MS NOW hosts leak their group chat conversation about politics & culture in new Clock It podcast

Symone Sanders Townsend and Eugene Daniels spend their days immersed in politics on television. But the conversations that led them to launch a new podcast, they said, were already happening off camera, by text, on FaceTime, and in the moments after their shows ended.

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“Now you can catch us on this podcast where we are literally bringing you into the conversations that we are already having,” Sanders Townsend told The Advocate when she and Daniels recently sat down for an interview.

That podcast, MS NOW Presents: Clock It, premieres Thursday and is built around a premise both hosts return to again and again: that politics and culture are no longer separate arenas, if they ever were.

MS NOW's Clock It featuring Symone and Eugene.MS NOW

“You are going to get politics, and you’re going to get culture,” Daniels, who is gay said. “I think both of our shows, in particular, do a really good job of reminding people that these two things are linked, but you don’t get a ton of time to speak about those because you have to speak to these newsmakers or these lawmakers.”

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Both hosts already anchor key parts of MS NOW’s lineup, the network formerly known as MSNBC, with Sanders Townsend as a cohost of The Weeknight and Daniels as a cohost of The Weekend. But Clock It is meant to be less about booking politicians, more about interrogating the cultural weather systems that now shape politics before most voters ever encounter a bill or a ballot.

On television, Sanders Townsend said, the show rundown rarely survives the hour. “We got breaking news every day, and it’s like, well, whatever was in the rundown. Throw it out. Throw it out. Throw it out,” she said.

The podcast, by contrast, is designed to linger in the space where viral moments, pop culture, and political power collide and to take that collision seriously. Daniels described it as a chance to spend time “talking about the issues of culture that intersect with politics, the kinds of things that politicians are doing when they’re trying to hijack the culture.”

Eugene Daniels is a longtime Washington reporter.MS NOW

Sanders Townsend added, “People pretend that culture is like a sideshow and that it has actually, especially nowadays, it is often the main event.”

The show’s title comes from a phrase both hosts use repeatedly: “clock it,” meaning to see what’s really happening beneath the surface. “So on Clock It, this is the kind of conversation we would have, so people can start to clock it too,” Sanders Townsend said. “So it’s not just like, oh no, OK, let me connect the dots, child. Connect it!”

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That idea runs through the show’s early conversations, including their take on the Super Bowl and the backlash surrounding Bad Bunny’s halftime performance. Daniels called the counterprogramming effort by conservatives “very interesting,” arguing that it reveals how much cultural stages still matter politically. “Why would you be having a fake halftime show if you didn’t think the real halftime show mattered?”

Sanders Townsend chimed in to add, “Bad Bunny is a global superstar, which is why he was picked. You want the halftime show to be profitable. You want it to be watched. You want people to tune in.”

Daniels noted that the halftime show has long carried political meaning, citing earlier performances. “When you think about when Beyoncé came out [in 2016], and she did ‘Formation,’ and she’s wearing a Black Panthers-looking outfit, that was a political statement that she was making,” he said, adding that the reaction to it also became political.

Symone Sanders Townsend wants listeners to join her group chat.MS NOW

For Sanders Townsend, the Bad Bunny debate is not a cultural detour from politics but an example of how power uses culture on purpose. “This is not a sideshow,” she said. She pointed out how popular music is deployed in official messaging. “When the White House uses very popular songs of the moment where they are literally terrorizing communities with these ICE, DHS, and Border Patrol operations, that’s intentional. That’s a choice.”

The podcast’s structure reflects that belief. Episodes, Sanders Townsend and Daniels said, will typically open with what the hosts call their “group chat,” a free-ranging discussion of whatever has been dominating their conversations, whether that’s a viral moment, an awards show, a social media controversy, or a breaking political story already filtered through memes and misinformation. Then comes a guest segment, followed by a closing stretch that’s deliberately lighter: what they’re watching, reading, or listening to when they’re not immersed in the news.

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Just as notable is who the show is not for.

Daniels and Sanders Townsend say the podcast will not be another stop on a politician's media tour. “I think it’s safe to say that if you are thinking that you’re going to tune into our podcast and hear a member of Congress, you will not,” Sanders Townsend said. “That is not this podcast.”

Both said that lawmakers are welcome on their television shows.

“We are going to start with our group conversation, what we have been talking about amongst ourselves,” Sanders Townsend said. “That’s where you will get the newsiest things, the news of the day, our take on whatever’s percolating.”

Those conversations, she said, might move from awards shows to violence to politics in the same breath, because that is how many people actually experience the news. Recalling a pilot episode, she described starting with the Golden Globes and Michael B. Jordan before turning to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis. “That’s how most people are talking about politics,” she said. “They’re talking about it in a way that that’s accessible to them, how they see it, how they really experience it.”

Daniels, a veteran reporter who previously covered the White House for Politico and served as president of the White House Correspondents Association, sees the project as a corrective to a media environment that often chases the day’s spin rather than the underlying story.

Symone Sanders Townsend is a seasoned political strategist who worked for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris before joining MS NOW.MS NOW

“I’ve never struggled with calling a lie a lie,” he said about describing what members of the Trump administration or President Donald Trump say publicly. “And Symone hasn’t either. People deserve to know what’s actually happening, not just what someone in power wants them to think is happening.”

Sanders Townsend, a former senior adviser to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, said one of the animating questions behind Clock It is why so many political fights now arrive in people’s lives wearing the costume of entertainment.

“Most people aren’t starting with a bill number,” she said. “They’re starting with what they saw, what they heard, what everyone’s talking about, and then connecting it to what’s really happening.”

Both hosts emphasized that the tone will be candid and consistent with how they already operate. “The two of us know nothing but to be ourselves,” Daniels said. “When we close this computer, we’re going to have the exact same energy and conversation. We don’t turn it on and turn it off.”

Sanders Townsend added, “And then we’ll talk about you too.”

She said that authenticity is not a branding choice so much as a necessity. “It’s the only thing we have,” she said. Daniels said he and Sanders Townsend don’t see the podcast as a “different” version of themselves.

For Sanders Townsend, that consistency is part of what makes politics feel less remote and less mystifying.

“Politics can feel inaccessible to people,” she said. “This is us turning the volume up on accessibility without pretending any of this is simple.”

The launch of Clock It comes as MS NOW continues to expand its digital and audio footprint following its rebrand and restructuring, part of a broader bet that audiences want political coverage that travels across platforms and formats. But the hosts are less interested in corporate strategy than in something more basic: whether people recognize their own conversations in what they’re hearing.

“This project is in addition to, not instead of,” Daniels said of both Black hosts’ television news roles.

“Clock that,” Sanders Townsend said.