Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?

Or is he something else entirely?

- James Parker

Someone is talking to you. Or is he talking to himself ? A deep, spacey voice with pondering pauses and a resinous Louisiana accent. “There’s this trick,” the voice says. “That’s the devil out there … That’s Satan, baby. That’s Lucifer, bruh. That’s Lucifer, that darkness sniffer.” Your whole life, it goes on; “you think, Oh, I’ll, I’ll just keep judging, keeping people at a distance … But then I get to the end of my life and I’ll realize, You know what? I didn’t win anything by doing that. That was a trick. And the only thing I won was being alone.”

Theo Von is not a preacher. Not officially. Officially, he’s a comedian with a podcast. But unofficially, he’ll take you right there, into that biblical light, into the hell chasm and the soul in its solitude and the benevolent rays of the divine. “The Lord lurks where the devil jerks,” Von says. And if he could get the devil onto his podcast—if he could land a two-hour download with Lucifer, that darkness sniffer, that snorter of lines of uncut night—he probably would.

Von’s This Past Weekend is huge. It’s currently the eighth-most-popular podcast in America, sandwiched between This American Life and The Ben Shapiro Show. No. 1 is of course The Joe Rogan Experience, where the bros burble for hours on end. Where cigars are smoked and theories are floated. Von has been on Rogan’s show multiple times, and while This