Joe Rogan says he gave Vice President Kamala Harris an “open opportunity” to sit down with him anytime in his Texas podcast studio — insisting, “I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up.”
The mega-popular podcaster on Wednesday defended his decision to reject a Harris interview based on the ground rules that the Democratic presidential candidate tried to impose — including limiting the time and potentially having her handlers in the room.
“She had an opportunity to come,” Rogan said when the saga came up during the latest episode of his “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
“You could look at this and you can say, ‘Oh, you’re being a diva,’ but she had an opportunity to come here when she was in Texas — and I literally gave them an open invitation.”
“I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10. I go, I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m. I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull,” he added.
Rogan’s decision to snub Harris’ interview proposal — which included him traveling to her and for the chat to last only an hour — came after former President Donald Trump’s three-hour appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” exploded online last week.
The podcaster also subsequently interviewed Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in his Austin studio on Wednesday, though it wasn’t immediately clear when that episode would air.
Asked about the saga during his Wednesday podcast chat with Konstantin Kisin, Rogan said he’d been negotiating with Harris’ team after it initially reached out.
“She actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on. So their camp reached out to me. So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down,” Rogan said.
“They wanted to travel and see the thing is … if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure,” he continued.
“My whole goal with her and with him is just talk. Just sit and have a conversation like a human being. You find out things about people. You get a sense of them, at least, a real sense. That was it. I don’t give a f–k what we talk about. I really don’t. I just want to talk to you. Who the f–k are you?”
Rogan’s highly anticipated interview with Trump has racked up well over 41 million views on YouTube after it aired last Friday.
In addition to going wildly viral, the former commander-in-chief’s podcast episode made headlines after fans started accusing YouTube of trying to censor the clip when it failed to come up using basic search terms.
“For some searches on Monday the original 3-hour interview didn’t appear prominently. Short excerpts uploaded by the Joe Rogan channel appeared, but we know it was frustrating for users looking to find the full video,” YouTube said in a statement in a post on X.
“We’ve worked to resolve this and viewers will begin seeing the full podcast in more YouTube search results soon.”
