Joe Rogan built the most popular podcast on the planet, and powerful people wanted it gone.
During the COVID years, the pressure campaign against him went higher up the food chain than most people ever knew.
And now Rogan is naming the weapon they used — even if he won’t yet name the names behind it.
Presidents Got Involved
Rogan made the disclosure recently on *The Joe Rogan Experience* while sitting down with author Chase Hughes. The two got into a discussion about the coordinated effort to strip Rogan of sponsors, pressure his platform, and ultimately silence a show that tens of millions of Americans were tuning into every week.
Around the time of the CNN controversy, Rogan said PACs and other groups were contacting sponsors and Spotify to derail his show. That much had been known for a while. What Rogan added this time went further.
“I can’t even talk about it but there was presidents involved and former presidents involved that were contacting Spotify. Oh yeah. Trying to get me removed for vaccine misinformation. Yeah. And it turned out to be right. All of it. Not a single [person] apologized,” he said.
He didn’t name names. But the plain meaning of what he said is hard to miss — sitting or former commanders in chief, people who once had access to the nuclear codes, were picking up the phone to lean on a Swedish streaming company over a podcast.
Rogan added that he usually avoids the subject because it goes “deep” for him. “It was nuts, but it didn’t work. But they tried. They spent a lot of money, a loooot of money,” he said.
The living former Presidents were Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush.
When Trump supporters slam the swamp uniparty, this is what they are talking about.
What They Were Trying to Shut Down
Rogan revealed he lost a lot of sponsors during the Covid-19 pandemic, and there were expensive efforts from groups trying to de-platform his show. The specific flashpoint that drew the most fire was his own COVID diagnosis and how he treated it.
In the video that sparked the firestorm, Rogan discussed getting COVID and fighting it off with a cocktail of drugs, including ivermectin. The media ran with it. CNN, in particular, became a target of Rogan’s anger when he accused the network of altering footage of him to make him look worse than he was.
The podcaster accused CNN of turning him “green” in a controversial video that led to the outlet being accused of manipulating an Instagram video in 2021 to make Rogan look more sickly. CNN denied any alterations, and an analysis found no manipulation. Rogan wasn’t buying it.
Rogan described the whole experience as a “wake-up call” that opened his eyes about the liberal legacy media. “It’s so dirty. It’s such a dirty business,” Rogan said. “God, I used to have massive respect for journalists. If I had never done this podcast, I would be your regular schmo out there with, you know, just spitting out all the company lines and all the blast all over the news.”
And then, with a laugh: “I kind of liked it better then.”
Spotify Didn’t Cave
Here’s the part the people who tried to take him down probably don’t love thinking about. It didn’t work.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek stated that his company would not alter its policies based on pressure from media frenzy. That’s a remarkable thing to say when the pressure reportedly included calls from former heads of state.
Rogan pointed out that Spotify’s status as a non-American company probably mattered. “Thank God I was on Spotify and thank God Spotify is not an American company. And also it helped that I was number one in, like, 90 countries and not number 90 in one country, you know? That helped. That helped a lot,” he said.
But Spotify did remove several episodes of *The Joe Rogan Experience* from its streaming platform during the height of the controversy, so it wasn’t a clean victory. The pressure got some results — just not the main one they wanted.
And the audience? Rogan’s listenership exploded during the controversy. “I grew by 2 million subscribers in a month,” Rogan explained.
“People started listening,” he said, despite how his critics attacked his reputation. “And they started listening, like, ‘Oh, he’s really reasonable and pretty humble about all this stuff and just asking questions.'”
Nobody Ever Said Sorry
The most telling line in the whole exchange wasn’t about the presidents or the money spent. It was the part about the apology — or rather, the total absence of one.
Rogan’s critics spent years calling his COVID positions dangerous, irresponsible, and lethal. They got musicians to pull their catalogs from Spotify. They got PACs to go after his sponsors. They apparently got former presidents to call the platform directly. And then, as the official COVID narrative crumbled — on lab origins, on natural immunity, on masking children, on the actual risk profile of the vaccines for young healthy people — not one of the people who led that charge picked up the phone to say they got it wrong.
That silence is its own kind of answer.
This is what the Make America Healthy Again movement has been pointing at for years. The people who controlled COVID policy and COVID messaging weren’t just wrong — they were aggressively wrong, and they used every tool available to them, including apparently the office of the presidency, to make sure nobody with a large audience could say so.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services, spent those same years raising the same kinds of questions Rogan was raising. He got the same treatment — labeled, dismissed, de-platformed where possible. The machinery was the same. The goal was the same.
But Rogan had 90 countries worth of listeners and a Swedish company that didn’t feel the same political heat a domestic platform would have. That combination, plus Spotify’s refusal to fully capitulate, is probably the only reason *The Joe Rogan Experience* still exists in the form it does today.
Think about that the next time someone tells you the censorship concern is overblown.
*The Joe Rogan Experience* remains the most popular podcast available on Spotify to this day, despite the early controversy. The people who spent all that money trying to stop it have nothing to show for it except the knowledge that it didn’t work — and that Rogan is still out there, still talking, still drawing an audience bigger than most cable news networks on their best nights.
He said the whole thing goes “deep” and that he can’t fully get into it. That’s either caution or there’s more to come. Either way, the part he did say out loud was plenty.
Sources: Mediaite, Fox News, Digital Music News, The Wrap