Joe Rogan, Spotify’s prized podcaster, has apologized for using the N-word multiple times during his show “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
On Saturday (Feb. 5), Rogan took to Instagram to address a montage video of himself saying the word “n*gger” in numerous instances on his show.
“I’m making this video to talk about the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly,” Rogan said in the five-and-a-half-minute Instagram post. “There’s a video that’s out that’s a compilation of me saying the N-word. It’s a video made of clips taken out of context of 12 years of conversations on my podcast and it’s all smushed together and it looks f*cking horrible even to me.”
“Now, I know that to most people there’s no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word, never mind publicly on a podcast, and I agree with that now. I haven’t said it in years, but for a long time when I would bring that word up, like if it would come up in conversation, instead of saying ‘the N-word,’ I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing,” he continued.
Rogan went on to say that he never used the racial slur to be racist and that he doesn’t consider himself “racist.”
“I’m not racist but whenever you’re in a situation where you have to say ‘I’m not racist,’ you f*cked up and I clearly f*cked up and that’s my intention to express myself in this video to say there’s nothing I can do to take that back,” he said. “
“I do hope that if anything, that this can be a teachable moment. I never thought it would ever be taken out of context and put in a video like that and now that it is holy sh*t it looks bad.”
Rogan also stated that the portion of the clip where he tells a story about going to see Planet of the Apes in Philadelphia “wasn’t a racist story but it sounded terrible.”
According to The New York Times, which cited the website JRE Missing, a total of 113 episodes out of more than 1,700 have been deleted from Spotify. Other reports mention that as many as 70 episodes were recently removed by the streaming platform.
The Instagram apology video is Rogan’s second this week. In a 10-minute video posted on Sunday (Jan. 29), Rogan apologized to Spotify for the COVID-19 misinformation backlash the streaming site has received.
“If I pissed you off, I’m sorry,” Rogan said. “I will do my best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints with other people’s perspectives so we can maybe find a better point of view.”
The comedian’s second apology arrives just days after India Arie brought attention to the matter and removed her music off Spotify in protest.
Check out Joe Rogan’s full apology below:
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