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The best-selling author, TED Talk star and University of Houston social-work professor is also a major force in the podcasting world — and she’s especially important to Spotify, the only platform where her podcasts are available. In early February, after protests erupted over vaccine misinformation and other offensive material on Spotify’s Joe Rogan Show, Brown announced that she was putting her two podcasts on pause while she learned more about what was happening.
She didn’t like what she found.
“As you may or may not know,” she wrote Wednesday on Facebook, “I’m under a multiyear, exclusive contract with Spotify. Unlike some creators, I don’t have the option of pulling my work from the platform.”
Podcasting, she wrote, is like a high-school cafeteria – a big free-for-all where people can say pretty much what they want. Her contract, though, requires her to sit at the Spotify table, alongside Rogan. And if her fans want to hang out with her, they have to sit there too.
Brown hates that. She decried the COVID-19 misinformation on Rogan’s show, its transphobia and its racism. “Furthermore,” she wrote, “the clip where Rogan is laughing with Joey Diaz as he brags about demanding sexual favors from young female comedians wanting to perform onstage at Los Angeles’ Comedy Store made me physically sick.”
She doesn’t deny that Rogan has a right to say those things. But she’s not willing, she writes, to invite her community to that metaphorical high-school table.
And yet that multiyear contract requires her to make podcasts. So, she wrote, “I’m going to make the best podcasts I can by talking about the issues that I think matter.”
She resumed “Unlocking Us” with an interview with Ben Wizner, of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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