Joe Rogan’s podcast has been met with criticism after airing an insensitive conversation about skin colour and spreading climate misinformation. 

Joe Rogan’s widely popular and controversial podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, has provoked an uproar on social media for its problematic content. 

In a recent interview with Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube personality Jordan Peterson, Rogan spoke about “the spectrum of shades” in reference to race. The two white men discussed who qualifies as a black person for Rogan’s 11 million viewers. 

“The Black and white thing is so strange because the shades are such a spectrum of shades of people,” said Rogan. 

“Unless you are talking to someone who is, like, 100 percent African from the darkest place, where they are not wearing any clothes all day and they have developed all of that melanin to protect themselves from the sun, even the term Black is weird. When you use it for people who are literally my colour, it becomes very strange.”

Trevor Noah made fun of the pair on The Daily Show as he examined his hands and joked, “Oh my God! I’m not Black! I’m… not Black! Joe Rogan’s right! I’m like a Caramel Mocha Frappuccino. This changes everything… This changes everything!” He then ran off stage and was met with police sirens and flashing lights before returning to remark, “The police said I’m Black.” 

Trevor went on to explain, “Black people didn’t call themselves Black.” 

“We have cultures. Zulu. Xhosa. Baganda. Igbo. Wakandans! But then white people got there, and they were like, ‘Wow. There’s a lot of Black people here. A lot of Black people.’ Then in America, they invented a rule that if you had one drop of Black blood in you, that makes you Black – which defined how you were treated by the government and by society.”

In the same interview, Rogan and Peterson discussed climate change enraging climate scientists due to the false claims presented by Peterson. Peterson said, “there’s no such thing as climate,” before criticizing climate modelling. 

“Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables — which are everything — to that set,” said Peterson. “But how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation if it’s about everything?”

This is a popular and debunked argument that Rogan didn’t challenge. 

Michael E. Mann, climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told CNN, “every great discovery in science has arisen [from scientific modelling]. Including the physics of electromagnetism that allowed Peterson and Rogan to record and broadcast this silly and absurd conversation.”