Joe Rogan, host of the wildly popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” responded directly on Sunday night to the political Left’s attempts to cancel him in recent weeks over a couple of episodes where he had on medical professionals and scientists who challenged the mainstream narrative on matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rogan posted the video late on Sunday night on Instagram after Spotify, which is where he hosts his show, released a statement earlier in the day announcing new actions that the company would take “to combat misinformation.”
Rogan said that a lot of people have a “distorted perception” of what he does based on misleading media coverage. He said that he focuses on simply just having conversations with interesting people and trying to learn from them.
“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.”
“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 continued. “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.”
“I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know. Because I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist,” Rogan continued. “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. 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.”
Rogan said that he agrees with Spotify’s decision to “at the beginning of these controversial podcasts, like specifically ones about COVID, … 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.”
Rogan said that moving forward he thinks he could do a better job of having more experts come on his show with different opinions immediately following episodes that are likely to be deemed controversial.
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