Earlier this week, Premiere Networks revealed that it would be utilizing the popular Verdict with Ted Cruz podcast as content for a one-hour weekend radio show. It isn’t lost on Cruz that his show becomes a radio show as he’s co-sponsoring the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA).
The show debuted as a radio program last weekend, with more than 100 stations already carrying the weekend offering.
According to the latest rankings from Triton Digital, Verdict with Ted Cruz is the 31st-ranked show in the Top Podcasts By Weekly Average Downloads category.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) hosts the show alongside iHeartMedia Memphis-based Ben Ferguson. The program debuted in 2020 before moving to Premiere Networks in 2022. Ferguson joined as host when it shifted to the network after the program was previously helmed by Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire.
Barrett Media sat down with Ted Cruz to ask about a variety of subjects — including his support of the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act, what he enjoys about hosting a podcast, if he’s surprised that it hasn’t become a more popular item with his colleagues, and how he feels about the future of AM Radio as a whole.
*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Garrett Searight: Before we dive into your podcast and becoming a radio show, I wanted to ask you about the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. Obviously, it matters to you. I wonder why it matters so much to you.
Ted Cruz: Well, AM radio is tremendously important on multiple fronts. Number one for AM radio, the barriers to entry are much, much lower than FM radio. That means you have a much wider diversity of owners. You have a significant number of African-American owned stations, Hispanic-owned stations, and women-owned stations. It allows for a wide array of free speech across the spectrum, which is tremendously valuable for America.
Number two, AM radio is critically important in a time of natural disaster and crisis. Whether you’re dealing with hurricanes, tornadoes, or wildfires, frequently, other modes of communication go down during a disaster. AM radio has proven, consistently, to be the most resilient form of communication to get people out of harm’s way and give them the emergency information they need.
Number three, AM radio is critically important for rural America. There are significant parts of Texas where AM radio is the key source of information for farmers and ranchers who are relying on weather reports, crop reports, sports, and news.
And number four, AM radio has been a vital avenue for free speech, and especially for conservative talk radio. In my view, that’s a significant reason why we saw eight car makers simultaneously announce that they were gonna remove AM radio from their new cars and trucks. I didn’t get it. It was driven by an effort to stifle speech, and I think that that effort — it is coming from the same spirits as big tech’s efforts to censor and silence speech.
I have long, in the Senate, led the fight against efforts to censor and silence free speech. So, with this bill, I joined with Ed Markey for the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act. Ed Markey may well be the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate, and I’m the most conservative senator in the Senate. It was striking the day after we introduced the bill, Ford Motor Company publicly announced they were reversing course and would include AM radio in their new cars and trucks. I think they looked at any coalition that stretches from Ed Markey to me and recognized that there was a vast and diverse political array against them. So they did the right thing.
I’m now the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which has jurisdiction over 40% of the U.S, economy — including radio and communications — so we had marked up the bill in committee. We have passed it out of committee with an overwhelming bipartisan vote, and I believe we’re going to pass it into law. I fully expect that we will take it up on the floor of the Senate, and it will pass with an overwhelming bipartisan vote, and we will move it to the House and get it signed into law.
GS: You mentioned Senator Markey. You are diametrically opposed on most issues, but you can come together on this one. Much of the criticism of Congress is that members don’t work together, both sides don’t work together. What can people read into the fact that two senators like you and Senator Markey can come together on an issue like this and work towards legislation that is widely supported by both parties?
TC: Well, I think it shows the breadth of support for AM radio and that should be encouraging. And in part, there is that support because AM radio has a wide diversity of views. That’s good. That’s what we should expect it in a pluralistic democracy where people have views across the spectrum. I will say Ed and I have worked together on a number of issues. We’ve got over 60 co-sponsors for the bill, both Republicans and Democrats.
As chairman of the Commerce Committee, the commerce committee is an incredibly productive committee. We pass a lot of legislation in the law. We work together in a bipartisan matter frequently. In my time in the Senate and I have authored and passed 102 different pieces of legislation into law. And I fully expect the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act to be yet another law that gets passed, signed, and made part of the United States code.
GS: What’s the overarching message that you would like to send to the radio industry about the bill and the future of AM radio from your perspective?
TC: Free speech matters, incredibly. It is the foundational liberty within our bill of rights and I am professionally devoted to defending free speech. That means I’m passionately devoted to defending AM radio because AM radio is a critical avenue for free speech in America. And as long as I represent Texas in the Senate, as long as I am chairman of the Senate commerce committee, I am going to use those roles to fight to defend the incredibly important medium of AM radio.
GS: Switching to your podcast and now radio show, it’s on more than 100 stations after just one week. What is it about the podcast that you find enjoyable?
TC: It’s a great opportunity to communicate directly with the American people. And not go through a middleman, not go through a mediator, and connect directly with Texans and with Americans, and explain what is happening in Washington. The podcast and now the brand new radio show does something you can’t get anywhere else. It takes you behind the scenes. It takes you behind the scenes in the United States Senate, it takes you behind the scenes of the White House, it takes you behind the scenes of the U.S. Supreme Court, and explains what’s happening and why it matters.
On the podcast, we regularly break news. We drive news nationwide. It is an incredibly powerful tool to cover information that doesn’t get covered anywhere else. You can’t find this information anywhere else, which is why the podcast has proven so durably popular. We’ve got millions of downloads every month — over roughly a million unique listeners. And our very first week on syndicated radio, we had over 100 radio stations nationwide choose to carry the podcast. I have every expectation that those numbers will only continue to grow. There’s no other avenue providing this sort of inside look at the happenings in Washington, which is why so many people listen and listen regularly.
GS: Does it surprise you that maybe more of your colleagues haven’t taken up the ability to have direct communication straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, with a podcast?
TC: Frankly, it doesn’t. Listen, we’ve seen numerous politicians try to do podcasts. And most of them don’t succeed. For one thing, if you’re a stiff and rigid politician who just reads from talking points, it’s going to be boring as hell. The podcast is going to be boring, and the radio show would be even more boring. Sadly, most politicians are very scripted. They read from the words in front of them. They can’t talk off the cuff, and so when politicians try and do this, it doesn’t work.
Secondly, far too many politicians — both Republicans and Democrats — act like they got a stick inserted somewhere it doesn’t belong. To communicate, whether on radio or podcast, you gotta be interesting. You gotta be fun. You gotta make people laugh. It’s gotta be entertaining. People have gotta want to listen and say ‘You know what? I learned something. I know something now that I didn’t before.’ My co-host, Ben Ferguson, and I, we are good friends. We laugh. We have fun. And we also try to give people information they can’t get anywhere else. That’s something that there have not been people of elected office who’ve been able to replicate that.
GS: What have you learned about yourself and the podcast industry/genre as a whole since you started the show more than five years ago?
TC: I have to admit I love the format because it is long form and you can engage in real substance. I do lots of interviews on TV shows or radio shows. And if you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing a six-minute hit or an eight-minute hit, that can be fine and you can talk about something. But six or eight minutes it’s necessarily truncated. What you can say in six or eight minutes on a topic — particularly a topic that is complicated — whereas in a podcast or an hour long radio show, you could do a deep dive into a topic and really explain ‘Ok, here are the issues on one side, here are the issues on the other side. Here’s what’s really going on. Here’s what CNN doesn’t tell you, here’s what The Washington Post doesn’t tell you.’
I still do the shorter interviews on other outlets, but I’ve grown to really value the opportunity to explain issues that are important and to give them attention. I mean, when we do a podcast — repeatedly, during the Biden administration, multiple times during the White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre would be asked about ‘On the podcast today, Ted Cruz said the following. How do you respond to it?’
And at the White House press briefing, the press secretary would respond. So, of course, the next podcast, I would respond to her and we would have a dialogue back-and-forth that you could have very few other ways. So it is a powerful way to drive news, to break news, and to a communicate real substance in a way that is fun and interesting.
GS: How have you learned to manage your time so you’re being the best you can be at being both a Senator and then also producing a high-quality podcast?
TC: Look, it’s hard. It takes a lot of time. Everyone in the radio business who puts together a show knows the time it takes both to do the show, but also the preparation. That is a significant investment of time. I’m doing the podcast three days a week and, frequently, I will do the podcast at the end of the day, sometimes recording it 10 PM, 11 PM, or midnight to come out at 5 AM the next morning. I do that after a full day of committee hearings, marking up legislation, debates on the Senate floor, questioning witnesses and hearings and meetings at the White House.
But what the podcast and the radio show does that you don’t get anywhere else is when I sit down with cabinet members, when I sit down with my colleagues in the Senate, when I sit down with President Trump, when I sit down with foreign leaders, I bring the listeners of the show into those meetings. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to D.C., he and I did a one-on-one meeting for two hours. After that, I recorded a podcast walking everyone through the details of the meeting.
Last month, I did an hour-long one-on-one interview with Elon Musk in the White House, where it was a fascinating interview. He’s a good friend. He is someone I know well, and he’s got an extraordinary mind. It was a great opportunity to ask him questions that we’re just interesting and fun about DOGE and the White House, but also about SpaceX and Tesla. And asking things like ‘How many hours do you sleep?’ Now, I’m curious: how many hours do you think Elon Musk sleeps?
GS: Probably four or five. Not a lot, I would imagine.
TC: That’s what I would guess, too. He says he sleeps six hours a night, which I have to admit, I was comforted by. I sleep about six hours a night. I’m like ‘Ok, good. I sort of thought you were super-human.’ I also observed during the podcast, Elon is 188 days younger than I am, and I’m like ‘Wow. I feel like I have accomplished very little in life, Elon. You’re going to Mars and the richest man on planet Earth, and currently I’ve lived 188 days more than you have.’ But that chance to bring people inside and let them know what’s going on behind the curtain, that’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s important to do.
GS: Well, Senator, I’m told you need to get going. I’m sure you’re busy, so I appreciate you giving me some of your time and some of your insight. Congratulations on the success of the podcast and congratulations on the success of the radio show beginning.
TC: I am thrilled to be in radio. I think radio has been massively important for the country, whether the extraordinary Rush Limbaugh, “The Great One” Mark Levin, or my dear friend Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, or so many just incredibly important communicators have been on radio. I’m really humbled to have a chance to join that tradition.
And I will tell you, the inspiration for the podcast was Ronald Reagan’s radio show that he did. And using radio as a chance to communicate directly with the American people. That’s why I launched the podcast. Because I thought when then-Governor Reagan did so, he communicated, he moved people’s hearts and minds in a way that was powerful. And I think there’s a profound need for that today, just as there was in the 1970s.
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
