Spotify’s $100 million podcast star acknowledged the elephant in the studio Monday, saying that he wasn’t trying to promote COVID misinformation by booking guests widely accused of offering just that and would try to do a better job with this and other controversial topics.
In an uncharacteristically short 9:43 episode, also posted on Instagram, Rogan said he had booked two pandemic conspiracy-theory advocates—Peter McCullough and Robert Malone—because they were “very highly credentialed, very highly accomplished people” who questioned consensus medical opinions.
Malone’s Dec. 31 appearance led a group of 270 medical experts to post an open letter demanding that Spotify set up a medical-misinformation policy. Last week, Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young picked up on that and had his music removed from the streaming service in protest, a move followed by Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, and other musicians.
Competing streaming-music alternatives such as Apple Music have capitalized on Young’s protest by highlighting how they continue to feature his music.
In Monday’s episode, Rogan defended the McCullough and Malone bookings by saying that establishment assessments would have rated some current consensus judgments—for instance, that vaccines can still let you get COVID and that cloth masks don’t work—as misinformation “a short while ago.” (That’s a bit of a stretch.)
Rogan also pointed to his booking medically astute guests as CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and Baylor College of Medicine Professor Peter Hotez. He said that in addition to accepting Spotify’s decision—announced Sunday in a quasi-apology from CEO Daniel Ek—to post a note before COVID-specific episodes with links to vetted medical advice, he would try to balance out his guests to ensure that a questionable contrarian viewpoint would not go unchallenged.
“One of the things I could do better is have more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones,” he said. “I do all the scheduling myself, and I don’t always get it right.”
Rogan further said he would try not to go into these interviews uninformed. “Oftentimes I have no idea what I’m going to talk about until I sit down and talk to people,” he admitted. “That’s why some of my ideas are not that prepared or fleshed out.”
The host of Spotify’s most-listened podcast professed no hard feelings over Young’s dumping of Spotify, saying “I’m a Neil Young fan, I’ve always been a Neil Young fan.”
