As you read these lines, the single greatest event in American history has already unfolded: Candace Owens has interviewed Hunter Biden on her podcast, in an episode that will drop on Thursday. Hookers, blow, shady deals with Ukraine—there’s no telling what we’re going to learn.
All right, so perhaps the interview isn’t exactly the single greatest event in American history—the Battle of Yorktown is a slightly better fit for the title—but many of us no longer live in America. We live in the People’s Republic of Podcastistan, where Candace is queen and every new revelation is just the greatest, the wackier the better.
In case you’re new to our fantasyland, here, in no obvious order, are a few gems shared recently by our most popular podcast hosts: Charlie Kirk was a literal time traveler who predicted his own death (Owens); Joseph Stalin was a great man whose birthday we should all be celebrating (Nick Fuentes); Israel manipulated America into fighting the war in Iran (Dave Smith); officers at the highest ranks of the military are telling their soldiers that the ultimate goal of the war in Iran is to usher in the return of Jesus Christ (Joe Rogan).
I could go on. After all, these hosts frequently sit down to bounce their outlandish theories off each other. Just this Monday, we were gifted with a three-hour conversation between Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes himself.
What ought we to make of this torrent of mind-bendingly, earth-shatteringly stupid pronouncements? Ask the medium’s many critics, and you’ll hear one of two prognostications.
The first is that the Era of the Podcast is over, done with, finished. Media malignancies metastasize rapidly these days, this argument goes, and podcasting as a medium spread so quickly and aggressively that it eventually killed its host body. Now, podcasting has become just a bunch of hotheads chatting with one another and competing to see who can come up with the most outrageous conspiracy theories—so people have simply stopped taking the medium seriously.
Not so fast, argues theory No. 2: Podcasts are still popular. In fact, they’re more popular than ever. According to research from the liberal group Media Matters for America, Owens added an astonishing 10.9 million new subscribers across social media platforms (nearly a third of her current 35-million tally) since January of last year, and is approaching the 1.5 billion-views mark on YouTube alone. Tucker Carlson’s podcast episodes reportedly average 56.8 million views across social media and podcast platforms. Which means that someone—in fact, millions of someones—is listening to this drivel, and regularly.
So, which of these theories is true? Is Podcastistan growing stronger, or is it collapsing in on itself?
The answer, sadly, is both.
To understand exactly why and how, think of another small and hysterical entity that has managed to persevere for decades despite quickly becoming patently absurd: North Korea.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as it is formally known, was ushered into existence in the aftermath of World War II, with east and west duking it out along the 38th parallel. Then, instead of becoming another puppet of Moscow or Beijing, North Korea developed a character of its own: a feverish cult of personality centered around a Dear Leader, Kim Il Sung, who was credited in propaganda with the ability to teleport himself, levitate, and heal the sick with a touch of his hand. As The Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief, Jonathan Cheng, argues in a brilliant new book, Kim understood innately that if you want to build something that lasts forever, you can’t offer people mundane things like policies or even political theories. You have to offer them religion. Hence the 72-foot-tall statue of Kim in Pyongyang. Hence his insistence that he would rule the country forever, even decades after his death (reflected in the state’s continued designation of him as “eternal president”).
Podcastistan follows a startlingly similar storyline. Its stars stumbled onto fame by using new technologies to connect with their audiences directly. They took advantage of the fact that podcasting—unlike, say, television—is the most intimate form of media. We listen to our favorite shows when we’re walking the dog or doing the dishes, alone with our thoughts, inevitably tempted to think of the voices in our ears not as entertainers but as close, personal friends. And then those stars followed the same hunch that inspired Kim to turn tyrannical: They borrowed the cadences and clout of religious fervor to deliver something new and intoxicating—a hermetically sealed universe where nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Some have argued that Podcastistan’s defining characteristic is its deep-seated and robust obsession with Jews, a feature that unites nearly every single host who now dominates the medium. But Jew-hatred, in the case of our reigning podcast hosts, is a symptom, not a cause. Minds that long for sweeping explanations of all of the world’s disparate ills are naturally going to gravitate toward antisemitism.
No, put the hosts’ loopy bigotry aside for a moment, and you’ll see something just as troubling as antisemitism at work. Pay close attention, and you’ll see that your average superstar podcast host is busy building a theological universe for the social media age.
No one, alas, does it better than Owens. Her insistence that Charlie Kirk was actually, literally, and physically a time traveler was met with much derision—look at that nutjob Candace!—but it was actually extraordinarily sophisticated. People, Owens realizes, are innate believers. Tear down their churches and their synagogues, tell them the faiths of their fathers are bad and oppressive and passé, and they’ll merely look for something else to believe. In telling her listeners that Kirk was a time traveler, that he always knew he would die young, that he was “marked since he was a child,” Owens turns Kirk into that “something,” cloaking his life and death in the kind of religious language that inspires rabid devotion. Call it the law of spiritual thermodynamics: Spiritual energy never dissipates, it just searches for a different form.
Other examples of religiously tinged performances abound. Theo Von, for example, has transformed himself from a dudebro par excellence into something like a St. Augustine with a mullet, regularly engaging in teary on-air confessions about faith, shame, and trauma. And after Joe Rogan riffed on Von’s mental health on a recent episode, saying Von’s use of antidepressants “freaks” him out, Von responded, “Sad to see this kind of stuff”—compelling Rogan to apologize publicly with an earnest, lengthy mea culpa exploring friendship, loyalty, and love.
The religious element of this second interaction is evident less in the language than in the collaboration itself. That Rogan spends so much time talking about—and to—Von is no coincidence. The principals of Podcastistan love having each other on their shows not because theirs is a tiny and airless bubble, but because they realize that there’s nothing more appealing to an audience than feeling you’re being let into a small and persecuted circle of courageous truth-tellers. As any priest in training will tell you, the potential convert enters the church first for the atmosphere, and only then for the gospel.
All of which makes Podcastistan such a thorny and complicated problem to solve. Mocking Owens et al. does little to diminish their popularity. The only thing that can trump a bad religion is. . . a very good one.
What we need right now isn’t an end to podcasts; it’s having podcasts that understand that what American listeners really want isn’t vapid entertainment or true crime—it’s salvation. That doesn’t necessarily mean overtly religious podcasts, though these, too, are thriving. Instead, what we direly lack are podcasters who are willing to reconnect with the medium’s original premise. Once upon a time, before Podcastistan hardened into the worst possible iteration of our legacy media, basking in its proximity to power and offering us nothing real, there were a number of daring podcast hosts who turned on the mic so they could ask real questions and tell real stories no one else dared tell.
The very first podcast, for example, did just that. It was called The Illusion of Independent Radio, and was produced in Rostov-on-Don in Soviet Russia in the late 1980s and distributed on cassette tapes. The show’s point, its co-creator, Galina Pilipenko, explained decades later, was to create something so raw and so real and so unruly—early episodes featured long and uncut interviews with leading poets and chaotic impromptu performances from underground punk bands—that even if the Kremlin allowed it to be aired, no commercial station would ever touch it.
Raw, real, and unruly, of course, is precisely what Owens, Rogan, Carlson, and their ilk claim to deliver: the unadulterated truths the establishment doesn’t want you to hear. And it is hard, even for the most discerning listeners among us, to tell a podcaster being real in an honest and productive way from one affecting the same stance perniciously. Our grasp on reality isn’t as strong and firm as it used to be. Which leaves us with a difficult choice to make.
We could argue that Podcastistan, like North Korea, has gone nuclear, and that the only way to disarm it is by disengaging from podcasts altogether and seeking salvation in more restorative corners, like houses of worship and book clubs and family dinners.
Or we could believe that, surging popularity in some circles aside, Podcastistan is still a relatively small and brittle entity that cannot withstand a concentrated attack. Should we opt for door No. 2—which I recommend, for it is hard to see a natural end to Podcastistan through any other means—we may find that all we need to do is channel the same wondrous energy that made the medium popular in the first place: its ability to subvert legacy media to reach truth rather than pervert it. In other words, if we want to stop Podcastistan from eventually toppling the United States, we must first understand what makes it tick, and then beat it at its own game. There is no other way.