Reaching the masses

In the weeks before the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance both appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast for two separate three-plus-hour interviews.

Leading up to Election Day, Trump and Vance didn’t play it safe. Rogan is the top podcaster in the world, known for casually asking about taboo topics like drug legalization, abortion, and cancel culture. He doesn’t let guests dodge questions with politically correct answers that skirt the real issues.

After Rogan landed a $100 million deal with Spotify in 2020, his ratings skyrocketed, and the age of the long-form interview podcast was suddenly mainstream. With some episodes more than four hours long, Rogan’s naturally curious style draws millions of listeners daily.

Independent media brands like this have emerged recently because people are desperate for honesty and truth untied to a political party, identity group, or cash-driven institution. These brands feel more genuine because they’re free from corporate sponsorship and editorial censorship, so despite today’s eight-second attention span, long-form audio keeps us engaged.

The ability to multitask, listen at 1.5 times speed, or play a podcast anywhere you have your earbuds certainly helps. But, why are we so willing to give hours of our precious time to these kinds of shows? I believe it’s because, for the first time, the public gets a glimpse of who these politicians and celebrities genuinely are—beyond the sound bites, press tour talking points, and carefully crafted personas.

The Trump and Vance episodes on Rogan blew cable interview appearances out of the water. Trump’s episode on YouTube alone currently has 54 million views, while Vance’s has 19 million. For reference, CNN’s October 2024 prime-time ratings reported 830,000 total viewers, while Fox News reported 2.7 million. A politician can reach more people in one episode of an independent podcast than appearing every night on the nation’s once illustrious cable news networks.

Even knowing this, the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz wouldn’t do it. This can only mean one thing: They were scared of us, the American people. Harris offered herself to almost exclusively “friendly” interviewers, minus a one-on-one with Fox News, which she abruptly ended early. Her 60 Minutes interview was deceptively edited, and she struggled to answer even basic questions (“What would have done differently if you were Joe Biden?”) on shows like The View.

While one side made themselves available to all, even to unfriendly audiences (Trump famously agreed to an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, where he knew he wasn’t well-liked), the other side shrank back, hoping to reach Election Day without further teleprompter slip-ups, flip-flops, or word salads.

For this reason, few of us question who Trump really is or what he believes. Yet many remained puzzled by Harris’ scripted lines, lack of personality, and repetitive, empty phrases (“opportunity economy” anyone?). The days of news conference answers and PR sound bites no longer appease the American people. We’re hungry for authenticity, not curated lines someone’s communications director thinks we want to hear. The one place you can reliably find this is the long-form conversational podcast, which offers something rare in media today: depth, authenticity, and unscripted conversation. It’s like eavesdropping on a real conversation rather than listening to a performance or piece of structured entertainment.

Hearing someone wrestle with complex ideas and share personal anecdotes that don’t make it into short interviews creates a more profound connection for listeners, allowing them to feel closer to a celebrity or politician than ever before.

On a program like Rogan’s, Harris would not have been able to get away with delivering evasive one-liners. Even though the mainstream media outlets shilled for her, they couldn’t scrub the internet of her terrible answers and endless bowls of “word salad” (how even top Democrats like David Axelrod took to describing her responses).

It’s why we flocked to podcasts to hear Trump discuss the effects of drugs and alcohol with Theo Von or listened as Vance explained his conversion from atheism to Catholicism with Megyn Kelly. It’s why one of the most popular conversation podcasts for years has been Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard: He manages to get celebrities like Vince Vaughn, Kevin Costner, and Goldie Hawn on the show, where they spend two hours talking about things like childhood trauma, divorce, abuse, fears, and insecurities. It’s fascinating to pull back the curtain.

We’re curious about politicians in the same way. So, while it’s always a risk to engage in a long-form, recorded conversation where the topic is “anything goes,” that’s what it takes to reach people with authenticity.