The drama surrounding the most popular podcast on the planet just won’t die down! Joe Rogan Experience is silently removing roughly 70 episodes from the rich catalogue following a huge public campaign to censor and deplatform it.
Around 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast mysteriously disappeared from Spotify on Friday, as spotted by JREMissing.com, a web tool that tracks missing episodes.
But the episodes in question are not the ones that everyone is arguing about – the ones starring doctor Peter McCollough nor Robert Malone.
Instead the episodes removed are those that feature Rogan’s friends with fringe believes – most notably Sam Tripoli, Duncan Trussell, Brian Redban, Jamie Killstein, Ari Shaffir and more.
From the recent guests list – you can no longer listen to the Kyle Kulinski podcast – Kulinski is a progressive leftist closely associated with Breaking Points’ Krystal Ball. He also served as moderator for Rogan during the election special and return of Alex Jones.
Roughly 40 episodes disappeared in April of last year.
A number of these episodes relates to the prepandemic period so it’s entirely unclear why they’re being removed now.
Spotify can’t really afford to lose Rogan or his audience. The company specifically licensed his show with the goal of both converting listeners to the platform and making money through ad sales. Once the podcast transitioned there was a very public backlash among the fans of the show over the non ads of McDonalds, Heiniken and other mainstream brands that were featured basically as product placement.
As is JRE is one of the most popular shows on the planet with 11 million downloads per episode.