Joe Rogan’s non-apology apology will remind you of your worst ex-boyfriend

He’s just a free spirit, man! He’s just out here having conversations! He doesn’t like labels!

(Getty/iStock/Spotify)

Ultimate man’s man and apparent Neil Young fan Joe Rogan has made an apology that channels the emotionally unavailable ex-boyfriend who you cried over for six months back in 2017. The Instagram video — which comes in at just under 10 long minutes — features all the greatest hits. “I’m not a doctor and I’m not a scientist; I’m just a person who sits down and has conversations… Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. But I’m not interested in only talking to people who have one perspective,” begins the warm-up act for this show of non-contrition.

We veer slightly into conspiracy territory — “I’m sure there there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes with these controversies” — and then turn right back into bad boyfriend town: “I’m very sorry they feel that way.” Who are “they” in this instance? Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, of course, both of whom have protested against Rogan’s podcast after it featured people like Peter McCullough — who stated inaccurately that the pandemic was planned, that vaccines cause harm, and that asymptomatic people with Covid can’t spread the disease — and Robert Malone, who claimed that people believe in vaccines because they are suffering from “mass psychosis” and that hospitals are financially incentivized to pretend patients died from Covid when they actually died from something else.

Rogan’s continuing speech reveals how little he understands about science or about the damage he can do by providing a platform for such conspiracy theorists on a podcast faithfully followed by millions of people. He claims that “you would be banned from social media” a year ago if you said that you can still catch and spread Covid after being vaccinated. Obviously no such bans ever actually took place, and no scientist has ever claimed that any vaccine is 100 percent effective. He claims the same imaginary ban would have happened if you’d said “cloth masks don’t work”, which he now thinks is established truth, when actually more people are simply coming to realize that N95 masks are the gold standard for virus protection with an extremely contagious variant like Omicron. That’s why N95 masks, and not cloth masks, are issued as standard in infectious disease wards for medical staff and always have been. In other words, Rogan thinks things have changed over the past year which have actually stayed the same — and he uses that flawed thinking to justify why the wild claims of people like McCullough or Malone might magically be proven right in another year’s time.

A better comparison for McCullough or Malone might be Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor who claimed in the nineties that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Wakefield — who was ultimately banned from practicing medicine for spreading global misinformation and subjecting children to unnecessary invasive procedures — has since become somewhat of an anti-vaxx celebrity in the US. He likes to claim in speeches that he is the victim of some sort of nefarious “establishment”. The truth is that he may have set out to genuinely investigate something he believed to be true, but seemed unable to accept it when his own research could find no link, and chose to double down and commit himself to conspiracy theories rather than follow the science.

“If there’s anything I’ve done that I could do better it’s to have more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones,” Rogan continues in his apology, as if there is an equivalence between peer-reviewed science and some guy’s unsubstantiated belief in the entire world falling victim to psychosis. “I do all the scheduling myself and I don’t always get it right,” he adds. “Oftentimes I have no idea what I’m gonna talk about [during an episode]” and they’re “not so prepared or fleshed out because I’m literally having them in real time but I do my best.” He’s just a free spirit, man! He’s just out here having conversations! These dudes just drove up and he had literally no idea what they were going to say — they could’ve started dispensing relationship advice to recent divorcees or ruminating on whether to leave bird seed out for robins in the winter but instead — oops! Covid denialism! Whatcha gonna do with a salt-of-the-earth guy like me? He doesn’t like labels. He’s too cool to commit to the mainstream.

Rogan then let us know that he’s a Neil Young fan and “I love Joni Mitchell — Chuckie’s in Love is a great song.” Chuckie’s in Love is not actually a Joni Mitchell song, but sure. Who cares if it’s not true? He’s just a person who sits down and has conversations. Does it matter if his opinion is that it’s someone else’s song? What is truth anyway? Maybe the world’s belief that Chuckie’s in Love was actually written and performed by Rickie Lee Jones is actually just a product of mass psychosis.

“It’s a strange responsibility to have this many viewers and listeners, it’s very strange and it’s nothing that I prepared for and it’s nothing that I ever anticipated,” Rogan rounds off with. He’s especially sorry to Spotify, who are currently planning to put a warning before his podcast and who provide a lot of his income. “I’m very sorry this is happening to them and they’re taking a lot of heat for it,” he says, as if he were talking about an act of God rather than a direct consequence of his own scheduling decisions.

Finally: “If I pissed you off, I’m sorry, and if you enjoyed the podcast, thank you. Thank you very much, thank you Spotify, thank you all the supporters and even thank you to the haters because it’s good to have some haters, it makes you reassess what you’re doing and put things into perspective and, uh, I think that’s good too. I’m gonna do my best.”

The problem with saying “I’m gonna do my best” when you just told everyone you spread Covid misinformation while also doing your best is that it’s clear your best isn’t good enough. And if you’re just a guy having conversations you can’t control and don’t know anything about, then maybe Covid vaccine misinformation isn’t the subject you should choose to explore on the episode of your Very Much Not Trying To Spread Conspiracy Theories podcast.