Jay Leno just handed over late-night royalty to an unlikely successor—and it's not another TV host.
In a candid chat with Deadline, the man who inherited Johnny Carson's throne at The Tonight Show declared that Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson. Leno wasn't talking about edgelord politics—he was talking about the seismic shift in how we actually watch television.
"Joe talks to everybody about everything," Leno said. "There's no FCC to step in and say what you can or can't say, so you really do get an unfiltered idea of what everybody thinks."
Podcasts have replaced traditional late-night talk shows. For decades, "appointment television" meant tuning into NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET. Now nobody's tethered to a schedule—they've got the whole internet at their fingertips.
Leno's observation goes deeper. He revealed that YouTube has become the world's most popular TV channel, and young people don't even know what CBS, NBC, or ABC are. "They know Channel 682 or whatever," he explained. "They just go to YouTube. Which is amazing."
The timing hits hard, especially with CBS recently canceling The Late Show—a reminder that network late-night is in free fall. While the late-night landscape continues to shrink, the podcasting world keeps expanding, with Rogan's The Joe Rogan Experience reaching millions without a single commercial break or FCC censorship.
If you'd told someone a decade ago that YouTube would become the world's most popular channel, they'd have thought you were insane. Now look.
