"Joe talks to everybody about everything," Leno says

In the last decade or so, network TV channels have reduced their late-night talk-show lineups, most recently with CBS canceling The Late Show. Now Jay Leno, who inherited The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson, has a theory about why that’s happened and the current state of chat-show discourse. “I mean, podcasts really are the new talk show,” he recently told Deadline. “Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson.”

Leno’s intention with the comment has less to do with Rogan’s edgelord opinions (in fact, he’s said he wished comedy wasn’t so politically polarized), though, and more to do with people’s shifting habits. For decades, people would tune into NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET to watch The Tonight Show, which Leno describes in the interview as “appointment television,” an idea he now finds “ridiculous” since people can call up anything they want to watch now, which prompted him to think of Rogan, who enjoys benefits he never did.

“Yeah, Joe talks to everybody about everything,” Leno said. “There’s no FCC to step in and say what you [can] say and can’t say, so you really do get an unfiltered idea of what everybody thinks. So yeah, I mean, to me, that’s what’s also changed late-night.”

Beyond his comments specifically about Rogan, Leno speculated that YouTube has become the world’s most popular TV channel. “I talk to young people — they don’t know CBS, NBC or ABC, Channel Four; they know Channel 682 or whatever,” he said. “They just go to YouTube. Which is amazing. If you had predicted YouTube would be the most popular channel in the world 10 years ago, I think people would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’ But it is now.”

And on that note, Leno, who recently hosted former President Joe Biden on his show, said he is also now enjoying the benefits of having a show on YouTube. To the MAGA ardent who say they’ll boycott Leno now, he shrugged. “It’s free on YouTube,” he said. “I don’t really care if you watch it or not, you know? But there’ll be all these people that you know will go on that Biden’s a crook, blah blah, That I just had his point of view on Trump, it wasn’t the whole gamut. Whatever. It’s just us driving around. I don’t really worry about it.”

Leno hosted The Tonight Show from 1992 to 2009 and again from 2010 to 2014. Jay Leno’s Garage now resides on YouTube.