Today, Explained - Spotify’s Joe Rogan problem

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

The podcast host built a massive audience by speaking to fringe figures in culture, business, and science. During the pandemic, that got him in trouble with Neil Young, among others. This episode was produced by Will Reid and Amina Al-Sadi, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today explained, Ramesh Verm. We talk a lot about powerful Joes on the show lately. There's obviously White House President Joe Biden. There's, of course, Senate President Joe Manchin.

And then there's the president of podcasts, Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. As you've surely heard by now, an old man named Neil Young got very mad at Joe Rogan and the company that distributes his podcast, Spotify, which subsequently lost something like a couple billion dollars of its market value. This past week, the situation kind of boiled over. Ashley Carmen has been covering the story and breaking news about it for The Verge.

Joe Rogan is signed exclusively to Spotify. And this past week, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and a bunch of others have started speaking out about them being uncomfortable with Spotify distributing his show. And then Neil Young and Joni Mitchell specifically pulled their music from the platform in protest. We started with how Spotify got its hands on Joe's show. Joe Rogan has been podcasting for years. Good to see you, buddy. What's going on? Good to see you too, sir. It's fucking awesome to have you come down here again.

Always, always a good time. Notably, he's a YouTube podcaster. That's how most people found him, know him. He's like associated with YouTube. Not because they paid him, just because he used the platform as the place he mainly distributed his show. It wasn't available actually through Spotify up until 2020 when Spotify signed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan for a reported $100 million.

$100 million. Yeah. I will admit more than I make to podcast every single day. Right. How does the industry respond to this deal? A hundred million dollars. I mean, it was reportedly a hundred million dollars, but I remember being shocked because I wondered how will they make that money back? Yeah. So I think the industry is in the folks who also make shows and who create shows. We're kind of like, whoa, this is like an eye

popping number for anybody. And I think it does come with questions of what are they getting for this? What does Spotify really see the value as? And so the answer to that is really Spotify sees potential in diversifying its revenue away from music and into podcasts and other forms of audio. Because when you stream music on Spotify, obviously Spotify pays royalties to the labels and musicians Because when you stream music on Spotify, obviously Spotify pays royalties to the labels and musicians. When you stream a podcast, specifically a podcast that Spotify exclusively distributes and monetizes, it makes money from you. So when you listen to a Joe Rogan episode, even if you're a paying subscriber of Spotify, you still get ads in the podcast.

And I reported recently that the minimum ad spend actually for advertisers to even touch Rogan's show this year is a million dollars. So you could see how they're rapidly trying to make back that money. And it's helping prop up their entire advertising business because when you buy ads on Rogan, you have to buy ads on other shows too. Got it. So this wasn't just a bet on Joe Rogan. It was kind of a bet on Spotify's advertising infrastructure. 100%. And Rogan was critical to sort of let that rocket ship take off because he already had such big reach.

I mean, we don't know exact numbers. It's not publicly shared, but you can probably safely assume millions of people. He's widely considered like the biggest podcaster in the world. So we don't know how this bet has paid off yet for Spotify in the sort of intervening year and some odd months? That's kind of the big question that I personally have been really trying to report on. You know, Rogan keeps Roganing.

Spotify is selling ads against Rogan. People still listen to Rogan, so they're making money off of those ads. The question is whether they can use this deal to get people to enjoy the rest of their advertising product and actually start coming there to advertise on all podcasts. And that's ultimately the goal. And that is it's unclear if that's happening. Rogan keeps Roganing feels like the perfect Spotify is now paying Rogan $100 million, giving it some responsibility, many people would say, to ensure that what he's saying and what his guests are saying is factual, responsible,

that they are a publisher. Are you, I mean, are you tired of this? Tired. Dealing with this? Do you feel a duty to talk about this? So in December, end of December, Joe Rogan had a guest on, Dr. Robert Malone, who is a doctor and scientist who did help work on the mRNA vaccines that we now use for COVID-19. We should just say, because historically, we should just state what's happening here.

So today is the 20th, no, the 30th of December. And yesterday you were kicked off Twitter, correct? True. But on his show, he said some stuff that many people would consider misinformation. He kind of discussed the world being hypnotized right now by the mainstream media to believe that vaccines are needed. A third of the population basically being hypnotized and totally wrapped up in whatever Tony Fauci and the mainstream media feeds them, whatever CNN tells them is true. He did, I believe, call vaccines experimental, which isn't true because obviously people do clinical studies for vaccines, so it's out of the experiment phase and into

the like, we've approved this and done it phase. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. When this doctor is going off about this mass psychosis and experimental vaccines and all these other things, he really doesn't get much pushback from Rogan at all. It's become very, not just common, but accepted to other people, to point at those, the others, whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats or the independents, whatever you choose to make it. Or the unvaccinated.

Or the unvaccinated. That's what I was going to get to. And that's one of the things that I find very bizarre about the tribal aspect of this is that people want me to get vaccinated. And like my friends who've been vaccinated want me to join the team. Like, I get the tattoo. Like, what are you saying? So, Joe, again, this is not me buttering you up, but this is this is why you're providing such a service to your country and to humanity. And that's really what prompted, I think, this movement, because then a bunch of doctors, scientists, medical community members published a letter. To Spotify about the misinformation on COVID vaccines and the pandemic spread on Joe Rogan's podcast.

Saying that, you know, Spotify and Joe Rogan are hurting public health. By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and so doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals. So that letter gets published.

Neil Young finds this letter, reads it, gets upset. And he says, you know, I don't like that Spotify is supporting misinformation on Joe Rogan's podcast. Therefore, I am going to pull my music. Young stated they can have Joe Rogan or Young, not both. And as soon as Neil Young pulls his music, Joni Mitchell pulls hers. Saying irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. So this little movement happens. Guitarist Nils Lofgren of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, pulling some 27 years worth of his solo work off the site.

I think specifically a lot of times on Joe's show, they encourage the wrong thing and it's disingenuous and dangerous. What are the Neil Youngs and the Joni Mitchells of the world asking for when they pull their music from Spotify? Are they saying, cancel Joe Rogan's show, cut him loose, and then we'll give you our music back? Or are they saying, we don't like your judgment, we're out, we're not really interested in having our music on your platform ever again. You know, that has been something that's a little unclear to me. I don't think it's that they'll never come back to Spotify is my hunch. I don't think the record labels would like that very much. But the thing that really made this a very complicated situation is up until this weekend and actually up until Friday, no one knew what Spotify's policies were around COVID.

They never publicly said what you could or couldn't say. No one knew what Spotify's policies were around COVID. They never publicly said what you could or couldn't say. No one knew what the rules were. So Spotify kept saying, well, Rogan's stuff fits within our rules. We're not taking it down. Now we have the rules and we can see why. What are the rules? So Spotify did publish its policies this week on what it actually believes to be infringing content of their rules. So they say, diseases are a hoax or not real. Encouraging the consumption of bleach products to cure various illnesses and diseases. Promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death. Encouraging people to purposely get infected with COVID-19 in order

to build immunity to it. Example, promoting or hosting coronavirus parties. That's it. That's all the rules okay and joe rogan didn't technically break those rules no i don't think joe rogan thinks covet 19 is fake um i don't think joe rogan encourages people to drink bleach he might encourage them to take ivermectin and this is obviously i'm not a doctor it says ivermectin was found to be a blocker of viral replicase. He might say that if you're a young person, like, would he tell you to get the vaccine? Probably not. Yeah, I think for the most part, it's safe to get vaccinated.

I do. I do. But if you're like 21 years old and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I go, no. But he doesn't say the vaccines are designed to kill you. So it's very easy to see why Rogan hasn't broken the rules. It's a long story short here. And how does Spotify respond to this Neil Young, Joni Mitchell,

obviously two extremely high profile musicians pulling their music? Do they publicly address that? On Sunday, so days later, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek publishes a press release that says, we are not going to take things down that don't break our rules. We believe in free speech or something like that, basically. And then they publish the rules. Spotify also said it would put an advisory on any podcast content that talks about COVID-19. This is similar to what we've seen on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, like those little boxes that they link out to information from the CDC or something. I don't know if this satisfies people because I think the core issue people have

is a little bit of Joe Rogan, yes, but it's more that Spotify specifically is paying $100 million to Joe Rogan, is publishing his stuff, and therefore has an editorial responsibility to make sure what he says is factual, correct, and not hurting the public. That, I think, is the core issue of what people are talking about. And this press release, this update does not change that fact at all. Like today, Rogan could publish and Spotify is still monetizing that podcast. It's still paying him $100 million. So nothing has changed ultimately. How's Joe Rogan responding to all this? So Rogan issued a video, a nine minute video on Sunday evening on Instagram.

Hello, friends. I wanted to make a video to address some of the controversy that's been going on over the past few days. And first of all, to say thank you to everyone that sent love and support. I truly, truly appreciate it. And it's been very nice to hear from you. Where he basically, you know, says, I'm a podcaster. I don't want to hurt anybody. I want to be friends with everyone. I'm just asking questions and doing my job as a podcaster. I don't want to hurt anybody. I want to be friends with everyone. I'm just asking questions and doing my job as a podcaster, which is to have discussions. These podcasts are very strange because they're just conversations. And oftentimes I have no idea what I'm going to talk about until I sit down and talk to people. And that's why some of my ideas are not that prepared or fleshed out because I'm literally having them in real time. But I do my best.

And they're just conversations. And I think that's also the appeal of the show. It's one of the things that makes it interesting. He mentioned that he thinks he could maybe have on some of these more controversial guests, but then in the following episode, bring on someone from like the CDC or more mainstream science to talk.

And then broadly, he's like, I like Neil Young. Keep on rocking in the free world. Spotify needs Joe Rogan to make its advertising platform work. It needs him right now. Without Rogan, they have some other shows, but he is the big kahuna who's bringing in all the marketers. So Neil Young, unfortunately, is not generating that kind of cash for Spotify.

There's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead Don't feel like Satan, but I am the damn So I try to forget it any way I can How Joe Rogan became the Big Kahuna in a minute on Today Explained. Keep on walking the free world

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Devin Gordon, you wrote about Joe Rogan and his podcast for The Atlantic a few years ago. And for that piece, I believe you even lived like Joe a little bit. Do you still drink his mushroom coffee? Oh my God, no. I stopped it as soon as I could. Not that good, huh? Living like Joe is something I can only recommend to the hardiest of people

and people who really enjoy living like Joe. And I did not, so I got rid of it very, very quickly. But it was a fascinating experience. It was kind of like getting into a part or getting into a role. I guess I really want to know more about why it is people would even want to live like Joe and what exactly living like Joe entails. But let's just start with, you know, how Joe got to be Joe for everyone who hasn't seen news radio, let's say. Where did Joe Rogan come from exactly? Well, first of all, if you haven't seen News Radio, you should go back and watch it because it's a great show, but not because of Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is one of the supporting characters. He

was a stand-up comedian who was getting one of his first supporting roles on a TV show. It was a bit part. He played like a producer type. He was a conspiracy theorist on the show. Yeah, were you ever here in 1984? Heard of it. Which is kind of funny and ironic given what happened to him in the future. Yeah, well, how do you be sure we're not subject to some grand social experiment engineered by unnamed, unseen forces headquartered under some mountain in Virginia or something? Wait a minute, Joe. If what you're saying is true, then I still don't care.

But he was sort of a B, C-list successful, but not particularly admired comedian. He sort of broke out as a name because of fear factor. And this box is separated in three sections. The first section will be your head, along with 3,000 Madagascar hissing cockroaches. The middle section will be 100 snakes. And then, especially because of calling matches on UFC. Where he is actually, my understanding, I New Year, April Fool's, whatever. I can't wait for this fight.

And so that's where his fame came from. So he was sort of building up a fan base through a certain universe of comedy and through a certain universe of UFC, which is going to be a lot of men, right? And then he starts doing a podcast. I love you, motherfuckers. Thank you very much for tuning in. And we are going to do this again. Don't know when, but within a week, right? podcast. And he's an early podcaster. He's a very early adopter, which is part of the reason

for his popularity is just that he was there first. And we should say that it is one of the most popular podcasts ever. It's consistently atop the charts. For all those people who have never indulged, what does an average episode of the Joe Rogan experience sound like? So first things first, it's a firehose of Joe Rogan. So once we accept virtual reality, regular life is going to be so mundane because you're going to be able to create artificial environments like avatar world like you're flying through 2001 a space odyssey you're hanging out with the champs you're going to have haptic suits on that give you feedback it's a long long conversation with uh someone of a dizzying variety of fields now if you take out fighters and comedians you probably lopped out

about 60% of the guest list. But from there, it's across the map from entertainers. You're Iron Man, man. It's just like certain dudes just own a role. Entrepreneurs, scientists, futurists, geneticists, military types, special ops types. Speaking of weapons technology, the US just tested a hypersonic weapon. And that's something to keep an eye on. And right-wing types. Candace Owens, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you?

I'm very good. Bernie Sanders has been on there, so there's left-wing types. Do you get frustrated by the time constraints of the debates? Absolutely. do you get frustrated by the the time constraints of the debates absolutely it's people from all across the political spectrum and conspiracy theorists loonies nut jobs and some dubious scientists mixed in but the point is they admit a bunch of vaccine deaths have happened now from the test but what was that into before that so you were just talking about mrna yeah modification yeah so type in vaccine to cure heroin addiction for a lot of people before that. You were just talking about mRNA vaccine. Behavioral modification. Yeah, so type in vaccine to cure heroin

addiction. For a lot of people, his first conversation with Elon Musk, which is the infamous one where Elon Musk smoked a joint with him. So is that a joint? And got himself into trouble with Tesla. That stock is down, but Mr. Musk appears to be kind of high.

That tends to be sort of a gateway drug, no pun intended, for fans of Joe Rogan. But I think one of the things that surprised me as I dug deeper into the universe was not just how broad his interests are, but also how broad his audience is. And in 2019, at least when I was writing this article, it was a pretty broad audience. I mean, this guy was very progressive on a lot of issues. So the idea that he was only for the alt-right was just counterfactual. And so it was a pretty big audience of people that you probably wouldn't have anticipated listening to them. Probably a bunch, you know, you've probably got friends who listen to Joe Rogan. We're increasingly less friends is the thing. Yeah. It's kind of getting hard. Like,

you know, and that may have been true, like I said, two or three years ago, the, you, you have friends who listen to Joe Rogan. You can be peaceful with those friends over the last couple of years. If you're still listening to Joe Rogan, you're starting to strain those friendships, but it's almost like the pandemic was the perfect polarizing force for someone like Joe Rogan and his audience, because it plays into all of his weak spots, right? His ego about knowing everything and spreading information and having people listen to him, but also his susceptibility to dubious science and his lack of skill at parsing information, but also his audience. His audience tends to be, let's just say it

leans toward people who reject conventional wisdom. I guess this brings us back to what exactly it means to live like Joe Rogan and why exactly people want to do that. Help me understand it. You know, there's something fundamentally optimistic about Joe Rogan. There's something proactive, self-starting, believe in yourself, go accomplish things. You make furniture for a living and you feel a great satisfaction out of that and you sell that furniture. Look, man, making furniture feels good. If you can do that, you could cut those corners perfectly and sand everything down nice and stain it.

And then it's done and you get the satisfaction. And you sell it to someone and that pays your bills. That is infinitely more satisfying. And that's a very compelling worldview, I think, particularly for a generation of men who, in a lot of cases, are struggling for purpose. If your audience is leaning white male, which I think Joe Rogan is, I think that's particularly true. Searching for self-worth and value. And maybe if you're leaning right, you're maybe feeling a little attacked. And Joe's you can do it sort of ethos.

There's a great version of that. That's just very pull yourself by your bootstraps. You can do anything. Be ambitious. Be curious. Fill your brain. Learn things. Try stuff. That's great. Those are the reasons why Joe's as big as he is. It's not because he's a hate monger. It's because he's very positive. And that's very compelling and persuasive. But it tips dark. Unless you're talking to someone who is like 100% African from the darkest place where they're not wearing any clothes all day, and they've developed all that melanin to protect themselves from the sun. You know, even the term black is weird. And I've heard this defense from him that he's just a regular guy.

He's just a comedian asking questions. But the truth is that he is no longer just a regular guy. He is no longer just a comedian asking questions. I'm a fucking comedian and a cage fighting commentator. When people are coming to me, like this is the source where you go for unbiased representations of what's going on in the world? That's crazy. Yeah. He's got a platform of millions and millions of people, and he knows that people

listen to him. They respect his authority. They think he knows things. They respect the fact that he interviews, quote unquote, experts. And so he gives these people the veneer, the imprimatur of being worth three hours of Joe Rogan's time. And so, well, shouldn't you listen to someone who's worth three hours of Joe Rogan's time? And that kind of conference of authority, it doesn't matter that he's just a comedian. He's lending credibility to the people that you're making a bad joke or maybe offending someone. But what does being a comedian have to do with spreading misinformation about a pandemic? It's just as bad to spread lies when you're a comedian. They're not funny lies. Do we know what Joe Rogan really believes?

You know, he's very outspoken on a lot of issues. I mean, I think you would sort of describe him almost as a pretty classic libertarian. He recently moved to Austin, which he adores. But I'm enjoying Austin. I love it. It's great. It's a dope city. He should be the head of the Austin Travel Board.

He's so enthusiastic about Austin and Texas. And a big part of it is the commitment to personal liberty that Texas is famous for. He's a big fan of personal liberty. At the same time, he's pro-universal healthcare. He says that he was pro-Bernie Sanders. But now that he's struck out into the COVID land, it's cast him into a universe that only the Trump guys are living in. And I think even he's sensing that. The extent that he's apologizing for this, I think, can be read in a bunch of ways. First of all, I genuinely don't think that he wants to be that guy. I don't think that Joe Rogan likes to be thought of as a purveyor of misinformation. I think he likes to think of himself as really curious and someone who's sharing a lot of really good information with people. But also, he doesn't want to be associated with the Trump, right? That's not his crew. That's not his gang. And I do think at a certain point over the last 24, 48 hours, he's probably been getting some pressure from Spotify because this has been getting rough. I mean, there's some estimates that Spotify lost something like $2 billion in market value

last week over this controversy and the sort of cancel Spotify hashtag movement that ensued. Do you think this is something that might lead this, you know, modern day prophet of sorts to reconsider his approach to just being that, you know, curious dude who asks questions when some of the people he might be asking those questions of might be spreading some harmful information. Yeah, I hope it does cause him to take some real steps toward fact-checking, being careful with the guests that he chooses, and even his own opinions. That being said, we're grown adults, and the final responsibility for parsing information lies with each of us. We can expect Joe Rogan to do better. But one thing I came away from my weeks of immersion in all of this noise that Joe Rogan is barfing out into the universe is that fundamentally,

we're going to have to make the choices about what we listen to and what we don't listen to. And Joe Rogan is a comedian. His podcast is an entertainment podcast. You should not be listening to it for deep medical advice about how to handle COVID. You just shouldn't. And he shouldn't be held to that standard because that's not what he's aspiring to. He just shouldn't be actively spreading misinformation. And if he's going to. He just shouldn't be actively spreading misinformation. And if he's going to take a step in that direction, that's great. And maybe Neil Young will come back. But I did notice a friend of mine sent me something very funny, which was a screen grab from Apple Music of their homepage saying, get caught up on Neil Young. Yeah, I think that's why we're not talking about

Neil Young right now, because all of this might have been good publicity for Neil Young. Neil Young did great. Be on my side or be on your side, baby There is no reason for you to hide It's so hard for me staying here all alone. Devin Gordon's an author who sometimes goes full method on Joe Rogan. You can find his piece about Joe over at theatlantic.com. It's titled, Why is Joe Rogan so popular? Earlier in the show,

you heard from Ashley Carman. She writes the Hot Pod newsletter. It's all about the podcast industry. You can find it at hotpodnews.com. Our show today was produced by Will Reed and Amina Alsadi, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by

Laura Bullard. The rest of the team includes Halima Shah, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, and Victoria Chamberlain. We used music by Breakmaster Halima Shah, Hadi Mawagdi, Miles Bryan, and Victoria Chamberlain. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. Vox's VP of audio is Liz Kelly Nelson. It's February. Noelle King is going to start hosting the show in two weeks. Get ready. Happy Lunar New Year. I'm Sean Ramos for him today, explained as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.