One of the embarrassments of humanity is that Candace Owens has one of the most popular podcasts on the planet. For those of you who are blessed to not know who she is, I’m not going to give her more attention or clicks than she currently gets. All you need to know is that she’s either very unintelligent or plays a character that’s very unintelligent. Some of her greatest hits include speculating that the French First Lady is transgender and that dinosaurs “are fake and gay.” It’s cutting edge stuff.
The ascension of Owens and others of poor intellectual quality may lead one to conclude that we have declined intellectually as a society. The reality is more complicated. We’ve always been this not-smart, it just so happens that not-smart people have never had this much influence in media and culture.
Contrary to what “less wrong” rationalists assert, smart ideologues are not the people to blame for the poisonous state of public discourse, but loud, sub-literate people.
Literacy in the United States
According to the National Literacy Institute, 54% of the population reads below a 6th grade level, including 20% reading below a 5th grade level and 21% of the population being functionally illiterate. These statistics are thrown around to joke about how “stupid” Americans are, but people don’t appreciate their far-reaching consequences.
Reading is a skill like any other. The more you read, the better you get at it, and the better you get at understanding complex ideas. Working your proverbial reading muscles will make you smarter than you otherwise would be. Most people are better readers when they graduate high school than they were when they started kindergarten, not just because their brains have grown and matured, but also because they’ve spent more time reading over the course of their education.
To illustrate how basic many people’s reading skills are, think of the books you read throughout your school and if you had to revisit them now. You, dear reader, could probably blow through any book you read in third grade in a day or a weekend. About 20% of the population could not. The books you read in 5th grade or middle school would probably not be challenging to you either, but they would be the absolute threshold of difficulty for half of the population. And the books you read later in high school or college? Forget about it, most of the population can’t read at that level.
How This Influences Political Discourse
My point here is that smart people really take for granted how smart they are, and we underestimate how many sub-literate people there are.1 The world makes more sense when you realize that there’s an abundance of sub-literate people logged onto the internet, boosting certain content in the algorithm, and parroting talking points mindlessly.
Again: This isn’t because we have more sub-literate people than we did 50 years ago, but that the sub-literate have greater access and influence over social and mass media than ever before. They aren’t degrading public discourse out of maliciousness, but because they quite literally lack the cognitive skills to do any different.
Some of them can only decode the content as they see it and emotionally react to it. Others can engage with the complexity of a piece of content, but not at a deep level.2
These sub-literate people “flood the zone” of discourse with nonsense, signal boosting propaganda and falsehoods. They encourage creators to dumb down their content and to pander to them, as all viewers are equal to the algorithm for ad revenue. Thus you have Candace Owens and people like her pandering to the sub-literate, and the sub-literate bolstering her subscriber count. It’s a vicious cycle.
For the last decade or so, those of us who try to practice intellectual virtue have tried to put the blame of discourse decay on smart and well-meaning people, but this is complete nonsense. The people pushing this idea are usually arguing on a message board, blog site, or in a publication: They are having the conversation on a site requiring reading. They are more literate and are writing for an audience that is more literate than the average American.
The problem with blaming smart, biased people for the decay of public discourse is that smart, biased people have always been influential in media and politics, while sub-literate people have not.
But now, thanks to social media, a sub-literate person can imitate competence without having it, gain a following from those who don’t know better, and parlay that imitation into influence. With the prevalence and ease to create video content, some of these sub-literate people can now join in the discourse, when in the past they needed to be able to read and write to be able to be heard and taken seriously.
Before, you had to have a certain degree of critical thinking to be taken seriously, but now it doesn’t matter if what you say isn’t true or if a middle schooler can see through the flaws in their logic. Because half of the population can’t think more critically than a middle schooler!
All that matters now is the vibes, the outrage, and the engagement. Walter Cronkite, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and William Buckley are all spinning in their graves.
I can’t find a better explanation for Owens's success other than sub-literate people finding and listening to her content in mass. Many normal, smart conservatives find her revolting and dumber than I do, so I’m skeptical that there are enough intelligent conservatives who are willing to check their brain at the door, look past how not-smart she is, and boost her ratings.
Call me an optimist, but I just don’t think motivated reasoning is that strong on the population level. It must be the sub-literate.
Case Study: The PBD podcast
You may say that I’m being uncharitable and mean to sub-literate people. Perhaps that’s true! But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I can’t listen to any of these podcasts without feeling that they cater almost exclusively to the sub-literate. Let’s look at a case study.
Look at this clip, from the PBD podcast, between about 6:50 to about 19:40 . It’s from when Trump started his trade war with Canada a few months ago. On the first glance, you’ll feel like “hey that was a lot of information and very informative.” But there are some things that stick out:
They played many clips, more than you’d see even on a cable news show.
The hosts read excerpts of articles and op-eds out loud.
In the op-eds they read, they didn’t go into the reasoning of the op-eds, but just criticized the conclusions for not agreeing with Trump.
They make unsubstantiated claims about internal Canadian Politics, many that have aged like milk.3
The hosts implied that their audience doesn’t know how a parliamentary system functions.4
The hosts repeated comments about fentanyl coming into America from Canada, with no effort to fact check.5
They talked about China in the context of a U.S.-Canada trade war, as a non-sequitur argument against free trade and strengthening other countries. Because apparently America free trading with Canada strengthens China?6
Funnily enough, at the end of this clip, they exported their critical thinking to ChatGPT.
I spent more time watching the actual clip (~12 minutes) than finding holes in its analysis (maybe 30 seconds?). The reason why is because everything in this clip was relatively shallow, and what commentary that was original was factually wrong or illogical (points 4,6,7).
I’m not saying that every second of every long-form podcast needs to be maximally intellectually rigorous, or that it’s not sometimes helpful and necessary to play and quote from primary sources. But what I am saying is that an audience that finds this intellectually satisfying is probably not the most critical or deep of thinkers.
In fact, if you are a deep thinker, who has paid attention to politics for longer than a couple of years or with any degree of rigor, you’ll find this commentary annoyingly shallow. It’s clearly for an audience with elementary-to-middle-school levels of literacy. It’s a simplistic repetition of what someone else said, either agreeing or disagreeing, but not putting forth any effort to engage with it critically. It’s decoding information, not analyzing it, and when analysis happens, it’s so simplistic to be wrong.7
It’s likely that many of the PBD podcasts viewers are young people getting into politics for the first time. There’s nothing wrong with that.8
But again: Just as I don’t believe there’s enough conservative ideologues who can turn off their brain to boost Candace Owens to one of the most popular podcasts on earth, I don’t think there’s enough young, smart, naive people to account for the popularity of the PBD podcast.
The New Talk Radio
Richard Hanania wrote a while back that Conservatives watch TV and liberals read. This is probably the most understated political reality of today, but it’s incomplete: conservatives also listen to podcasts.
In the 80s and 90s, conservative talk radio blew up because working class listeners that worked not-cognitively-intensive jobs (like truckers) could listen to them all day. This was novel at the time. Today, we’re seeing a similar dynamic with podcasting and YouTube: Working class people and people who don’t read are probably the primary audience for podcasting.9
That’s not to say liberals and leftists don’t listen to podcasts, just that they’re likely much more selective in what they listen to. They’re more likely to use their brain to solve abstract, complex tasks as a job, and so they can’t listen to a podcast during the work day.10 They don’t eight less hours of time that they can consume content.
Another underrated difference in liberal podcasting and conservative podcasting is that the latter is so much more fun than the former. Liberal podcasts are more about discussing the truth, evaluating evidence, and nuanced details that can get dry and boring if you don’t like abstract conversations. Conservative podcasts are more about the personalities of the podcasters themselves.
So if you listen to a podcast from the New York Times or Atlantic, the content will feel identical because the subject is the point.. But if you turn on right wing podcasts, you’ll notice that Rogan is different from Friedman who is different from Williamson, just as Limbaugh was different from Hannity who was different from Savage in the 1990s.11
The Influence of Sub-Literacy Is Ruining Politics.
The reason why our political discourse is more poisonous than it used to be is because sub-literate people, who have always been somewhere between 20-40% of the population, have a bigger voice than they ever have. As a society, we’re not less smart than we used to be, we just hear from the least smart among us more than we used to because social media has destroyed the barriers for sub-literate people to consume and produce politics.
I respect people who try to apply “Less Wrong” methods of thinking to improve their understanding of the world. But that intellectual culture is not going to save us. I don’t really know what to do about this problem, but so long as we deny it and instead blame literate people for the intellectual vices of the sub-literate, we can’t find the solution.
If you read my posts, you probably read at least a high school level. Congratulations! You’re not the problem.
You know how a debate may go back and forth for a long time? These literate, but unsophisticated readers would read the opening statement and rebuttal and then lose interest or the ability to keep up soon after.
Saying that Trudeau’s retaliatory Tariffs were unpopular with Canadians, and that Trudeau’s actions were coming from a place of weakness. Though it’s true that Trudeau was a weak, lame duck PM, the Liberal Party’s actions resurrected their electoral chances for the 2025 election.
You can say I’m nitpicking right here, but you don’t need to be a political junkie to understand how most of the world practices democracy via a parliamentary system.
It’s possible he elaborates this claim later on but I doubt it and refuse to put more effort and charity into understanding this person than he does, so I’m not watching more.
One could say I’m being too uncharitable and that any ideology could do this to another ideology, but I disagree.
I would have found content like this very stimulating as a high schooler. I watched Hannity for goodness sake, and thought I was a prodigy!
One of the ironies here is that many “podcast bros” think podcasting is superior to reading, when inferior to reading in terms of time spent and information learned.
Speaking for myself, I tried in 2016-2020 to listen to multiple podcasts, but I eventually just felt overwhelmed. I had more things to do with my brain than listen to podcasts all day, and eventually, podcasts would just become repetitive at best or skippable at worst. So, I stopped listening altogether. But if I was working manual labor and had hours of time during the day that I could fill with podcast listening, I’d do it.
This confuses conservative podcasters like Charlie Kirk who think that liberals are bad at podcasting because they aren’t “smart” or “masculine” enough to do them. The reality is that most progressives and liberals treat politics as ideas and not entertainment as conservatives do.
Would it be possible to make higher-quality podcasts for working class people / non-readers?
I like radio as a genre, but think the existing outlets could be improved on. In 2022, I checked in on what I could find locally. NPR was too much like a cloudy day in a cafe (the information is the tea you sip), while listening to low-key jazz on the cafe sound system (i.e., not active enough, not engaged in the life-and-death of reality) (now they sound like they've lost their spirit and are fairly neutral, maybe because they have fallen on hard times). Conservative talk radio sounded like (still sounds like) a small businessman driving around on a hot day, life precarious, remembering the fight he had with his wife last night, afraid of getting screwed over by a supplier (i.e. a lot of grievance, engaged in the life-and-death of reality, but in a self-centered way). I didn't think either of them were good for motivating sustained productive work.
So back in 2022, I thought of an alternative form of talk radio, which would be based on the music of J. S. Bach. A fun call-in show that played excerpts of Bach, trying to go for Bach vibes of "delayed gratification", "prolificness / productivity / diligence", "solidity / stability", "patience", "complexity". (The vibes could be talked about openly, but would also be communicated through the music.) The show would try to emphasis that people had agency and how they could exercise agency, in their own lives and politically (with practical advice). Its political stance would be pragmatic and anti-partisan.
While I would listen to a show like that (especially if I had a long commute), and I can think of a few people I have known who might like it, it is a bit of a joke (a "Bach themed talk radio" idea is a bit outside the Overton Window for a lot of people, I think). But I wonder if there are other "alternative talk radios" that could be imagined, for working class people or non-readers. I don't know about the world of podcasts as much, so maybe these alternatives already exist there?