Welcome to ‘Useful Idiots,’ a New Rolling Stone Podcast

Rolling Stone is pleased to announce a launch this week of Useful Idiots, a news and politics podcast I’ll be co-hosting with my friend and colleague, Katie Halper.

Useful Idiots is an iconoclastic take on the political podcast. Imagine a standard cable-news commentary show, and we’ll be shooting for its opposite. We’ll be focusing on stories that were blacked out by national news media, while offering unsparing weekly takes on candidates, TV talking heads, campaign spokesgoons, academics, and other monsters of the realm.

Because I’ll be covering the presidential election for Rolling Stone for much of the next two years, the program will focus on the election, with guests culled from, in, and around the campaign trail (Tulsi Gabbard is an inaugural interview, for instance). We’ll also be hosting debate night drinking games and testing audiences and each other with bits like “ErotoPol,” where we try to match the politician to the creepy love scenes he or she wrote when moonlighting as suspense novelists.

Katie is a well-known podcaster and comic. She gave her childhood to socialist summer camps and was writing poems about the homeless when she was eight. I didn’t stop watching Scooby-Doo until I was 40. Together we’ll be interviewing politicians, authors, musicians, comedians, scientists, and random people who are interesting but not famous (in fact, if you have a really compelling reason you should be a podcast guest, ping me at @mtaibbi).

You can find the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.