I Listened to Gavin Newsom’s New Podcast. I’m, Uh, Very Confused!

Marshawn Lynch, the NFL superstar turned actor and sports team part-owner, accidentally pulled off a nearly impossible feat last week: He flustered California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Newsom is nearly unflappable with a camera or microphone in front of him. His airtight responses are both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness: He’s quick-witted, impassioned, has rebuttals and talking points ready to rip. Newsom’s fans and defenders call that charisma. Others see it as transparently phony, and Newsom as the epitome of a sweet-talking skeezeball politician whose shtick is saying and doing whatever it takes to move up the ladder.

Wherever you land on Newsom’s cool-to-cringe scale, it’s hard to deny the man is a rock-solid surrogate for the Democratic Party. Which is why the opening minutes of Politickin’the new podcast Newsom and Lynch are co-hosting alongside their mutual friend, sports agent Doug Hendrickson, are so disorienting.

When iHeartRadio first announced the Politickin’ podcast on July 3, they marketed it as something totally separate from the political realm. A teaser clip for the show featured Newsom—a politician co-hosting a podcast called Politickin’—avowing that there would be “no politics” on his show. “No politics,” Lynch agreed. “Politickin’ but with no politics.”

Confusing. So, too, was the rollout for this poorly defined podcast, which was reportedly in development for more than a year. When the powers that be started planning for this podcast, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2024—and Newsom was steering far away from the accusation that he would dare challenge Biden for the crown. Well, at least for 2024. A supposedly apolitical podcast with a universally beloved athlete and his longtime sports agent/friend could certainly be seen as an easy boost to Newsom’s national profile in preparation for 2028. Get to know the real Gavinall that good stuff.

Unfortunately for Newsom, the politics have been politickin’ of late. Biden flamed out at the June 27 debates, ushering in the beginning of the end of his reelection campaign, while Newsom staunchly defended him on the media circuit. Then came the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. Politickin’which was supposed to debut on Monday, July 15, was postponed “in light of recent events.” (Presumably, Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21 delayed things further.)

Politickin’ was finally released on July 24. The first 10 minutes of the first episode are exclusively about politics. In fact, the first three seconds are Marshawn Lynch saying: “Hell nah, Gavin, why the fuck you ain’t running for president, bruh?”

“We’re going to get to that!” Newsom exclaims. (They did not get to that.) Newsom jokingly and awkwardly tosses the conversation to Hendrickson to discuss what he’s been up to lately. Hendrickson rambles for too long before redirecting to his client, asking Lynch about some sort of media venture he’s working on. Lynch—who later said he does not follow politics closely, and thus probably does not know that Newsom is terrified of being accused of running a shadow campaign for POTUS—does not relent. He instead again asks Newsom (whom he’s nicknamed “Batman,” for reasons unknown) why he’s not “running for motherfucking president.”

“I fuck with you … I thought you were finna get in the mix,” Lynch tries to say, at which point Hendrickson talks over him: “So Gavin, did you talk to Biden on Sunday? Did President Biden call you?” Prior to this podcast episode, Newsom hadn’t commented on Biden dropping out, save for a standard written statement. Like any professional podcast host, he was saving an anecdote for his show. He relays a story about being at the gym (specifically, on the treadmill) when the news came down; his voicemail filled up so quickly and he got so many texts that he missed reach-outs from both Biden and Kamala Harris, he says.

Eventually, Newsom tries to sell Lynch on Harris’ candidacy. “Marshawn, I’ll tell you what’s going on: People are all-in now for Kamala Harris,” Newsom says. Lynch is more interested in discussing the Trump assassination attempt. Newsom condemns the political violence, interestingly noting that he reached out to Trump’s “family” after the assassination attempt. (That could include Kimberly Guilfoyle, Newsom’s ex-wife, who is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr.; she was one of just 266 people following the Politickin’ account on X when I checked on July 12.)

Newsom snaps back to surrogate mode. Trump, he argues, was caught “flat-footed” by the switch from Biden to Harris. (True! But Newsom had just admitted he was also caught flat-footed, too. On the treadmill, no less.) Newsom then winds up and delivers one more endorsement of Harris to Lynch, who’s also from the Bay Area. “You’ve got your own Oakland girl, Oakland through and through, Alameda County prosecutor who’s going to prosecute the case” against Trump, Newsom says.

“I wonder if she prosecuted my daddy,” Lynch responds. Brutal.

The next hour-plus is an interview with Golden State Warriors star and fellow podcaster Draymond Green. It was, in the Politickin’ podcast’s defense, an apolitical conversation. Also: well-trod territory. Green rehashes stories and experiences about addressing his mental health as a professional athlete, and how racist Boston Celtics fans are—stuff he’s already publicly addressed many times over.

Green also warns Newsom that the media and his haters will tell him he shouldn’t do a podcast, that he should just focus on his job as governor of California. The podcast ends, in fact, with Green bringing that topic back up, referring to Newsom’s decision to do this podcast as “admirable,” because he’s putting himself “out there.”

That’s not really what Newsom did, though. At least not in Episode 1. Or Episode 2, for that matter, a comparatively breezy 54-minute podcast that dropped on Monday and centers on how Lynch’s relationship with Hendrickson came to be. Relative to his co-hosts, Newsom barely talks in Episode 2, though he does reiterate at one point that this show is not about politics.

We get it, Gavin! Except, if the Politickin’ podcast co-hosts insist on dancing around politics, save for when world-historic events occur, then they’ll keep getting caught flat-footed far more than they’ll be putting themselves “out there.” Which might make for some accidentally entertaining moments from Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch. But for Newsom? Not so much.