Every single minute, someone in the world decides to start a podcast. Okay, I just made up that fact. But as of March 2019, there were 700,000 podcasts available for listeners to choose from. That’s a stat for which I can actually cite a source to validate. Given the recent rise in the podcast market, the numbers will only continue to proliferate. However, from among this infinite sea of content for you to tune into on your commutes, the Joe Rogan Experience reigns supreme. 

Rogan has accumulated 7.38 million subscribers on YouTube, becoming the top-earning podcaster with a yearly salary of $30 million. In order to preserve these numbers, he’s gotta protect his content. During his recent conversation with comedian Jim Norton, Rogan revealed that he no longer livestreams his podcasts because other channels would steal his content and profit off it. “There were companies that were taking clips as we were live and uploading them immediately and building these huge channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” he explains at the beginning of the episode. “You could use that for anything and they were selling things. They had links to stuff. They’re basically building a business off of your clips. You can’t let that happen because you also don’t know what they’re gonna turn that channel into.”

Aside from the theft issues, Rogan avoids livestreaming because he needs to revise his episodes to ensure he doesn’t infringe upon any of YouTube’s guidelines. “YouTube is still a little bit of a wild west situation,” he continues. “Then there were are also copyright issues – like you get three copyright flags in a row and they take your whole channel down. And we had gotten a bunch of them. We’ve gotten them for clips that we show, we’ve gotten them for pictures… you gotta figure out what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do.”

In this episode with Norton, Rogan also addressed the recent controversy over Ari Shaffir’s jokes about Kobe Bryant’s death. 

Joe Rogan hosts one of the most successful podcasts on the market, inviting a list of insightful and entertaining guests to his table to speak on some of the most pressing issues in pop culture, sports, and more. The comedian has a great handle on what people want to hear, integrating hot topics into his conversations and offering thought-provoking takes on the situation. The world of comedy was shook last week when Ari Shaffir made a tasteless “joke” about Kobe Bryant’s death, celebrating his passing in a video that he has since apologized for. It was all part of Shaffir’s regular shtick. The comedian often tears apart celebrities who have recently passed away but, this time, he crossed a line. Joe Rogan and his guest Jim Norton spoke about Shaffir, who is Rogan’s friend, and discussed the comments that were made on the new episode of JRE. 

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Beginning their talk about Ari Shaffir’s Kobe Bryant comments, Joe Rogan says that he needs to find a word better than “dumb” to describe the comedian’s actions. “It was so stupid, but it’s also what you said earlier, that you gotta keep ramping it up. When you do outrageous things to get people to be like “oh, look at Jimmy, he’s crazy,” you get caught in a trap and you keep doing it more and more outrageous,” said Joe. “With Ari, he’s always done this thing where, when people die, he would make the meanest comment […] but he just did it for shock value. You gotta keep upping that every time.”

Admitting that he doesn’t know how Shaffir will bounce back from this misstep, Rogan noted that he thinks it’s kind of a good thing this happened to him. He explains, “He needed to know that there are consequences for just saying ridiculous shit that you’re not supposed to say when people die.”

Joe Rogan even admitted that he feels the slightest bit responsible for Ari’s actions, noting that he convinced him to get an iPhone to stay connected to his fans on social media, now realizing that Shaffir should have stuck to a flip phone or a social media manager.

Watch their discussion below, beginning at the 42-minute mark.