If only the rest of us could do so much with so little.
A podcast doesn't stay relevant with a large and loyal audience unless it's actually good. To pretend like JRE is a continued success purely because he was on TV before 1) ignores the countless podcasts started by people far less famous than Rogan was when he started which have failed to take off and 2) sounds like a cynical, resentful thing you tell yourself feel better along the lines of "well, if I came from where Rogan did, I'd be just as successful."
Whatever you want to say about the reasons anyone tuned in to begin with, it's transparently unfair (and betrays your own "issues") to not offer a balanced perspective which includes the need to acknowledge the obvious which is that Rogan's success just might be _also_ due to the fact that he is a good interviewer, that he has good guests on his show, that he's able to spark interesting conversations, etc.
The idea that his TV stint and MMA fame makes a listenership of 12M an automatic thing is just laughable.
You appear to have missed that context and have launched into a passionate defense of his talent, behavior and personality. As a bonus you've dipped into the ad hominem well at least twice.
If you think it's impressive that somebody very famous can make a podcast with only three employees, ok. Go ahead and be impressed.
Don't like Rogan? Don't listen to him and leave it at that.
2. Some people come to his defense.
3. "Why is there so much effort to defend this person?!"
He's not that different to a top-tier Youtuber or influencer of which there are hundreds who have managed to build successful content businesses with very small staff.
They are all just standing on the shoulders of the platforms and content creation tools which allows them to affordably produce and distribute high quality content to billions. Something which has never previously been possible.
According to [1], JRE launched in late 2009. According to [2], podcasts took off spectacularly in 2004 and by 2005, every man and his dog had a podcast (paraphrasing, obvs.) Whilst he has been doing it a long time, he was relatively late to the party.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Timeline
It’s the highest listened to podcast for many years now. You don’t find that impressive?
I’m not a Howard Stern fan, but I’m impressed by the reach of his satellite show.
Do you not find podcasts impressing at all? Reaching millions of people for hours each week is very rare.
Nobody watches top tier YouTubers, rather than others YouTubers, because of the platform. The platform is absolutely saturated with others, making identical content. It's the same with podcasts. The same guests are almost always making rounds to all the other podcasts, yet people prefer Joe Rogan over all the other podcasts the guests are on. Why?
The top tier people have some mix of personality traits, physical traits, work ethics, or talents that separate them from everyone else. That ability to be so massively separated is what should be considered "impressive", since it's provably not trivial or common.
I’m always impressed by someone getting to number one, on their own merit, because I know the reasons are extensive rather than simple. Well, except for something like OnlyFans.
Unfortunately in today's environment, many people (most of the ones who don't like Rogan) think it is incumbent on everyone to be a wokescold. They think that having a conversation with someone somehow grants them legitimacy or "normalizes" their views, while intelligent people with coherent, well-thought out principles understand that legitimacy is not something that is granted through proxy.
The team behind the team started small and have managed to stay small despite the massive audience. Very cool indeed.
He was one of the fist big podcasts and livestreamers before others started doing the same. Most of his initial (and repeat) guests are simply friends from these various industries.
Joe identifies as a man.
I use singular they all the time, especially online where people are accounts and not people.
They don’t have many employees. They don’t take much time to produce shows. They don’t have countless assistants to schedule logistics. They keep their operating costs modest. And yet their shows reach a mass audience.
I respect how a small team has kept onto their autonomy and continues to grow and be in the headlines constantly depending on what was discussed. They just push content into the world and the world reacts to it.