“A lot of people are like, ’they’re telling Joe Rogan what he can and can’t do.’ They’re no—they’re not,” Rogan said last month in a podcast with stand-up comedian Fahim Anwar.
“Anytime anything gets big enough… there’s gonna be strings attached.” Anwar said, to which Rogan responded: “Yeah, that’s the criticism of me being on Spotify.”
Rogan said he agreed for episodes to be omitted but future clips wouldn’t be policed: “They don’t give a f**k man. They haven’t given me a hard time at all. There were a few episodes they didn’t want on their platform, I was like ‘okay, I don’t care’.
“But other than that, in terms of what I do in the future, the big test was having Alex Jones on… Alex Jones and Tim Dillon was like one of my favorite podcasts.”
Speculation about censorship of his vastly popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, resurfaced this week after being featured in a video by righ- wing conspiracy theorist Mark Dice, whose post was also shared among Rogan’s Reddit community.
Dice alleged that Rogan had “lied” about the platform censoring his content, although misattributed at least one quote to Rogan that was in fact made by conspiracy theorist and radio host Alex Jones last September amid the initial controversy.
Rogan announced the Spotify deal, reportedly worth more than $100 million, on May 19, 2020, and told fans it would not have creative control over content decisions.
While short clips remain popular on YouTube, the podcast started streaming on Spotify on September 1, and became exclusive to the platform in December 2020.
But a slew of right-wing guests failed to make the cut during the move, including Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulus, Stefan Molyneux and earlier Jones interviews.
At the time, Jones said Rogan was not being censored by Spotify and the missing files would be migrated to the streaming platform at a later date.
Jones claimed that Rogan’s “favorite 100 episodes would remain on YouTube past the December 31 move date to Spotify.” Rogan did not personally address the matter, and Jones’ comments were made ahead of another podcast appearance in October.
That October segment briefly disappeared from Spotify and Rogan blamed the issue on a technical glitch. It has since been restored, and is accessible on the platform. Spotify has been contacted for comment about the missing episodes by Newsweek.
