Podcasts

My partner has taken to calling his favorite podcast host ‘Dad’. ‘Can I put Dad on?’ he asks when we get into the car. I’ve fallen into the habit too. ‘Does your dad have a new episode today?’ I don’t know how much he actually agrees with Dad — Scott Galloway, the NYU professor and business expert whose podcast properties include Pivot with Kara Swisher and The Prof G Pod — as he is yet to invest in Galloway-approved stocks or repeat Dad’s opinions as his own. I also don’t think he aspires to be like Galloway, with his clearly nonexistent work-life balance and tragic dad jokes.

Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to talk around Knausgaard. Or to talk through Knausgaard, towards the sense of what the Knausgaard phenomenon means. Or, it sometimes seems, they want to talk about everything but Knausgaard — cigarettes, Constance Garnett, the history of literary criticism, to what extent hotness is a function of tallness, Clarice Lispector, media hype, backlash, cancel culture, sneakers, Gen X, how Geoff Dyer got where he did — until the only territory left uncovered by the conversation is Knausgaard himself, described only through omission, in negative outline, raising yet another cigarette to his smoldering, craggy face.

There are a lot of theories as to why we are living through a true crime boom. Is it white women fetishizing our pain and fear of men? Is it a psy-op to discredit leftist attempts to defund the police and abolish prisons? Or is it the collective psyche trying to metabolize a few decades of turmoil and violence now that murder rates are down from their Seventies and Eighties peak? I think it’s less complicated. It’s entertaining, it’s cathartic and it’s a way of externalizing anxiety. You listen to stories of bloody murder and grave injustice, and then you listen to the problem getting resolved as the murderer is revealed, the innocent person released, the mystery solved.

We need to stop letting people ‘tell their stories’. Why should random people get half an hour to tell what Oprah would call ‘their truth’? There are so many podcasts out there that simply broadcast people’s rambling anecdotage about the worst thing that ever happened to them — going for that salacious, daytime-TV vibe, but with the authority of journalism, which means narrating traumatic and often outlandish stories while the hosts offer weighty reflections like ‘huh’ and ‘crazy’. The moment when I gave up on the podcast Committed, a series dedicated to letting couples tell their ‘hilarious, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories’ with no journalistic interference whatsoever, was in an episode called ‘No More Secrets’.

Sam Harris has been in several tangles in his busy career. This is to be expected from a leader of the New Atheist movement, a vocal critic of Islam (he called the term ‘Islamophobia’ a ‘pernicious meme’), a member of the Men’s Movement (shocker: some non-men found it anti-woman), and a gleeful saboteur of the notion of free will. But for years now, Harris has been using his background in neuroscience and meditation to help people untangle their minds through his podcast Making Sense. It’s hard to find a podcast about meditation that is not made by or for quasi-spiritual, anti-vaxxer yoga moms. Making Sense is for the more serious inquiring mind. Harris, dry and wry, discusses not only meditation but philosophy, science, politics and ethics.

I was not born in the USA. But I am, technically, American — or at least, one half of me is. My mother hails from Ohio, where some of my family still live today. As a kid, I’d jet into the States on my American passport and back out again on my British one. This strange part-tourist part-citizen relationship ended up making me doubly nostalgic for the mirage of America. So for all my English cynicism, when I heard about Renegades, the new podcast by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, I actually thought it sounded quite appealing. I’m a sucker for what you might call Obamaganda or Springspeak — that kind of folksy, wistful, idealistic American rhetoric, the vocabulary of which consists largely of better angels, bridges, and melting pots.

Pro-Trump commentators Diamond & Silk are launching their first ever podcast on Thursday with special guest Donald Trump Jr, the duo confirmed to The Spectator in an interview Wednesday. The duo dropped a teaser for Diamond & Silk: The Podcast on Spotify and Apple Music on Monday, promising that it would deliver 'the real news, none of the fake media spin'. They told The Spectator that they hope sharing their story of leaving the Democratic party and supporting President Trump can inspire other voters to get off the fence.

All good things come to an end or, in this case, all trash must return to the trash heap. The raunchy, sex-obsessed podcast Call Her Daddy is likely ending for good after negotiations with Barstool Sports went south. Barstool, founded by Dave Portnoy aka El Presidente, currently owns the rights to the Call Her Daddy podcast, hosted by Alexandra Cooper, 27, and Sofia Franklyn, 26. The podcast mysteriously went dark for several weeks until Portnoy recorded his own episode titled ‘Daddy Speaks’ revealing that the women were shopping the show to other platforms despite being under a three-year exclusivity contract.

‘I want you to walk into a bar and order yourselves a full-bodied opinion,’ Dave Rubin writes in his new book. It seems the podcast host’s habit is more along the lines of glancing over to the next stool and saying ‘I’ll have what she’s having.’ Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in the Age of Unreason is currently sitting in 12th place on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Reviews, though, have not been particularly kind. 'Despite its provocative title, it's hard to imagine anyone being so angered by a book loaded with the same milquetoast arguments that he's been hammering for years,' wrote Anthony L. Fisher in Business Insider. 'Don’t Burn This Book is not a serious work.

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At a recent party, a mortgage-banker friend approached, asking me to come on his podcast. I politely declined. ‘What do I know about mortgage banking?’ I protested. ‘I don’t know my ARM from my Fannie Mae.’ I’ve never made my amigo for the sensitive type. His hobbies include drinking tequila like he’s in a worm-eating contest and getting in fistfights at professional sporting events. But he seemed wounded. ‘My podcast isn’t just about mortgage banking,’ he said, ‘it’s about spirituality.’ Here, I was briefly tempted, as I’m more in touch with spirituality than loan originations.

It’s a normal hot day in Los Angeles somewhere east of the 405 freeway. It’s also the day after Labor Day, so talk show host Dave Rubin, like most Americans, is back at work. For him, though, it was more than a long weekend. He’d been off the grid for 33 days straight, the whole of August and then some. No news, no phone, no nothing. So the first thing he says to me when I walk in the door is ‘Don’t tell me anything about current events! That’s part of the deal on the show today. The guest host is going to tell me what I’ve missed.