What the Hell Is the MeidasTouch Podcast and Why Has It Surpassed Joe Rogan?

This week, Joe Rogan lost his grip on the top of the podcast charts again, the second time in just a couple of months. The first to dethrone him was Kylie Kelce, who is decidedly not the liberal Joe Rogan (she’s very nice, but her podcast isn’t political at all). Kelce’s surge to No. 1 was partly due to the algorithmic boost that often favors newly launched podcasts.

That’s not the case for MeidasTouch, the lefty podcast that just knocked Rogan down a rung.

If you’re wondering, “What the hell is MeidasTouch?” — congratulations! You managed to avoid political social media for the last several years. I have mixed feelings about MeidasTouch — actually, that’s a lie. I strongly dislike MeidasTouch, but I don’t necessarily hate the attention they’re getting. They’re basically the podcast equivalent of that liberal aunt who posts on Facebook every half hour and floods your Bluesky timeline with reskeets. In person, she’s great! Online, she needs to chill the f**k out.

MeidasTouch is a lefty media company founded by brothers Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas, spun out of a Democratic Super PAC they launched in 2020. And their podcast is exactly what you’d expect from a Democratic Super PAC: the audio equivalent of those relentless fundraising texts from the Democratic Party. “Yes, I appreciate the cause, but for the love of God, stop texting me!”

I won’t go so far as to call them grifters — although they are — but they thrive on liberal outrage, fear, and despair. They’re the outlet that convinced liberals that Trump would lose the 2024 election by a landslide before probably launching some election conspiracy theories of their own. They’ve perfected the Buzzfeedification of progressive media. Here’s a sampling of their recent episode titles (and keep in mind, they often drop three, four, sometimes five 10-20 minute episodes a day):

- Fox News in Total Panic as Trump Approval Falls
- Trump Glitches Out on Live TV as His Mind Deteriorates
- Fox News Starts Collapsing as Trump Can’t Be Saved
- WTF?! Trump and Musk BRAIN IMPLANT Plan REVEALED …
- Trump Utterly BOMBS Fox Interview … Gets INSTANTLY DESTROYED

They say exactly what the left wants to hear, whether it’s true or not. They’re basically a rapid-response team for the DNC, if the DNC were run entirely by SEO marketers and clickbait merchants. Some will argue that Democrats need to counter every GOP move with the same intensity, and this is what that looks like. It’s exhausting. I follow politics closely; MeidasTouch is for people who define their entire existence by it.

If you live in a social media echo chamber, you’ve probably encountered them, briefly felt buoyed by their doom-for-the-GOP headlines, then either muted them in exhaustion or fell deep into their fantasy reality. It’s a cope podcast for liberals who want to believe Trump is one bad news cycle away from total collapse. And while I personally can’t stand it, maybe it serves as a counterweight to the far-right’s own delusions. More likely, though, it’s just another layer of clickbait that will inspire more of the same until the podcast landscape, like the enshittified X and Facebook before it, is controlled only by the loudest and most insistent voices.