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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

This seemed like the obvious trap he was going to fall into.

I used to listen to him when he interviewed someone I was interested in. I even installed Spotify so I can access his podcast.

In practice, because I don’t use Spotify for anything else, I have simply forgotten about him.

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"This seemed like the obvious trap he was going to fall into."

He cashed in before his expiration date. Brilliant move.

He was given $100 million dollars up front to crash before his expiration date. Yes, that is a brilliant move.

wow, I never heard that figure, that is staggering IMO, I've never understood why Joe was famous, never got his appeal. Per WSJ, "The deal with Mr. Rogan is a multiyear licensing agreement for an amount of time that couldn’t be learned. It will likely be worth more than $100 million based on milestones and performance metrics, according to the person familiar." Wonder what those milestones are like and how important they are to Joe. https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-strikes-exclusive-podca...

say what you want about rogan, but he is a good listener. Period. He knows when to shut the fuck up and let the guest speak.

He also can talk to people he disagrees with without going into petty word fights. Despite his image he has a lot of humility, he knows and openly admits not to be the smartest man in the room. And to me comes across as a person eager to learn and hear new ideas.

I have learnt quite a lot about being good conversationalist by studying what and how he deals with guests.

He has casual (friends) episodes that are pretty repetitive but he also invites experts from all over. Those episodes are very entertaining.

(I dont use spotify so havent been following his podcast since the move)

I don’t like Joe Rogan but his earlier episodes were my first introduction to real long form, off the cuff conversations that have become pretty common now. Even relatively recently, I watched the Bernie Sanders one and felt like I hadn’t really heard Bernie Sanders just have a conversation like that for a long period. Among others I know, that, at least used to, be the appeal.

Well, I'm sure he was making pretty good movie before and yet he was independent, people talked about him, reporters wrote stories more often – in the long-term he could have monetized that even better.

> in the long-term he could have monetized that even better.

Could being the operative word. We're talking about "blow a million dollars on random shit every year until you die and still have multiple millions left over" amounts of money. Why would anyone who doesn't already have hundreds of millions of dollars opt for that? The whole point of this tangent in the discussion is that he probably realized his time in the spotlight was limited, so any plan that assumes longevity is statistically unlikely to come to fruition.

Would you fell into a trap like this for 100.000.000$?

Apparently he made $30M in the year before the deal.

If the deal lasts for more than 2 years, then he has made a serious error.

But you also have to assess risks. Joe is a prime candidate for getting canceled. Being on YouTube carries this risk for him.

On Spotify not only he got some cash upfront, but also significantly mitigated this risk, since platform is way more aligned (i.e. it's important business for Spotify and a footnote for YouTube).

It’s not YouTube vs Spotify, it’s Spotify vs every other platform. Lots of people just listened to his podcasts which can’t be cancelled.

That assumes that his podcast had at least 3 years of legs, which is not at all clear to me.

Is Spotify the only source of revenue from his podcast? I don't listen to JRE, but this thread suggests he's still running third-party ads on the show. Presumably then he's still getting some portion of that $30M/year on top of what Spotify pays him.

> Spotify doesn’t play or include ads that interrupt the listening experience of Premium subscribers. However, some podcast creators may include third-party advertising, host-read endorsements, or sponsorship messages in their episodes.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Other-Podcasts-Partners-etc...

Not only does he run the ads (though I suspect spotify reaps those benefits), they're randomly inserting them in the podcast now and it's annoying. Sometimes it's mid sentence.

Annoying to both pay for spotify and get hammered with ads. Granted I pay for the music, but it's still annoying as all.

Its even worse, up until a few weeks ago, you could rip his podcasts using youtube-dl. I am paying for a subscription to support him but ripping his podcasts and throwing away their garbage app in favor of Jellyfin. Now they have begun encrypting his podcasts with Widevine. :/

Since I still have to listen to ads, i'm thinking of just dropping the subscription and hoping there becomes a method to break this Widevine trash. I encounter a bug with their app on a daily basis and I am tired of it. From what I gather, there are different levels of Widevine encryption that limit video quality but the lower levels are crackable. I hope someone smarter than me tries the crack on the JRE podcast.

When this happened to me I assumed Spotify had become logged out of my account somehow. Nope, they’re injecting adverts randomly into paying customers podcasts. I cancelled Spotify that moment. I never really agreed with their attempted land grab on podcasts, this, however, I felt had really crossed a line. There are plenty of other podcasts I listen to, some without ads, supported only by Patreon, etc. so the money I spent on Spotify will get redistributed to them.

You can retire with a high standard of living for the rest of your life with that amount as a lump sum. It's not clear to me that the decision was wrong.

When is it enough money? $130M in two years, and he made an error to take it?

He said not to long ago that he was actually hoping to be less famous and relevant by moving to Spotify. He wanted less lime light. However to him it backfired as more people are talking about him although less are probably actually listening.

I've installed Spotify only to discover that podcasts are not available in Russia at all.

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