Joe Rogan’s Trump Episode Nets 28 Million Views on YouTube

(Left) Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 25, 2024. (Right) Joe Rogan at a UFC event in Boston on Aug. 18, 2023. AP Photo

Former President Donald Trump’s interview with podcast host Joe Rogan racked up about 28 million views on YouTube in just over a day, becoming the most-viewed podcast appearance for either Trump or his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris.

By Sunday afternoon, the episode had 28.3 million views on YouTube alone. Spotify, where Rogan hosts his podcast primarily, does not release viewership data for individual episodes.

But the YouTube figures suggest that Trump’s interview may be one of the most significantly watched episodes in Rogan’s show’s history. Fan website JRE Library found that the top 10 most-watched episodes have between 27 million and 69 million views, with Elon Musk’s episode being the most-watched.

Trump and Harris have been courting voters with appearances on podcasts, in addition to more traditional rallies and interviews with journalists.

A poll by YouGov last year found that 81 percent of Rogan’s listeners are male and 56 percent are under 35 years old, a demographic that tends to support Trump over Harris in swing states.

Harris’s campaign has said that she will not appear on Rogan’s podcast. Harris’s team had been in touch with Rogan’s program about a possible appearance, but scheduling did not line up, a spokesperson said.

“We talked with Rogan and his team about the podcast. Unfortunately it isn’t going to work out right now because of the scheduling of this ... period of the campaign,” spokesperson Ian Sams said on MSNBC last week.

Harris appeared on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast earlier in October, which garnered about 703,000 views in three weeks.

Rogan Explains Why

At the start of the podcast episode with Trump, Rogan explained why he wanted the former president to appear on the program now—with just over a week to go before the Nov. 5 election.

Rogan said, “Once they shot you I was like, ‘He’s gotta come in here,'” stressing that it was “all about timing” and that the “timing is perfect.”

Later in the interview, Rogan said that he hoped Harris would appear on his show. “I would talk to her like a human being and try to have a conversation with her,” he said.

“I think we’d have a fine conversation. I think I’d be able to talk to her. I wouldn’t try to interview her. I’d just try to have a conversation with her and hopefully get to know her as a human being. That was my goal. Having her on, trying to get her to express herself,” Rogan said.

Final Stretch

On Sunday, Trump will headline a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, a high-profile event in a state that last backed a Republican president in 1984.

The same day, Harris has multiple events scheduled in Philadelphia, the largest city and a Democratic stronghold in must-win Pennsylvania, with stops planned in a black barbershop and a Puerto Rican restaurant to encourage people to vote.

Speaking at the Church of Christian Compassion on Sunday morning, Harris didn’t mention Trump by name. “In this moment we do face a real question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” she said.

Polls show the rival candidates are neck-and-neck in the battleground states that will decide the next president with just over a week until Election Day. More than 41 million votes have already been cast, according to data provided by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Reuters contributed to this report.