Jay Leno: Joe Rogan Is 21st Century’s Johnny Carson

Jay Leno thinks he’s spotted the new Johnny Carson—and he’s not on broadcast TV. In a wide-ranging interview with Deadline, the former Tonight Show host argues that podcasts, not traditional late-night shows, now own the talk space:

• “Joe Rogan is the new Johnny Carson,” he says. “Yeah, Joe talks to everybody about everything. There’s no FCC to step in and say what you 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.”

In another part of the interview, Leno blames “too many commercials” as the primary factor in the decline of late-night shows. The resulting chopped-up programs have lost their conversational feel. “Why watch that,” he asks, when viewers can pull up an hour-long, unedited chat with a star online at any time? Read the full interview, in which Leno pushes back on criticism from HBO’s John Oliver and insists he never said that current hosts are “doing it wrong.”