Joe Rogan and his podcast continue to make headlines, this time with an offer of $100 million to move his show to the platform Rumble, Yahoo News reports.
As reported by The Dallas Express, earlier this month, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell said they would remove their music from the streaming platform Spotify due to a recent episode of Rogan’s podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
In the episode, Dr. Robert Malone, a scientist, revealed his thoughts on COVID-19. Malone made several claims about the COVID-19 vaccine and wearing a mask. He believes that a “third of the population” is being “hypnotized” to follow public health advice and get the vaccine.
In more recent controversy, Rogan has received blacklash regarding his use of the N-word.
According to Variety, singer India Arie recently followed in Young and Mitchell’s footsteps, announcing she would be pulling her music and podcasts off of Spotify due to Rogan’s comments.
“I find Joe Rogan problematic for reasons other than COVID interviews,” she said. “For me it’s also his language around race.”
After Spotify removed around seventy episodes of his podcast without explanation, Rogan posted an Instagram video apologizing for using the N-word on his show, The New York Times reports.
In the apology video posted to his Instagram, Rogan specifically mentions a clip compilation shared by India Arie just after her announcement, which shows him repeatedly using the N-word during his podcast episodes over the course of several years, Yahoo News reports.
“There’s a video that’s out, that’s a compilation of me saying the N-word,” Rogan said on Instagram. “It’s a video that’s made of clips taken out of context of me of … 12 years of conversations on my podcast, and it’s all smushed together, and it looks (expletive) horrible, even to me. “Now, I haven’t said it in years, but for a long time, when I would bring that word up like if it would come up in conversation, instead of saying ‘the N-word’, I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing.”
“He shouldn’t even be uttering the word,” Arie said in the caption of the video on Instagram. “Don’t even say it, under any context. Don’t say it. That’s where I stand. I have always stood there.”
After Rogan’s apology, Rumble CEO Chris Pvalovski asked him in a letter on Monday, “How about you bring all your shows to Rumble, both old and new, with no censorship, for 100 million bucks over four years?” following the question up with, “Yes, this is legit.”
On February 7, shares of the CF Acquisition IV SPAC, which agreed to merge with YouTube competitor Rumble late last year, jumped as much as 43% after Rumble’s CEO tried to lure Rogan away from Spotify with a $100 million offer, Business Insider reported.
According to reports, Rogan’s entire podcast library was initially moved to Spotify in 2020 in a deal worth more than $100 million.