece that’s supposed to pull the company’s entire podcast bet together and take it to the next level. So, with that in mind, Spotify is more likely to tailor its content policy approach around Rogan’s needs than around anything else, because Spotify likely sees the upside of keeping Rogan happy being greater than the downsides he could bring to the business… even the risk of employee unrest, perhaps.
But however they land on content moderation, they have to land somewhere — and soon, too, because the Jones-Rogan situation is only one type of many, many big content risks the company will inevitably have to deal with in the days to come.
It’s often been asked of Spotify whether it’s a Netflix or a YouTube, with that inquiry generally being used as a way to think through how they should be held accountable for the content that flows through their pipes. That binary is false, I think, as the company has built its push into podcasting on the twin prongs of serving as a publisher of original content (substantiated by talent deals and various acquisitions) and serving as a platform (substantiated by acquiring the hosting platform Anchor). In other words, Spotify is effectively both Netflix and YouTube, and as such, they are exposed to being held accountable to either paradigm depending on the situation. In this specific context, they are responsible for The Joe Rogan Experience as a publisher in much the same way that… oh, I don’t know, YouTube is responsible for Cobra Kai. And someday — perhaps sooner than you might expect — they should be held responsible for hosting unambiguously bad or harmful actors on Anchor.
It’s a lot to think through, and for more insight, I thought I’d call up an expert source who’s been covering this type of stuff for years and years: Casey Newton.
The Same Movie, Over and Over Again: Platformer’s Casey Newton on Spotify
I’ve been following Casey Newton’s work for closely quite some time now, particularly over the past few years as he’s zeroed in on covering tech platforms and content moderation as a senior editor at The Verge. Among his many achievements there, he broke huge stories about the horrible working conditions for Facebook’s outsourced content moderators as part of his broader reporting on Facebook, and he also started a newsletter called The Interface that focused on the intersection of social media and democracy.
Newton recently left The Verge to launch Platformer, his own independent newsletter on Substack — which, by the way, is another platform that I personally believe should be held to the same kinds of platform-publisher questions nowadays — where he continues to stay on the beat. In case it isn’t crystal clear by now, podcasting falls well within this discussion these days, as perhaps they should always have been, and I figured Newton’s insight into Spotify’s predicament would be useful to set the frame for what’s to come.
***
Hot Pod: Based on your experience, what do you see when you look at Spotify’s situation over the past week?
Casey Newton: I think we’re in the early stages of seeing Spotify eventually come around to implementing many more restrictions on the content that even their own podcasts will include.
So, let’s back up for a second and talk about the bigger shift that we’ve been seeing in the tech industry more broadly. At the beginning of a tech platform, we mostly just see that company as infrastructure. It is a tool that helps put a thing into the world. The early days of Twitter, certainly. Substack is in that zone right now, though recent developments suggest that people are beginning to see it a little differently now.
That early stage is the Wild West. People will post whatever and the platform is barely going to investigate abuse because they see themselves as a tool and not responsible for the content of anything its users publish. As the years go on, these platforms get bigger and more powerful. As their audience share grows, we stop thinking of them as simple infrastructure and start thinking of them as true publishers who should be responsible for the content on their platforms.
This is all preamble to talk about where Spotify is right now. Before they started buying, licensing, and hosting podcasts, you could argue they were a podcast player like any other. Now, there are a lot of bad actor podcasts out there, and if one of them were on Spotify’s platform, they could argue they were just a tool for spreading the thing. We saw this with Alex Jones when they took him off the platform a few years ago.
For the most part, though, Spotify has been generally reluctant to intervene in things like this. They had the whole R. Kelly issue on the music side a few years ago, but they were able to just say: “Have your feelings about artists, but we believe in making a super broad range of content available and we’re not going to weigh in every time an artist does a bad thing, and we’re not going to necessarily remove them from playlists.
None of those music controversies ultimately went anywhere, and while there may have been angry blog posts and critical news reports, they haven’t been called before Congress or whatever. It hasn’t been a major scandal.
I think you’re going to start to see that turn with the Joe Rogan thing. This is their show pony. This is their biggest original content deal ever, and he is a problematic figure. In this Alex Jones situation, Rogan brought on somebody who has been de-platformed by many of the biggest platforms in the world. So I suspect this is the moment where Spotify is crossing over being understood as infrastructure towards being regarded as a publisher in a big way. Because they’re paying Joe Rogan’s salary, they’re responsible for him in a way that even YouTube is not responsible for hosting Joe Rogan, as he was just uploading videos there.
HP: What does it mean to be responsible for Rogan?
Newton: That’s a great question, and I think it mostly hinges on another question, which is: what should Spotify’s publishing standards be?
That should be a process that involves a lot of stakeholders and a lot of thought. They should be bringing in people who have worked on this issue for other platforms. They need to be gaming out scenarios. Of course, they could land in a bunch of places in that process — and, by the way, one of those places could be, “We don’t care if our podcast hosts bring on people who have been deplatformed elsewhere, we’re going to enable more speech than any other platform, and here’s why.” They can say that, and it feels like they basically tried out that argument on the earnings call this week.
I’ve seen this play out so many times before, and I feel like I’m watching the first act of a movie I’ve already seen. Now, the second act of that movie is: there will be more controversies about more podcasts, and then there will be a series of articles laying out the most problematic podcasts on Spotify and how much is being paid for each of them, and then there’s a continuous drumbeat of leaks from inside Spotify. Some employees quit, some employees write Medium posts about why they quit and how toxic the environment has become, and then Spotify comes out and says, “We hear you, we’re going to adopt some real community standards now, here are the new rules going forward.”
Of course, maybe that won’t happen. But right now, I don’t see a world in which it doesn’t.
HP: I get the sense from what you’re saying that there are two layers to dig through here. The first is Spotify not yet having a coherent content policy that can be consistently applied across their various business lines. The second layer, which is perhaps more the heart of it, is how it feels like Spotify still hasn’t really committed to the reality of the situation they got when they pushed into podcasting both as a publisher and a platform. There’s a bit of wanting to have its cake and eat it too: “We’re for all sorts of speech, but we’re still the friendly Swedes in the room.” Having seen this movie several times before, what’s the appropriate move for a platform at this point in the story?
Newton: I think platforms would do well to approach these problems with humility, especially at this early stage. It should be okay for them to say: “We’re relatively early in our journey as a publisher that is acquiring and promoting podcasts under our own name, we understand that there are valid questions about the kinds of podcasts are being distributed on our platform, and we want to think about what the rules should be for that so we can adequately communicate them.”
I would start there. You could look at what Zoom did earlier this summer when they experienced all that crazy growth during the pandemic and journalists started uncovering all these problems: encryption issues, security holes, so on. Then Zoom said, “You know, you’re right, we were not prepared for this level of scrutiny, we’re going to take the next ninety days, we’re not going to ship a new feature, we’re going to bring in a bunch of security consultants and stress test the platform, and then we’ll go back to making new features after we figure all that out.”
And that’s exactly what they did. They later publicized what they found and the changes they made, and I would argue that Zoom is on better footing now than before they undertook that process.
I’ve been sort of laughing as I’ve watched Spotify’s early responses to its situation, because all those responses seem to suggest that they think they’re only going to get this problem once. Like, “if we can just get through the controversy around this one Joe Rogan episode, we can put this issue to rest forever.” That’s just not what’s going to happen here.
HP: Who would be the key player within Spotify to watch on this specific issue moving forward?
Newton: So, the kinds of folks within big companies who typically work on problems like this… well, they go by many names, and there still isn’t really a consistent name for this team, but the name you hear the most is “Trust and Safety.”
The weird thing about Trust and Safety is that it’s a baby industry. There wasn’t a professional trade association for employees working in Trust and Safety until this year. It was founded by this woman named Clara Tsao, who is a really interesting thinker. One of the big points that she’s made over the years is that one of the reasons these [content policy] issues have been so acute is that it’s not even seen as a proper career path for people. If you want to be in the business of managing content policies inside platforms, the path to do so is really murky.
Content moderation is usually a backwater. It’s usually the first thing a tech founder will give up as soon as they can, because the tradeoffs are hard and people will be unhappy no matter the decision you take.
My sense is that Spotify doesn’t really have a Trust and Safety team or equivalent. I’m sure they have people working on these issues, but the question is whether they are empowered. I believe there hasn’t been real community standards set for podcasters on the platform just yet. Will they undertake a real process to carve out actual community standards? Because over the long run, they’re not going to find it workable for Daniel Ek to keep responding on earnings calls to a quarter’s worth of complaints about that.
HP: Does it bother you to keep seeing this story play out over and over again?
Newton: Nah, it just makes me excited. I feel like I ended up in this weird niche as a journalist where I’m always writing about these same issues, and I’m happy to repeat myself, you know? I don’t actually have to do a lot of work. It’s just, “We’re in act one now, class, anybody wants to guess what happens next?”
For this Jones-Rogan situation, I’m not really that bothered. I think Jones has actually been effectively de-platformed, and yeah, Rogan has said some anti-trans stuff that’s gross and upsetting, but I wouldn’t put Joe Rogan on my top ten list of worst content problems on the internet. There are other ones that have definitely bothered me way more, a lot of it on Facebook.
But I was talking with someone a few years ago — I won’t say his name, but he’s a billionaire tech founder — and he was saying, “You guys really aren’t studying podcasts enough.” He brought up people like Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson, and he said, “People are spending four or five hours a week with these guys, and most journalists aren’t listening to these podcasts, so there are these huge surging currents of thought in America that are really underexplored.”
And I started thinking about that for myself. A podcast I’ve listened to for over ten years now is the Savage Lovecast, and I’m now at a point where all my opinions about sex and relationships are just Dan Savage’s opinions. That is one situation where I thought I had really firm opinions about certain things, but over ten years, Dan just wore me down, and now all my opinions are basically his opinions.
Now, I believe his opinions are good, and if he’s radicalized me about anything, it’s just to be, like, a good and loving partner, you know? But if you apply that framework to listeners of these other kinds of podcasts… The scariest stuff here isn’t when a podcast host has a bad guest on, but when you get somebody with a genuinely pernicious ideology podcasting that maybe starts out being really innocuous but gets really dark over time. That’s a much harder problem for a platform like Spotify to solve, because you don’t want them policing thought, but what happens when you get something like a Stefan Molyneux? What happens when you have certain kinds of people banned on YouTube, and they start becoming the next generation of popular podcasts on Anchor? Will Spotify intervene there?
That, I think, is the bigger and more interesting question.
Joe Rogan, a podcasting giant who has been dismissive of vaccination, has Covid.
Joe Rogan performing in August 2019 at the Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena, Calif.Credit...Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images
By Alyssa Lukpat
Joe Rogan, the host of the hugely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from a series of shows in Florida, where the virus is rampant.
Mr. Rogan, who was rebuked by federal officials last spring for suggesting on the podcast that young healthy people need not get Covid vaccinations, said that he started feeling sick on Saturday night after he returned from performing in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did not say whether he had been vaccinated.
“Throughout the night, I got fevers, sweats, and I knew what was going on,” he said in a video on Instagram, adding that he moved to a different part of his house away from his family. (In an episode of his podcast in April, he mentioned that his children had experienced mild Covid-19 symptoms earlier in the pandemic.)
He took a coronavirus test the next morning that came back positive, he said.
In his video on Wednesday, Mr. Rogan said he had been treated with a series of medications. “Sunday sucked,” he said, but by the time he made the video, he said he was feeling “pretty good,” using an expletive.
“A wonderful heartfelt thank you to modern medicine for pulling me out of this so quickly and easily,” he said.
The list of treatments he mentioned included monoclonal antibodies, which have been shown to protect Covid patients at risk of becoming gravely ill; and prednisone, a steroid widely accepted as a Covid treatment. When Donald J. Trump was stricken with Covid during his presidency, he was also treated with monoclonal antibodies.
Mr. Rogan also said he had received a “vitamin drip” as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Covid-19 patients against taking the drug, which has repeatedly been shown as ineffective for them in clinical trials. However, it is a popular subject on Facebook, Reddit and among some conservative talk show hosts, and some toxicologists have warned of a surge of reports of overexposure to the drug by those who obtain it from livestock supply stores.
Mr. Rogan has been traveling nationally with a show called, “Joe Rogan: The Sacred Clown Tour.” He was scheduled to perform a show with the comedian Dave Chappelle in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday, but said in his video on Wednesday that it would be postponed to October.
His podcast is effectively a series of wandering conversations, often over whiskey and weed, on topics including but not limited to comedy, cage-fighting, psychedelics, quantum mechanics and the political excesses of the left. The show was licensed to Spotify last year in an estimated $100 million deal. His comments on the show in the spring undermining the value of vaccinations for young, healthy people drew condemnations from the Biden administration and Prince Harry, another Spotify podcaster.
Mr. Rogan has offered refunds to fans who bought tickets to an upcoming show scheduled for Madison Square Garden after New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, required that attendees at major events show proof of vaccination.
Mr. Rogan said on his podcast last week that 13,000 tickets to the show had already been sold, but that because he opposes vaccine requirements, he would offer refunds.
“If someone has an ideological or physiological reason for not getting vaccinated, I don’t want to force them to get vaccinated to see” the show, he said on the podcast in late August, underscoring his comment with a profanity. “And now they say that everybody has to be vaccinated, and I want everybody to know that you can get your money back.”
Mr. Rogan returned from performing three shows last week in Florida, where the state is reckoning with its highest-ever surge in virus infections, according to a New York Times database. Even as cases continue to rise, with more than 15,600 people hospitalized with the virus across Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has held firm on banning vaccine and mask mandates. Florida’s deaths are considerably higher than those in any other state in the country.
Joe Rogan performing in August 2019 at the Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena, Calif.Credit...Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images
By Alyssa Lukpat
Joe Rogan, the host of the hugely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from a series of shows in Florida, where the virus is rampant.
Mr. Rogan, who was rebuked by federal officials last spring for suggesting on the podcast that young healthy people need not get Covid vaccinations, said that he started feeling sick on Saturday night after he returned from performing in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did not say whether he had been vaccinated.
“Throughout the night, I got fevers, sweats, and I knew what was going on,” he said in a video on Instagram, adding that he moved to a different part of his house away from his family. (In an episode of his podcast in April, he mentioned that his children had experienced mild Covid-19 symptoms earlier in the pandemic.)
He took a coronavirus test the next morning that came back positive, he said.
In his video on Wednesday, Mr. Rogan said he had been treated with a series of medications. “Sunday sucked,” he said, but by the time he made the video, he said he was feeling “pretty good,” using an expletive.
“A wonderful heartfelt thank you to modern medicine for pulling me out of this so quickly and easily,” he said.
The list of treatments he mentioned included monoclonal antibodies, which have been shown to protect Covid patients at risk of becoming gravely ill; and prednisone, a steroid widely accepted as a Covid treatment. When Donald J. Trump was stricken with Covid during his presidency, he was also treated with monoclonal antibodies.
Mr. Rogan also said he had received a “vitamin drip” as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Covid-19 patients against taking the drug, which has repeatedly been shown as ineffective for them in clinical trials. However, it is a popular subject on Facebook, Reddit and among some conservative talk show hosts, and some toxicologists have warned of a surge of reports of overexposure to the drug by those who obtain it from livestock supply stores.
Mr. Rogan has been traveling nationally with a show called, “Joe Rogan: The Sacred Clown Tour.” He was scheduled to perform a show with the comedian Dave Chappelle in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday, but said in his video on Wednesday that it would be postponed to October.
His podcast is effectively a series of wandering conversations, often over whiskey and weed, on topics including but not limited to comedy, cage-fighting, psychedelics, quantum mechanics and the political excesses of the left. The show was licensed to Spotify last year in an estimated $100 million deal. His comments on the show in the spring undermining the value of vaccinations for young, healthy people drew condemnations from the Biden administration and Prince Harry, another Spotify podcaster.
Mr. Rogan has offered refunds to fans who bought tickets to an upcoming show scheduled for Madison Square Garden after New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, required that attendees at major events show proof of vaccination.
Mr. Rogan said on his podcast last week that 13,000 tickets to the show had already been sold, but that because he opposes vaccine requirements, he would offer refunds.
“If someone has an ideological or physiological reason for not getting vaccinated, I don’t want to force them to get vaccinated to see” the show, he said on the podcast in late August, underscoring his comment with a profanity. “And now they say that everybody has to be vaccinated, and I want everybody to know that you can get your money back.”
Mr. Rogan returned from performing three shows last week in Florida, where the state is reckoning with its highest-ever surge in virus infections, according to a New York Times database. Even as cases continue to rise, with more than 15,600 people hospitalized with the virus across Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has held firm on banning vaccine and mask mandates. Florida’s deaths are considerably higher than those in any other state in the country.
This fucking horse dewormer is given to the wealthy but the poor are wack jobs.
the thing is the rich pretty much know what they getting
can they poor say the same?
and who is selling it to them and giving them instructions on how to administer it?
We had nurses giving fake vaccines to hundreds...
what do you think an unregulated horse medication could actually be?
Bruh, I'll take anything that won't sicken or kill me. Cowpox cured smallpox sufferers.
The hell were patients were tested for before viagara become viagara?
OK I hear you
Good post. Fuck CNN.
They are suppressing any and all information concerning medicine that is counter to the vaccine narrative they are pushing.
be sure to say the SAME THING for all the fake misinformation posted on here and other sites.
Joe aint exactly been a source of unbiased facts on this and MANY other topics
No misinformation on EITHER side.
Ivermectin works... period...point blank...brah
God-Of-War-420
Mr. Pool
I'll just leave this reminder here for all you fans.
God-Of-War-420
Mr. Pool
cacs are so retarded..
just dont call nobody that, nobody gives
a fuck what you say in conversation..
as if I forgot who they are....
gatdam
mamluks!!!!
cant fool me!!
Because right after he said he took ivermectin, they were sold out at stores that cater to animals.