The Journal. - Ben Shapiro and Preet Bharara on the ‘Podcast Election’

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

In a special video edition of The Journal, WSJ's Ryan Knutson sits down with Ben Shapiro of The Ben Shapiro Show and Preet Bharara of Stay Tuned with Preet in the Spotify mobile studio in Washington DC. We discuss how new media has shaped politics and how politics has shaped a new era of media.  Further Listening:  Corporate America’s Embrace of Trump 2.0 The End of Facebook’s Content Moderation Era Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AirTransat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good! How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer. Don't worry, you can handle it. Visit airtransat.com for details, conditions apply. Air Transat, travel moves us. Welcome to a special edition of the Journal podcast.

We're in Washington, DC today on inauguration weekend. And we're here to talk about the rise of podcasting and the impact it had on the 2024 election. I'm your host, Ryan Knutson, and I'm joined today by two other podcast hosts, Ben Shapiro and Preet Bharara. Thanks so much for being here. Great to be here, thanks for having us.

So you guys both sit on opposite sides of the political aisle. Ben, you're one of the most well-known conservative voices out there. You were previously editor-at-large of the political aisle. Ben, you're one of the most well-known conservative voices out there. You were previously editor-at-large of Breitbart. You co-founded The Daily Wire. Now you have one of the top conservative podcasts with the Ben Shapiro

show. Preet, you are a former U.S. attorney appointed under President Obama. You served as chief counsel for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. And on your podcast, stay tuned with Preet. You also make no secret about your politics. But I want to talk about the thing you have in common, which is that you're both podcasters

in the podcast industry. So the 2024 election, as I'm sure you've heard, has been dubbed by some the podcast election. Both candidates spent a lot of time going on podcasts. Trump appeared on at least 20, including the Ben Shapiro show, and Kamala Harris appeared on at least 20, including the Ben Shapiro show, and Kamala Harris went on at least eight. So I want to put this question just to both of you. What role do you think this medium played in the 2024 election?

Let me take this first. I think it played a huge role. I mean, it granted access to, for President Trump, places that he wouldn't have been able to reach before through legacy media without the same sort of filter I think was a big mistake for Kamala Harris not to take advantage of that a little bit more obviously it was very Controversial when she decided that she was gonna have a negotiation with Joe Rogan and Rogan wasn't gonna have her on then he was Gonna have her on then he wasn't gonna have her on I think that the President Trump actually broke through a lot of Perceptions about him as a person because in a long form podcast you get the opportunity to sort of delve into what people are more. You get past the surface very often. And for President Trump, I think that was a really, really big

thing. Plus, of course, the audience for podcasts is significantly younger than the audience for traditional media. So if you're talking about legacy media, legacy media, if you're talking cable TV is probably 50 and up largely at this point. And if you're talking about the podcast industry, it's largely 40 and under. And so I think that one of the big shifts in this election was how younger voters actually moved toward President Trump, a market number, largely because they were exposed to him in a way that they hadn't been through kind of the short clips and the political framing. And I think a lot of the things that people like about President Trump tend to be more personal

and culture driven in a way that I think benefited him a lot in this election cycle. Preet, did you watch Trump or sorry, did you listen to Trump on any of his podcasts? I listened to two portions of it. So I'd like to say we have a moment of agreement on the eve of the new administration. Ben Shapiro and Preet Bharara agree about the power of podcasts. It's not new. We didn't have Kamala Harris or Donald Trump on our podcast this past season. But we had- Did you try to get them on?

We tried to get one of those two on. I figured one of them would have been futile, and it turned out both were futile. So Joe Rogan and I are bonded forever in that same regard. And Kamala Harris wouldn't come on either one of our podcasts, I think probably for similar reasons. No, that was just- Yeah, logistics and timing.

You wanted her for three hours. I don't know. But back in 2020, we had a number of the Democratic primary candidates, Pete Buttigieg notably, went on a number of podcasts and obviously, as everyone knows, goes on media that does not necessarily associate itself with the liberal cause. I agree then also that the intimacy of podcasts,

the relationship that people have with the podcast host, whether it's Ben or me or you or anyone else, translates into I think a greater intensity of feeling and listenership, not just with the host, but whatever their guest is. And in the long form, particularly in the very, very long form, it's hard to bullsh** who you are. Pretty much anybody can do it, whether they have half a brain or not. No offense to the legacy media on cable. But for six minutes or four minutes, if you're on a panel with other people or three minutes, you can pretty much get away with pretending to say what you think you mean, but your staff has given you talking points on. You can't do that if you're an arrow with Ben and hopefully you can pretty much get away with pretending to say what you think you mean, but your staff is giving you talking points on. You can't do that if you're an hour with Ben, and hopefully

you can't do that if you're an hour with me. And I think it gives people a better sense of who the candidate is. And then if the candidate is good and allies with what, you know, the listenership, you know, putative voters want to hear from a candidate about authenticity and their policy positions, well then that's very good. If you're not, then he can go in the other direction. Ben, when you had Donald Trump on your show, what were you hoping to get out of that conversation? So the truth is I'd seen President Trump the prior week.

So on October 7th, he and I went to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and I brought along a hostage family that has a child who's an American citizen who's still hostage in Gaza. And so we're sort of recapitulating what that was like. I wanted to talk to him about that. I wanted to talk about, you know, that was, I think, two weeks before the end of the campaign. So what the campaign was going to include, it was a shorter podcast for what it was. It was about a 20-minute interview. If I'd had him there for three hours, we would have talked a lot more, I'm sure, about what

it is like to be on the campaign trail. What are his deeper thoughts on issues like trade? Like dig into that. I think one of the things that makes Trump sort of an interesting podcast guest is that it's not as though he has a thoroughgoing ideology, right? As everyone has noted in this space, President Trump is not an ideologue. President Trump is a utilitarian pragmatist. And what that means is that he tends to shift and move his positions based on what he thinks will be effective. And that provides some rich fodder for digging. Now, that doesn't mean that people who are deeply ideological are boring.

I'm deeply ideological and pretty deeply ideological. But in order for somebody ideological to actually be interesting, they have to have thought through all of their positions all the way down to root level so you can have a really interesting discussion about that. And I think politicians tend to live in that mid space where they have an ideology, but they haven't thought it all the way down to the bottom. And so they want to repeat those same five points that you're talking about as opposed to get at sort of the broader conversations that lie at the root of

our politics that really are interesting. When I had Bradon we talked about kind of the big issues at the bottom of the iceberg and that stuff's interesting. You can do that but if you're always at the top of the iceberg it's very boring. It's sometimes scary to dive down to the bottom because you don't know what you'll find. You know what it'll do to your views. That's why there's not a lot of consistency among a lot of people who are in public office. It seems like conservatives have done a better job at building and cultivating audiences in the podcast space.

Because we had to. I mean, that's the actual reason. The reason is because we had to. It didn't begin that way. Like four or five years ago, people are maybe six or seven years ago, people were calling podcasting liberal talk radio. So something changed. Maybe it was Ben Shapiro.

I'll take prep for part of it, but it wasn't me only. I think what happened is that just like AM talk radio, which became a very big business in the United States, started as an offshoot of the fact that legacy media was so dominant. Podcasting started in much the same way. I mean, the reason that I got into podcasting is I was doing a talk radio show in Seattle, and I was noticing that three or four thousand people were downloading it from all over the

country. And I was like, well, if I've got that on like a local talk radio show in Seattle, maybe if I start posting this, it'll grow to a bigger audience. It kind of exploded in a way that we didn't think was going to necessarily happen. But the biggest thing about podcasting that has been, I think, such a revelation to people is that there is such a siphoned informational environment. There are not that many networks, right? You got MSNBC and you got Fox, you got CNN on the cables, and then you have the mainstream

legacy networks, and you have a few big newspapers. That's kind of it. And if you don't hear a voice there, and they don't tend to be particularly heterodox voices, if you can't get a voice there, where else are you going to get it? And podcasting offered that ability and also the immediacy of being able to react in close to real time to things. That I think was another big thing. It's something we definitely embraced in this election cycle more than we have in past election

cycles. We started doing these react series where something would break in the news and five minutes later I'd be on the air anytime a day just reacting to what was going on. And I think that that actually meets with the news cycle somehow better than the 24-7 wall-to-wall cable coverage sometimes does. So, Pree, what do you think the left needs to do differently? I mean, people are talking about it needs a Joe Rogan of the left. Yeah, no. Copycats, I don't think necessarily do very well. That goes against the entire grain of what we've been talking about, which is authenticity. If someone decides to try to manufacture in a laboratory or in this case a podcast studio, someone who sort of emulates Joe Rogan from the left,

I mean, he'll tell you and he has said, and people have said, there was a liberal Joe Rogan, it was Joe Rogan. Right? I don't know that I agree with that and I don't want people to get upset with me, but I think different voices develop in different ways. And the other point I think different voices develop in different ways.

And the other point I think that someone mentioned to me once about the difference in this business sphere, whether you're talking about cable television or podcasting, I think it's sort of similar. And I wonder what you think of this, either or both of you. Good friend once told me who was a high ranking person at Fox News. This is the thing you gotta remember about Fox News and conservative outlets is they make money and have listenership and viewership when there's a Republican in the White House because they get cheerleading.

And they get listenership and viewership when there's a Democrat in the White House because they're in opposition. And contrary to that on the left, it seems that they get a lot of listenership and viewership when there's opposition, when there's Trump or someone like Trump in the White House. And then when they have their own

guy in the White House, they kind of take it easy and they go camping. I'm curious to get your take on the media landscape as it's evolving. It seems like the most prominent voices that are forming is,

on the right, on the left, there's sort of these two echo chambers. People are in that for their algorithms, you know, the sort of fed information that they are more likely to believe in. And a traditional media that tries to position itself as more neutral in the center is shrinking in its influence. What do you think that means for our national discourse? So I think that there's a little bit too much worry over this. I think that there's a lot of talk about, oh, the legacy media, which was seeking an objective middle.

I think the reason that our industry exploded is because everybody didn't believe them. We all thought they were full of it. And when I watched MSNBC or just ABC News or 60 Minutes, I can identify the bias immediately in one particular direction. And I don't think that they're trying to be particularly objective. I think they live in their own little echo chamber. I think the thing about podcasting that's weird and what's interesting and strange and cool about the industry is that the spectrum of views is really broad.

Where do you peg Joe Rogan? Where's Joe? I mean, he endorsed Trump. He's also endorsed the economic plans of Bernie Sanders in the past. He's somebody who's very pro ayahuasca, but he's also very anti-crime. He's kind of all over the place on the ideological maps. Where do you place him? For me, I would consider myself a pretty strict down the line conservative, but conservatism

has shifted definition so many times at this point that on some points I'm now heterodox. I'm a free trader, for example, in a party that seems to be significantly more friendly to tariffs. This sort of kind of ideological diversity does exist and you're starting to see it, I would hope, on the left. I think one of the things that the left needs to do, if they do wish to have a Joe Rogan, is they actually need to allow perspectives that live outside of the sort of Nancy Pelosi wing

of the Democratic party. There needs to, like, some of my friends, I won't mention their names because then it'll get them on Trump alone left because that's the way this works. But some of my friends who are in Congress, who are on the Democratic side, are pretty heterodox in many of their views,

but they're scared sh**less to say what their views are, because they know they're gonna get burned down by their own side. Well, in podcast land, that's the exact thing that would make them popular and interesting. There's two things that I think on the liberal side, the Democratic side, and maybe some of this is, you know, is relevant to the conservative side. But a liberal hosts or center or center left hosts or whatever you want to call them, should not be excoriated for bringing on people

who are on the opposite side of the aisle. And I think on the part of some platforms, there is a worry that if I bring so and so on, are people going to be upset? Are they going to cancel their subscriptions, etc?

And also, for people who are on the left side, to go on programs, to go on podcasts, et cetera. And also for people who are on the left side, to go on programs, to go on podcasts, where the hosts are very, very different. I mentioned Pete Buttigieg once, I mentioned him a second time. He does it with respect to Fox News. I believe he does it with podcasts also.

We tried to get Pete on, I will say. When he was running for president, we really tried very hard to get him on. Because I thought he was really more fascinating at the time than he is now. It's too bad that he didn't get on. He's a smart guy, yeah. But there should be, you know,

there should be an openness on the part of everyone on every side to have people from the other side or whatever that means, you know, or adjacent sides to come on and hear people out. But you sometimes see on social media, as soon as, you know, this podcast host has this person on, why are you platforming that person? Well, that's how we get stuck in our silos.

Did you try to get Kamala Harris on your show as well? Did you know? Did we? Actually we did, okay, so my producer, my executive producer, we did issue an invite. I mean, if she wasn't gonna go on pre, she definitely wasn't gonna go on my show, that's for sure.

I think in her case, I think it was, they made, I don't know, I'm not part of the campaign, I wasn't part of the campaign. They made a determination about use of time, which we can all second guess now I don't know that it was necessarily in every case. I mean, I think they made a determination about her inability to speak off the cuff in any sort of convincing and coherent way and you saw that evidence even in interviews with mainstream media outlets where she had a producer sitting over somebody shoulder

being like, looks like time's up we got to run. What do you see is your role in the media landscape? I mean, for me, I'm a conservative. I got in this because I want to convince people in my point of view. I mean, I've never been dishonest about that. I say that openly, I've said that consistently. And what's funny is that then you'll have news garter, fact checkers be like, well, you said this because you're conservative.

I'm like, that's not a gotcha. I say that I'm conservative. Of course I'm saying it from a conservative perspective. With that said, I think one of the best ways for me to defend my conservatism is to put it up against different ideas and then ask questions of those ideas. And sometimes there may be kind of weird crossovers.

That does happen from time to time. And at other times, there's not a crossover. But in order for an ideology or any idea to really be interesting, you have to put it up against some sort of contrast. Can I just say what my goal is? So I'm not quite a political podcaster. My podcast was born of my experience.

And when I began podcasting in the fall of 2017, there was lots of legal news, there was a lot of news about the Mueller investigation, and I knew something about that, and it was in my wheelhouse. That has expanded over time to cover politics and policy issues and all sorts of other things. But I try to be myself, which is I'm not enraged,

I'm not trying to enrage other people and their podcasts that do that on the left and the right, but sort of assess as the best as I can. I have a point of view, I'm an opponent of Donald Trump, a critic of Donald Trump. I was a supporter of Joe Biden, I was a supporter of Kamala I'm an opponent of Donald Trump, a critic of Donald Trump. I was a supporter of Joe Biden, I was a supporter of Kamala Harris. I've always voted Democrat.

I voted for, I worked for Senator Schumer. But I do, as Ben says he tries to do, look at an issue, whether it's the withdrawal from Afghanistan or a crime bill or a particular course of actions taken by the special counsel, you know, sort of calmly and in measured voice, course of actions taken by the special counsel, sort of calmly and in measured voice, not too quickly, make my point of view known,

and it's not always the point of view that other people have, it's just sort of be like a sane voice, will I always get it right? Is my point of view the one to be taken as gospel? No, because I have a perspective, and I have kind of innate bias and everybody has a perspective, but I try to call it as fair as I can see it.

And I think and hope for audience members who keep coming back and for those who want to check us out, that that's what we bring, not just sort of, you know, necessarily predictable views, but a calm, rational assessment of the things that we see them. I want to ask about the economics of this new industry. The economics obviously have shaped everything. The economics of the

traditional newspaper business, let's say, over the last, you know, in the 20th century was to have as wide of an audience as possible. That's led to, in some ways, the rise of objectivity because we're just neutral. We're just telling the facts so that we can have as many eyeballs on our newspaper. We can get as big of advertising dollars as we can get. What are the economic incentives that push the industry in the way that it's forming now? I mean, I try not to be led in my viewpoint by the economic incentives.

I do think that there are some negative economic incentives for being nuanced and interesting. Meaning there's some quick and easy money to be made by saying, I'd say inflammatory conspiratorial things. I think that there's always a great audience for that. And the thing is the country's so big that you don't need that big a chunk of the American audience to have a really big audience, right?

You can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of people watching you say crazy. If because it's a really, really big country. And so I think that there is an incentive to steer into some of that sort of stuff, depending on sort of how the algorithms push it and people get very animated about that sort of thing. So if you want to talk about the JFK assassination

every night, then you'll probably do big numbers. And that's something that I'm not willing to do. Again, I got into this business because I actually care about the things that I'm saying. And the money came much later, much later. And I think that's true for pretty much everybody who takes their politics seriously. I mean, I've worked for,

I wrote a syndicated column from the time I'm 17. I started to hit like financial success point, probably around the time that we started Daily Wire, 2015. So by that time I was already 31. I've been doing it for 10, 15 years already. So there are principles that I'm not willing to sign off on just in order to make the quick buck. And again, I think that goes back to the authenticity.

The audience could sense that. If I suddenly turn and I started saying conspiratorial stuff, like people listen to my show. Some people do that, some people do that. There are people who have been excommunicated from mainstream media, I won't name any of them, who are very polemical in their podcast and it serves them well in terms of audience.

Well, Ben, in the description of your show it says, of your podcast, Ben brutally breaks down the culture and never gives an inch. Why brutal? Well, I think again that goes to, when you talk about the marketing versus the content, if you look at my stuff on YouTube, there'll be a lot of Ben Shapiro destroys with facts and logic kind of stuff. There's the clickability factor of getting people to listen to the thing, then there's

the actual thing. If you listen to the show, I think that the show is, when it says brutally, I think the idea there is that I'm not going to shade what I think is the truth regardless of what I think my audience wants to hear or what the opposing audience is going to want to hear. And again, that means that sometimes I find myself crosswise with my audience. I mean, I can think of half a dozen times that's happened over the course of the last six months, probably. But I think that that again goes to the authentic point.

By brutal, we just mean we're not shading it. We're not hiding it. It is exactly what is. I don't mean brutal. Like I'm going to just sit there. It would be boring, by the way, if I got on there and I was like all day, Kamala Harris is stupid or Joe Biden is stupid and see now. But do you think your show would be as successful if it had been kindly breaks down the culture? Of course not because people don't engage in politics in order to be kind. That's not what politics is about. I mean it was Nixon who suggested that if you're looking for sympathy, get a dog. I mean this is politics is a rough and tumble place. It has been since the days of

Machiavelli. And so this sort of notion that I'm going to break down politics in a non-exciting, boring way. I think people confuse civility with boring. And I don't think those two things are the same. I mean, again, Preet and I can be perfectly civil with one another. And we can also say stuff that is pretty raw about the politics of the other, I think. And I think that's one of the things that we've lost, actually, is the notion that brutal and non civil

are somehow they go hand in hand. I mean, if you go back to the debates that were being had between William F Buckley and Gorkha at all, it was pretty brutal. And yet they did that for several years running. The dimension on which I wish these things were judged was not level of brutality or civility, although, you know, those are interesting, but good faith, right? So if there's a very, very smart person who believes something different from me, and they don't bullshit about my argument, they present like as lawyers are trained to do, right? And I know Ben is a trained lawyer as well. And you say, I take your argument

to be X or Y, and this is why your argument is full of ****. And then they say their arguments. And if it's done brutally or uncivilly, to me that matters less than they're engaging in the argument in good faith and from their perspective. So where do you, last question, where do you see this going? Where do you see, do you think this is sort of an anomaly where we are with podcasts and the way that the media is forming? Or do you think that this is just the beginning of an even bigger change? No, I think there's a sea change in the way that media is consumed. And I think that the shifts in social media are part of that sea change.

I'm very excited that Facebook and Zuckerberg have decided to actually release the throttle on political content on the outlet. I'm hopeful that YouTube is going to do the same. I mean, I think that there's been too much jiggering of the various levers that prevent people from actually seeing the stuff they want to see. And I'm excited that that's going to happen. Plus, again, I think that the legacy media, I think that this election may have been the death knell

of legacy media's trust. I think that it was already going down. You can see this, it starts basically in 2015. It starts dipping and has never reversed. What's what's your view on where things are headed? Growth. I mean, I think until every human on the planet has a podcast, we haven't hit maximum growth. It's like no barrier to entry. You know, and the other thing that people you know,

since this is a business enterprise here, it's hard to make money in the podcast. Ben has been very fortunate, we've been very fortunate. There's some big name, Joe Rogan has been really, really fortunate. But a lot of people have really good high quality podcasts that focus on a particular issue that's of interest to them and to a constituency of people. But because of the way that ads are sold and the amount of money that companies have so far that they allocate to podcasts versus television and print and radio, I still think the heyday of podcasts as a business matter are still in the future. You know, when I first got into podcasting, I had never listened to a podcast before.

That's how arrogant I am. You know, I don't know how many ads the typical listened to a podcast before. You know, that's how arrogant I am. You know, I don't know how many ads the typical hour long podcast has. I think we have like four minutes of ads. If you go beyond four minutes, people will find someone else to listen to. Listen to any kind of radio, I don't know what the number is,

but it's a lot more than four minutes and they pay more. For whatever reason, and this is a wonderful thing, right? People love podcasts in part because they're not interrupted in the same way as talk radio is or news radio is. But that leaves a particular gap, financially and economically, between the model of radio and the model of podcasting. And I wonder if we're gonna get over that at some point,

because that would make it more lucrative for even more people to join. Great, well thank you both so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for having us. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Ben and Preet for being here today. We'll be back later this afternoon with a new episode of The Journal. Thanks for listening.

See you then. Fox News was mentioned in this episode. As a reminder, Fox News, parent company and the parent company of The Wall Street Journal share common ownership.