Once I noticed the news that the king of all podcasting, Joe Rogan, had inked a take care of Spotify for his extensively fashionable present I texted to congratulate him on getting loopy wealthy. How wealthy?

“Weirdly richer,” he replied. “Prefer it doesn’t register. Appears pretend.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal may quantity to greater than $100 million, a quantity that Rogan doesn’t wish to talk about. “It feels gross,” he advised me Thursday night time. “Particularly proper now, when individuals can’t work.”

Information of Tuesday’s deal, which gave Spotify unique rights to “The Joe Rogan Expertise,” despatched the corporate’s inventory hovering: It added $1.7 billion to its market cap in 23 minutes. The musician and critic Ted Gioia pointed out on Twitter that “a musician would wish to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights.”

OK, so it’s some huge cash. However Spotify reportedly paid almost double for Invoice Simmons’s podcasting firm, the Ringer, earlier this yr. Cash just isn’t the one cause this deal issues.

Rogan is a good friend of mine, and I’ve been on his present. However I nonetheless discover the extent of his reputation mind-boggling. Think about if I had advised you, a dozen years in the past, that the previous host of “The Worry Issue,” an MMA shade commentator who loves cool vehicles and taking pictures weapons and figuring out, a man with a uncooked interview present that includes comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was extra influential than the complete slate of hosts on CNN.

You’d suppose I used to be nuts. But it surely’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and carrying loafers at hedge funds.

Rogan’s deal comes whereas the mainstream press founders; the pandemic has lower the legs out from underneath many publications. Each day it appears one other blue verify mark with a level from the suitable school hangs up her pixelated-shingle, whereas the remainder of us avert our eyes, hoping we gained’t be subsequent.

The timing of Rogan’s rise and the Previous Guard’s disintegration just isn’t coincidental. His success was made potential, a minimum of partly, by legacy media’s blind spots.

Whereas GQ places Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the duvet of its “new masculinity” concern (launched by the editor explaining that the lads’s journal “isn’t actually making an attempt to be completely for or about males in any respect”), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk. Males are hungry. He’s serving steak, uncommon. Condé Nast, GQ’s writer, has laid off some 100 employees because the pandemic started. Meantime, “The Joe Rogan Expertise” has 190 million downloads a month.

His success indicators a profound shift, or a number of of them — a shift in what individuals wish to discuss, how they wish to hear it, and who they wish to hear it from.

Does the person himself purchase any of this? I known as him to search out out.

***

“All of the solutions are: I don’t give it some thought. And P.S. I’m dumb,” he stated as a blanket reply to all my questions. I laughed.

That is each a particularly Joe Rogan factor to say and one among his handiest weapons — a rip twine he can pull each time his present veers into difficult territory, or when he needs to distance himself from a few of his interview topics, like Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. I’m only a comedian, he’ll say. The joke’s on you in the event you take something I say too severely.

However the matter right here is podcasting, an space the place Rogan, like Howard Stern in radio, is the undisputed boss. He’s hosted 1,479 episodes, freewheeling conversations with everybody 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 determine which is weirder) onto their our bodies.

He isn’t dumb.

If you wish to perceive why podcasting is killing, he says, you first want to understand the world-changing, brain-rewiring transformation in how we devour data.

Studying or watching the information is now not immersive, because it was whenever you sat down with a bunch of papers or in entrance of a front room TV. Now it’s a fragmented expertise, normally carried out on a cellphone.

“The issue,” he advised me, “is that the cellphone additionally has YouTube movies of the craziest issues ever — infants touchdown on cats and animal assaults and bare individuals.”

Why would you learn a 2,000-word story in regards to the collapse of well being care in Venezuela when you’ll be able to zone out with some TikToks?

“No person ever thought: We have to gear our leisure, our media, to individuals who prepare dinner, who jog, who hike, individuals who drive. Even books on tape can require an excessive amount of pondering.” However a podcast, he stated, “doesn’t require that a lot pondering in any respect. You get captivated by the dialog. One of many issues about this medium basically is that it’s very easy to take heed to whilst you do different stuff.”

I do. Whereas I prepare dinner dinner I’m doubtless listening to Rogan, Sam Harris, “The Portal” or “Red Scare.” I’m going for morning walks and take heed to “The Daily.” You possibly can’t prepare dinner or stroll whereas studying.

Journalism is one factor that podcasters are competing with: Why learn a profile of Elon Musk with staid quotes when you’ll be able to take heed to him get high and riff for two hours in Rogan’s studio? Tv is one other.

“I’d think about on a present like Seth Meyers there’s a bunch of different opinions concerned. Proper or fallacious, in podcasting you’re getting that very pure, particular person perspective,” Rogan stated. “On my present, it’s my opinion and the visitor’s opinion. That’s it. On community, it’s a focus-group collective concept of what individuals are going to love or not like. You don’t get something wild. You don’t get something that can get you fired.”

“Podcasting is all freeballing,” he added. “It’s the other of polished. And due to that, it resonates.”

Whenever you’re on MSNBC for a five-minute hit, you’ll be able to management your message. When you find yourself sucked right into a dialog with Rogan, it could actually go sideways, quick. And also you’re within the scorching seat for generally three hours. As a visitor, no present is extra intimidating. However as a listener, it’s why I tune in.

That unpredictability, that willingness to take dangers with matters, tone and company, is among the causes podcasting is consuming our lunch. The status press has grow to be too delicate, anxious about backlash on Twitter and thus shying away from an ever-increasing variety of perceived third rails.

“There are a variety of holes which were left by mainstream media,” Rogan stated.

Consider Tara Reade. Anybody with eyes may see that her accusation in opposition to Joe Biden was treated differently by the press than the accusations in opposition to Brett Kavanaugh. Reade’s declare was largely ignored for greater than two weeks. Julie Swetnick’s accusation of gang rape was printed the day it was made.

You possibly can depend on Rogan to speak about that double commonplace. Certainly, you’ll be able to depend on Rogan to speak about absolutely anything in any respect.

Take the minefield of gender identification. When he talks in regards to the delicate matter — one which has grow to be almost untouchable contained in the institutional world — there may be not one of the throat-clearing I’ve grow to be used to.

“There is no such thing as a balanced perspective to say: Be free! Change your pronouns, change your identify, be whoever you need,” Rogan stated. “On the Fox Information facet they wish to say ‘That is left-wing lunacy and everybody’s shedding their thoughts.’”

On the similar time, on the left, “there’s an aggressive, progressive doctrine that must be adopted, and adopted with full compliance and no room for debate,” he stated. “In terms of competitors, particularly fight sports activities, with transwomen preventing organic ladies, individuals are so progressive they let that slide, to the purpose that organic ladies are getting pushed over.”

“No person needs to the touch it as a result of no one needs the blowback.”

Why is he prepared to? Particularly when he is aware of {that a} dangerous joke or an ill-advised remark can generate per week’s price of dangerous press?

“I’m interested by issues that make me scared, that make me nervous,” he stated.

After all another excuse is that this form of factor is precisely what makes him fashionable together with his viewers.

However there may be additionally a really sensible cause Rogan can say no matter he thinks: He’s a person and never a company. Eric Weinstein, one other podcaster and a good friend of Rogan, advised me, “It’s the identical cause {that a} contractor can put on a MAGA hat on a job and an worker inside Fb headquarters can not: There is no such thing as a HR division at ‘The Joe Rogan Expertise’.”

“When you might have one thing that may’t get canceled, you may be free,” stated Rogan.

The flexibility to be freed from censorship is probably the factor Rogan prizes most — and he’s very involved about censorship, particularly contained in the tech corporations that management essentially the most highly effective types of mass communication the world has ever seen.

He factors to YouTube’s decision final month to take down a video of Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, two medical doctors in Bakersfield, Calif., who the corporate accused of spreading misinformation. “The medical doctors in Bakersfield had been speaking about statistics, however their video stored getting taken down. Why?”

YouTube stated that the video violated its insurance policies by disputing public well being steerage. The American School of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Drugs stated the medical doctors’ claims had been “reckless and untested” and “inconsistent with present science and epidemiology.”

YouTube is a personal firm and thus not certain by the First Modification; legally, it could actually determine what it needs to placed on its website and what it doesn’t. Rogan will get that. His present, till now, has streamed on the platform. He nonetheless thinks it’s fallacious.

“What Twitter is and what YouTube is are approach greater than a social media firm. There’s a actual good argument that they need to be like public utilities,” he stated.

“What has made society higher right now than it was tons of of years in the past is not only our prosperity. It’s the evolution of concepts. Something that wishes to restrict dialogue is harmful to the evolution of concepts.”

I don’t know what to consider the Erickson video, however I are inclined to assist preserving the Overton window as broad as potential. And I’m allergic to the faddish concept of mental contamination — the notion you can one way or the other get skunk-sprayed by speaking to a different individual, even a reprehensible one. If I believed that, I’d be within the fallacious career.

But I’m deeply uncomfortable once I see Rogan laughing with Jones. I feel that’s due to the present’s vibe: Rogan is laddish and beneficiant with everybody he sits throughout from — and their proximity to him provides them his imprimatur, particularly within the eyes of Rogan’s fiercely loyal followers.

Proudly owning simply how influential he’s is one thing that Joe Rogan doesn’t wish to do. He says he doesn’t wish to lose his bearings, and makes a bunch of self-deprecating jokes.

However maybe the very best inform of Rogan’ affect is what occurred once I requested him, offhandedly, a couple of months again, who he was going to vote for within the Democratic main. He stated “in all probability” Bernie. “Him as a human being, once I was hanging out with him, I consider in him. I like him — I like him so much,” he stated. Inside 48 hours, the Sanders marketing campaign had cut that clip into an advert.

He thought that was loopy: “I gave essentially the most lukewarm endorsement of Bernie Sanders ever. After which they took it and ran with it.” Instantly the press dove deep into his again catalog, grabbing bits from his comedy set that includes jokes about strap-ons and quoting them as in the event that they had been severe quotes. I ended counting the variety of op-eds and tweets from Bernie voters beseeching the marketing campaign to show his assist away.

It was a second that confirmed that if he wished to, Rogan may transfer elections. However politics are usually not his bag.

“I feel there’s a lot manipulation and a lot bullshit relating to politics, I’m not interested by it,” he stated. He stated he turned down requests from Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden to return on the present. (Although he interviewed Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders.)

However whether or not he needs to or not, Rogan doesn’t have to play politics to affect it. His complete ethos — curious; not notably ideological; biased towards issues that work; baffled by the state of each events — is the place so many People are proper now. And that’s his energy. He’s a mirror, when so many publications are damaged glass, able to reflecting solely a shard.

The appropriate has at all times insisted that the elite left controls the tradition. However Rogan’s reputation reveals that maybe that’s now not true.

The actual query for Rogan Nation is whether or not their man might be modified by a Spotify contract.

“Why would I promote out now? You promote out to get what you need.”