This past August, clips of the millennial comedian and podcaster Adam Friedland speaking about the war in Gaza collected millions of views online, becoming some of the year’s most influential bits of commentary. In the footage, Friedland is slouched in a leather chair on a wood-panelled stage set, wearing a blue suit jacket with jeans, his curly hair foppishly askew. The vibe is casual, but his words have a sober urgency. “They’re demeaned and dehumanized and surveilled constantly,” he says of Palestinians. Tearing up, growing more impassioned, Friedland argues that the war in Gaza amounted to a genocide, perpetrated by a people who should know better. “The fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing,” he adds at one point. His interlocutor, the New York congressman Ritchie Torres, a pro-Israel Democrat, appears cold and unmoved, which only makes Friedland’s emotions seem more pronounced. These fragments of media came from “The Adam Friedland Show,” a podcast launched in 2022 that has turned into a high-production-value video series distributed on YouTube and many other platforms. Friedland first became well-known online nearly a decade ago, as a host of the raunchy, leftist politics-adjacent podcast “Cum Town,” but the recent success of his video podcast has turned him into something else: an onscreen talent, a recognizable face, a televisual celebrity of the digital sphere.
In the course of 2025, the video-podcast clip in general became a major unit of discourse. Once upon a time, aspiring public intellectuals and digital-native commentators had blogs. Then they had Twitter accounts, snarking from behind cartoon avatars; then podcasts, speaking into microphones into the void; then newsletters, publishing reams of text into our inboxes. In all of those formats, the human body was conspicuously absent—but no longer. With the rise of the somewhat oxymoronic video podcast, the de-rigueur medium is a digital talk show of one, an eponymous production performed—face, body, outfit, and soul—for the camera. We don’t just listen to Friedland, Ezra Klein, “Call Her Daddy” ’s Alex Cooper, “Talk Easy” ’s Sam Fragoso, “Throwing Fits” ’s James Harris and Lawrence Schlossman, or myriad other podcast proprietors anymore; we watch, often in closeup, every expression that flits across their faces, and thus cultivate a kind of parasocial intimacy usually reserved for Hollywood actors. There is no more hiding behind a byline; the moment mandates hair stylists and makeup. And, with the end of faceless punditry, measured neutrality moves toward obsolescence, too. The quality that hosts need in order to court and maintain audiences online is a dose of charismatic feeling, preferably caught in thirty seconds or less.
A few early adopters have been broadcasting their podcasts on video for many years. Joe Rogan has been filming his podcast since it launched in 2009, and the tech tastemaker Lex Fridman started filming his conversations back in 2018. But the mass rush toward video podcasting began with the 2024 Presidential race, which made clear just how much influence on public opinion shows like Rogan’s exerted. Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Elon Musk all took their turns doing three-hour gab sessions with Rogan in the run-up to Election Day; that August, Trump went viral discussing addiction in an unusually touchy-feely moment on Theo Von’s video podcast. MAGA’s success reaching voters this way—and Kamala Harris’s regrettable decision not to go on Rogan—sparked a realization that the medium was more than passive man-cave listening. Early this year, YouTube revealed that a billion monthly users consumed podcasts on its platform and declared itself “the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S.”
During Trump’s first year back in office, D.I.Y. footage of two people talking into microphones has shaped the news cycle as much as any cable network. In January, the Times columnist Ross Douthat patched Steve Bannon in over Zoom for a conversation first aired on an episode of the Times’ “Matter of Opinion” podcast and then syndicated on Douthat’s new video podcast, “Interesting Times.” In a surreal mise en scène, Douthat, appearing in high res in a cozy studio, watched Bannon’s face on a laptop as he denounced “Broligarchs” such as Musk, whose DOGE operations were ramping up at the time, signalling the first clear schism between the MAGA right and the tech overlords who backed Trump in 2024. (Watching someone watch a Zoom call is a video-podcast innovation of dubious appeal.) Then, in February, Musk made a redux appearance on Rogan’s show and delivered one of his most in-depth public discussions of DOGE; on YouTube, the episode racked up more than fourteen million views. The video podcast was suddenly a news-making venue, a makeshift press conference at a time when, thanks in part to Trump’s draconian approach to the First Amendment, press was more limited than ever.
