We’re a long way from 2015.
Nine years ago, Barack Obama rolled up to a soundproofed garage outside the comedian Marc Maron’s California home, and entered podcasting lore. Not only the first black president, the first president on a podcast.
Fast forward to 2024, and the first three-President podcast. By March, when Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden all turned up on Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s mega-bucks big-network vehicle, SmartLess, something had shifted.
It’s been a long short ride, with many false starts, but just as 2008 was indisputably ‘the first social media election’, 2024 is definitely the first longform podcast election.
What began as a trickle is ending in a blitz. Trump’s turn on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend in August has hit 13 million views. His episode of Lex Fridman is presently sitting on 5 million, and his uproarious turn on comedian Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant is also pegging around 5 million.
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