Listening to Podcasts Is So Gen X
There are a lot of people, myself included, who think Kamala Harris may have lost the election by not going on the Joe Rogan Experience. He has a huge audience of young males — a weak demographic for her — yet one that is split roughly evenly between Republican, Democrat, and independent (according to Edison Research). Trump appeared, as did JD Vance and RFK Jr., but not the VP or Gov. Walz. She did plenty of other podcasts, but somehow chose to avoid JRE.
As Tatiana Siegal and Todd Spangler wrote in Variety: “it is clear that Harris relied on an outdated playbook — one that opted for Howard Stern, who pioneered bro radio in the ’90s but whose influence is now negligible — and failed to see the significance of Rogan.”
The above notwithstanding, I promise this is not going to be about politics. It’s not even going to be about listening to podcasts. Rather, it’s about a trend with podcasts that took me by surprise: we’re more likely to watch podcasts than listen to them, and when we do, we’re most likely to do so on YouTube — not the usual podcast kings, Apple and Spotify,