Joe Rogan Is the New Mainstream Media

His success signals a profound shift, or several of them — a shift in what people want to talk about, how they want to hear it, and who they want to hear it from.

Does the man himself buy any of this? I called him to find out.

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“All the answers are: I don’t think about it. And P.S. I’m dumb,” he said as a blanket reply to all my questions. I laughed.

This is both an extremely Joe Rogan thing to say and one of his most effective weapons — a rip cord he can pull whenever his show veers into tricky territory, or when he wants to distance himself from some of his interview subjects, like Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. I’m just a comic, he’ll say. The joke’s on you if you take anything I say too seriously.

But the topic here is podcasting, an area where Rogan, like Howard Stern in radio, is the undisputed boss. He’s hosted 1,479 episodes, freewheeling conversations with everyone from Mike Tyson to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Members of Rogan Nation have tattooed his face, or that of his Golden Retriever, Marshall, (and I can’t decide which is weirder) onto their bodies.

He is not dumb.

If you want to understand why podcasting is killing, he says, you first need to appreciate the world-changing, brain-rewiring transformation in how we consume information.

Reading or watching the news is no longer immersive, as it was when you sat down with a bunch of papers or in front of a living room TV. Now it is a fragmented experience, usually done on a cellphone.

“The problem,” he told me, “is that the cellphone also has YouTube videos of the craziest things ever — babies landing on cats and animal attacks and naked people.”