Joe Rogan's The Joe Rogan Experience isn’t number one anymore on the YouTube podcast charts. The new man at the top is Tony Hinchcliffe, the controversial comedian who went viral after calling Puerto Rico a "floating pile of garbage."
Hinchcliffe is the host of Kill Tony, a comedy podcast that has blown up since it began in 2013. The live podcast and comedy show features aspiring stand-up comedians with just one minute to perform a set. Their names are pulled at random from a bucket, and after their set, they're more likely than not roasted by Hinchcliffe and a rotating panel of guest comedians.
The UFC commentator has been one of the guest comedians on several occasions, and they are good friends, so the former Fear Factor host probably isn't feeling too sad that he got dethroned by him.
Rogan has been sitting pretty at #1 across Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. In 2020, he signed a deal that was exclusively with Spotify worth more than $200 million over 3.5 years, but in 2024, he signed a new multi-year partnership deal that made it available on other platforms.
The timing comes amid Rogan's critiques of Donald Trump, calling out the administration’s deportation policies, and more. He also recently had Bernie Sanders on as a guest.
Tony Hinchcliffe's controversy
Hinchcliffe angered a lot of Latinos in October 2024 during the presidential elections when he was a speaker at a Trump rally hosted in Madison Square Garden, where he made comments about Latin immigrants and Puerto Ricans. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said.
Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, and Bad Bunny were among the celebrities who responded to his statements. Some would say it lit a match under Bad Bunny, who released an eight-minute video celebrating the resilience and history of his native island.
Hinchcliffe doubled down, saying he "apologizes to absolutely nobody." “I love Puerto Ricans, they’re very smart people. They’re smart, they’re street smart, and they’re smart enough to know when they’re being used as political fodder,” he explained.