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. (Schulz said to Trump: ‘Barron is 18. He’s handsome, he’s tall, he’s rich. He’s about to be unleashed on New York… Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v Wade right now?’)
For her part, the former submarine candidate Kamala has put in a campaign stop on the Zoomer-tasteful wood-’n’-white set of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. Her VP, Tim Walz, recorded with the SmartLess boys, while JD Vance entered the belly of the beast in a genteel battle of manners on The New York Times’ The Interview.
More important and much-whispered, both are apparently ‘in talks’ with podcasting’s silverback gorilla Joe Rogan, for a turn on his Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan’s most popular episode, with Elon Musk, has notched up 34 million hits just on YouTube. Throw in the audio-only version and you can comfortably double those numbers.
Podcasting is where the people are, but more importantly to campaign directors, it is where the market segments are. In a fractured media environment, audiences have begun to curate their own content archipelagos, unconnected to each other, or to the mainstream ‘messaging’ that used to fill up the grid. Cable news, once the mainstay of the ’24-hour media cycle’, is increasingly the preserve of the olds: the average Fox viewer is 65 years old. CNN will only allow you to talk to Blue State Boomers.
Who will get you in front of slightly neurotic Zoomer women? That’ll be Call Her Daddy. Black men over 30? Try the basketball nostalgia super-pod All The Smoke – which hosted Kamala. Politically-incorrect Zoomer men? Get on Schwarz. Car mechanics and sales guys? Take your brow down a notch and head to Theo Von. It is no coincidence that Kamala filled most of her Alex Cooper slot hammering abortion – it’s precisely where she polls well, and the show talks to precisely the abortion-motivated urban-progressive demographic she will need to turn out on 5 November.
For a long time, the media grid-makers seemed sniffy about the pod world. For as long, they were simply clueless. Many false starts. Does anyone remember Hillary Clinton having her own pod in 2016? Precisely. That cycle was dominated by pundit shows, a style more in keeping with the era, where much podcasting still tried to track traditional media in its approach. The three hosts of The Ringer’s Keepin’ It 1600 were former Obama staffers, who then went on to found the great leftist podcasting institution Crooked Media. Elsewhere, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight Elections Podcast wonked spreadsheet-first into the data.
Podcasting has also undergone something of a revolution since 2020
But the form that now predominates is closer to Maron’s vision: the ordinary dude(ette) getting on a level. Standups are perfect vehicles because it’s a whole genre built around ‘have you ever noticed/isn’t it weird that’.
Podcasting has also undergone something of a revolution since 2020. Filming the discussions is increasingly standard. A small change in some ways: what do you really gain by watching three guys you have seen a hundred times have a conversation? But one that has allowed the industry to merge seamlessly with YouTube, leveraging views, and knitting it tighter into the bigger content ecosystem.
Now, the grid is pivoting. The numbers don’t lie. ABC may allow you to precisely ‘message’ into the traditional media ecosystem (which has so far managed to maintain a fierce firewall between itself and the alt-media). But in raw views, it is fast becoming an ant-heap compared to the biggest podcasters. The trend is clear.
And just as the advent of social media lead to a whole new breed of politician who was adept at it, the advent of Pod seems like it will change the way that politicians are invited to ‘relate’ to us.
This is by no means a monstrous development. Longform podcasting is the closest device we have to the Beer Test. And it’s largely unfakeable. No one can do three hours with Rogan and not come out having said something true or interesting.
Trump on Theo Von contained several odd moments, in which Trump suddenly got interested in the life of anyone other than Donald Trump.
When Theo was telling him about what it’s like to be an addict, to do cocaine, Trump became lost in his own curiosity:
‘So you’re up – way up – with cocaine?’
‘Cocaine will turn you into a goddamn owl homie… ’
Trump went on to talk at depth about his brother, who drank himself to death by 42: the reason why he is teetotal (‘never touched a drop’). Both moments offered a new perspective on an overexposed candidate, and if anything were somehow less rambling than his usual style.
And I suppose there will have to be media training. Candidates will be coached to craft the long rambling anecdote about the guy who lost his thumb on your uncle’s Catskills fishing trip. In a sense, this is just an extension of the ‘going on Carson/Kimmel’ trope, where the host cues up the punchline-ready tale for you. But here the anecdote will be so much baggier – and the host won’t cue you up.
And, in a supply-creates demand way, the coming era also promises to open up a whole range of non-Overton issues. When an entire genre is built around frat talk, loose-lipped discussions of race, jags on Epstein Island, CIA cutouts, woolly speculation on Kennedy assassinations and extra-terrestrials, where are you going to find your landing strip?
When Bernie Sanders – another pioneer – went on Rogan in 2020, Joe’s final question was about whether, if he ever made the Oval Office, Sanders would declassify the Roswell papers. Bernie said yes. Then Joe endorsed Bernie. This is what power looks like.
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