The Podcast Election

I’m still in my pajamas — haven’t changed since Tuesday night. I’m also drinking a fair amount and toggling between Netflix shows: Nobody Wants This, which is pleasant but über cliche (i.e., stupid); and Monsters, which, as the father of two boys, I find just plain disturbing. In sum, for me, it’s Covid again. Even my stocks are going up … so 2021.

I’ve received 22 emails in the past 24 hours (when I’m down, I obsess over inconsequential data as a coping mechanism) asking for my thoughts on the election. My reflexive desire, or megalomaniacal belief, that I can comfort strangers, leads me to remind them that “nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems,” and that the U.S. remains the U.S. — the richest and freest country on Earth. This election was neither what I wanted nor expected, but I’m still very much looking forward to moving back to America.

I just read the previous paragraph, and it’s sort of true. Sort of. My disbelief and despair are shapeshifting to anger. A narcissist (President Biden) crowned an untested candidate and asked her, in 107 days, to overcome the crises of immigration and inflation and the burden of an unpopular incumbency. When two-thirds of the country says we’re on the wrong track, there’s no way someone from the current administration can credibly claim to be a change agent, much less the disruptor people are looking for in an age of rage. 

I am going on AC360/MSNBC/Smerconish to discuss the male vote — this election gave us the opposite of the expected referendum on bodily autonomy; it was the Testosterone Election. The only thing I’m (fairly) certain of is what medium played a pivotal role, for the first time, in young people’s decision to violently pivot to Trump: podcasts. And that’s what this post is about. 

New(er) Media 

New forms of media periodically reshape our culture and politics. FDR mastered radio, JFK leveraged TV, and Reagan nailed cable news. Obama energized young voters via the internet. Trump hijacked the world’s attention on Twitter. This year it was podcasting. The three biggest media events of this fall were the debate and Harris and Trump’s respective appearances on Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Almost half of adult Americans, 136 million people, listen to at least one podcast a month. The global audience is now 505 million, a quarter of the internet’s reach. When Trump went on Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and This Past Weekend w/Theo Von, he was embracing the manosphere and riding a tectonic shift in media: The most efficient way to reach the largest and most persuadable audience (i.e., young men) is via podcast. Nothing comes close.

Reach and Focus

 

Rogan has 16 million Spotify subscribers and can reach many more people across a variety of other platforms: In just three days after the live podcast, his three-hour-long conversation with Trump was viewed 40 million times on YouTube. The audio downloads likely exceeded 15 million. There will be a lot of second-guessing re what the Harris campaign should have done. Getting on a plane to Austin to visit Rogan would have been a layup.

Lamestream Media

By comparison, when Trump appeared on Fox News’ Gutfeld!, which averages about 3 million viewers, he reached 5 million people, and the full episode has been viewed 2.3 million times on YouTube. To reach as many people as he did via Rogan, Trump would have had to do at least three separate one-hour hits on cable TV shows with numbers comparable to Gutfeld! There are only a handful of those, and they’re all on Fox, the top-rated cable news channel. Any other news network would have been a waste of his time. The typical viewership for CNN is below 1 million, and CNBC’s is less than 100k. 

Anyway, the comparison is apples to cocaine. Specifically, the audience on the pods is not only exponentially bigger, but also much more valuable (i..e, younger, more male, and more persuadable). What if a campaign could gather the tens of millions of undecided or persuadable voters who may/may not vote and put their candidate in front of them for three hours in an environment that sets the candidate up for success? The Trump campaign achieved this by prioritizing podcasts. 

Catheter TV

Among Fox’s 3.5 million regular viewers, 70% are 50 and over and 45% are women. The No. 2 cable network, MSNBC, reaches 1.5 million viewers most days; its median viewer is a 70-year-old woman. So: a big audience of young men vs. a small audience of older women. People listen to pods to learn; they watch cable TV to sanctify what they already believe. The former is (much) more appealing to candidates and advertisers. 

Rogan’s demographic is 80% male, 93% under 54, and 56% under 34. Men under 34 are the Great White Rhinos of advertising, the most valuable beast in the consumer jungle, and they’re increasingly difficult to find. The average listener to my Prof G podcast is 35, male, and makes about $150k a year. This is an audience I sometimes — affectionately! — call stupid. They have disposable incomes and are in the meeting-and-mating years, meaning they’re prone to buying all kinds of high-margin stuff to try to increase their sexual attractiveness. 

They’re also the cohort ambitious politicians want to reach. Both Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, who launched a short-lived primary challenge to Biden, and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who loudly called on the president to drop out after his disastrous debate performance, have come on the Prof G pod and been nice to me, and they’ll likely come back. It’s not my charm. Both want to be president and recognize they have to build name recognition with young men. The calculus is simple math: Just as newspapers lost relevance to Google and Meta, cable news is losing relevance to podcasts. 

Money Follows Attention 

We have transitioned from a fossil-fuel-based economy to an attention economy, full stop. If you command attention, revenue will follow. Note: The best-performing tech IPO of 2024 is the fourth-most-trafficked site in the U.S., yet the company was valued at only $5.7b when it debuted on the Nasdaq seven months ago. Since then the market cap of Reddit (Nasdaq: RDDT) is up 274%. The only ad-supported medium growing as fast as Meta, TikTok, Alphabet, and (now) Reddit is podcasting. Podcasting revenue grew 18% this year, similar to Alphabet (15%) and Meta (17%). 

Podcasts’ share of attention is well ahead of their share of ad revenue. This delta will converge. I believe podcast revenue is going to grow faster than that of every other digital platform, with the possible exception of TikTok. My guess is that, next year, pods’ ad revenue will grow by 20+%. Listenership will continue to grow as well, and the ARPU, like those of Meta and Alphabet, will increase dramatically, too, as advertisers discover this is where young, successful consumers have been hiding. Podcast CPMs now are about $18 for a 30-second ad and $25 for a 60-second ad. 

Friend 

When people approach me in the wild, it’s easy to discern where they’ve been exposed to my content. A high five and some bro-ey banter, video. If they greet me like a friend they haven’t seen in a while, podcast.

It’s a very intimate medium. You are physically in somebody’s ear, in a private setting — washing the dishes, working out, walking the dog. It’s just you and them. That’s one reason advertisers like podcasts, as the audience’s “I’m being sold to” screen is more porous. A listener’s guard isn’t up. Tom Brokaw never had that kind of relationship with his audience. 

That level of intimacy also makes podcasting a great medium for interviews. In his conversation with Rogan, Trump seemed unusually relaxed and comfortable, a guy you could grab a beer with. And that’s typical for a pod. The medium has a zeitgeist where hosts generally try to present their guests in a good light. Unlike cable TV, the hosts aren’t looking for a gotcha moment; we let the guest “run.” 

Initially, people accused pods of being … radio. They aren’t. Pods aren’t shackled to the clock, for the listener or the podcaster; they’re on-demand (i.e.,streaming). And hosts decide how much time a topic deserves, or doesn’t. Think about this: One of the key commercial advantages of movies over TV was the producers’ control over the cadence and length of their content; they didn’t have the 21- or 41-minute guardrails that network TV later imposed. Rogan thought Trump’s story was worth three hours of his audience’s time, not one or four. TV anchors and radio hosts are asked to create differentiated art using a one-size canvas.

Talent Sits on the Iron Throne 

Broadcasters sink a lot of capital into state-of-the-art studios, satellite trucks, transmitters, fiber optic cables, people, etc. Podcasts don’t need any of that stuff. That capex was a moat that created leverage for the networks and their shareholders, who captured most of the medium’s profits. They controlled the means of production. The moat’s now been crossed.

When I go on CNN or another TV network, I travel to a studio staffed by numerous skilled technical people. The network pays their salaries and benefits, and gives them offices and snacks. A decent TV studio can easily run $400k. It’s also inefficient. My show on CNN+ (weak flex) took a dozen or more people the better part of a week to pull together 21 minutes of content. AWESOME content … but still.

Now my studio looks like a pretentious footballer’s Dopp kit. I doubt it cost $1k. Assembled by my tech guy, Drew, it travels with me everywhere. Any place that has broadband, or even just cell reception, I have a studio that can produce content. I’d speculate a third of my podcasts are done from somewhere other than my (home) studio. Think about how efficient this is. It enables me to host or co-host three pods a week and appear on many more. That kind of portability wasn’t physically possible pre-Covid. Meanwhile, net neutrality ensures that any podcast I go on is available to anyone, anytime. There is no technical reason I could not, in theory, reach every one of the 5.25 billion humans on the planet with a digital device. 

In broadcast and cable TV, the platform has always been bigger than the talent. In podcasting, it’s the other way around. There is little sustainable enterprise value in a podcast company; what matters isn’t capex or infrastructure, it’s talent. That’s why a lot of individual podcasters are getting rich, but not a lot of podcast company shareholders. 

All you really need to start is a computer and an internet connection. You don’t have to run the obstacle course of suits you’d encounter trying to get into TV or radio or any other old media. Which is another reason advertisers love podcasts: There are fewer hands in the talent’s pocket and fewer hands in their pockets, resulting in a greater ROI on ad spend. 

Low capex means the profits can be enormous once a podcaster covers the costs of producing two pods a week (e.g., two or three producers and a part-time sound engineer). The Prof G podcast portfolio (Prof G, Prof G Markets, Raging Moderates) will register 2025 revenue of approximately $10m. We employ five producers, two analysts, and a technical director/sound engineer. Few businesses garner $1m+ per employee. Pivot, the podcast I co-host with Kara Swisher, does more revenue, with even fewer resources. (Note: Vox, our distribution partner, is responsible for ad sales.)

 The pods that make the jump to lightspeed (covering their fixed costs) — and few do — are very profitable businesses. The best part? A: As I have a great team, with some people I’ve worked with for a decade or more, I spend 8-12 hours (total) per week on the pods. The leverage on (my) time is substantial. The cocktail of broad reach and low overhead translates to more for less for advertisers and talent.

Winner Take Most (Everything)

All the moons have lined up, and podcasting is on an upward spiral. But as with most everything digital, podcasting is a winner-take-most/all proposition, because everyone has access to … everyone. A scant handful of pods, those with the biggest listenerships, capture nearly all the ad revenue. By some estimates, of the 600k podcasts that produce content each week, the top 10 get half the revenue. Put another way, to build a business in podcasting that pays people well and keeps the attention of a host with high opportunity cost(s), you likely need to be in the top 0.1% by listenership. 

Math Is Fun

The odds of success are admittedly long. If you’re a high school drama student who goes on to join SAG-AFTRA, you’re 2x more likely to win an Academy Award than have a sustainable pod. As a member of UCLA’s crew team, I was 3.5x more likely to end up in the Olympics than telling dick jokes (and making a good living) on a successful podcast. I could do this all day …

The political power of podcasting is only beginning to be felt. This election was supposed to be a referendum on bodily autonomy: It wasn’t. Historically, the candidate who raises the most money wins: She didn’t. In each election the victor is likely to be whoever best weaponizes an emerging medium: He did. By far the most potent media weapon this time was podcasting. 

Life is so rich,

P.S. Jessica Tarlov and I discuss the election results on a special Friday edition of Raging Moderates available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

P.P.S. Section is hosting a free event on AI safety and the risks of AGI with the executive director of the Center for AI Safety, Dan Hendrycks, on Nov. 21. AI that can do what we do is closer than you think, so join this free event and learn something.

 

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