When Donald Trump won back the White House in November, his team credited a series of people as they revelled in victory speeches. Taking the stage alongside Trump, UFC chief executive Dana White shouted to a cheering crowd: “I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ with the Boys and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”.
Some Americans — probably a lot of them — had never heard these names before. For others, they were celebrities and household fixtures.
In campaigning to be president again, Trump skipped CBS’s 60 Minutes, breaking several decades of precedent. Instead he spent, by my count, about 17 hours — or about 1,000 minutes — chatting with a cluster of podcasters who have become new media stars. This group, a constellation of online influencers and comedians who orbit around superstar Rogan, have been dubbed a “manosphere” for their grip on young American men.
Rogan, Von and at least one member of the Nelk Boys descended on Washington this week for Trump’s inauguration festivities.
Inside the US Capitol rotunda, Rogan sat alongside tech billionaires and former US presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush to watch Trump take the oath of office. As Trump spoke, influencers Jake and Logan Paul “pranked” Von, causing him to tumble out of his chair. That evening, at the “Starlight Ball”, the podcast brigade mingled among crypto entrepreneurs, donors and celebrities including X chief executive Linda Yaccarino, Megyn Kelly and Caitlyn Jenner. Jake Paul held a swaying Mike Tyson on his shoulders.
Their attendance seemed to solidify the entrance of the “manosphere’’ to the upper echelon of American political power — and a seismic revolution in the media.
Media upheavals usually sprout from a new format or technology. But podcasts and YouTube have been around since the early 2000s. Instead, we’re experiencing radical changes via the underbelly of an internet that serves increasingly niche interests, allowing people to fine-tune their media diets and sources of information.
The result is “a radical reordering of trust and credibility in media”, says Gabriel Kahn, a media professor at the University of Southern California. “It’s like shards of glass from what was once — the academic term would be — a public, shattered into a million publics. Organised by interest group or allegiance”.
There is a huge, and growing, media world that is hidden from sight for mainstream audiences. Today’s podcast stars are both very famous — filling up Madison Square Garden, for example — yet also unknown to large portions of Americans. My parents, who are in their seventies and still keep “the news” humming on their TV set all day, have never heard of them. For younger generations, YouTube has supplanted cable television.
Media observers have been talking about this fragmentation for many years. But during the recent US election, the trend seemed to explode in plain sight, as exemplified by the influx of podcast bros inside the marbled halls of Washington this week.
The reordering raises an existential question for the giant conglomerates that have dominated the US media for the past century: where will the dust settle? And what will be the role of traditional media in 10 years’ time?
Unlike Hollywood actors or journalists, who exist studiously out of reach, these new stars are defined by how available they are.
They’re in your ear while you’re doing the dishes or driving to work; they’re on the TV in the background while you work or eat dinner. Every week there’s another hour — or two or three — of content. They respond to your comments. They’ll even read them on air. They speak informally, crudely. Some of them have been banned from various platforms for use of hate slurs or other controversies.
“They feel like that guy whose house you walked by on your way to high school, who was fixing his car in the driveway and on the way to school he might throw a beer can at you, and on the way home he’ll invite you into his house for your first bong load”, says Scott Galloway, who hosts Pivot, a business and technology podcast, with Kara Swisher. “These guys feel relatable. And they’ve just tapped into an enormous [underserved] group.”
Stylistically, the “manosphere” is in many ways the opposite of what traditional media are taught to do. As journalists, we’re asked to be brief and punchy. Television news is a slick and expansive production: anchors are dusted in make-up, seated in elaborate sets, speaking formally and deliberately. Legendary news veteran Brian Williams recently slammed the tone of network newscasts as “cliched old phrases from another time in American life”.
These new shows, in contrast, consist largely of meandering chat. A livestream on Twitch can run for eight hours or more. The hosts are not journalists, nor do they want to be.
Lauren Jarvis, the former Spotify executive who brought Rogan to the streaming app in 2020, says of the phenomenon: “People are tired of headlines, soundbites and overly produced, pre-packaged shows.” Instead, shows such as Rogan’s allow for “longer, more thoughtful discussions”.
These podcasters don’t tend to fit neatly into a typical left or right ideological profile — although there’s a through-line of contempt for “the establishment” and resistance to political correctness. While they’re all unique, these men share some common interests: sports, fitness supplements and, strangely enough, the possible existence of extraterrestrial life pop up frequently. They’ll often appear on each other’s podcasts or streams, cultivating a Marvel-esque multiverse of characters.
Adverts and product placement are plentiful, often strewn on a coffee table or a bookshelf in the set. In the middle of an interview, the camera will abruptly cut to the host reading out an advert for erectile dysfunction tablets or online therapy.
“The person who is in the show is not an interviewer. This is what a lot of people get wrong. They’re having a conversation . . . They express a little bit of their own opinions as well. And that becomes very relatable and very intimate”, says Jarvis. “We used to have people pitch us new shows all the time at Spotify, and they would pitch all the wonderful people they were going to interview. What I would always say to them is: you actually matter more. You’re the person who is the show, not who you interview”.
The conversations usually don’t involve much pushback. Podcasters aren’t held to the same standards of accuracy as the traditional press, so there’s little emphasis on fact-checking. “It turns out a huge proportion of younger demographics just don’t care about any of that”, says Douglas McCabe, CEO at Enders Analysis. “The feeling is: ‘I’m getting the authentic voice, and I’m not subject to whatever the agenda of the editorial newsroom is’,” he says.
The sheer length of the conversations allows for moments of vulnerability. The casual nature keeps costs low. Even the biggest shows require only a handful of staff. The industry is largely unregulated. There are no standard metrics for even basic measures, such as how many people listened to a given podcast. Instead, you can trace views on YouTube or browse Spotify rankings.
Nick Hilton, co-founder of podcast production company Podot, says the lack of regulation “is why [podcasting] attracts the more lunatic fringe”.
“These people own their company, it’s in private hands, none of them have boards or shareholders,” Hilton says. “We’ve got an evolution of the media into these incredibly oligarchic silos. Predominantly young men with broadly libertarian, right-leaning views, are now in control of some of the most mainstream media platforms, with basically no internal or external oversight.”
Podcasts primarily make money through advertisements. If the host reads out an endorsement of a product himself, there’s a considerable premium. For podcasters with a big following, there is significant money to be made. Galloway estimates that the people ranked in the top 10 most popular podcasts make $10mn to $50mn a year. “At a million downloads, you’re making $50,000 to $100,000 a month,” he estimates.
Without the costs of infrastructure — headquarters, lawyers, accountants, security — profits are “huge”, says Galloway. “Just to turn on the lights for a [television] show probably costs $2mn or $3mn a year, at least. You can start a podcast for tens of thousands of dollars”. The Pivot podcast is set to make $7mn to $10mn in revenue this year.
A podcast also serves as marketing for the influencer’s personal brand, opening up other opportunities, such as speaking gigs or merchandise sales that can bring in more millions of dollars.
Traditional media has taken notice of how popular podcasters have become, particularly in rightwing politics. Fox News this month rejigged its programming line-up, giving Will Cain his own daily show that will, according to a press release, have “a signature podcast style”.
It’s unclear where the balance between old and new media will resettle. “I can’t see [traditional media] having the same scale of influence and commercial heft in the marketplace in the next five years that they had five or 10 years ago”, says McCabe. “I don’t think that’s controversial. It’s inevitable”.
But there’s a case to be made that old and new will co-exist. The podcasters scored coveted invites to Trump’s inauguration — but so did Rupert Murdoch. Trump has hired no fewer than 19 former Fox News staffers for his White House, indicating that cable television still very much matters to the world’s most powerful person.
Anna Nicolaou is the FT’s US media editor
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
Read the full article here
