Episode 998: Owen Benjamin

TL;DR: Joe Rogan platformed comedian Owen Benjamin for a conversation that included unscientific claims about transgender children and hormone therapy — an appearance that helped accelerate Benjamin’s pipeline from working comic into open antisemitism, Holocaust denial, flat-earth conspiracism, and bans from every major platform. Spotify later quietly removed this episode from its catalog.

This August 2017 episode features Owen Benjamin, a comedian then in the middle of his transformation from mainstream stand-up into far-right conspiracist. The conversation veered into the medical care of transgender youth — a topic neither host nor guest was qualified to discuss — and helped seed talking points that Benjamin would build a hate-fueled second career around.

Who Is Owen Benjamin?

Owen Benjamin (real name Owen Benjamin Smith) is a comedian who, in the years following this appearance, was banned from:

YouTube (December 2019) — for hate speech violations
Twitter — for repeated policy violations
Instagram and Facebook (December 2019) — for antisemitic content
His talent agency, which dropped him as a client

The Anti-Defamation League maintains a profile on Benjamin documenting his promotion of:

Holocaust denial
Antisemitic conspiracy theories (“the Jews” controlling media, finance, etc.)
White nationalist talking points
Flat-earth beliefs (he spoke at the 2019 Flat Earth International Conference)
Denial that dinosaurs ever existed
The claim that transgender rights are a “eugenics program”

Sources: ADL — Owen Benjamin: What You Need to Know, Wikipedia — Owen Benjamin, Media Matters

The Core Problem: Two Non-Experts Discussing Pediatric Medicine

The most damaging segment of the episode is the discussion of transgender children, puberty blockers, and hormone therapy.

Claim: Parents allowing transgender children to access medical transition care are abusing them.

Neither Rogan nor Benjamin is a pediatrician, endocrinologist, adolescent psychiatrist, or trans healthcare specialist. Yet the segment is delivered with the confident tone of medical authority.

What the evidence actually says

American Academy of Pediatrics (2018, reaffirmed): Gender-affirming care for transgender youth is supported by major medical organizations. AAP Policy Statement
Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline (2017): Puberty suppression with GnRH analogues is reversible and is used to give adolescents and families time to make decisions. Guideline
American Medical Association: Opposes legislation restricting medically necessary gender-affirming care for minors. AMA Statement
WPATH Standards of Care (Version 8): Adolescent care involves multi-disciplinary assessment over time, not on-demand hormone prescriptions as the episode implies. WPATH SOC8

The framing in the episode — that children are being casually pumped full of hormones — is not what the medical literature or clinical practice describes.

Joe Rogan’s Role

This is a textbook example of the Rogan “just asking questions” platforming pattern.

No pushback. Rogan does not challenge Benjamin’s framing of pediatric trans healthcare even though the claims are medically inaccurate.
Amplification. Rogan adds his own speculation about parents and hormones, lending the segment the air of two reasonable men puzzling out a medical issue rather than two comedians speculating about a field neither understands.
No experts invited. Rogan has had access to endocrinologists, pediatricians, and trans healthcare clinicians. This episode platforms only the take of an increasingly radicalized comedian.
Long-term consequences. Benjamin used appearances like this to build the audience he later monetized via hate content after being deplatformed. Rogan’s reach was a meaningful boost.

Real-World Harm

The “trans kids are being abused by hormones” framing — which this episode helped popularize for a mass audience in 2017 — has been used to justify:

State-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors. As of 2024, more than 20 U.S. states have enacted such laws despite opposition from every major medical association. Human Rights Campaign tracker
Increased mental health harm. A 2022 JAMA Network Open study found that access to gender-affirming care is associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality among trans youth. Tordoff et al., JAMA Network Open, 2022
Harassment of clinicians and families. Children’s hospitals offering gender-affirming care have received bomb threats and sustained harassment campaigns. NBC News reporting

The “I’m just a comedian” defense doesn’t undo the damage of normalizing medically unsupported claims to a multi-million-listener audience.

Spotify Quietly Removed This Episode

When Spotify acquired exclusive rights to the JRE catalog in 2020, episode 998 was among the 40+ episodes the platform removed. Owen Benjamin’s escalating public antisemitism and Holocaust denial made the episode indefensible to keep up.

Rogan himself has never publicly addressed the platforming of Benjamin or revisited the trans-healthcare claims made on this episode.

Source: Digital Music News — Spotify Has Removed 40 Joe Rogan Episodes, JRE Library — Missing Spotify Episodes

Why This Episode Matters

It is an early, clear example of Rogan’s pattern of platforming guests on the cusp of radicalization without the friction of expert pushback.
It contributed to mainstreaming anti-trans medical disinformation years before that became a dominant political project.
It platformed a guest whose later trajectory — open antisemitism, Holocaust denial, flat-earth conspiracism — was already legible in 2017 if anyone in the room had been pushing back.

Sources: ADL profile of Owen Benjamin, JTA — How Owen Benjamin became an alt-right darling, Right Wing Watch profile