Podcasts offer hope for deeper political discussion

By Matthew Gagnon

This week we learned that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in negotiations to appear on the “Joe Rogan Experience” prior to Election Day, which is currently the most listened to podcast in the world. Rogan’s podcast has roughly 17.4 million YouTube subscribers and more than 1.9 billion lifetime downloads. There is a reason Spotify signed Rogan to a $250 million deal.

Rogan’s audience skews male — which, given her struggles with men, is likely a major reason why Harris wants to do it — and is made up of a vast cross-section of political types, though there is certainly a preponderance of anti-establishment quasi-libertarianism to the audience, which is also fairly young.

That might sound right in Trump’s wheelhouse, but it isn’t. For one, Rogan has fairly classical left-wing opinions on many subjects that will not align with Trump. More importantly, though, Rogan has rather famously sparred with Trump for years, and is not a fan. In 2022, Rogan called Trump “an existential threat to democracy,” also saying that he “might be crazy” and could be a “sociopath.”  

So both candidates — both of whom have done several podcast interviews this year with other hosts — are going to be walking into dangerous territory.

Or are they?

The rise of the podcast has been a fascinating thing to watch, because the “product” flies in the face of everything that people think consumers want in media. For generations, radio, television and especially social media have shortened attention spans to the point where no one seems to be able to pay attention to anything anymore. 

The most recent social media platform to explode — TikTok, and its clones — consists of manically edited short videos meant to attract your attention for 20 seconds before you move on. In an oversaturated world of so much noise, there seems to be a race to create the shortest and most explosive content to break through the logjam and attract your attention. 

But then there are podcasts.

The first real podcast I ever gave a chance came on the recommendation of a friend. “You like history,” he said to me one day. “Are you interested in World War I? Because I just listened to a great podcast about it.”

The podcast he was referencing was from Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History,” and was a six-part, nearly 24-hour-long series within that podcast called “Blueprint for Armageddon.” Each episode was around three or four hours and dealt with a different aspect of the First World War.

Never had I been so captivated. It was the anti-TikTok. It was slow. It took its time. It explored something with depth and detail, and in a compelling way. It was easy to consume, and I found myself not only patient dealing with the volume of the story, but actually being calmed and relaxed, while simultaneously feeling like I was getting smarter. 

In a world that has forced people into a nightmare of frantic activity and noise, this medium ultimately rose most likely because human beings crave something more. 

Which brings me back to Rogan, and these (hopeful) interviews. 

Americans have grown accustomed to a barren wasteland of political rhetoric, whereby candidates speak in soundbites and contrived quick-cut videos, say nothing substantial in debates, and avoid exposing themselves to anything that might make them look bad. This ends up creating phony candidates saying phony things.

But in a three- or four-hour podcast, where the conversation is not timed and there are no commercials, the candidates are relaxed, but they are also asked questions about substantive issues and have real, unscripted dialogue about those issues? Where they might laugh, tell a joke or relay a story without any of those things feeling like intentional filibustering meant to avoid answering a question. In a podcast, you talk as long as you have to and can answer questions with as many words as you want. 

That’s one of the reasons they are so compelling. 

Interestingly, that is how politics used to work. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, the most famous examples of American political debate, lasted around three hours each, with one candidate speaking for about an hour, with his opponent delivering an hour-and-a-half reply, and the first candidate closing for 30 minutes. No short answers. No sound bites. No stalling. Just talking about what they believe. 

If we are lucky, politics in the future will eliminate “debates,” and lean into this form of conversation as the main way we get to know our candidates and what they believe. One can only hope.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.