Joe Rogan. Theo Von. Andrew Huberman. If these names sound familiar to you, you’re probably among the tens of millions of people who tune in to the “brocasters,” a loosely defined coterie of podcasters who put men and masculinity front and center.
The term — which calls to mind hourslong interviews with frequent references to health supplements, classical philosophy or mixed martial arts — has broken through on social media over the last year, as clips from brocasters have become harder to escape than a full nelson.
Though Mr. Rogan and Mr. Von had been peripheral figures in American pop culture for decades — Mr. Rogan hosted NBC’s gross-out game show, “Fear Factor,” starting in 2001, and Mr. Von made his debut on MTV’s “Road Rules” a year earlier — both podcasters hit critical mass last year when they interviewed Donald J. Trump during the run-up to the presidential election.
How it’s pronounced
/brō-ka-stər/
On average, Mr. Rogan’s podcast reached over 20.1 million listeners a week last year, making it the No. 1 podcast in the United States for the sixth straight year, said Melissa Kiesche, a senior vice president at Edison Research. And its audience increased in the last quarter, during the election season.
That was also true of other podcasts aimed at conservative audiences, such as “The Charlie Kirk Show” and “Candace Owens,” Ms. Kiesche said.
For some listeners, brocasters are an entry point for a political worldview that goes beyond the left-right divide, said David Futrelle, a journalist who for years tracked the rise of what he calls the “men’s rights movement” on the “We Hunted the Mammoth” blog. The brocasters, Mr. Futrelle said, are in some cases a “gateway drug” to the manosphere, a vast informal network of content creators who believe the rise of feminism has displaced men.
“They feel that men are being pushed aside and that women are kind of running the world, which is obviously incredibly exaggerated,” Mr. Futrelle said.
Though Mr. Rogan doesn’t describe himself as a member of the manosphere, his guests often discuss maleness in detail — as Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, did in January when he rhapsodized about “masculine energy.”
But not all podcasting bros skew conservative. “Pod Save America,” the popular podcast founded in 2017 by three veterans of the Obama administration, made its debut on Edison Research’s top-10 list last quarter, as interest in politics spiked around the election, Ms. Kiesche said.
Democrats have seized on the rising success of the brocasters to make the case for a “Joe Rogan of the left” who can build enthusiastic audiences around progressive issues. Alex Cooper, the Barstool alumna behind the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast, made a brief detour into politics last year with an interview with the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But a true rival to Mr. Rogan is probably unlikely to emerge anytime soon. His audience dwarfs that of his closest competitor, “Crime Junkie,” a true-crime podcast hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat, two women. Mr. Rogan’s podcast is No. 1 among women, too, meaning that the brocasters aren’t just for the bros.
“In order to be as big as he is, he has to do well among women,” Ms. Kiesche said.
