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.
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.