In the last couple of years podcasts have seen a renaissance. From a lull at the end of the 2000s and early 2010s, the number of different shows and number of listeners has boomed. Podcasts like Serial, This American Life, and WTF with Marc Maron have reached huge audiences globally. Celebrities have piled into the game, too: Russell Brand, Lena Dunham and Shaquille O’Neal all have podcasts. Even Snooki from Jersey Shore and her makeup artist are podcasting.

One perhaps surprisingly successful entrant into this competitive industry has been Cambridge’s own Talking Politics, drawing as many as 50,000 listeners to its weekly podcasts. Academics more familiar with half-full morning lectures are now reaching huge, international audiences with deep dives into the political issues of the day. Among them is Helen Thompson, Cambridge’s Professor of Political Economy, who moonlights as a weekly panellist on the show.

Thompson was a founding member, but back then the show reached only 1,000 people a week. She puts its rise in popularity down to our extraordinary times: “I think there is a sense that increasing numbers of people do want to try and understand the world in which they live, and are willing to expend some time on trying to understand it.”

“We’re not talking in academic politics language. I’m more at ease with worldly language about politics”

Thompson tells me that the podcast was the idea of David Runciman, Professor of Politics and head of department (POLIS), who had wanted “to see if politics podcasting could be done in a different way to what the established media outlets were doing, thinking that some people in the department could make a more distinctive kind of contribution”.

Runciman chairs the podcast, which is produced by Catherine Carr. More often than not it features a round-table discussion of political events with Thompson and fellow department members Chris Brooke and Chris Bickerton, and occasional guests. I wondered whether Thompson and the others found it hard to make things understandable while also offering something academic and distinct. “For me I didn’t really because one of the things I like about it is the fact that we’re not talking in academic politics language. I’m more at ease with worldly language about politics than I am with political science theorising.”

When Talking Politics began as a show about the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband was trying to woo the electorate with some cautious spending pledges and changes to the energy industry. Since then, politics has changed totally. Thompson remarks that at that time it was easy to think about politics in “fairly narrow, British, parochial” terms. In early 2016, with Sanders and Trump threatening huge upsets in their respective primaries, politics was blown open. “The question of how you explain this, what are the origins of this – if you think about things seriously – is going to throw you back into long term, historical change”, Thompson says. It quickly became clear that British politics, too, needed to be understood in a different way. “The very nature of Brexit, of being an overthrow of something that had been in place for 40 years, encourages historical analysis.”

“You can’t really think about present politics questions without really thinking about political economy”

I venture into the shaky and complex area of explanations for the two humongous events since Talking Politics began: President Trump and Brexit. Thompson aways avoids simple answers, and is wary of grand narratives linking the two. “The Trump story is fundamentally a story of what happens in a polity that is the hegemonic power, where the domestic politics has become more and more oligarchic and dominated by money.” On top of this, Thompson says, the US “has had the usual problems of a domestic economy that has created losers”. Combined with the erosion of the US’s dominance and the overwhelming influence of lobbying money it is not surprising you end up with Trump, she says. “I think if you tried to understand Brexit in those terms you wouldn’t get very far.”

Occasionally the Talking Politics panel move away from historical analysis and put forward some predictions. Recent political events have shown this to be a perilous business, however, and Thompson is skeptical of the value of political predictions. “I can’t see the point of it. People want a prediction about what’s going to happen next week or two weeks’ time and my instinct is, well, why can’t you just wait and find out? There’s an element of egotism to the world of predictions.” It is much more important, she says, “to concentrate on trying to see things as they currently are, as clearly as possible. Trying to do that is much more difficult to do well than people think it is.”

As Professor of Political Economy, Thompson often steers conversations on the podcast back to the economics underlying the politics. To her, this is the key part of seeing things as they currently are. “You can’t really think about present politics questions without really thinking about political economy, or without thinking about what’s going on in the economic part of the world. One of the things that’s happened since 2008 is that actually more people have seen that that’s the case, that some understanding of political economy is necessary tin order to think seriously about politics.”

“QE has significantly increased the value of assets, shares, house prices in a number of cities, the value of bonds. Assets are held by people who are already rich”

As our topic changes to economics, we hit upon the issue of quantitative easing, or QE, which is when a country’s central bank digitally creates money and uses it to buy bonds (effectively IOUs) from private sector investors like banks, businesses, and pension funds. This puts more money into the economy in the hope that this will boost lending and spending. Through QE the Bank of England has pumped £435 billion into the economy; globally around $14 trillion has been created.

Thompson wants to highlight the huge importance of this policy, which is often neglected. “Some people would talk about fiscal austerity as the response to 2008, but if you look at the scale of changes in public expenditure or our increases in tax they’re just nothing in comparison to the amount of money that has been created by central banks. The scale of money is just enormous.”

I ask what the consequences of it are and am informed that nobody really knows, although a few are currently noticeable. “It’s led to an increase in inequality of wealth. It looks like in a number of countries inequality of income has come down since the crisis, but what QE has done is to significantly increase the value of assets, shares, house prices in a number of cities, the value of bonds. Assets are held by people who are already rich.”

Pumping money into the economy creates asset bubbles, like the pre-2008 housing bubble, as people invest it in certain areas. When such bubbles burst there could be a financial crisis. “The answer to the question about whether there’ll be a financial crash because of the bond bubble and other asset bubbles is that anybody who thinks about it hasn’t got any idea whatsoever.” We are now living, Thompson says, “in a monetary world and a financial market world that nobody’s got any experience of because it hasn’t existed before,” but is concerned that “the discourse about electoral politics doesn’t really grapple with this problem at all.” Perhaps the growth of political podcasts can alert more people to these issues in ways that conventional news would not, and get them thinking and talking about politics