Joe Rogan inks reported massive deal as Spotify looks to strongly enter the podcast space.
The Joe Rogan Experience is heading to Spotify in an exclusive deal.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal is worth more than $100 million. Rogan’s podcast will stream exclusively on the Spotify platform as part of the multi-year deal.
According to TechCrunch, the show will debut on Spotify on September 1, then go exclusive to the platform later in the year.
The Joe Rogan Experience has continually dominated podcast charts for years, and has found equal footing on YouTube, where Rogan has over 8 million subscribers.
A former Fear Factor host, Rogan is a comedian and UFC commentator who has built a massive following for his podcast, which features lengthy interviews with people of note from all walks of life. It can venture into politics (not super adeptly, but there it goes all the same) but tends to stick with in-depth conversations about life, success, manhood, etc.
This is just the most recent of Spotify’s big plays to get into the podcasting space. The company acquired sports and pop culture website The Ringer, which was founded by Bill Simmons, and in doing so acquired Simmons’ podcast, as well as other podcasts started by the outlet. It also recently acquired the podcast giant Gimlet.
But the show is still going on tonight in Jacksonville, Fla. with a title fight between Henry Cejudo and Dominick Cruz as the co-main event and an interim title fight between Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje as the main event.
No fans will be inside the Jacksonville Arena and the cageside setup will be a lot different than normal as they rightfully set it up with social distancing rules in place.
Daniel Cormier, who will be calling the fights with Jon Anik and Joe Rogan, gave a tour of the setup a few hours before UFC 249 begins. The announcers will all be sitting apart from each other, as will the others who will be cageside.
Check this out:
This is what @ufc 249 looks like. Tables apart. Very spaced out. Little different but it’s ok because the fights are back!!!!!!! LFG pic.twitter.com/PjnrDMkCio
UFC 248’s main event on Saturday night did not put on the type of violent show that fight fans had hoped to see, but a few other matchups on the card sure didn’t disappoint at all.
The co-main event between Joanna Jedrzejczyk and strawweight champ Weili Zhang was one of the greatest fights you’ll ever see. Zhang got the W to defend her belt via unanimous decision after five incredible rounds, while Jedrzejczyk suffered some dangerous looking damage.
But the fight before that between Beneil Dariush and Drakkar Klose had the finish of the night as Dariush knocked out Klose after a wild exchange of punches.
After blaming a 40-pound costume for his loss to Tyson Fury, a video surfaced of Deontay Wilder saying he trains in 45-pound vests.
Deontay Wilder’s costume continues to look like a way to dress up an excuse.
A few days after blaming a 40-pound suit of nuts, bolts, batteries and armor for his loss to Tyson Fury, a video surfaces of him talking about how he trains in vests that weigh about 45 pounds, give or take a battery.
“We want to activate the fast-twitch muscles,” Wilder said on the The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Dec. 10, 2018. “We do everything with rapid speed. If I’m doing anything that consists of me moving my feet, it’s sprinting.
“Now, I wear a 45-pound vest on me as well as doing all my exercises and everything that I do to have that extra weight on me.”
But that extra weight, minus about five pounds, was apparently too much for Wilder in the dressing room, the walk to the ring and up the steps.
It left him, he said, with weakened legs and vulnerable to the bigger Fury, whose two hands landed like 40 pounds each in dropping Wilder twice, in the third round and again in the fifth at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. In a timely act of mercy, assistant trainer Mark Breland threw in the towel in the seventh.
“He didn’t hurt me at all, but the simple fact is that my uniform was way too heavy for me,’’ Wilder said a couple of days after his first loss. “I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight. In the third round, my legs were just shot all the way through.”
Message to Wilder: Get rid of the suit. Get rid of the excuse. There’s no costume that can disguise it anymore.
Joe Soliz is not Joe Rogan’s favorite person after UFC 247.
[autotag]Joe Rogan[/autotag] wasn’t happy with the scoring of the Jon Jones vs. Dominick Reyes headliner at UFC 247, and he let it be known.
Rogan, the long-time UFC color commentator, expressed his frustrations with the judging Saturday night in Houston, specifically for the main event at Toyota Center. Jones retained his light heavyweight title, beating Reyes by unanimous decision in which he claimed scores of 48-47, 48-47 and 49-46.
There’s no doubt the fight between Jones and Reyes was close, which puts into question the 49-46 scorecard submitted by judge Joe Soliz. Rogan didn’t hold back when he weighed in on Soliz’s scoring on the UFC 247 broadcast.
“I can’t argue about this enough,” Rogan said. “I can’t get angry enough. I’ve done it so many times. For anyone to think that was 4-1 Jon Jones, that person’s insane.
“They’re insane. Dominick Reyes put on a hell of a fight tonight. And to disrespect that performance by that kind of judging is insane.”
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This wasn’t the only time Rogan complained about the scoring at UFC 247. Earlier in the preliminary action, Rogan blasted the judging in the bantamweight bout between Jonathan Martinez and Andre Ewell, who won by split decision. In that fight, Soliz scored it 30-27 for the winner Ewell, much to the dismay of the MMA community.
So apparently, the two analysts aren’t happy with each other. Rogan doesn’t think Smith should be firing off hot takes about a sport he doesn’t understand. Smith, meanwhile, doesn’t think Rogan should be firing off hot takes about Smith’s job.
“You have your right, just like I have my right to respond, as I’m doing right now,” Smith said in the message directed at Rogan. “But any time you want to talk to me about this fight, or you want to talk to me about my credentials to discuss something in the world of sports, name the time and place, Joe Rogan, and I’ll show up. It’s not a problem. It’s not a problem at all.
“You don’t know me, so I’m not going to knock you for speaking out the way you spoke out without calling me. I don’t care about all that. I respect where you’re coming from. You’re just wrong on this particular one, and I’m telling you you’re wrong.”
Maybe Rogan and Smith should step into the octagon to settle their beef. After all, a video of Smith going through a boxing workout made rounds on social media. That would be quite the pay-per-view event.
“This guy should not be allowed to talk about fighting.”
Stephen A. Smith is ESPN’s biggest star and highest-paid talent, so it wasn’t particularly surprising when he made a guest appearance during the broadcast of UFC 246 on ESPN+ last weekend. Smith fired off a signature hot take after Conor McGregor demolished Donald Cerrone, saying he was “disgusted” by the main event, which lasted just 40 seconds.
During his appearance, Smith said that he felt Cerrone gave up after taking a few hits from McGregor.
“Here’s the deal: 15 seconds in, ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone was done. He got hit with those shoulders in the clinch, and he was done. It look like he gave up. It was just an atrocious performance on his part,” Smith said.
Cerrone suffered a broken nose and an orbital bone fracture in the fight. Veteran UFC commentator Joe Rogan was visibly bemused by Smith’s take on air, and many fans and fighters have since called out Smith for his comments.
In the latest episode of his podcast, Rogan argued that it’s a “bad look” for ESPN to be relying on Smith during UFC events, and said that the First Take host “should not be allowed to talk about fighting.”
(Warning: Video contains profanity.)
“I don’t know him as a human being. I’ve only met him a couple of times. He’s a nice guy, nice guy to me. We had a nice conversation. On air, we had a little weirdness because he was just saying ‘we didn’t learn anything about Conor!’ I’m like ‘the [expletive] you didn’t!’ He just destroyed Cowboy in 40 seconds. Like, you learned something. You learned he could perform under the bright lights in a giant pay-per-view after more than a year and a half out of the game. Yeah, you learned something, you just don’t know what you saw.
….. With fighting, you have to know it, or no one’s going to respect you. If you don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re talking about it in front of millions of people, man that’s a bad look for everybody. It’s a bad look for ESPN, it’s a bad look for him, it’s a bad look for the sport. It’s like… there’s other people that can do this.”
Rogan said that he doesn’t believe Smith’s general mode of analysis is appropriate for combat sports, where the stakes are much higher when compared to traditional sports.
“There’s a lot of currency in being a Stephen A. Smith, you know? He’s really entertaining. The [expletive]-talking that he does…. he’s a guy that’s fun to watch. He talks a lot of [expletive] and he gets real loud and everybody disagrees with him. Look, it’s made him a fantastic career. That’s why, and he carries that over to MMA. I think it’s a bad idea.”
Smith went viral again after UFC 246 when he released video of himself throwing punches, and was immediately roasted by the internet.
UFC legend Daniel Cormier defended Smith in an Instagram comment.
“I think it’s fine, he’s trying to better understand our sport. I mean hes a massive star who can talk from his perch and no one can touch him. Yet he chooses to try and learn the game so there is some weight to his opinion.”
Now that ESPN is the broadcast partner of the UFC, it means more ESPN analysts are getting in on the coverage, including Stephen A. Smith, who is paid well to yell about every sport in the world, apparently. He’s been there for some UFC fights and a lot of big boxing matches.
After UFC 246 we got to live in a world where Rogan and Stephen A. appeared on camera together in a segment in which they broke down the fights, and that pairing led to UFC fans having lots of jokes and thoughts:
Joe Rogan is wondering why the hell Stephen A Smith is there instead of max kellerman… he was laughing about Stephan A talking about ufc on his podcast like 2 months ago https://t.co/Gd4b0SmSp3
Lol espn gave Stephen A Smith @stephenasmith a raise to 10 million a year a few months ago and since then they have just been sticking him on every single show and event 😂 making him earn that money.. joe Rogan wanted to call him out so bad tonight for not knowing anything pic.twitter.com/n47nrNTZ7U
