The editors at The Baffler want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster.
What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I do whenever possible. Maybe it’s the newness of the profession; in terms of recency, I slot it in with UX designer and the guys in the Philippines who respond to OnlyFans messages. When asked about my job by strangers at parties, I tell them I “work in media.” I make sure to say that in the kind of way that forbids questioning, like I’m the guy who bathes Bari Weiss or a janitor at the New York Post.
But I would never lie to you. Not only is my job a podcast, but the podcast is successful. I’m a white man with brown hair and glasses in his mid-thirties having fun and making money. My podcast is called TrueAnon. At the time of this writing, it’s the 172nd-biggest news podcast in America and one of the most subscribed-to podcasts on Patreon. Originally a ramshackle effort to track news about the famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the show now covers any number of things broadly contained in the “news and opinion” category: Alan Dershowitz’s feud with a pierogi stand, rumors regarding Elon Musk’s robotic penis, Jerome Powell’s problems with Trump, etc. I get stopped on the street almost every day. They say to me: “You do that podcast!” And I say: “Yes, I do! Thank you so much for listening!” Then they say: “I thought you were five foot three!” And I have to explain to them that I lie about my height on the podcast so listeners resent me less for making a lot of money just for talking into a microphone twice a week.
First Time Caller
I heard a podcast for the first time during Obama’s first term. (For reasons that will become obvious, one must temporalize podcasts via presidents.) I had been working at a flower stand on the side of the highway since 2008, but I wanted to be a sailor. A girl I knew in San Francisco had gone off to the Bronx to attend a maritime college in Throggs Neck. I looked up the school on the internet occasionally, but I couldn’t stop taking OxyContin. I rarely left the city. At night, I’d walk from my basement apartment in the Tenderloin up over Nob Hill, staring into doorways and windows, taking in expensive couches and giant houseplants, tidy desks topped with triple monitors. I’d end up at Aquatic Park, where I’d sit on the steps and look at the lights bobbing on the water.
What you want are sound bites, sections produced memorably enough to snap listeners out of their fugue and rewind fifteen seconds to hear it again.
It was 2011. I was dopesick and shivering in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s car, heading up the interstate back to San Francisco from Los Angeles. It turned out I couldn’t quit OxyContin by staring at the Bay. Once you pass Coalinga, a grim conglomerate of roadside cattle feedlots causes the highway to stink tremendously. I was no good for conversation and she must’ve been tired of music, because she put on WTF with Marc Maron. I was too weak to resist. Listening to this semifailed comedian who was either talking about his divorce or complaining about his life to a much more famous and successful guy, I thought, Wow, I could do that. It sounded humiliating but was certainly a situation I could easily find myself in. When we got back to San Francisco, my girlfriend realized I was stealing money from her bank account.
Three years later, I listened to a podcast of my own free will for the first time. I was looking for a job. After being asked to leave a rehabilitation facility in the North Bay because of my bad attitude, I had detoxed with clonidine patches alone in a basement apartment that I was being forced to vacate. Everything had become exorbitantly expensive, so a friend on Haight Street let me crash at his house. I was thin and pale and hated almost everyone in San Francisco. There were hunched men in vests walking around in a hurry and freaks wearing Google Glass. One got the sense that something terrifically digital was happening.
I’d walk around the city, handing out résumés and listening to new episodes of Serial. The show felt like prestige radio, a serious enterprise compared with farts-and-Sybians shock jocks like Bubba the Love Sponge or Howard Stern. The lady hosting Serial laid out some evidence that maybe the guy accused of killing his girlfriend didn’t do it. She sounded urgent, but the NPR-style somnambulant tones made the stakes seem low (unless you were Adnan Syed, I guess).
Podcasting during Obama had a wondrous feeling: we Americans had finally untangled the more vexatious knots of modernity by electing him and were ready to train our curious minds on the minute problems and the major shortcomings in society. (At least this is what I assume people thought; personally, I was broke and miserable.) The shows that were popular around then—like Serial or Invisibilia, which debuted the following year with a pledge to explore “the intangible forces that shape human behavior”—all had a very Eagle Scout approach. This was a house style inherited from Serial’s coproducers, This American Life. That show began, of course, on public radio, but when it added an RSS feed in 2006 it dominated a market filled with shows like MuggleCast and Diggnation. (This American Life has cemented its place in the liberal canon of podcasts; see, for instance, Time’s recent one hundred top podcasts list, which includes the show alongside other stalwarts like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and 99% Invisible.) It made a certain kind of sense that the pathetic pseudo-intellectualism of the Obama years would spawn shows hosted by similar-sounding hosts bewitching listeners with gentle urgency to slow down and look at the details. In 2015, if you said, “I heard it on a podcast,” you were trying to sound smart. In 2025, it’s better to lie.
At the same time, despite Obama’s worldwide assassination and surveillance program, the twilight years of his presidency were not going well. ISIS was overrunning Iraq, Guantánamo remained open, and the president was ramming through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The magic had worn off; you could tell he was ready to sign a deal with Netflix and put all this stuff behind him. (New media wasn’t done with Obama, however; in 2023, Tucker Carlson interviewed a man on his podcast who claimed to have sucked Obama’s dick in Gurnee, Illinois.) Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were running for president. You couldn’t avoid Pizzagate or stilted explanations of “democratic socialism.” I had found a decent-paying job at a boxing gym. On my lunch breaks I went to Warm Water Cove, which had been turned from a streetcar graveyard into a dog park. I ate my sandwiches and watched yuppies pick up puppy shit and listened to Chapo Trap House. I didn’t know there were so many newspaper columnists you could hate.
The city was turning into a latticework of digital connections. Clear-skinned, smiling adults started coming to the gym demanding upscale offerings that we struggled to provide. Rent, already high, climbed to impossible levels; many people I knew left San Francisco. Companies sporting gibberish names like Zendesk and Zynga filled office buildings and swelled the tech worker population of the city to the point where people were attacking them on the street. I decided to leave the country to go to Syria and fight in the war.
When Trump got elected, I didn’t find out for almost a week. I was in a supply base, reloading 14.5 mm cartridges with a rubber mallet, when I saw the news on the TV. I was relieved that I wasn’t in America; everyone seemed to be going bonkers back home. While in Syria, I had become modestly well-known, having made the mistake of posting things I thought were funny on Twitter (whose offices were retained in San Francisco’s Market Street by means of a ludicrous tax break) under an obscene screen name. It’s also where I made my first podcast appearance, calling into Chapo from a cell phone during a brief lull between assignments. I can’t bear to revisit it. I became, midway through the call, acutely aware that this would be the final testament I gave to the world if I were to get obliterated by some hideously high-caliber round. I don’t mean that as a reflection on Chapo—it just felt dismal and absurd that my epitaph might be a podcast. It seemed a world away from For Whom the Bell Tolls. A few months later, I stepped on a mine near a village outside of Raqqa called al-Kalta. It didn’t go off. I went home and got a job at a brewery.
The first Trump term was kind to podcasts. Everybody had something to say, and signifying by way of consumption became more important than ever. While even the most banal products had a culture war patina, MAGA’s frothing hatred of the media made it necessary for liberals to consume “smart” content. This gave rise to an explosion of podcast brands that functioned like major labels and had the names of luxury apartment complexes in midsize cities: Gimlet, Anchor, Wondery. Individual, mostly liberal shows gained prominence, like The Daily, the New York Times’ self-recap podcast, hosted by an Ira Glass knockoff whose only notable characteristic is he’d gone from a gay marriage to a straight one. The liberals had Pod Save America, formed by young, identical Obama staffers. (At the 2024 DNC, I bore horrified witness to a seemingly hungover, no-longer-young Pod Save host sit through a talent show of youthful TikTokers pitching their big ideas to bring generational change to the Democratic Party.) There were true-crime podcasts describing rapes and murder to the titillation of bored, horny women. Joe Rogan, inquisitive, grunting, was in the earbuds of everyone from your male coworkers to your male assistant managers.
Not that I listened to any of it. I worked a big machine at the brewery and would’ve gotten fired for wearing headphones. I had finally gotten my merchant mariner card and was taking classes to join the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. In July of 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. My friend Liz and I spoke on the phone about it a few times, and it occurred to us that we might as well start a podcast, at least for a few episodes. Our third member, Steven, I knew from political work; he had offered to produce a podcast (I was a loudmouth) if I ever wanted to. I envisioned a send-up of true crime shows, but, really, we didn’t know what we were doing. Still, people liked it immediately. TrueAnon started making money pretty quickly when Epstein died sometime around our third episode, giving us a huge boost in listenership. I figured, what the hell, I’ll do this for work. Then Covid hit and podcasts went through the roof, and now I have the salary of a dermatologist and live in Brooklyn, which is Israel for podcasters.
Obama-Era Backwash
Why do people listen to this shit? Around 2014, after the release of Serial, one began to encounter a media-driven elation about podcasting. In retrospect, this was part of a now thoroughly shamed and diminished fad wherein traditional publications sought salvation for dwindling readerships by investing in exciting new mediums—e.g., streaming, Facebook, podcasts. This led to attempts at elevated shows: the Radiolab clones, the Gimlet Media sphere. While these were just Obama backwash in retrospect, they did begin the deceitful trend of podcasts letting listeners pretend that they are learning something—and hosts believe that they themselves were expressing something of intellectual worth. If listening and watching have in large part replaced reading, so talking has mostly finished off writing. I speak from long experience that it’s difficult for most people (including myself) to express complex thoughts on a podcast. Frankly, complexity can work against you; what you want are sound bites, sections produced memorably enough to snap listeners out of their fugue and rewind fifteen seconds to hear it again. Most listeners are half-listening, so repetition, conversational language, humor, and emotion are significantly more important than actually saying anything interesting.
These days we’re happy only if everyone else is unhappy. It’s a perfect relationship.
Now in 2025 everyone’s crazy, and what they want to learn is nuts. That’s where guys like Lex Fridman or Andrew Huberman come in. Just as self-help and get-rich books dominate the nonfiction market, these types have replaced Radiolab and its ilk for striving young professionals whose new fascination with longevity and health-tech dominate places like San Francisco. Huberman is a supposed scientist selling optimization routines, which means he soaks in cold water often and maintains a sleep schedule out of Dachau. Millions of assholes ape his routine. He was once semicanceled in a cover story from New York, which put on display his precise, meticulous schedule that seemed to largely revolve around meeting various women for coffee and sex in Topanga. Fridman makes me dizzy to think about. Picture this: a slim man in a nothing suit with a light Eastern European accent sits seriously across from Trump or Zelensky or Zuckerberg and asks them if they think a high capacity for forgiveness is a good quality in a person. How far we’ve fallen that even our professional sycophants aren’t pleasing to observe! He has the personality of a fortune cookie, his charisma so null that his already narcotic qualities—which I suppose could be useful if a listener was to run out of Ambien on vacation—turn sinister and hateful. Yet his popularity is outstanding. He’s at the top of the charts in the same way large language models are increasingly being used as substitute therapists. I’ve frequently wondered if he isn’t himself some sort of construct. Here’s a quote from Lex: “Life is short. Enjoy every good moment, and make the best of every shitty one. It’s all a beautiful mess.” One sees a person already indistinguishable from AI—these days, one sees many!
Of course, most aren’t actively listening to Fridman and Huberman for two hours at a time. The episodes are a layer of white noise, a way to blot out thoughts. Podcasts came of age amid the growing absence of meaningful contact in the average person’s day, in a time when silence is hated. That’s probably why parasocial relationships—that two-dollar phrase for people who are also excited to write things like “ontology”—are so popular now, being simulacra that work just good enough to replace the real thing. The “friendship simulator” element is crucial in all this, and also its most sordid part. The hugely popular shows have a familiarity to them, the host drawing listeners in such that you feel like you might just be a shy participant in an exciting conversation. This has an effect on people: it’s become a cliché to catch a young man repeating a Nick Mullen bit about the N-word he cribbed from Cum Town. Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while you do laundry or cook dinner, your best friend lives in your phone.
This is tricky for the hosts, especially if you didn’t get into the business to pretend to be the number-one pal of thousands of strangers. Many embrace this relationship with fans, promoting a feeling of intimacy by making certain disclosures about yourself. Your audience, for the most part, will love it. Many will even prefer that to other content featured on the show. Many shows contain a dizzying mixture of news, political opinions, and debased confessions, resembling a chat with an outré friend you can’t give up, no matter how strange their opinions. Candace Owens is your pal, dishing about her pregnancy and interviewing her husband on air. It’s only fair to hear her out when she tells you Brigitte Macron is a transgender Rothschild agent controlling the president of France by means of incestual, Satanic sex magic.
All that is to say Covid and the Biden era was excellent for podcasts. Already isolated individuals now worked from home, with only roommates or a dog for company. The sharp rise in loneliness facilitated the shift from high-brow liberal shows to cartoonish hangout sessions with the worst every gender has to offer. Are Baffler readers familiar with Call Her Daddy? I’ll fill you in: starting in 2018, two young, beautiful women, thin like sticks and exuding a palpable passion for sex, started talking about the butt-fucking accidents and jism spills that are de rigueur in the fast-paced world of New York dating. Five years after I first heard it, the show was down to one host, who sat seriously across from Kamala Harris as they haltingly discussed women’s health. Where else but podcasts can you get that kind of growth? Harris had been offered a chance to go on Rogan, turned it down, and instead chose a show where, a few years before, you could learn how to precisely squeeze a nutsack to attain the perfect squeal from your partner.
I Just Work Here
Not that Rogan suffered for it. Overall, masculine shows, hosted by Austin-based comedians and aging special operators suffering from testosterone replacement therapy–induced hair loss, dominated the 2024 cycle by hosting Trump, Vance, et al. in obsequious, occasionally worshipful episodes of their podcasts. They were effective. The newspapers say these guys made Donald Trump become the president. They were feted at the inauguration alongside Elon Musk and Javier Milei. The personalities here may seem ugly or garish, even repellent, to many reading this. The shows largely consist of stupid clichés spoken by repulsive people. They are often plainly thought destroying. That is precisely the reason for their popularity.
Now, after their humiliating defeat in the 2024 election, the Democrats have degraded themselves further and begun to search for a liberal answer to Joe Rogan. Of course I threw my hat in the ring, but my rejection was no doubt the work of hidden forces. Maybe you can do it. Podcasts aren’t difficult to make—in theory, you just sit behind a microphone and talk—but it’s hard to do right. (I know I’m coming to you as a bit of a fraud here, but I genuinely enjoy making TrueAnon. My colleagues are sharp and reliable, we have no management and don’t run ads, and I’m getting too old now to start as a merchant mariner.) For the aspiring liberal Rogans, my recommendation is you take Vyvanse and a beta blocker and email Ro Khanna. He will agree to an interview. Ask ChatGPT to write you a script and then suck up to him.
Of course, you actually just want to make money. That’s why you read The Baffler. Unfortunately, few independent podcasts are successful. The top twenty-five shows today capture the majority of market share. Podcasting isn’t immune from the broader trends that have, in part and in whole, made using the internet substantially worse over the past decade. In 2022, Bloomberg published a report on fake podcast metrics, detailing how numbers were artificially juiced to keep ad sales afloat. This has likely only worsened as bots have gotten better and why the numbers of paid subscribers is the only metric I count as real; everything else is ephemeral. Harder to miss is the rise of the video podcast, which in turn has led to the strange linguistic development where one hears people refer to podcasts they watch. It’s standard practice now to film a recording session, if only so a young man in the Third World hired off Fiverr can slice it up into clips, paste subtitles over them, and thrust everything into the YouTube or TikTok algorithm. Sometimes even the podcast portion is cut out; there is a massive industry of fake podcasters recording attention-grabbing viral clips or goofy advertisements in studios built to look like living rooms.
I imagine the hit rate for a new show is something along the lines of the average OnlyFans profile; you’re spreading your asshole for nothing. But the industry could turn around: loneliness and attention spans will certainly get worse, and standards for entertainment are likely to continue to fall. And you’re different! Especially if you have a measure of already extant fame, or you’re able to trick some bigger show into joining in on a beef you start with them. The most important thing is consistency, in any case. You’ll get into a rhythm, which is the only way to do it—when a show gets popular, you’ll find listeners get mad when you’re late, or you miss an upload, or maybe you put out something rushed because you were sort of sick or had to go to a wedding. That’s fine, though; it should feel nice to be desired. Your fans, no matter what, will despise you a little bit. You make a podcast, after all, which elicits understandable baseline disgust, but you’ll say something unflattering, wrong, or too right, and they’ll murder you for it. But that’s wonderful. You can get mad at them for not understanding (after all, you can never be wrong, only wrongly interpreted). These days we’re happy only if everyone else is unhappy. It’s a perfect relationship: your fans will resent you, and you’ll resent your fans, and everyone will come out satisfied. You will read ads for Adam & Eve, the online sex retailer. You will become a dildo salesmen, hawk dick pills and kratom until you work your way up to Mailchimp and BetterHelp. Once you start getting car ads, you can retire, and you’ll never have to think about getting a real job ever again.