Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
After initially claiming there were no concerns about his interview with Donald Trump on YouTube, Joe Rogan reversed course and said there were problems. That led to Elon Musk and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek getting involved.
Rogan assured observers that there was no funny business after his own producers originally removed the episode with Trump last week to ensure it was published on both Spotify and YouTube at the same time.
However, users noticed that the episode was difficult to find on YouTube. The conversation between Joe Rogan and Donald Trump was ultimately published in its entirety on the X social media platform, which Elon Musk owns.
Joe Rogan revealed that Musk personally reached out to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to get permission for the episode to be published on the social media app, ensuring it was seen by as many viewers as possible.
“If you Google’d ‘Rogan Trump’ you could only get clips, you couldn’t find the full episode,” said Rogan. “We reached out to them, and they fixed it. But in the meantime, Elon was furious and contacted Daniel Ek at Spotify and they put it on X as well.”
Rogan then shared his displeasure with the situation, saying it’s the latest in a long line of censorship concerns.
“You can’t suppress (expletive). It doesn’t work. This is the internet. This is 2024. People are going to realize what you’re doing,” said Rogan. “If (my video with Trump) isn’t trending, you tell me what the (expletive) is. If one show has 36 million downloads in two days, that’s not trending?”
Joe Rogan concluded by adding that it isn’t possible, in his opinion, that the episode failing to come up under certain search terms was a coincidence.
“There’s no way this was a mistake. That’s too convenient,” he shared. “It could have been a rogue engineer. There’s a lot of people working behind the scenes.”
