How Will Popular Culture Change in Trump’s Second Term?
Update: 2024-11-20
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His first term was marked by backlash and protest. But the president-elect has found new streams of embrace and approval. Guest: Joe Coscarelli.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything
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00:00:00
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00:00:06
I am Isabella Rossellini, and in each episode of "This Is Not A Beauty Podcast," I uncover stories that explain beauty's fascinating and often hidden role in modern life.
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00:00:31
One of the New York Times' podcasts,
00:00:46
your dubs and chat of music, music, and criticism, sometimes beyond that of John Caramoneca,
00:00:56
a critic of the New York Times.
00:00:58
I'm Joe Cuscarelli, a reporter at the New York Times.
00:01:01
How about that?
00:01:02
Great things to be.
00:01:04
Joe, at the beginning of this episode, we are listening to a song that I think we're going to be hearing a lot in the next four years.
00:01:10
That is God, plus America, Mar-a-Lago version.
00:01:13
This was sung a few nights ago at a gathering, as well where all the gatherings of the Republican elite and potentially post-Republican elite are hanging out,
00:01:24
Donald J.
00:01:24
Trump, the presumptive 47th president of the United States, on stage singing along Elon Musk, richest man in the world, on stage singing along, embracing America,
00:01:35
or embracing a song.
00:01:36
That's what culture is starting to look like, and maybe will look like from the next four years.
00:01:41
We have already lived through one Trump administration.
00:01:44
And there have been a lot.
00:01:45
I did, yeah, I was in my teens, maybe.
00:01:49
And there are things that I remember culturally from that administration.
00:01:53
I remember the slight hardening of the right magnification of certain corners of Nashville.
00:01:58
I remember that weird edict that all new government building should be built using classical architecture styles as opposed to modernism or postmodernism, which didn't seem to take effect.
00:02:11
How are the architects doing in the wake of the election?
00:02:13
I feel like maybe that's a two point out.
00:02:15
If you're an architect and you listen to pop gas email as a pop gas in light times dot com, let us know how you're feeling.
00:02:22
Trump is back.
00:02:23
Trump's America is back.
00:02:25
And it's got me thinking, what is culture going to look like in the second Trump administration?
00:02:31
And I mean that on two different planes.
00:02:35
One, what is the organic culture that comes from that world?
00:02:40
What does it look like?
00:02:41
What does it sound like?
00:02:42
What are the values?
00:02:43
What are the cultural touch points?
00:02:45
The second thing is what of that seeps across ideological divides and actually spreads?
00:02:55
And I, I love to use the term mainstreamed because I think you could contend potentially that the mainstream is that culture.
00:03:06
That is what is the centrist culture happening in American culture right now.
00:03:10
I don't know the answer to that question.
00:03:13
I imagine it's a moving target, but it is something to consider.
00:03:17
And I think often in the media, there is this presumption that if people are talking about it in certain media outlets, that is the center of culture, popular culture,
00:03:28
ideological approaches or whatnot.
00:03:30
And maybe that's not always the case.
00:03:32
And this is going to be an interesting four years for seeing what the give and take is across the ideological spectrum, your top line thoughts about the give and take.
00:03:46
My top line thought is that often the culture of a presidential administration, a moment in time, is hard to see at the moment while it's happening.
00:03:59
Often is only clear in the rear view and takes a while, I think, to really take hold to see it.
00:04:07
To see it, in the sense that there's a universe in which what we're talking about now happening because Trump won the election was actually what was happening in these past few years under Joe Biden.
00:04:22
Finally, manifest.
00:04:23
And that this is that the election results, you know, that map where all the arrows, all the red arrows are pointing in one direction, except like in the Atlanta suburbs,
00:04:34
weirdly.
00:04:34
And my Colorado.
00:04:35
Yeah.
00:04:36
Yeah.
00:04:37
That is.
00:04:38
That's, that's the culture that I would like to hear from the music critic of the Denver, what's the Denver newspaper, the post, the Denver Post.
00:04:47
I'd love to hear from the music critic of the Denver Post.
00:04:49
Just see what the vibes are like in that area.
00:04:51
Right.
00:04:52
And so I think like what we lived under in the Joe Biden administration was actually a representation of Trump culture.
00:05:02
You know what I mean?
00:05:06
Looking back, New York magazine, Vulture, they did a great package, sort of in the lead-up to the election about what they called Obamacore.
00:05:16
And it was only in 2024, maybe, that you could really see what it was like between 2008 and 2016.
00:05:25
This, you know, the time of Glee in 1989.
00:05:28
I thought a really evocative one was like Louis CK playing a cop on Parks and Recreation.
00:05:34
Like there's no more like Obama era line than that, you know, but it, but it, but you need to look at it in the rear view.
00:05:43
So I think it's helpful that we had a Trump administration, then we had a break in which that culture was dormant or silent majority-ish.
00:05:54
And now we'll get to see it rear its head back up in a more, let's call it, you know, forceful way.
00:06:03
Right.
00:06:04
And so I think that a lot of this stuff has been bubbling for a really long time, all of which is to say, meaning Morgan Wallen.
00:06:10
Well, sure.
00:06:11
Of course.
00:06:12
It's been really popular for a really long time.
00:06:14
For a really long time.
00:06:15
Okay.
00:06:16
So I'm interested in, like I said, that level of culture, which is sort of organic to right leading communities, but I'm also interested in these moments where they cross out into these broader spaces.
00:06:27
So we're recording this on a Monday yesterday was a Sunday, which was the NFL.
00:06:33
And there were, I believe, three instances of a receiver catching a touchdown pass and then doing the Trump dance as the celebration,
00:06:43
the Trump little shimmy, this kind of like arithmic rhythmic shimmy that he does, John Jones, the UFC fight, same thing, had a knockout, did the Trump dance,
00:06:55
there was also the Nick Bosa thing, which was before the election.
00:06:58
Yes.
00:06:59
And also wearing the MAGA hat.
00:07:00
And I was maybe less surprised on a micro level that someone like a receiver would do that dance.
00:07:07
I mean, you know, everything's a meme now, like that things have been largely stripped of.
00:07:11
Do you see the Reagan frame by frame recreate?
00:07:14
Yes.
00:07:15
I did.
00:07:16
Very good.
00:07:17
So I was a political, what I mean, you know, except it's pro, it's pro break dancing.
00:07:24
It's pro, it's pro keeping the culture alive of break dancing.
00:07:28
So I wasn't necessarily spicy people doing the dance, but apparently at least some of the media operations of the football teams either did not share clips of that or there was at least one example of someone being asked about the dance in a post game,
00:07:45
breast conference, and then that could have got disappeared a memory hole from the internet, right?
00:07:49
And being being sort of shoved away like press conferences of right.
00:07:53
And so that to me, these ruptures are interesting, there's two ruptures.
00:07:59
One, it's the rupture of a dance breaking out into a ostensibly nonpartisan space.
00:08:07
We can say the NFL is partisan or not.
00:08:09
But let's say for the purpose of this conversation, it's a nonpartisan space.
00:08:14
And then the corporate interest of the NFL or the individual team say, actually, no, we're going to, we're going to tie this up before it gets ugly.
00:08:22
How often are they going to be able to do that?
00:08:23
It's like they're every team is going to do that every week for the rest of the season.
00:08:28
Even the attempts, I mean, this is how you know that that drum culture is ascendant because even the attempts to be like, no, no, no, we don't normalize that are fewer and further between and they're less forceful than they used to be.
00:08:42
I think like the Bosa example is an interesting one.
00:08:45
You know, we're talking about the San Francisco 49ers, but you don't need to know the specifics of what's going on in these ports to take the cultural impact away.
00:08:53
But basically, there's a post-gabin conference a couple of weeks ago ahead of the election.
00:08:57
And he pops on the screen and is basically photobombing with his make America great again, hat.
00:09:03
He gets a fine for that.
00:09:04
And then Trump wins the election and then he does the dance to basically be like, you can't stop me.
00:09:09
Yes.
00:09:10
Like we won.
00:09:11
Like what are you going to do if this would have been on the, if the shoe would have been on the other foot, I think he's arguing or at least insinuating, like, I never would have heard about this,
00:09:22
but you can no longer act like this stuff is off limits.
00:09:24
And I think that that's a huge, that's a shift.
00:09:28
And that's a shift.
00:09:29
And that's like the turn in the argument, which is, you know, we've heard a lot of conversation.
00:09:33
We're going to get into preparing on podcasts.
00:09:36
A lot of conversation about platforming versus de platforming should, should liberals be going on Fox News should liberal candidates be going on Joe Rogan to liberals need their own Joe Rogan or do they need to,
00:09:48
they need to interact with the Rogan we have at home.
00:09:52
Like, you know, we have Joe Rogan on YouTube can go on, can go on Joe Rogan.
00:09:58
And I think like, do you think AOC should come on podcast?
00:10:00
Um, sure.
00:10:01
And I think that so should JD Vance, great, who famously had a lot of playlists and all sorts of emo faces, maybe a big garden steak guy.
00:10:10
Yeah.
00:10:11
According to his old blog.
00:10:12
Wow.
00:10:13
Yeah.
00:10:14
Yeah.
00:10:15
So anytime, both either both together, together, but I think that that, you know, if you think back to 2016, like right after Trump won, remember, like, Mike Pence went to go see Hamilton and there's like a huge blow up.
00:10:26
Yeah.
00:10:27
No fascist.
00:10:28
They spoke to him.
00:10:29
Yeah.
00:10:30
Like from the stage.
00:10:31
Like this really happened like, this really happened.
00:10:35
And then Trump demanded they apologize for breaking script to address the fact that Mike Pence was there.
00:10:40
Well, it cares about the integrity of art.
00:10:42
Yeah.
00:10:43
Classic.
00:10:44
Classic.
00:10:45
Classic.
00:10:46
But I, I just think like those, those are no longer, those conversations are from eight years ago.
00:10:52
And I think that we're going to have to rapidly move into a new phase.
00:10:56
That's okay.
00:10:57
Let's talk about some of the things that led to this softening, right?
00:11:02
One thing that I was thinking about a lot looking at and forgive, I literally can't believe I'm going to use this phrase, but like looking at media Twitter in the months leading up to the election, one thing that I feel like I was seeing more and more were people engaging with Trump less as obviously a figure they do not wish to be president.
00:11:20
And more of dare I say a softer figure, someone who they were trying to, they were admitting to the comedy in they were, they were attuned to his ticks in a way that suggested they were less maybe preoccupied in the immediate short term with policy and more and willing to see him as a figure of culture.
00:11:43
That softening felt that that level of discourse felt very different to me than the conversation around him.
00:11:50
Certainly during his first term or even leading up to his first term.
00:11:53
Yeah, and I think that's another thing that was happening, especially after the 2020 election and there was a moment which I think a lot of the political coverage has harped on where it felt like the left had vanquished Trump and that now in the past and that now a lot of liberals could say,
00:12:15
you know, like now they were like, I got to admit, pretty funny, some, some good means, you know, at seven, it's marginal, like watch the Christmas clip, like over and over again,
00:12:25
without feeling guilty about it because we're no longer normalizing.
00:12:29
Right.
00:12:30
It was the notion that the Trump presidency was a glitch in American history and normalcy had been restored.
00:12:38
And like you said, you can look in the rear view and say, okay, I can take, I can cherry pick something that maybe makes me feel a little bit better about that time rather than an acknowledgement that actually,
00:12:49
potentially the first and now the incoming second term presidency represents something much broader for democracy and for the state of the United States and also recalibrate who is maintaining the power of cultural decision-making.
00:13:03
Right.
00:13:04
So that, to me, I'm most interested, I think, in the coming months, especially of the, I guess maybe the term would be leakage.
00:13:13
What is the leakage from MAGA universe into everyone else who was saying, I wish to have no part of this and then maybe softened slightly.
00:13:24
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00:13:55
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00:13:57
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00:13:59
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00:14:57
Trump and the campaign seemingly leaned into this.
00:15:01
Let's just let him be a meme.
00:15:02
Yes.
00:15:03
Thing, and we're lent the stage on which to do that by a sort of just subterranean alternative mainstream.
00:15:13
Also, I would actually say not subterranean, I would say ultra-terranean, you know, to the thing that when I was looking up the numbers that I had, and I wrote a piece about Manusphere broadcasters and Trump's appearances on those shows,
00:15:27
partially because I felt like people were alluding to them, but had not actually watched them.
00:15:31
I thought it was important to watch them and say, well, what are we seeing?
00:15:35
And what am I seeing?
00:15:37
And therefore, what are millions and millions and millions of Americans seeing?
00:15:40
That was important.
00:15:42
But one of the things that I had in a version of Peace and I took out was after each show, I was just like, you know, X million followers or X million views.
00:15:51
And when you look at those numbers, they don't seem so subterranean.
00:15:56
Or maybe subterranean in the sense that they don't appear on Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel or they don't appear on NPR or so and so forth.
00:16:05
But from a size perspective, it is an alternative media.
00:16:11
And there was that, I'm not remembering who said this, but someone on the right one side, the night of the election sort of was like looking over like the daily wire and all these folks.
00:16:21
And he was like, you were the media now.
00:16:24
And here we are in this building and being like, I don't know, but that's really like that's a potentially legitimate and viable perspective.
00:16:33
And so it's not subterranean.
00:16:35
It's altering into me.
00:16:38
And those shows have millions of followers and also hundreds of millions of aggregated views.
00:16:45
And one of the things that we talked about a couple of months ago on popcast, the Harris campaign went in a totally different direction.
00:16:52
The Harris campaign was basically like, when was it last sunshine in America?
00:16:57
Who was famous?
00:16:58
Let's let's remind people of that.
00:17:00
Let's remind people of Oprah.
00:17:03
Let's remind people.
00:17:04
I mean, you only need to remind me on a Taylor Swift.
00:17:06
But let's bring those old, they might need to remind people of Katy Perry.
00:17:12
But let's bring people back to that feeling.
00:17:14
And then if we can access that feeling and trigger it, then maybe they'll apply that feeling to this candidate.
00:17:21
And obviously he's denied access to any of that.
00:17:25
He doesn't know none of those people would take him.
00:17:26
Seriously, none of them would take the phone call.
00:17:29
You know, his celebrity ecosystem is a scatter shot as it were.
00:17:36
And we talked about some of the people who did, you know, gangster rappers.
00:17:40
Yes.
00:17:41
Has been gangster rappers in a lot of cases, but also present day drill artists, you know, people who are pardoned by him, I like black,
00:17:51
you know, somebody who loves his attention and maybe isn't getting as much of it as he used to, like a little pump or a walk of black flame.
00:18:00
Like these, these things are happening.
00:18:01
You always have the kid rocks and the sort of, you know, extra outlaw, modern country stars.
00:18:09
Outlaw, trademark.
00:18:10
Yeah.
00:18:11
Yeah.
00:18:12
But I wonder what you make of people who want to look back over cultural trends from the last two to four years and say that actually this was proof.
00:18:22
You know, you see this tongue in cheek, but also earnestly where everyone's like, we should have known when Beyonce went country.
00:18:28
We should have known when the Hock Tua girl became a celebrity and then all of a sudden had one of the most popular podcasts in the world.
00:18:37
We should have known, right?
00:18:41
We should have known when Morgan Wallen ruled the charts, even though he's cast to a, yeah, like post Malone going cut like were these harbingers?
00:18:52
I mean, even the popularity of UFC, like you mentioned John Jones and this event over the weekend where Trump, Elon, Kid Rock, Dana White, they're all together and they're saying like here,
00:19:03
here we are at the world.
00:19:05
Like UFC isn't more popular this weekend than it was two weekends ago.
00:19:09
Right.
00:19:10
I think a lot about the oxygen that Trump and his compatriots was denied in the post 2020.
00:19:20
It's not as if you know how like normal politics goes where it's like the Republicans lose, but it's like everybody gets a soft landing, they get their CNN commentary job, even like one or two on MSNBC,
00:19:31
a bunch go to Fox News, people go lobby.
00:19:34
It's like everybody has soft landing.
00:19:36
Trump organization in 2016, 2020, no one was like welcoming those people with open arms.
00:19:41
I mean, obviously some of them end up on the old standard networks.
00:19:44
But by and large, a lot of people who Trump employed people were saying, no, no, no, we're keeping this an arms like that.
00:19:49
And so what happened is they started speaking out explicitly against him.
00:19:53
Right.
00:19:54
Exactly.
00:19:55
Yes.
00:19:56
And so what happened is at the same time, there's like a cycle of funding of right wing politically focused media outlets.
00:20:08
There is the expansion of the podcast space where you need no buy in in order to start just making a YouTube show, everybody should have a YouTube show as far as I'm concerned.
00:20:17
And so all of a sudden, there is oxygen for those figures.
00:20:23
And from the outside looking in it might have seemed like, oh, well, that's like the dying, that's the signs of a dying empire.
00:20:30
It was a glitch and these are the last gasps of the glitch.
00:20:34
And instead what it was was the aggregation of a lot of loose energy that needed a home.
00:20:41
And then it formalized it like you can think what you want about the Rogan interview of Trump, the Theo van interview of Trump, the bus and with the boys interview with Trump.
00:20:51
What that did is it put Trump in front of millions of people.
00:20:54
It didn't, it wasn't random and it wasn't arbitrary.
00:20:59
There are millions of people in those spaces who were there receptive and waiting for a message from this person.
00:21:06
That's why those things worked.
00:21:08
And to me, as far as like, Beyonce going country, postman going country, I'm a little less in on that as far as like the temperature of the United States of America.
00:21:18
But I do think like from a U.S., like all of this stuff existed.
00:21:23
These slots existed, they just didn't have a key.
00:21:27
And Trump comes along and says, I can provide the key.
00:21:31
And then all of a sudden, all that stuff looks almost as legitimate as all the things that people are trained to think of as legitimate.
00:21:38
I think in the wake of 2016, there was a real moment of reckoning and looking in the mirror by mainstream media, the New York Times included or chief among them.
00:21:50
So it was sort of like, we need to get into the diners, we need to get into the coal mines.
00:21:55
This is where, honestly, where JD Vance came from.
00:21:58
This is how Billie Eiligee was held up as a sort of window into this thing that we ignored.
00:22:05
And that felt like it was on right or wrong, agree with it as a tactic or not.
00:22:11
That felt like it was on a citizen level.
00:22:15
And it felt, you know, like liberals on the coast were like, we just didn't even know that these people existed, like we never opened our eyes or our hearts to them.
00:22:27
And I think, and it was quite, it was heavy, there was a gravitas to this sort of soul searching.
00:22:34
Again, whether or not you think it was earnest or valid or not.
00:22:40
And now I think what you're seeing is a little bit less of a, we didn't know these people existed to, we didn't take their media and their culture seriously.
00:22:49
Yes.
00:22:50
Correct.
00:22:51
And now instead of saying we weren't aware of these people, we were like liberals are saying we shouldn't have written off the spaces in which they act silly.
00:23:02
Well, this, whether it's a podcast, yeah, or an ultimate fighting champion.
00:23:07
And this is, this was sort of the main thing that I was most interested in in trying to watch these shows is I did not go into what, let's, all right,
00:23:17
so I'm going to list all the ones I watched.
00:23:19
They were actually a couple of years ago.
00:23:20
I didn't watch the one with the undertaker, who knows, my bad.
00:23:23
Yeah, where, where's your wrestling?
00:23:25
You have a blind, you have a huge blind, sorry, I'm taking a six months sabbatical to school up on professional wrestling.
00:23:31
I mean, Vince McMahon is proto Trump, yes, yes.
00:23:36
So I need to be better prepared for the next four years.
00:23:39
So the Joe Rogan experience, fear of on show, it's called this past weekend, Andrew Schilds is shows called flagrant, the milk boys did a full send episode.
00:23:48
And they also did a vlog on Trump force one, busing with the boys, which is a pair of ex football players, break 50, which is Bryson, who's like one of the best current golfers.
00:24:01
And then of course, the Aden Ross live stream, I didn't go into any of those things expecting policy conversation.
00:24:07
There were like bits and pieces of policy conversation and one thing about Trump is, he does go on autopilot quite a lot.
00:24:13
So I think if he senses an opening to do the stump speech, yeah, like essentially the week of the stump speech.
00:24:19
Right.
00:24:20
And especially like a weakness dare I say in the host, he can just steamroll with stump.
00:24:25
But I was curious.
00:24:26
And I think the thing that really sent me down this path was the Theo Vaughn episode.
00:24:31
And the clips that were circulating, I'm, you know, I truly think that, you know, you're loath to be like any one specific moment like tilts the election because that's like that's not how elections work.
00:24:40
But the conversation with Theo Vaughn had with Trump about cocaine use and even just drugs and alcohol.
00:24:46
Yeah.
00:24:47
Just in general.
00:24:48
And Theo Vaughn talking about how they're something in the cocaine that's that's causing a rattle.
00:24:52
And it'll have you on your porch like an owl and Trump seeming like genuinely concerned and destabilized.
00:25:00
And maybe like 10% like why am I sitting here?
00:25:03
I think that this is not what I'm supposed to be doing, but also like Trump's family.
00:25:08
There's family history with the issues quite gingerly using it as a way to tease out elements of Trump's biography that he often glosses over.
00:25:17
He talks about his brother being an alcoholic and is, you know, his relationship with his father.
00:25:22
But Theo Vaughn was like teasing more and more out of him by honestly using the deflective tactics of a comedian with Theo Vaughn is.
00:25:30
Yes.
00:25:31
So I thought Trump was maybe even using the opportunity to look and be a little reflective for himself and say, I don't get to talk to people who have experienced this,
00:25:42
this much.
00:25:44
And I actually do have a curiosity about what that was like, what that might have been like for my brother and what that might, what that might have been like for this individual in front of me.
00:25:51
Let me at least ask you don't see Trump ask a lot of questions.
00:25:55
And one of the interesting things about these shows, particularly Theo Vaughn and to a lesser degree flagrant and the bottom of the boy show is Trump asked a lot of questions.
00:26:06
And you don't necessarily experience him as like a person of curiosity when you see speeches and when you see the tweets or the truth social posts, you don't experience him that way.
00:26:16
But it was quite striking that in moments, there was a softening, a relaxing of the guard and relaxing of the stump speech and then a tiny bit of curiosity comes out.
00:26:27
And I think if you are a young person, probably for this case, mostly young men watching this, that's that version of Trump is your that's your primary entry point.
00:26:39
You're seeing that.
00:26:40
You're not seeing a person on stage delivering rants.
00:26:44
You're not seeing a person on stage saying things that a lot of people find politically very, very itchy and hard to and hard to work with.
00:26:51
You're seeing a person who can hang with the guys and that is what I think the aggregate effect of these shows was is it showed a new generation of people.
00:27:03
He's just like us.
00:27:05
That's an interesting wrinkle because I do continue to find even in these bases, Trump to be not actually one of the guys.
00:27:14
He's quite close to all.
00:27:16
He's quite.
00:27:17
He's great, you know, he's he's quite unique, you know, there are just as many people who will point to his love of like Les Mis and what like he definitely knows more about Les Mis than he knows about NFL football.
00:27:33
Yes.
00:27:34
But he may know more about golf than he knows about Les Mis, although golf, I think is is where he is, where he does have a lot in common with with these with the common,
00:27:44
yeah, the common bro.
00:27:46
I also think that it's there is an awkward fit for him there because he's just a weird guy.
00:27:52
And I think there's a lot of weird guys in this new coalition in this cohort.
00:27:58
And I think it's not a coincidence that it dovetails with comedy.
00:28:02
And the thing that I think they haven't common and this brings us back to the question of what was culture during the Trump term and the in between Biden term and now again.
00:28:11
And I think a lot of what these people were responding to is being told that they couldn't say things.
00:28:17
And I think that that's where that's the the most obvious common causes between a bunch of aspiring and or successful stand up comedians.
00:28:29
And Donald Trump.
00:28:30
Yes.
00:28:31
Another aspiring stand up comedians.
00:28:32
That's true.
00:28:33
True.
00:28:34
Actually though.
00:28:35
And I think that that middle ground and and that's where you bring in a lot of disaffected men who maybe don't even have that much interest in politics, but are are saying,
00:28:46
you know, Tony Hinchcliffe before the election in the Minnesota Garden Rally making a bad joke about Puerto Rico.
00:28:54
Like that as much as that might have alienated voters.
00:28:58
I think it just as often brings people in to say, ah, finally like this guy says whatever he wants, he gives us the leeway to say things we used to be able to say.
00:29:13
And that now liberals want us to stop saying.
00:29:15
So I do wonder if one of the things we've seen in this sort of retraction and expansion of of culture in the identity politics era is that this next Trump term is going to be a time when anyone can say anything or do it like there are there are there are fewer guardrails or self-imposed guardrails right about who can say what and how.
00:29:44
It's Melissa Clark from New York Times cooking and I'm in the kitchen with some of our team.
00:29:47
Nikita Richardson.
00:29:48
What are you making for Thanksgiving this year?
00:29:50
I'm making the cheesy hassle back potato gratin featuring layers of thinly cut potatoes.
00:29:55
Very easy, but it's a real showstopper.
00:29:58
Genevieve Co.
00:29:59
What about you?
00:30:00
I'm actually doing a mushroom wellington puff pastry wrapped around this delicious savory mushroom filling arguably as stunning if not more so than a turkey.
00:30:08
No matter what kind of Thanksgiving you're cooking, you can find the recipes you need at nytcooking.com/thanksgiving.
00:30:15
And I also wonder that the sort of 2.0 of that is if I'm a programming executive at Netflix or NBC or whatever,
00:30:25
am I going to look at, I got to replace Kimmel in 3 years.
00:30:30
I got to replace Fallon in 5 years like am I looking at one of these guys?
00:30:34
My looking at Shultz, my looking at Vaughn to take over accounts like that and saying effectively you can do a version of whatever it is you are already doing is that really where things are going.
00:30:48
That to me is a bit of a head scratch.
00:30:50
I wonder this came up in a meeting that we had here last week where talking about like the aesthetics of the YouTube guys and someone was asking me in the meeting like did I think the aesthetics of the YouTube of the YouTubers would change as more eyeballs went to them and more money rolled in and so and so forth.
00:31:07
And I was like no, I actually think the bigger thing is I think mainstream outlets, mainstream cable broadcast are going to say, well, these other people are getting way more attention than us at a far lower budget.
00:31:20
Why are we spending all this money?
00:31:22
Actually we should like change our PNLs and figure out how to make things that are feel more low-fi and feel more approachable.
00:31:28
I think that's much more likely than the other way around.
00:31:32
Don't you think that those people are also taking from something like a vice?
00:31:38
Which I think, you mean the vice, which I think occupies an interesting space like back to the Obama era, you sent me a link earlier from Semaphore in which they were saying that Shane Smith,
00:31:51
the founder of ICE, who's trying to make a comeback, wants to bring conservatives onto his show and is telling them like no, no, no, like that liberal dance we were doing,
00:32:02
like that was just for show.
00:32:03
Like we were I was a Disney.
00:32:04
Yeah, that was true.
00:32:05
That was for our corporate partners.
00:32:07
Like we've always been more freewheeling than of course another co-founder of ICE.
00:32:11
The founder of the Proud Boys, but I do think there was a lot of that DIY energy and spirit in what might have once been considered the liberal media.
00:32:23
And then it was co-opted or borrowed or whatever and the left slipped back into glossy mainstream zeitgeists,
00:32:36
the stuff we're talking about and sort of left seeded that ground to the right.
00:32:41
And I think that's a lot of what you've seen cheerleading on the right is like we became, we're the punks.
00:32:47
We're the cool, we have, you don't have a monopoly on cool or fame anymore.
00:32:52
That's our stuff.
00:32:53
And I think you're seeing a big exhale from even the people who wanted to exist in both places, the NFL players, who thought okay, we play in the NFL.
00:33:04
This is a huge, jingoistic, billion dollar pro-military corporation, but also it says end racism in the end zone.
00:33:13
So I have to be on both sides of these lines.
00:33:16
And now I think you're having a lot of people, you know, call it what it is, like a mask-off moment, where they say, oh, like I thought I had to keep this stuff to myself, but in fact,
00:33:27
I don't.
00:33:28
And now, and we see that in the streets.
00:33:30
Well, this reminds me of a TikTok.
00:33:34
I saw the other day of a film by a guy who was walking the streets in New York wearing a mag-ass.
00:33:38
And like, you know, we walked the streets in New York quite a bit.
00:33:40
We don't really see mag-ass that much, certainly not prior to two weeks ago.
00:33:45
And he's filming, and I can't, I assume it's surfed, ticiously.
00:33:48
He's filming.
00:33:49
People are like giving him fist bombs and sort of being like, ah, finally, you know, it's like it goes back to the guy, the meme on the plane, where the guy obviously wants people to comment on this.
00:33:57
Are they sure?
00:33:58
Yes.
00:33:59
So there was that.
00:34:01
And then there was another video I saw of kind of like the kind of pickup truck flying to Trump flags that you would see on social media from the south or the Midwest,
00:34:13
but driving through the heart of Los Angeles and people like honking at it and so on and so forth.
00:34:18
Mask-off is, I think, the right phrase for it.
00:34:20
It's it's people who now feel emboldened.
00:34:24
I also imagine part of the emboldening has to do with a lot of the politics of the last year of what's been happening in the Middle East and people being vociferous on both sides and and that sort of spilling out into larger political discourse.
00:34:38
It feels like it's all of a piece.
00:34:41
Remember Kanye West?
00:34:45
Japan is lovely this time of year.
00:34:46
I wonder what you thought to the extent that you watched of both the aesthetics and the interviewing skills or styles of the people who do these podcasts.
00:34:57
I think the lack of professionalism is often helpful.
00:35:03
For sure.
00:35:04
Whether you're talking about Rogan, you know, I've watched many hours of Rogan over many years.
00:35:10
Good time for me.
00:35:11
Get some neurogum out.
00:35:14
Much like much like a Mark Marin who often seems under-prepared.
00:35:18
Yes.
00:35:19
But because of the vibe that they've fostered in the room and because of the sort of naivete of the questioning and the windingness of the conversation,
00:35:32
unending, you know, this is not, we need to get our 15 minutes and you need to get out of here to get our next interview.
00:35:39
This is, let's luxuriate in our shared lack of knowledge and various subjects.
00:35:46
Be lost to guests.
00:35:47
Be lost to guests.
00:35:48
Yes.
00:35:49
I think that that is an interview style that has taken over and, you know, you're like, "That guy can do it.
00:35:56
That guy doesn't really know anything."
00:35:57
Like, I think the O'Von's lack of training and professionalism helps them.
00:36:02
Yeah.
00:36:03
It's an asset and it gets more out of especially people who are wily and suspicious of journalists, frankly.
00:36:12
Right.
00:36:13
And so the two that I was most fascinated by, weirdly, I probably haven't watched as much Rogan as you, but I was weirdly, I don't want to say let down, but I sort of felt like I could see all the moves coming with Rogan.
00:36:26
But the two that I was most fascinated by structurally were The O'Von and Andrew Schultz.
00:36:32
Andrew Schultz's show is the most like a conventional talk show.
00:36:37
It's called Flagrant.
00:36:39
He has a sidekick on his side.
00:36:41
He's got two silent guys on the other couch flanking the guest.
00:36:46
I was like, "It's a must-have nightmare for the Secret Service.
00:36:49
He's got people on every angle blocking Trump."
00:36:53
And Schultz is an incredibly polished stand-up, like rhythmically very polished.
00:37:01
The thing about The O'Von is he's so like he is a rhythmic personified.
00:37:07
Andrew Schultz is not.
00:37:08
Andrew Schultz is very, very polished, but also because of that polished and because he's not particularly scared to go at controversial things, I felt like he was the person who was of everyone,
00:37:18
even more than Rogan, most willing kind of like look Trump in the eye and kind of almost be like, "This thing that you said is like maybe it's BS, but I want to ask you about it anyway."
00:37:28
And I thought that was interesting because I don't think anybody ever talks to Trump like that, but I think fundamentally he wasn't trying to extract something politically from Trump that is not out of line with some of the other shows that we were talking about today.
00:37:43
I was very, very struck because I thought he was very present and I thought he acknowledged Trump's foibles and then in a comedic way, wove them into a sometimes serious line of questioning.
00:37:54
The O'Von's interview does the exact opposite.
00:37:58
The O'Von is truly, I did not know which neuron was going to fire next and I think you saw this.
00:38:06
Like I also watched the Bernie Sanders episode, I also watched the JD Vance episode.
00:38:09
They're all fascinating and they're fascinating because if you're a career politician and you're used to conversations taking an expected line.
00:38:18
You look at the person across me, you know who they are, roughly know what their outlet is about, roughly know what they stand for or what they're curious about.
00:38:25
You're almost prepared to answer the question without even being there mentally.
00:38:29
The O'Von's brain is moving in so many different directions and an unstable way and I think it forced people to soften their shoulders and answer maybe dare I say truthfully in some places.
00:38:43
Yeah, I do wonder if there's sort of misguided attempt to think ah in fact like this is what we need to get more out of Trump like if we're if we want to be a mainstream media that engages with these type of figures,
00:38:58
maybe we shouldn't be adversarial and we should present us friendly and then that gives them plenty of rope, you know that they can they can be comfortable with saying these things,
00:39:10
but I think if then your goal is to hold them to account for the things that they say or the factual inaccuracies that come out in the process, I think like we've also seen that that that's not happening.
00:39:23
Yeah, like there's no it's it's not that Trump got so loose on these podcasts that then he said things that were then held against him like I think what it's dispossession, it's the dispossitional thing that you don't usually see it's not the it's not the substance and the policy and maybe it's audience,
00:39:41
but I also think it's it's telling that Trump did how many of these interviews a dozen yeah, probably a dozen of the last six months didn't seem to make a single gap in any of them that had any real burn in the mainstream media like never none of this but other than the fact of it of their existence none of this became a news cycle in and of itself in part because he's so inundated the world.
00:40:05
There's so much white, but like it's interesting that he didn't it wasn't a trap door, it didn't prove these places did not prove to be a trap door, but also they weren't asking him about trap door things by and large like to hear the I mean,
00:40:18
that's never stopped.
00:40:19
No, of course, fair, but it's like hearing Andrew Andrew shills say the words of the Abraham accord and I was like, what like that's that's very much an outlier moment in all these shows and and Trump kind of runs a rough shot.
00:40:32
I mean, this happened with Aden Ross for sure this happened with the bus and with the boys guys where these are not people who are in a position to have a sophisticated political conversation.
00:40:43
And so even just like bringing up a political topic, there's no whatever Trump's going to say to them leading back into stump is not going to be radically different than what he would say anywhere else.
00:40:55
We talked about this a bit last time we touched on this subject as far as the musicians and who was lining up behind Harris and who was lining up behind Trump and why.
00:41:04
And I do wonder and think it's important to note that these people don't see what they're doing as journalism.
00:41:10
They see what they're doing as content creators.
00:41:12
Yes, it's right.
00:41:13
Exactly.
00:41:14
And Trump is primarily a content creator himself and they see in him what they see in one another, which is good content and ratings and ratings.
00:41:27
And they know that he and his world are a path to eyeballs bad ratings for them and paradoxically great ratings for him.
00:41:35
And I think Aden Ross paying Playboy Cardi to show up on his stream is not really any different than Donald Trump.
00:41:44
He's been in buying Trump a cyber truck.
00:41:46
Yeah.
00:41:46
And these are these are both people who are going to send the view counter into the stratosphere.
00:41:52
Yeah.
00:41:53
Regardless of what they do.
00:41:54
I mean, this is the other thing.
00:41:56
It's like even though Playboy Cardi Aden Ross was a huge disaster, he got more burn out of it being a disaster than he would have if he just had a normal conversation with him.
00:42:07
So I think there is presidential middle of the art for Playboy Cardi.
00:42:10
Is that what you're saying?
00:42:13
Yeah.
00:42:14
Yes.
00:42:14
Yes.
00:42:14
Eventually, if we have something to do with that.
00:42:18
And it's interesting because all of this dovetails with another event that happened over the weekend, which is not actually Trump culture in any explicit way.
00:42:31
But the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, I think live on Netflix.
00:42:36
However, many dozens of millions of viewers more than the World Series.
00:42:41
I'm sure more than the NBA Finals, I'm sure.
00:42:43
And that is the same strain, like that making its way to becoming the marquee culture and sporting event of the month,
00:42:57
the year, whatever it is.
00:42:59
Yeah.
00:42:59
It's the same current in culture.
00:43:03
Yeah.
00:43:03
Even if it's not explicitly right wing.
00:43:07
Yeah.
00:43:07
I was texting with our colleague Jacob Gallagher.
00:43:10
He went to Complex Con this weekend.
00:43:12
We pray for Jacob and a safe and speedy return.
00:43:15
And I'll read you the text because I was texting with him about like a certain kind of streamer bro.
00:43:21
And I won't name who he was talking about.
00:43:23
But I was just like, yeah, there's a whole generation of famous dudes who lives are activation to activation, tussle to tussle.
00:43:31
And that to me feels like, you know, Jake Paul is the potentially the inventor of that guy, right?
00:43:38
Starting as like a relatively harmless YouTuber, leaning into pranks, leaning into diversity, yeah, leaning into controversy, turning into both a mogul,
00:43:48
also someone whose primary public facing thing is monetizing violence, right?
00:43:54
And that being absolutely emblematic of everything that we are seeing now bubble up from this part of the media sphere.
00:44:05
And I guess, did you see Paul Tyson, both as that and also some weird like microcosm of like the Trump era,
00:44:15
officially vanquishing like the Clinton and Obama eras.
00:44:20
Or is that too, is that too both too dark and also too deep?
00:44:24
Talk, talk me through that a little bit.
00:44:26
Like obviously like you look at Mike Tyson, you look at this man who on his best days would absolutely wipe the floor with Jake Paul,
00:44:37
like absolutely no, no question to me.
00:44:40
But being kind of like stubborn and rigid and saying, I'm going to hold on.
00:44:44
I still wish to prove myself.
00:44:46
I still feel like I can, I have a message that people need to hear, even if that message is that you do not need to have a legacy.
00:44:53
And you say it's like a 13 year old interviewer that we all die and end up as dust, which you know, real spit.
00:45:00
But and then Jake Paul saying, number one, you your history, Mike Tyson, your history, your legacy, that's real.
00:45:09
But also means nothing to me.
00:45:11
You know what also means nothing to me.
00:45:13
Boxings like sense of decorum, the sweet science, any of this like none of that means anything to me.
00:45:20
I simply wish to go out, be driven out in like a hydraulic car, wag my tongue at you and walk home with $40 million for taking like the softest of fun,
00:45:31
the softest of beatings.
00:45:32
Like, is that not reflective of a larger sea change in the type of culture that we are going to be seeing moving forward?
00:45:40
I think it's all reality television.
00:45:42
And in the same way that it's all wrestling, it's all reality television.
00:45:46
It's all that's like, it's content.
00:45:47
It's not sport.
00:45:48
It's not politics.
00:45:50
It's content.
00:45:51
And I think content can succeed or it can fail based on whatever valence people want to project on to it.
00:45:59
Yeah.
00:46:00
But I think what would Norman Maylor have done with Jake Paul Mike Tyson?
00:46:05
He would have written the crap.
00:46:07
You know, like he just just like that, that's.
00:46:11
Yeah.
00:46:11
But I think that if anything, it's it's about a posture.
00:46:17
And I think the posture that people want in their art for lack of a better term.
00:46:22
Is art still permitted?
00:46:24
Anyone else?
00:46:25
In their entertainment has art not been banned in 2025?
00:46:29
I think what people want in their entertainment is a sense of fearlessness.
00:46:35
And I think that that's what they see in Trump and what we're likely to see in the work that comes out in this next Trump administration is if not a total fearlessness than like a gesture towards it.
00:46:51
Okay.
00:46:51
So I have to I think as we tie up this messy package, this two potential directions that will probably coexist, right?
00:47:00
But to what you were talking about, like I do think about the resurgence of low pump as like a political meme figure.
00:47:08
And low pump had a number of sound cloud hits in like, what was it?
00:47:13
What was the number two or three?
00:47:15
Not denigrate the work.
00:47:19
I like.
00:47:20
I like.
00:47:20
As someone who went on the first no jumper tour, you know, I was there.
00:47:25
You opened right?
00:47:26
I still have all the tattoos.
00:47:29
You know, someone who's there at the ground level, it was a fascinating thing to watch in real time.
00:47:34
And then little, you know, hip-hop moved away.
00:47:37
The main characters of that scene died of drug overdoses primarily or worse.
00:47:42
And you would think, oh, someone like low pump would just, that's it, consigned to the dustbin.
00:47:48
And no, what he did is he remade himself as like a social media punching bag with Jake Paul, quite literally a punching bag, taking a punch from him.
00:47:56
And then a mean coin, right wing, mega shell, who also spoke at a Trump rally when spoke is,
00:48:06
you know, strong word, but, you know, present at a Trump rally, little pimp.
00:48:10
And that was shocking.
00:48:13
And again, from the outside looking in, you think, oh, that's, well, I don't know.
00:48:17
That's like the last gasp again.
00:48:20
And no, now it's actually quite this.
00:48:22
I think he's going to have another 10 or 15 years of something on the back of all this.
00:48:27
I saw a tick hit rocking up and down the block.
00:48:29
Yeah, I mean, I saw a TikTok of him in Dubai the other day, like some rich TikTok guy took him to Laura Piana, like got him sued out Laura Piana.
00:48:38
I was like, oh, like he's crossing into other spaces.
00:48:41
Like, it's going to be, he's going to end up with 10 or 15 more years of this.
00:48:46
So you're going to have folks like that, whatever rappers coming in on the long tail of that streamers, certainly, streamer culture and podcaster culture.
00:48:56
The other thing is I, I spent a lot of this weekend watching English teacher on FX Hulu.
00:49:01
And this is a show about a gay English teacher in Texas.
00:49:07
And half of it is like just regular punchline, like older generation, younger generation comedy.
00:49:13
But every other episode is essentially about a hot button issue.
00:49:16
But there's one about what is the sign reading and the kids cheating one is about gun culture.
00:49:23
And it's all this kind of tension between, quote unquote, "woke culture" and also the pushback to woke culture and then wait.
00:49:30
And then each episode kind of like ties a little bow at the end and says, there's actually ways we can all get along.
00:49:36
You said you, we talked before you said you watched a little bit.
00:49:38
Sure.
00:49:38
I wonder what you think of that as kind of like a sub-rosa Trump 2.0 approach to central allegedly centrist, allegedly mainstream comedy.
00:49:49
And that goes back to what I was saying about hillbilly allergy, where I felt like before, I was like, you're saying that the English teacher is like the...
00:49:56
I'm saying it's the update.
00:49:58
It's the revamped version of what the left was trying to do then, which is like let's like humanize them.
00:50:06
Yeah, let's humanize them.
00:50:08
We'll look at them anthropologically.
00:50:11
And now it's a little more like weave in the, let's weave it in.
00:50:16
Like the culture clash is actually fertile ground for comedy.
00:50:20
And it's what we deal with on a daily basis.
00:50:23
It's what it's like when you have a family dinner on Thanksgiving.
00:50:26
And some people are sold the family.
00:50:28
Yeah, exactly.
00:50:30
And it goes back to that.
00:50:31
And I do think there's a little bit more not reaching across the aisle, but like let's laugh at ourselves and laugh at you and agree that like regardless of who's in office,
00:50:44
we have to coexist in these spaces in our offices, in our gyms, in our, at our family, at our family dinners.
00:50:51
And I think you know, there as far as it goes on the left, like maybe it goes way into hope and escapism, maybe it goes into blue sky, nihilism and darkness.
00:51:03
I was listening over the weekend to our friend Sean Fantasy on the big picture, talking about the Oscar race.
00:51:10
And he and his guests reminded me that not long after Trump's first election in 2016 was the La La Land Moonlight Oscars early the next year.
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And that sort of standing in for, you know, and the Academy voters basically breaking 100 years of tradition to say, no, no,
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now moonlight is best picture, not La La Land.
00:51:38
It's moonlight and moonlight one and the way one obviously insane.
00:51:41
But I think it's interesting to see how that's going to play out in this year's Oscar race or in this year's Grammy race.
00:51:49
Like do we now as when we see Beyonce win her album of the year?
00:51:52
And for saying, for saying country music has black roots and that, oh, now we have to galvanize ourselves by stamping this or are we about to live through the winter of wicked wherever one saying,
00:52:10
no, no, no, we can't even deal with this.
00:52:12
We're just going to slip into escape.
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And it's just going to be a fairy tale about how we should all get along.
00:52:18
And the middle ground, I think is something like the English teacher or something like Post Malone.
00:52:24
You know, I think he is, he is our bipartisan hero at the moment because he's both a collaborator of young thug and a collaborator of Blake and yeah,
00:52:35
church and wallen and whoever else you want to want to throw in that bucket.
00:52:40
I guess to my final note is one thing that I've been quite surprised by is how ungalvanized people seem.
00:52:47
Right.
00:52:48
You think about 2017, the obviously protests and the constant pushback to an emergent Trump agenda.
00:52:57
And I don't want to say people are being conciliatory, although, you know, Joe Biden welcoming him into the White House.
00:53:04
That was red widely, as like essentially a conciliatory gesture.
00:53:08
You don't want to say that, but at the same time, that sense that like big tense sense of outrage, it doesn't feel like that temperature is rising,
00:53:18
which makes me think that that kind of culture maybe is not due for a comment, but it could be more collaborative.
00:53:28
Yes.
00:53:28
And you know, maybe we should go out with the song that is making Brian Jordan Alvarez, the star of the English teacher famous.
00:53:36
Actually, I would dare I say it's less the content of the show, which is revealing in and of itself.
00:53:41
I turned on this show.
00:53:42
I was influenced by the means.
00:53:44
I watched the memes, a hundred of them.
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And I was like, fine, I watched the show.
00:53:48
And then the show was like, I was like, damn, this is way smarter.
00:53:50
This is extremely smart.
00:53:51
Very, very well executed show, but sometimes it takes a dumb thing to get people to watch a smart thing.
00:53:57
So let me, let's go out with Ali Alexander's, Viby Jason Marazi style record.
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It's called brief.
00:54:05
That's our show.
00:54:06
Every episode of pop cast is at nytimes.com/popcast.
00:54:10
Our producers in the rumors, Maddie, Masiello.
00:54:14
And at home, it's Pedro Azaro from that separate media.
00:54:23
We will be back next week.
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