Podcasting giant Tim Pool recently allowed us a little glimpse into the upper echelons of the podcasting industry. Things are tough at the moment, says Pool. The election cycle is far behind us now, the midterms are still a ways off, so the market for politically driven podcasts is relatively inert and dry.
According to Pool, everyone’s fave podcasters will have to crank out a bit of cultural stuff to keep the revenue stream open and the algorithms humming until the next lucrative news cycle arrives. There is, though, a conspicuous outlier on the right-leaning podcasting circuit who isn’t suffering in the drought like everyone else, but instead, is surging in popularity. Namely, Candace Owens.
Pool describes podcasters as a marine biologist would describe hagfish, horseshoe crabs, and sleeper sharks: bottom feeders at the furthest depths of the ocean floor, forever in search of content morsels. In this regard, the murder of Charlie Kirk was the equivalent of a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza, a whale-fall.
Candace Owens has gained notoriety because, to keep the Charlie Kirk storyline current, she simply invented conspiracies and slanderous allegations, and tied Kirk’s murder into a larger conspiracy theory she has about the President of France’s wife actually being a man.
Yet, Owens’ excessiveness has spurred other podcasters such as Tim Pool to now view her as a traitor to Kirk and the right more generally. So now they have new content as well in the form of responding to Owens. This somewhat cannibalistic approach to content creation is nothing new, but it does stand out that, at its root, there appears to be nothing of any substance at all.
The fact is, there simply isn’t enough news to justify hours of talking content every single day. Yet the background hum of chatter must chatter on, and so streamers and podcasters increasingly rely on external sources or other podcasters as props.
We can watch Tim Pool watching Candace Owens watch the reaction of Turning Point USA to her allegations. We can listen to streamers listen to experts on animal health watching Hasan Piker electrocute his dog, while streaming, of course.
Prominent podcasters and streamers have now moved far from being deliverers of news and opinions, and have instead become the central characters in their own story arcs. In this way, audience engagement is locked in to the person themselves rather than their opinions on politics or ideology.
Nick Fuentes’ journey from the banned hinterlands to Tucker Carlson and beyond has resembled the leader board of an old fighting video game, such as Street Fighter II, with Piers Morgan or Joe Rogan waiting like end-of-game bosses.
It’s easy to be glib, yet there probably will be real-world consequences because of the surging anti-Zionist sentiment on the right - almost all of it generated via podcasts and streams.
The story of collapsing support for Israel on the right is a story of large Zionist-friendly podcasts failing to gatekeep and contain insurgent streamers and content creators. It is Ben Shapiro’s brand of boot-strapping pulling Reaganite economics and identity politics for Jews only, failing in the marketplace of audience retention against Tucker, Fuentes, and even Ana Kasparian.
Shapiro held an emergency broadcast stream detailing to his dwindling audience how serious the situation was becoming, and Konstantin Kisin’s Triggernometry platform appeared to be dispatched to America on an emergency podcast tour to shore up support and generally hold the line.
Who controls American foreign policy is not inconsequential; it does matter. Yet, the battlelines and hot zones amount to listener capture, who is listening to whom on their dog walks and on night shifts as ambient noise.
It is, fundamentally, a question of Tucker Carlson drinking Ben Shapiro’s milkshake.
We can hold our nose as the underwater UFO content appears the day after our latest political hope, we sympathise that there are lots of milkshakes, and many audiences to capture.
Perhaps the broader issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a saturation point for long-form audio content. There’s no Candace Owens take too barmy, no Tim Pool show too tepid. Leftist streamers routinely do eight-hour shifts playing video games or commenting on each other, or the other content mine, having a window to Xitter open so that the cues and props never end.
Does nobody listen to music anymore? Does nobody ever just enjoy silence?
Of course, there’s a bitter irony within all of this because I, too, do audio content. I recently noted on my Monthly Review podcast, where I discussed the saturation of long-form audio, that I was doing the same on my podcast, and the hypocrisy is apparent. Thus, like late-stage Kurt Cobain, you can lambast the medium using the medium. The only difference is that small- to mid-sized content creators are now like ants scuttling between elephants' toes.
Years ago, Peter Hitchens wrote an article in the Daily Mail moaning that pop singer Robbie Williams had been spotted in public wearing large headphones. The point Hitchens was making was that Williams epitomised the (then) aloof youth culture that had closed itself off from wider society and become a world unto themselves.
The fact that there appears to be a nigh-on infinite demand for hearing people talk reflects the profoundly atomised and dislocated mass of individuals out there. The market share and the number of people in the algorithm, or all people in the real world, with ears to listen and the willingness to do so. Formerly, it was understood that radio was a third space, usually middle-of-the-road and almost always focused on music.
The stream or the podcast is a personal experience; it’s just the listener and the device.
As such, it has become the ambient, personalised, algorithmically selected noise of a fragmented existence, where conversation is rare and social gathering is a chore or non-existent.
Joe Rogan isn’t interesting or intellectually challenging; he’s company.
For all the hyperrealism, content cannibalism, and self-referential arcs, at its core, the podcast phenomenon is a campfire for one.
Wasn't it always thus? Growing up, before podcasts, it was all about talk radio or FM music in the background. People had radios or TVs on constantly. Sports games were often passively watched, with the commenter being the company in the room. A drive around town reveals that nearly everyone - especially lower-class people - have some kind of broadcast on constantly. And often very loud.
I wonder if podcasting is just the white man's reggaeton.
Thank you for this masterpiece, Mr. Morgoth. We remember that you never entered the self-referential podcast discourse merry-go-round and know that you never will.
And your observation of the link between listening to podcasts and atomization is all-too accurate. And yet I feel that this is also because of the remarkably high quality of the podcast content in our circles. It was easy to have a conversation during lunch with colleagues or acquaintances during, say, the 90s because what was on people´s minds were not existential political or philosophical questions, and that was because there were few obvious reasons to grapple with these issues. And even if there were, in order to personally engage with these topics there was no other way than to read the appropriate books, obviously a "slower" process.
Just considering Mr. Morgoth and his frens (such as AA) as a source, I can easily listen to an hour of interesting new content a day. But the discourse in this sphere at this point essentially presupposes a basic understanding of several elite theorists, not to mention news information not widely reported in the mainstream media and various other esoteric knowledge. Even if a newbie was politically sympathetic, the discourse is too "advanced" to easily get into. It would be like entering a conversation baroque music aficionados are having about virtuosos in an eccentric musical style. I think a lot of your listeners would like to have such conversations in real life and not just as a parasocial activity, but that that level of intellectual inclination is not widely spread enough for that to be realistic in "normal" social circles.