| Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has spent his precious campaign time doing something rather unusual: talking to younger male podcasters. Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin takes a look at what's happening with this strategy. Plus: Trump's man on Wall Street and an effort at modernizing government IT that isn't going all that well. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Here's a fairly conventional media case study: A faltering and long-in-the-tooth company or investor needs a turnaround, and fast. But where are the good ideas? He latches onto a story he heard at a cocktail party about something his friend's teenage son claimed was "the future." Think Rupert Murdoch's now-forgotten iPad-only newspaper, or the inexplicable decision by some of the most powerful people in entertainment to coin the word "Quibi," or Kendall Roy's buyout of Vaulter on Succession. More recently, there's Donald Trump's embrace of the podcast manosphere. The former president has attempted to reclaim the lead he'd once enjoyed in the polls by seeking out audiences with controversial podcasters and influencers who cater mostly to the tastes of very young men and boys. These include Adin Ross (a video game streamer), Logan Paul (a novelty boxer and shock comedian), Elon Musk (a billionaire who's at times affected the pose of a shock comedian and novelty boxer) and, on Wednesday, Lex Fridman, an MIT and Joe Rogan-affiliated computer scientist who's known for conducting extremely ponderous interviews with controversial figures. (See, for instance, Episode 438, "Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity," which has a run time of 8 hours and 37 minutes.)  Podcaster Logan Paul in 2015. Source: Handout/Image Group LA/ABC/Getty Images Trump sat down with Fridman for a comparatively snappy 46 minutes of back-and-forth. It began with Fridman asking how Trump maintains a winner's mindset and what he'd learned from watching other great winners such as Michael Jordan. Trump's rambling answer was hard to follow, but it was, in a sense, a perfect opener for the medium that tends to be less focused on moral clarity than on self-improvement. "The arc of podcasting is long," wrote the Atlantic's Helen Lewis. "And it bends toward interviewing tech CEOs about their morning routine." This isn't to say that Trump's interview with Fridman didn't have its moments. Say what you want about the wisdom of allowing Kanye West to spout conspiracy theories about Jews, as Fridman did two years ago, but manosphere podcasters are less predictable than actual journalists, which has led to some unexpected comedy over the past month or so. In August, Trump's interview with the stand-up comedian and podcaster Theo Von produced an exchange on the effects of cocaine between the former president and the star of Road Rules: Maximum Velocity Tour. (Trump: "Is cocaine a stronger up?" Von: "Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.") Sadly, Fridman didn't address Trump as "homie," but he did manage to hit Trump's past association with Jeffrey Epstein ("I never went to his island, fortunately," Trump said), his beef with Fridman's podcasting mentor Rogan ("He's sort of a liberal guy, I guess"), and the potential mental health benefits of ayahuasca (Trump declined to comment on the wisdom of tripping balls). As during Trump's meandering, glitch-laden interview with Musk, it was tempting to wonder what this was all for. As tech journalist Max Read memorably put it, "the funniest component of the Trump campaign's media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach." Trump actually anticipated this objection during his interview with Fridman, noting that in contrast to podcasts, traditional television audiences were getting older. New media platforms "are starting to dominate," he said. He noted that his interview with Musk "got numbers like nobody's ever heard before." If you squint, it was possible to see a strategy at play: In her Atlantic column, Lewis suggested that with Trump well underwater among women, he was trying to make up for that "by attempting to increase turnout among young men." Trump told Von he'd decided to come on his podcast on the recommendation of his teenage son, Barron. And it's true that Paul, Musk and Fridman have big audiences. Just how influential they'll actually be with voters is an open question. For starters, the numbers themselves are far from rock solid. Trump's claims about Musk's audience have been wildly exaggerated, in part because of the misleading way that Musk's social media platform reports viewership. Musk said that "combined views" of his interview with Trump, including "subsequent discussion by other accounts," had reached more than 1 billion impressions. In fact, it was apparent to anyone who actually tuned in to the Q&A that the audience was fairly small. At its peak, the X app showed a little over 1 million people listening in—fewer than what the most popular shows on cable news routinely attract, and far, far fewer than the 25 million adults in the US who were tuning in during the final night of the Republican National Convention, according to Nielsen data. Those TV audiences–composed largely of older American voters–are much more valuable than podcast audiences, which include lots of users from outside the US and those old enough to indulge in conspiracy theories but not old enough to actually vote. Moreover, there's no shortage of examples of candidates who've failed or struggled after attempting to cater to this corner of internet, including Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and, perhaps most famously, Trump's own vice presidential candidate. JD Vance's 2022 primary Senate campaign relied heavily on wide-ranging interviews with controversial podcasters. Vance won his election, but by a much smaller margin than other state Republicans. Along the way, he produced a seemingly endless opposition research file full of clips about "childless cat ladies" that have helped make him a historically unpopular VP candidate. It's possible that Trump's "alt-media strategy" will look, in retrospect, like the watershed moment when podcasts, streamers and other influencers claimed supremacy over cable news talkers, at least among conservative audiences, and got bookings that are the envy of every professional broadcasting operation. On the other hand, it seems just as likely to be remembered as a clumsy attempt to influence millions of nonvoters while creating fresh controversies. In other words: It's the politics equivalent of a pivot to video. | 
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