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Comment by aliqot | Hacker News Reader

to be a fly on the wall at rogan's right now.. yeah he made the money, but I wonder sometimes if it tanked his show. Almost nobody talks about him or his guest's antics anymore when just 2yrs ago he was approaching howard stern status.

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You can’t single out moving to Spotify as the cause because there are two other confounding factors - moving to Texas and his reaction to everything around Covid.

And even if it was because of Spotify… well, that’s what the money is for - they paid him enough to be okay with it.

The covid thing is interesting because there are people who will flock TO someone for being so against it. In the basketball world saw the same thing with Kyrie Irving. Is it enough to offset all the people who see that and nope out? No clue but there is at least a vocal minority who are so incredibly anti-vaccine now.

and also moving from sorta chaotic neutral to definitively right wing.

I don't think him moving to Texas had anything to do with it.

I do think he became deeply unpopular in many circles because of the anti COVID takes though. He went from a bro-y, kinda douchey guy who seemed harmless to a spokesperson for antivaxers. Lots of folks in the middle who didn't have much of an opinion, or care too much about him, that ended up writing him off completely.

TBH his podcast just got boring before then. I had pretty much stopped listening because I got bored with Joe interrupting the guest to talk about apes or something like that. He didn't really seem to make an effort to understand his guests a lot, especially when it was something he might be politically against. It just became uninteresting. I forgot who it was that he had on, but they were talking about how in another world where team sports were gender-mixed instead of what they are now, we'd value different things in teams (like the different qualities brought by the different types of players, or their ability to work together to succeed, not just worship at individual superstar athletes as is common now) and Joe was just like "but guys are the best, I don't understand". Like, it wasn't really a hard concept to grasp, even if you don't think sports teams should be gender-mixed.

I think it was his move to spotify that was the inflection point. I used to watch a handful of his podcasts on youtube each year, whenever I saw that he had interesting guests on (and not just his unfunny comedian friends or MMA fighters...) But since he moved to spotify I haven't seen a single one of his interviews. I'm not installing some dumb app to watch a dump ape a few times a year.

I find Spotify in general to be greatly inferior to Youtube and I listen to JRE a lot less since his move there. I'll catch all his high profile guests but I find I never listen to random podcasts because the Joe Rogan "Experience" downright sucks on Spotify.

- The constant ads in the US, they're skippable but they're obnoxiously long and frequent and annoy the crap out of me. - Spotify app performs poorly, seeking is slow, random freezes/hangs, sometimes I have to close the app completely to get an updated list of shows for a podcaster for some reason. - The interface for viewing shows is inferior. Thumbnails for shows are tiny while they have a ton of wasted space on a typical 1440p monitor.

I also think he's greatly bought into the mob's demands and engages political topics a lot less frequently since at least COVID, despite being lied about repeatedly and basically being correct in almost everything he ever said or questioned.

My favorite Joe Rogan episode was with Jesse Ventura where he tried to inject testosterone into the conversation and Ventura promptly shut him down. I find the podcast full of pseudoscience and the guests are for the most part nobodies or resume fabulists. He is a likable guy and a lot of people do love the MMA stuff so I don't see him going away anytime soon.

I, as one data point, refused to make a Spotify account just to continue listening to Rogan.

I already have a paid Pandora account, that's more than a decade old and I really like. I have all the same "features" a paid Spotify account has (offline listening, playlists, choose any song, etc) and what I feel is a vastly superior "radio" aka. suggested listening.

I have no reason to use Spotify, except Rogan - and that wasn't enough.

So, Rogan lost me as a regular listener, and Spotify's plan was thwarted (in a single case at least). Although... I'm probably not alone here.

Sounds like you went from 0 reasons to use Spotify to 1 reason to use Spotify, which was probably part of their plan.

Not enough to make you transfer across, but maybe enough to make some people transfer across.

Maybe his influence would fade away anyway and he sold it at its peak. Just like “Draw Something”.

Rogan already got paid, so I'm sure he won't be too bothered. He's also kept the YouTube channel alive with occasional clips and fight companions, and would presumably switch back should things turn sour with Spotify.

I'm really curious what kinds of numbers he's been getting since switching to Spotify. My perception has been that his cultural importance has waned significantly since the switch, but I don't have any hard numbers to back this up, it's just vibes.

I mean, the same thing happened to Howard Stern when he signed with Sirius XM, right?

He's also, kinda sorta semi-retired. He only broadcasts like 2 days a week now.

We can't know for sure because sirius doesn't publish ratings like terrestrial radio. We do know sirius had put incentives in his contract where if they reached X more subscribers after Stern announced he was moving, he'd get a bonus. He met these almost instantly.

More than his radio show, Stern also lost TV around the same time he switched to sirius.

Surely his pandemic opinions also had an effect.

Rogan would love nothing more than being less popular.

What do you imagine the benefit of being more famous to be? It is all downside once you get past being able to ask anyone to be on your show or go for dinner and most of them say yes.

I wish famous people would openly talk about what a pain in the ass and actual security risk it is to be even remotely famous.

I think your insight isn't a bad one but -- The famous people I've interacted with would be pretty quick to agree with the downsides (they are painful and huge) .. but also very generous about admitting the upsides. Depending on the level of fame they can be enormous. The special access of famous people's lives is.. hard to understand if you don't have it (I don't have it, but I've witnessed and experienced the tiniest bits of it and holy shit). I don't think a single one of them would trade it / go back.

Would they really not give up the fame but keep the money if they could? I feel like the advantage of getting free shit doesn't really matter when you have a 9 figure net worth like Rogan.

Ahhh, maybe those are conflated so irreversibly in their head it’s hard to imagine one without the other.

Seems ideal though, anonymous wealth :)

I'd definitely choose the money there

Better like this.

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