The New York Times’ In-House Conservative Is Launching a Podcast to Decode MAGA—and Talk UFOs

What could technological advancements in AI, declining birth rates, psychedelics, and UFO sightings possibly have to do with Donald Trump’s political rise and reshaping of modern conservatism? Ross Douthat is on a mission to find out for The New York Times.

Interesting Times With Ross Douthat, a new podcast from the Times Opinion section, isn’t aiming to be an explicit foray into the conservative podcast ecosystem, according to the host. Instead, “It’s trying to be a window from The New York Times into a changed world with a conservative guide,” Douthat tells Vanity Fair. Each Thursday, starting April 10, the conservative opinion writer will explore the New Right through discussions with newsmakers in an attempt to offer a place within the Times that “tries to engage with a world that has been deeply unsettled.”

The new podcast will serve as a place where this “strange new world meets the concrete realities of politics,” Douthat explains in an interview, telling me that the podcast will touch on the modern conservative movement, political party realignment, organized religion, technology, pop culture, and even aliens. Douthat, who often writes about religion, said he plans to explore “the weirder edges of religion right now—from psychedelics to UFOs. Not just what’s going on with Catholicism, but what’s going on with unidentified flying objects and people having wild spiritual encounters while taking ayahuasca,” he says.

“The conceit of the show is that these weird things have some kind of real connection to what’s happening in normal politics,” he adds. “We’re going to be trying to make that connection clear.”

Douthat, 45, joined the Times in 2009 after a stint at The Atlantic and with two books already under his belt: Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Douthat’s since been one of the Times’ most reliable conservative voices on the Opinion page, providing an intellectual perspective from the right that’s surely more palatable to Times readers than a MAGA firebrand. Douthat’s also knocked out five more books in that time and cohosted the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast, which typically featured columnists from varying political points of view. It’s on Matter of Opinion where Douthat also flew solo this year in interviews with conservative and contrarian voices like Steve Bannon, Chris Rufo, and Marc Andreessen.

“We knew pretty much immediately after the election that we wanted to do a show like this,” Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times opinion editor, tells me. “What we were trying out in the last few months, and you saw this a little bit with those interviews, was trying to figure out what the format should be.” According to Kingsbury, those interviews performed particularly well with Times readers consuming the content in all forms—audio, video, and transcript. “People were hungry for understanding and guidance for this moment, in a way that just blew us away,” she says.

Trump’s return to power has sparked a fresh wave of calls for a better understanding of the right, with California governor Gavin Newsom, for one, kicking off his new podcast with Charlie Kirk, followed by Michael Savage and Bannon. Douthat tells me his podcast was green lit following the success of his interviews with figures on the right, which he said are a “good example of what the show wants to do,” while ensuring me that’s “not going to be all that the show is, by any means.”

“It wasn’t something we decided a year ago or something. It was much more in the last few months, where there was just sort of this sense that after the election, the landscape had shifted and I might be a good person to help Times readers understand what was going on,” he adds. While he is “slightly intimidated” to transition from Matter of Opinion cohost to the host of his own podcast, Douthat says that opinion leadership has been “very enthusiastic about the idea.”

Kingsbury, who took over the Opinion section in 2020, says she’s been “committed to bringing a broader range of viewpoints into the section, and that particularly includes conservative voices.” Douthat, she says, “has long been a brilliant voice in text for Opinion, and I feel even better that we’re going to be able to bring this show around him, his interests, and his ideas going forward.”

While the Times has built out their opinion offerings by bringing writers with varying political views together via roundtables, the paper sees a niche for Douthat in the audio space, pushing him to the forefront of his own show, using similar tactics that allowed for the success of the Ezra Klein Show, one of the Times’ fastest-growing podcasts.

Douthat’s show will also be available as a video podcast on YouTube, a strategy that has been particularly successful for Ezra Klein, an opinion columnist who, like Douthat, cut his teeth in the aughts political blogosphere, albeit from the left. “We’re basically making that show video first, knowing that we find a larger and different audience on YouTube than we do if we just continue to publish on site,” Kingbury says. “We’re really focused on figuring out how to think more broadly. I think Opinion is the part of the Times that has probably made the most inroads in this, but you see it across the Times. We’re trying to figure out how to offer our audiences more and more ways to interact with our journalism and engage with it.”

“Like a lot of big successful organizations, the Times is not a dominant presence on YouTube, or anything like that,” says Douthat, adding that “there’s certainly room for Times audio to grow.”