I have to confess, I really didn’t want to do the COMMENTARY Magazine Podcast in the first place. Credit for its existence goes to the relentless Noah Rothman, then our associate editor, who believed we had an opportunity to add an interesting voice to this not-exactly-new medium. I was uncomfortable with this. Though I had already been appearing on a podcast once a month for several years at that point, I was not really a fan of the medium.

It seemed fiduciarily irresponsible to dedicate some of our nonprofit institution’s limited financial resources to a professional-sounding audio program. The only prudent approach was to do something extremely simple and spare, and I feared it would sound and seem amateurish. And I didn’t want to devote significant time to the experiment because we didn’t have any.

We made a deal, Noah and I: As long as we could do it for no money, and as long as we didn’t write scripts or spend time in planning the thing, we’d give it a go. If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t, no harm, no foul. And so we began it, in 2015. And for five years, we met in a closet-like space in the COMMENTARY office where we’d thrown up some sound baffles, bought four cheap microphones, and a bare-bones sound mixer. There we’d sit, Noah and I and Abe Greenwald and, for a time, Sohrab Ahmari, twice a week. And we were off.

It did fine. People seemed to like it. After a time, we had maybe 10,000–15,000 listeners as we struggled to make sense of the Trump years. Sohrab left and Christine Rosen came on board—causing technical headaches because she lived in D.C. rather than New York and we had to figure out how to patch her in.

And then came Covid. In March 2020, when everybody was sent home and New York became a ghost town, we (like everyone else) suddenly became experts on this thing called Zoom, and it turned out you could record things over Zoom. Voilà. New podcasting system. Everyone at home, with a cheap mic, and Zoom did the rest.

I had this notion that this unprecedented challenge mirrored the national crisis in late 1979 when Americans were held hostage in Iran and ABC inaugurated a 15-minute update on the story after the 11 p.m. news. I thought maybe we should do a daily update on the Covid emergency, which would have the added benefit of allowing COMMENTARY’s editorial staff to have a reason to sit together remotely and have a conversation every day so that we would not go stark raving insane in our working isolation.

You want proof of the theory of supply-side economics, or of the whispering voice in Field of Dreams that said, “If you build it, they will come”? We did nothing to promote our daily conversation, but by mid-June our audience had tripled, even quadrupled—and at one point during the summer of 2020, we had one of the 50 top political podcasts in the world.

We didn’t remain at those empyrean heights, but over the past five years, we have settled into what seems like a very comfortable niche in the world of podcasting. Noah moved on to National Review, Matt Continetti and Seth Mandel joined the squad seamlessly, and here we are.

The podcast has done a remarkable job of promoting COMMENTARY as a publishing entity and has proved a crucial element in promoting not only subscriptions but the fundraising necessary to keep the lights on and the presses running. And though its audience is enthusiastic and engaged, we have succeeded in not becoming a podcast with a magazine attached. We remain a magazine that also produces a podcast.

This year, the magazine turns 80. This month, the podcast turns 10. I hoped for the best but expected the worst—and what do you know, the best has, so far, won out.

Photo: Getty Images/Westend61

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