Joe Rogan Apologizes for ‘Shameful’ Past Use of Racial Slur

As pressure has intensified on Spotify and its star podcaster Joe Rogan, listeners reported that the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.

In an Instagram video, Rogan — whose talk show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is Spotify’s most popular podcast, and has been available there exclusively for more than a year — addressed what he called “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.” A compilation video showed Rogan using the slur numerous times in past episodes of his show; it had been shared by the singer India.Arie, who has removed her catalog from Spotify in protest of what she called Rogan’s “language around race.”

{snip} The clips, he said, had been taken out of context, which he said included discussions about how it had been used by comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who were Black, and Lenny Bruce, who was white.

When posting the clip compilation, Arie said that Rogan “shouldn’t even be uttering the word. Don’t say it, under any context.” In his video, Rogan said that he had come to agree with that view. “It’s not my word to use,” he said. “I’m well aware of that now.” {snip}

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In his latest video, Rogan also discussed a clip from another podcast episode, which he said he had deleted, in which he described seeing “Planet of the Apes” at a theater in a Black neighborhood in Philadelphia. “I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said it was like we got out and we were in Africa. It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes,’” he said, adding that it was an “idiotic” thing to say that “looks terrible even in context.”

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