Thu Oct 17

With reports Kamala Harris might join Joe Rogan for a chat, the US election is showing the power of podcasting

Written by Lea Redfern, Lecturer, Discipline of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

It was big news ^[1] in the podcasting world when US Vice-President Kamala Harris recently sat down with Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy for an extended interview. This was not just because it was one of the few times Harris has opened herself up to direct media scrutiny, but also because it signalled podcasting’s coming of age.

Now there are fresh reports she could sit down with Joe Rogan ^[2] for his top-rated show. Former president Donald Trump has also said he’ll record with Rogan ^[3] before election day.

High-stakes interviews are no longer solely the domain of legacy media. Politicians, like celebrities with a story to tell or a film to sell, can pop onto a podcast with a hopefully sympathetic host to reach vast and potentially new audiences. (That said, Harris also did interviews with CBS News, 60 Minutes, The View and CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the same week.)

So for the VP and Democratic presidential candidate, is this about finding new audiences or answering to a different, perhaps softer style of interview?

Call her who?

If you haven’t heard of Call Her Daddy, note the show’s emphasis is on sex and female empowerment. Cooper’s listeners are 70% women and 76% of them are aged under 35. It is often compared to the Joe Rogan Experience, a comparison Cooper hates ^[4]. Cooper has also been called ^[5] the Oprah Winfrey of her generation, which may say something about her interviewing skills or her market value.

The comparisons to Rogan are hard to avoid. Call Her Daddy has been running since 2018. In 2020, Cooper split with her co-host and took the program to Spotify, also home to the Joe Rogan Experience. There, Call Her Daddy rose to be the second most-listened-to podcast globally, behind Rogan, with an average of 5 million weekly listeners. Spotify gave Cooper US$60 million ^[6] to Rogan’s rumoured ^[7] $250 million. This particular gender pay gap was recently reduced when Cooper took the podcast to SiriusXM ^[8] for $125 million.

A Harris appearance on Rogan’s podcast could give her a larger audience than Cooper’s and parallel access to young male listeners.

‘Here’s the thing …’

Soft or smart?

Harris’ decision to be interviewed on a podcast aimed at young women brought criticism from those who saw it as the “soft option”, as well as those who don’t rate young women or approve of talk of sex ^[9].

The same commentators seem to have overlooked that for the last year, Trump has been wooing the “manosphere” and has called in to friendly bro-casts such as This Past Weekend with Theo Von ^[10]. In other podcasts ^[11] like Full Send, Trump has had scope for friendly freewheeling banter on topics from Ice Spice to golf.

Cooper says she also invited the former president onto her show to discuss women’s rights ^[12].

In the journalistic tradition of podcasts since Serial ^[13], Cooper revealed her process and opened her interview with Harris by sharing the reasoning behind her line of questioning. “Let’s be real, I’m probably not the one to be having the fracking conversation,” she deadpanned.

Harris said she went on the podcast “to be real, you know, and to talk about the things that people really care about”. There were moments of genuine emotion, such as anger and compassion at the death of a young woman, Amber Thurman ^[14], in Georgia in the wake of the US’s newly restrictive abortion laws. Yet at times Harris still sounded rehearsed, in the manner of people in the public eye required to repeatedly answer similar questions and give similar speeches.

The risk to a politician is that the authenticity and intimacy for which podcasting is known could just as well work against them – a lack of “realness” becomes amplified through headphones, straight into the listeners’ ears.

While Harris’ cadence sounded like familiar speechifying near the end, perhaps her anecdotes were new to sections of Cooper’s audience. For all the claims that a focus on the concerns of women made for a “soft interview”, it was also a timely reminder of the centrality of reproductive freedom to women’s lives and the election.

The risks of the interview were more Cooper’s, who hinted at the prospect of losing listeners by interviewing a politician while wanting Call Her Daddy to be “a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in”. This is a pertinent concern for her as much of the program’s initial popularity was built on Barstool, a media company known for its conservative leanings.

A different listener

The question remains: is appearing on extremely popular podcasts with young audiences a good political strategy for Harris? The positives of appearing on Call Her Daddy were clear, given Cooper’s main audience of young women is generally more politically engaged and motivated to vote than young men.

Rogan’s audience ^[15] is 81% male with 34% aged 18–35. Making a connection with young men could prove trickier for Harris within the “bro-ey”, jokey framework of the Joe Rogan Experience than it was with Cooper.

A lot will depend on Harris’ interaction with the host, but Rogan is not known for hostile interviewing and Harris is experienced in connecting with people from a range of backgrounds. And her recent spot on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show ^[16] gave her a chance to share her love of car racing.

In a tight election, which could come down to swing voters in six or seven states, such skills, showcased in the podcasting space, could impact the election. The potential gains seem worth any risks.