Ever since Gov. Gavin Newsom of California started his podcast over a year ago, one of the biggest questions about it has been: Doesn’t this man have other things to do?
In the modern political attention economy, the answer is apparently no.
Which is how it came to be that Mr. Newsom, the chief executive of the world’s fourth-largest economy, shared a YouTube screen on Friday for a 95-minute podcast chat with Hunter Biden, the convicted and pardoned son of the last president.
Best known for the personal tumult he caused for himself and the political headaches he caused for his father, the younger Mr. Biden has recently spent his online days reminiscing about his drug abuse and joking — maybe — about running for president in 2028.
In the influencer world, the term for what both Mr. Newsom and Mr. Biden are doing is engagement farming, using notoriety to build an audience while exploiting social media algorithms that reward conflict and rage bait.
For both men, the forum of an extended podcast allows for self-discovery. Mr. Newsom touched on his complicated relationship with his father, while Mr. Biden offered a cleareyed assessment of the pardon he received after his father repeatedly insisted he would not get one.
“That’s how much you know my dad loves me,” Mr. Biden said. “He chose me over his political legacy.”
Since Mr. Biden began his spree of remarkably candid posts on social media last month, he has become a prolific personality on the social media platform X, building a larger audience by exploiting his notoriety. At the same time, he has rehashed moments from his father’s White House tenure that many Democrats would prefer be forgotten.
Mr. Newsom — long one of the most devoted supporters of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s doomed re-election bid — is also trying to build a bigger media footprint, in advance of a widely expected presidential campaign.
The deferential discussion showcased Mr. Newsom’s ability to conduct a civil conversation with just about anyone, a skill that makes him a better politician than an interviewer. He drew out tales of Mr. Biden’s crack addiction and what it felt like to be at the center of political and media firestorms, but failed to ask whether the Biden family had any regrets about the former president’s decision to seek re-election.
Instead, Mr. Newsom probed Mr. Biden about political news of the day. Mr. Biden defended two Democrats who have been embattled recently: Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, and Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
“Show me your phone,” Mr. Biden said. “If that’s the standard by which we are going to judge people, particularly people in elected office, then I don’t think we’re going to have many people in elected offices.”
And Mr. Biden offered a vintage Biden-esque lament about how American culture has moved to the internet.
“I think everybody’s carrying around a bag of heroin in their pocket, and it’s called an iPhone,” he said. “It is the dopamine hit of choice for 350 million of us. And what we do is that we are fed this lie that this country’s divided, that everybody hates everybody.”
Like his father, Mr. Biden is a raconteur who sometimes does not allow the facts to get in the way of a good story. He alternated between saying he had made “about $220,000 a year” selling his paintings — many of which were bought by a Biden family friend — and arguing that “I don’t have two nickels to rub together.”
One revealing portion of the discussion came when Mr. Newsom asked Mr. Biden about the state of the Democratic Party.
Mr. Biden unleashed a series of old grievances.
He lamented how the Democratic strategist David Axelrod had long warned that President Biden’s age was a political problem.
He referred to Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor who wrote a book critical of President Biden, as “Jake Brick Tamland Tapper,” after a dim-witted character in the movie “Anchorman.”
And he dismissed any suggestion that his father’s policy on Israel had cost Democrats the 2024 election.
“All these people calling for, like, a public lashing. What do they want?” Mr. Biden said. “You know, it’s Gaza. You know, what a bunch of” nonsense, he added, though he used a more pungent word.
Mr. Newsom, who has had his own zigs and zags on Israel policy, nodded along.
Mr. Axelrod, Mr. Tapper and a CNN spokeswoman declined to comment.
Mr. Biden also revealed that he had written two books about his father’s White House tenure — one, he said, is “kind of like a thriller,” with his MAGA tormentors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Stephen K. Bannon as leading characters.
But Mr. Biden does not plan a publisher-funded book rollout like that of Jill Biden. Instead, he said he planned to serialize his book on the newsletter platform Substack.
Mr. Newsom suggested that Mr. Biden would be a literary successor to Charles Dickens, whose 19th-century novels were published chapter by chapter in London newspapers.
www.nytimes.com