Joe Rogan has responded after his host platform, Spotify, announced earlier on Sunday that it would make its content policy public amid a left-wing outcry over COVID-19 “misinformation” the top podcaster allegedly spread on his show, “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
The platform’s CEO made the announcement after legacy musicians including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell complained about claims Rogan made on his podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” regarding the pandemic. Both Young and Mitchell removed their music from the platform, along with a few others.
“We have had rules in place for many years but admittedly, we haven’t been transparent around the policies that guide our content more broadly. This, in turn, led to questions around their application to serious issues including COVID-19,” CEO Daniel Ek wrote on Sunday.
In a video posted shortly after Ek’s announcement, Rogan offered explanations for his show and how he approaches subjects in a bid to clear the air and correct several misconceptions and, dare we say, ‘misinformation’ about his program.
After noting that the left has a “distorted perception” of what he does, he noted that he focuses primarily on having interesting conversations with interesting people in order to learn “the truth” about issues.
“The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation, specifically about two episodes, a little bit about some other ones, but specifically about two,” Rogan said. “One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to mRNA vaccines.
“Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion, that’s different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is,” he continued.
“I had them on and because of that, those episodes in particular, those episodes were labeled as being dangerous, they had dangerous misinformation in them,” Rogan added. “The problem I have with the term misinformation, especially today is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact, like, for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘if you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID,’ you’d be removed from social media, they would they would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.
“If you said, I don’t think cloth masks work, you would be banned from social media. Now that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that COVID-19 came from a lab, you’d be banned from many social media platforms – now that’s on the cover of Newsweek. All of those theories that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast that had been accused of dangerous misinformation,” he added.
“I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know. Because I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them. Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong, but I try to correct them. Whenever I get something wrong. I try to correct it because I’m interested in telling the truth,” he noted further.
“I’m interested in finding out what the truth is. And I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions. I’m not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective. That’s one of the reasons why I had Sanjay Gupta on, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who I respect very much, and I really enjoyed our conversation together. He has a different opinion than those men do. I had Dr. Michael Osterholm on at the very beginning of the pandemic, he is on President Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board. I had Dr. Peter Hotez on, who is a vaccine expert. I’m interested in finding out what is correct and I’m also finding out how people come to these conclusions and what the facts are,” he said.
Rogan also said he agrees with the platform’s decision “at the beginning of these controversial podcasts, like specifically ones about COVID” to “put a disclaimer and say that you should speak with your physician and that these people and the opinions that they express are contrary to the opinions of the consensus of experts, which I think is very important, sure, have that on there.”
He went on to say he would attempt, in the future, to have more experts on his show immediately following ‘controversies’ to provide alternative explanations.
