Long-form conversations without the fuss or formality was the sell for The Karl Stefanovic Show. But in the execution, it was almost a long-form conversation without the furniture: just two plain-looking armchairs, an occasional table which looked like it was borrowed from a nearby office, and sweeping views of the Brisbane CBD in the background.
The 51-year-old host of Today (aired on the Nine Network, owner of this masthead) was all charm and got-my-black-jeans-on ease, talking to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson in a best-part-of-an-hour-long live podcast interview that hovered, at times, on the brink of either looking like a free political kick, or descending into small talk.
This project is being produced independently of Nine, with no network involvement. As with most shows in this style, the biggest weakness is poor time management. In the search for an easy, talky vibe, both host and subject tend to drift, interesting answers to good questions were left un-probed further. It was noisy, but not muscular.
The result was a bunch of great moments, but no gotchas, stitched together by clumps of occasional table chatter. No “politics and policy” here, Stefanovic said. Of course not. Both are listener turn-offs. But there was not enough of a push into the most interesting revelations, notably Hanson’s recent visit to Donald Trump’s presidential palace Mar-a-Lago.
Speaking to media ahead of the podcast launch, Stefanovic name-checked the success of US podcaster Joe Rogan, who has become one of the most influential voices in American media, as part of what prompted him to shift into this space, part-time at least. (He’s not giving up his day job.) The show would be “unscripted, unfiltered, uncensored. I’m going to unleash the beast”, Stefanovic said.
The Joe Rogan Experience, which has streamed weekly since 2009, is described as “a destination for open dialogue with a wide range of guests and perspectives”. But it achieved critical mass in October 2024 when his endorsement of Donald Trump’s second election campaign was seen as critical to unlocking a difficult-to-mobilise young, male voter demographic.
Unlike Stefanovic, however, Rogan – and hosts of podcasts of a similar ilk, such as Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy – do not directly address or acknowledge the audience. The show unfolds as an intimate conversation between host and guest. Not so here. Stevanovic directly addresses the camera at the outset and a section of the podcast is given over specifically to audience questions.
Stefanovic’s intentions are clearly noble. He’s an uncomplicated, sometimes even earnest man, not so different from the persona he presents on Today. But Hanson falls a bit short when it comes to podcast talent. She’s street-smart and spotlight-hungry but not intellectually robust enough to co-create the kind of memorable debates that this podcast clearly has an ambitious eye on. (Or that the Rogan program has cornered the market with.)
Hanson is good at fencing talking points, but she struggles to prosecute a case. (Or, sometimes, even an idea.) In media noise terms, offering her a platform – the day before Australia Day, no less – in the hope that you’ll hook a headline is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. And even then, the take-away was patchy.
What Hanson does bring, however, is authenticity, and in a political class defined either by noisy posturing or repeated falsehood, her best skill is a different kind of earnestness. She owns her failures, even if she persistently rejects the circumstances that create them. She can be moved to a tear, perhaps because she lacks the natural political artifice to hide them. “I’ve been true to myself,” Hanson told Stefanovic and on that point, she’s spot on.
But it wasn’t long before we were precisely where Stefanovic had assured us we would not end up: “politics and policy”. A long-form interview show would be a welcome addition to the Australian media; there are not enough platforms for robust, small detail-detail driven analysis. What we don’t need is another program where politicians can make speeches without hard fact-checking.
Perhaps the underlying question here is whether preaching-to-the-ecosystem podcasting is any more useful to the wider discourse than preaching-to-the-ecosystem politics. After almost three decades of Fox News, for example, the issues facing Americans do not seem particularly well-illuminated; one could even go so far as to argue the US, and its ecosystem-tuned audience, knows less than ever.
And while The Joe Rogan Experience may well present a robust potential business model for an Australian podcast looking to find a foothold in a genre full of smaller players, that Rogan’s name is even needed as a pre-launch taking point suggests that without the clear signposting, the audience is not sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone to speak from the silence.
Worse, watching Rogan himself express a form of buyer’s remorse when faced with the broken US political landscape that he, in part, helped to bring about, might usually be enough to give any sensible person pause.
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