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Donald Trump surprised a lot of people when he appeared on a number of nonpolitical podcasts this summer, spending valuable campaign time with unconventional figures, from the comedian Andrew Schultz and the former wrestler known as The Undertaker to the podcast king, Joe Rogan. Nicholas Quah, a critic for New York’s Vulture who reviews podcasts and spent a few years as the host of one of his own—a podcast about podcasts, for LAist—took in a lot of those appearances. He heard some unexpected, engaging moments and gleaned genuine insight into the information-consumption habits of today’s audio audience. But just as he doesn’t think that liberals stand any chance of creating a Rogan of their own, he also thinks that the media should be careful in trying to draw too many lessons from the successes of the provocative and, as he puts it, “politically squishy” hosts of those shows. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JH: What was this world of podcasts that Trump tapped into? Can you give us a primer on it?
NQ: Trump was actually pretty early in courting what has now been described as the “manosphere.” Broadly speaking, it refers to this loose constellation of—let’s call them influencers. A lot of them host YouTube shows; a lot of them host podcasts that are also YouTube shows. A couple of them are streamers. They tend to be hosted—they’re actually all hosted by men, men that you could code as younger. And they tend to be nonpolitical, or at least the relationship with politics is spurious. Those shows are primarily entertainment shows.
Take, for example, Flagrant, which is Andrew Schultz’s podcast. They mostly talk about basketball and comedy and cultural-entertainment subjects writ large. The extent to which a political figure goes on these shows, that’s what was new in this particular election cycle. The recognition was made that these shows have accumulated a large following of what you could shorthand call “disaffected” young men.
And so the play on the part of the Trump campaign was to just increase exposure in front of them, to engage in their language, engage in their culture. And in doing so, establish a sense of familiarity, a sense of presence. And sometimes that alone is enough, because if you sit down and watch many of these Trump appearances—setting aside, of course, Joe Rogan—there was very little talk of policy, very little talk of actual, material concerns. A lot of it is just vibes.
What’s different about Rogan?
What’s different is the scale. What’s different is also who he is as a person. Joe Rogan is largely thought to be the largest podcast in the business by far. So, you go on that show, you’re reaching a lot of people. Rogan has acquired a very, very strong, very broad following, largely on the back of interviewing comedians and entertainment figures. And he’s also a big UFC guy—he’s a commentator—so he does a lot of coverage on his show, and he’s since accumulated standing as a masc figure, like an avatar of masculinity.
And then through the pandemic, he developed a very controversial political persona. He had skepticism over the vaccine. He frequently platforms people who are transphobic. And he himself has a very specific view when it comes to trans identity—you know, that entire wing of politics with people who are concerned about male-to-female-transitioned people playing sports, he’s very tapped into that.
But there’s also more substance to his conversations?
You know, “substance” is debatable. If you’re thinking about it like, “Rogan is a political or news podcaster,” that’s just not true. I think most people who are in his following, they go to him for the other stuff.
Now, there’s a much larger truth here, which is that nothing is apolitical, nothing is absent of ideology. But there’s a difference between The Joe Rogan Experience and something like Pod Save America, which is to say that Pod Save America is a show that’s built on a certain kind of political ideology, right? And the work that they do there is mostly within the frame of maintaining the frame of that ideology. But with Rogan, that dude is just going to do what he wants. I mean, he has politics, he has his own ideology, but his primary function is not necessarily to manufacture or govern a specific political ideology. It is a way for people to pass the time, and it’s a space in which people, through consuming entertainment, find themselves within the terms of that entertainment.
In a recent article you referred to these podcasters as being “politically squishy,” which I feel is somehow exactly correct—but also, I don’t have any idea what it means. Maybe that’s the point: that these people exist in this space where they don’t line up with traditional Democratic or Republican political ideas.
So the keyword here is “traditional,” right? When I used the word “squishy,” it is squishy in relation to politics as practiced in the two-party electoral system. Take who Rogan has believed in as candidates in the past: In the 2020 cycle, he essentially endorsed Bernie Sanders, and he’s aligned with many parts of Sanders’s ideology and diagnoses of culture. And obviously, he ended up backing Trump. Rogan would say—and I think a lot of folks who have paid close attention to him would agree—that, at some point, he was a liberal in the traditional sense, or at least he was in that direction. And, you know, this is a further reflection of how American politics plays out mainly within a two-party system, but the actual spectrum of political views is vast and wide. It can consist of many contradictions.
You listened to a lot of these pods that Trump was on. Were they any good? Did you enjoy them?
It depended on the show. I’ll say this: I learned a lot. I learned a lot that you wouldn’t quite grok if all you did was read about those episodes. I learned a lot about the candidate, beyond the performative caricature that he puts on when he’s on a news show or when he’s putting on a rally. I mean, a lot of it is stuff I have a hard time listening to because I do not align with Trump on many things. But what I found to be interesting—particularly in the instances when he’s not spouting bizarre conspiracy theories—is that there is a “there” there. It was engaging—engaging in the way that the Trump experience has always been engaging. And intuitively I understood, if he’s going to win, it’s going to be for the same reason he’s always won, which is because people cannot look away.
Do you find these shows to be journalistic?
The short answer is no: they’re not classically journalistic. They’re not doing the Face the Nation– or 60 Minutes–style follow-up or rebuttal.
But interviews like that still have value in the world. And sometimes when people say that these platforms are not journalistic, there is a very specific and very narrow idea of journalism they are referring to, according to the old rules. Whereas we now live in a world where there’s an increasing number of people who are just not familiar with, or maybe aren’t even exposed to the value of, the old rules. Maybe they’re okay with new rules. There is also a slight ahistoricism, in a sense that journalism wasn’t always this rigid.
But I think what is very scary, and what is the Lovecraftian horror that lies beneath, is the fact that it’s hard to argue that ethics matter when nobody is reading.
There’s a discourse now that the Democrats need to find their own Joe Rogan. Most people seem to agree with you that it’s a pipe dream.
I think it’s nonsense.
But I wonder if the more germane question here is whether the media needs to find its own Joe Rogan.
Well, there’s an underlying question baked into that, which is, How does traditional media become powerful and relevant again? I don’t think anybody can replicate exactly Rogan’s trajectory, let alone the nature of his appeal. Because part of the whole thing with him is that he was one of the very first people to start a podcast and meaningfully put sweat into it. The lesson is not that everybody should be doing three-hour-long podcasts. Most people shouldn’t. But the point is he staked a place in an ecosystem that was then new, that he could break out in, the same way that I think the people who are big on Substack now benefited in large part from being first and for being specific and for being direct.
So what should traditional media companies do? That’s actually a very different conversation because that’s about an institution. The problem of traditional media organizations is a problem of institution building, and the question of Rogan is a question of celebrity.
And by the way, call me old-fashioned, call me a boomer in a thirty-five-year-old person’s body, but I believe in institutions. I believe in the importance of building a paper or a news organization where no one person is more important than the other. The purpose of institutions is such that the gains generated by the top can trickle down to feed a newer class of talent, the new people coming into the pipeline. This is something that we lose fundamentally from the disaggregation of talent that happens with Substackers and podcasters and people who go off on their own so that they can be free. The whole point of an institution capturing some of the value of any individual talent is to support other talent.
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