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(noun) an influencer with a podcast, invariably male, who styles himself as the liberal elite’s enemy and antidote
“Bro-caster is the opposite of broad-caster” is the sort of joke you might expect from a bro-caster. It’s anti-woke, being glibly sexist in an old-fashioned way, and comes off more conceited than funny. Whereas women in media learn to make themselves the butt of the joke, the heterodoxy doesn’t do self-deprecation.
Joe Rogan, one of the world’s most popular podcasters, is the proto bro. His podcast, launched in 2009, set the template. It has more than 14.5mn followers on Spotify. According to a YouGov poll of Britons, more than four-fifths of listeners are male and the majority is aged between 18 and 34.
Though Rogan’s own political beliefs are hard to pigeonhole, he gives airtime to fringe scientists, political extremists and conspiracy theorists. No one gets an easy ride, with the host using the same cut-the-crap style on flat-earthers as he does on Donald Trump and Elon Musk. At least part of Rogan’s appeal is the sense that, if he tires of any guest, he could very easily beat them up.
And while Rogan is measured in his support for men’s rights, the bro-casters who followed his lead are more willing to stoke age-old resentments. Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer and self-identifying alpha male, is the manosphere’s most notorious campaigner with a brand of toxic misogyny that resonates in school playgrounds.
In the mainstream, bro-casters can be seen as the successors to shock-jocks like Howard Stern. Their irreverence and boundary-pushing profanity appealed to Gen X because it came wrapped in a layer of ironic distance.
Then the wind changed. The manufactured anarchy of talk radio was replaced by influencers’ manufactured authenticity. There is no hint of irony in Jordan Peterson’s self-help psychobabble, or Steven Bartlett’s C-suite fist bumps, or the machismo of former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan. They all want to be taken seriously as truth seekers while being admired as caricatures of masculinity. Bro-casting is what happens when an audience wants answers but has heard enough from experts.
bryce.elder@ft.com
