Graham Finlay
speaker
481 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5d ago
Graham Finlay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And so it's it's relatively recent, but it's part of the long trend of celebritification of politics, which um had been going on for a while, um and also mirrored trends in celebrity like initially.
Celebrities actually had to do something to be a celebrity, and then they just had to be on a reality television show, but you still had to have a real reality television show.
Now you can create your own celebrity brand from nothing, the way the most famous podcaster in the world, probably Joe Rogan, did, you know, as recently as you know the the 2010 or so, where you know he he started just
He he used the word different word, BSing into a laptop, uh, for an it turned out to be hours at a time about anything and everything.
And I what I really like about Joe Rogan's history is that his first episode was mostly dead air as they tried to figure out how to use the technology.
But now he's making hundreds of millions of dollars um and is influencing elections by having presidential candidates
On.
And that only really started w not with the 2016 election, which um featured a reality television show candidate in Donald Trump, who's like the ultimate celebrity politician, um, but in the 2020 election where
In the run up, people got a significant bounce for their presidential aspirations.
Um, you know, people could do significant damage to their their brand if you were uh Elon Musk smoking dope on Joe Gro Rogan's podcast.
I mean, the immediate hits, as Anthony Albanese found out, uh are are are really quite dramatic.
But it's it's the last seven or eight years.
Yeah, I mean this feeds into another trend in American politics which is extreme polarization which has been going on since the early nineties when when the Republican Party largely used it as a way to
To differentiate themselves from Clinton, to attack the Clinton administration and so forth.
You know, again, that was something which was on mainstream platforms, that was in newspapers, that was on television, that was through Fox News, which was an embodiment of this kind of polarization.
They but then it mainstreamed or main moved quite quickly into the podcast sphere, which in some ways imitates traditional media, but in some ways is completely.
Completely unshackled by it.
And and there, if your currency is polarization, if your currency is giving your audience red meat.
You find podcasters in particular going further and further into more extreme positions, which then feeds back into real politics.
So right now, for example, there's a Senate election in in Michigan where Abdul El Sayyed is the Democratic nominee.
Showing 101–120 of 481 · page 6 of 25
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