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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's how many downloads Ted Cruz's podcast pulled in during a single month last year. Not his Senate office. Not a campaign ad buy. A podcast. And he's not an outlier — he's the clearest signal that "politician with a podcast" has gone from novelty to infrastructure.

Here's the shift that matters, and it's bigger than one download number.

Politicians don't just go on podcasts anymore. They're building them — as owned media channels where they control the pace, the framing, and the edit.

The ones doing it well are treating the show the same way a previous generation treated a prime-time interview slot: as a direct line to the people they need to reach, without anyone in between.

This isn't accidental. It solves three problems at once.

First, it bypasses gatekeepers entirely. The Reuters Institute's 2026 outlook specifically flagged a growing pattern of politicians "disintermediating" traditional media — going direct through podcasts, YouTube, and social instead of press conferences and cable news hits. When you have your own show, you don't need to pitch a segment producer. You are the segment producer.

Second, it fits how people actually consume information now. Social media officially overtook television as the primary news source in the US last year, and long-form audio and video are the formats building the deepest audience relationships. A twelve-second clip might get attention. A weekly podcast builds familiarity. And familiarity, in politics, is the whole game. People don't vote for platforms. They vote for people they feel like they know.

Third — and this is the part most people miss — a podcast scales as campaign infrastructure. A weekly show becomes a steady pipeline for fundraising, positioning, donor cultivation, and soft-launching bigger ambitions without ever having to announce anything. That's why the "podcast primary" framing keeps showing up around 2028 hopefuls. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear launched one last fall. So did several other Democrats openly testing the national stage. The show isn't a side project. It's the exploratory committee wearing a microphone.

Political and culture podcasts are now booking presidents, ex-presidents, and top-ticket names because that's where the reachable audience actually sits. The Washington Post recently profiled the hosts of "I've Had It" — a show that's become a destination for political figures precisely because it doesn't feel like a political show. That's the point. The less it looks like media, the more it works like media.

This is happening internationally too. In the UK, Green Party leader Zack Polanski built "Bold Politics" as part of a broader strategy to push the party beyond its climate-only image into populist messaging that reaches younger voters directly. The Financial Times just profiled his transformation of the Greens, and the podcast is central to the playbook. He's not waiting for the BBC to book him. He's building his own distribution.

The Forward Party launched a video podcast positioned around democracy reform and independent voters — packaging a political movement and a media channel into the same thing. MS NOW's "Clock It" is doing something similar, blending political conversation with culture in a podcast-native format where news, memes, and power all sit in the same feed.

Now, the honest caveat: the payoff is wildly uneven. A few shows break out. Most don't. Having a podcast doesn't mean having an audience — the same way having a website in 2005 didn't mean having traffic. The format is easy to start and hard to sustain. And the biggest tradeoff is one nobody in politics wants to talk about: the less filtered the format, the higher the risk of unforced errors. No producer is going to save you from yourself on your own show.

But the direction is clear. Podcasting isn't a media trend politicians are borrowing. It's becoming a default lane for political communication — and the infrastructure underneath the next cycle of campaigns is being built right now, one episode at a time.

In a Guardian interview published Friday, the California governor's media strategy — including his podcast positioning — is framed as part of a broader "rules-setting" approach to his public profile. He's not running for anything yet. He's constructing the distribution first. If you want to know who's actually serious about 2028, don't watch for announcements. Watch for who's already three months into a content cadence when the announcement finally drops.

The Forward Party launched "It's Up to Us" in January as a video podcast packaging democracy reform messaging for independent voters — movement and media channel built as a single product from day one. MS NOW's "Clock It," which launched in February with hosts Eugene Daniels and Symone Sanders Townsend, blends political reporting with culture in a format that sounds more like a group chat than a panel show. That's not a coincidence. The shows that are working aren't the ones that moved cable news into a podcast feed. They're the ones that threw out the cable news format entirely.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: If you're building a show yourself — political or otherwise — don't start with "I should do a podcast." Start with a repeatable format, a distribution plan that includes video, and a booking strategy that forces real substance instead of vibe-only conversations. The winners in this space aren't going to be the loudest. They're going to be the most consistent.

And if you're just paying attention as a citizen: know that the next election cycle is being shaped right now in a format most people still think of as entertainment. That's not a warning. It's just the reality of where influence lives in 2026.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

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