Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's podcast interview with Joe Rogan has been viewed over 26 million times on YouTube in its first 24 hours.
It is the most viewed podcast appearance so far for either candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign, and among the highest viewed Joe Rogan Experience episodes in history.
Trump sat with Rogan for a full three-hour podcast episode, discussing topics ranging from UFOs, the alleged impact of wind turbines on the mental health of whales, to Trump's regrets in office, and his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud.
The Joe Rogan Experience is the most watched podcast in the world. It has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers. Although Spotify and Apple Podcasts do not release viewership data for individual episodes, the YouTube views suggest it is one of the biggest episodes in the show's history, and reached more viewers than other podcasts so far on the campaign.
According to Rogan fan website JRE Library, across the podcast's 15-year, more than 2,000-episode-long history, the 10 most watched episodes were between 27 million times and 68 million times on YouTube, so the Trump interview falls just outside that range in its first 24 hours.
The most viewed episode ever was his September 2018 interview with tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump in his 2024 presidential bid. In the show, which has been viewed more than 68 million times, the Tesla owner famously smoked marijuana and drank whiskey with the host.
Rogan's podcast was exclusively available on Spotify from 2020 until earlier this year. The episodes from that time have since been reuploaded to YouTube, but do not have full viewership data from the time they were released due to being uploaded to the site retrospectively.
The most recent Rogan episode to have as many YouTube views as the Trump interview was in May 2020 when he spoke with radio host Alex Jones and comedian Tim Dillon, which has been viewed almost 28 million times.
Jones is a prominent conspiracy theorist who was ordered to pay almost $1 billion to the families of Sandy Hook victims after he spent years defaming them by saying their children had not been murdered, but were instead "crisis actors."
Did Joe Rogan Endorse Donald Trump?
Rogan did not endorse Trump during the interview. Rogan has previously endorsed Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has since suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
In the podcast, Trump praised Rogan, calling him "a fascinating guy," while the host praised the candidate's sense of humor. "One of the beautiful things about you is that you freeball," Rogan said, telling the former president that he thought his impression mocking President Joe Biden was "funny stuff."
Rogan said that he would be interested in doing an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, but her campaign has since confirmed that she will not join him on the show before Election Day.
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About the writer
Flynn Nicholls is a Newsweek reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics and society. Originally ... Read more