The public fury—and more specifically, famous musicians' fury—over podcast host Joe Rogan's relentless pandemic misinformation has reached a pitch where both Rogan and streaming service Spotify felt compelled to answer this weekend, and whether you find value in either response probably depends on your own remaining patience. In a ten-minute Instagram video, Rogan gave a mostly-vague promise to do better, promising to "do my best to make sure I've researched these topics," and "try harder to get people with differing opinions."
Coming from someone who has promoted the phony miracle properties of ivermectin (doesn't work) and who is receiving criticism precisely for hosting people with "differing opinions" on basic pandemic facts, both of those specific pledges sound more ominous than comforting. It was Rogan's own "research" chops that led him to believe deworming medicine was an effective treatment against a virus—a popular Facebook theory that has seemingly been immune to all actual research proving the contrary; we do not need "differing opinions" on whether getting vaccinated will cause you to become magnetic, wreaking havoc on your library of old VHS tapes, but competent opinions that do not treat superstition and fact as competing gladiators set loose on each other for the sake of spectacle.
It's Rogan's defense of his continual screw-ups that's perhaps most off-putting, though. "I've never tried to do anything with this podcast other than just talk to people, and have interesting conversations."