In a now deleted post on his website, musician Neil Young told his management
team and his record label to remove all of his music off of Spotify.
Well, why did he wanna do that?
Well, apparently he's pushing back against the COVID disinformation coming from
one of the top podcasts carried on Spotify, The Joe Rogan Experience.
So he says this again, this is the
now deleted statement that he had on his website.
I'm doing this because Spotify is
spreading fake information about vaccines potentially
causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.
Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.
Spotify can have Joe Rogan or Young, not both.
And he also said and this is correct,
with an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, the
Joe Rogan Experience, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify
is the world's largest podcast and has tremendous influence.
Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation
on its platform though the company presently has no misinformation policy.
And by the way, I wanna provide just one
of the more recent examples from Joe Rogan's podcast.
This is actually kind of a wonderful moment because he got pushed back
in real time from his guest who clearly knew what he was talking about.
This was a few weeks ago when he had Josh Szeps on, so just take a quick look at how this interaction went down.
For young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the vaccine.
It's like 2-4 fold increase in the instances of myocarditis-
>> Yes.
[CROSSTALK] You know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis among that age cohort
from getting COVID as well which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.
>> I don't think that's true.
I don't think it's true.
No, no, no, I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of myocarditis
from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.
>> No, there is.
>> Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's true.
Myocarditis is more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination.
But is this with children?
Yeah, we're talking about young people.
>> Men and boys aged under 30 after this is what it says here.
>> With children is the issue.
>> Well, no, we were talking about 15 year olds.
Well, we're talking about young children- >> Male child 12 to 17.
>> 12 to 17 more like to belt myocarditis with three months of catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection.
This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis per million at the same time following their second dose of Pfizer.
>> Yeah, so you're about eight times likelier to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine.
>> That's interesting now that is not what I've read before.
But also even when we're reading these things, it's like, what are we getting this from?
Is this from the VAERS reports?
But even from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report, it's the underreporting.
>> That was fantastic.
Now luckily Josh Szeps was the guest on his show that day, not one of the many lunatics he has on that just go along with his weird disinformation campaign in regard to vaccines and such.
But Francesca, what do you make of Neil Young and his move?
So far his music has not been taken off of Spotify.
It's unclear whether that's gonna happen, but clearly he felt the need to speak out.
>> I mean, I think it's incredibly admirable and I also think it speaks to the benefits flash, the lack thereof.
When it comes to being an artist on Spotify who gets paid pennies of royalties and the entire streaming racket for musicians, even someone like Neil Young is really bad.
They're not getting deals that Joe Rogan gets, they are getting again, pennies on the dollars for every play of their music.
So go and play [LAUGH] a bunch of Neil Young right now.
Here's what I will say, maybe I've said this before flippantly, but I'm saying now, I think that Rogan's days are numbered on Spotify.
But I have to remember that actually Rogan made Spotify a podcast platform.
Before Rogan, Spotify was music and still is music, and getting the Rogan deal was huge for them.
Because suddenly people were like, okay, well I'm gonna get now my podcast on Spotify.
And if Rogan is only available on Spotify also that's huge, Rogan will be fine if Spotify ditches him.
But Spotify wants that money baby and sadly Neil Young's replays are not nearly as much as Joe Rogan's.
No matter who he brings on, what he says or if he basically is like, nah, only fat people get COVID and die.
Yay, is that something you stand behind?
And look, I don't believe honestly, I'm of two minds about deplatforming, but at a certain point I do think on Spotify, it is a bad look.
It's bad if I were like head of corporate accountability or some role like that, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near Joe Rogan's podcast.
>> I mean, especially now I don't know why it devolved to where it is today.
There were always conversations I disagreed with on that podcast.
I used to listen to it regularly, but lately it's just kind of devolved into one weird COVID conspiracy theorist after the next.
And what really was striking to me with that interaction with Josh Szeps was, it's a different way of handling pushback, right?
Whereas before I felt like Rogan was open minded enough to accept new information, and now it's like, no, no, no, that's not true, that's not true.
He gets proven wrong, they look it up and it's like, yeah, but like, but how, I mean, how reliable is this information?
It's like, okay, I guess, so there's literally no evidence that's gonna persuade you [LAUGH] to think a little differently about all of this.
It's just really fascinating..
>> That's just really interesting because he doesn't push back on let's say Nazis who are like Gavin McGinnis or whomever was like hey, let's think about an ethnos state, whites over here, blacks over here.
And he's like, wow, that's so interesting, how would you set that up?
Would it be like, I don't know, like apartheid?
Yeah, yeah, separate drinking fountains, have we seen that ever in history?
And then when it comes to someone being like, no, actually you're parroting false COVID information, vaccine information.
He's like, no, no, no, there's gotta be something more.
And okay, so it's very indicative of who he is actually challenging on his show and who he's letting run their mouths.
>> That's exactly right, there's definitely a double standard there.
And it's really uncomfortable to watch it because he used to be way more open minded.
And I mean, some of the best moments have come from his podcast back in the day, including his pushback on Dave Rubin and the post office.
It's like one of my favorite Joe Rogan moments.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Go back to that, start thinking for yourself again.
I think this is all a knee jerk reaction to people criticizing him.
Sometimes when there's a wave of criticism, you wanna double down, people get defensive.
>> Sure.
>> But
don't
get
like
that,
just
be
better.