Lance Armstrong launches weekly podcast

Launched yesterday, the Forward Podcast will come out weekly and will see Lance Armstrong interview a variety of guests. So what’s it all about? We had a listen to try and work that out.

Armstrong’s first guest was Tim League, the founder and CEO of the Alamo Drafthouse cinema in Austin and someone who he apparently goes cycling with from time to time. The podcast appears to have been recorded the morning after the Orlando nightclub shootings took place and Armstrong starts out by asking League for his take on the incident.

League says that at that point he’s only seen a headline and nothing more. "You're potentially talking to the most ignorant person on the planet right now about the details of the incident."

It’s instantly clear that the podcast is not tightly scripted. The conversation necessarily veers towards what League was doing instead (eating an Egg McMuffin) and how Lance ‘loves’ a McDonald’s breakfast.

Things improve a bit from there as the two men discuss gun control, the state of mental healthcare in the United States and also Donald Trump. Armstrong then decides to introduce a note of levity by asking League about his new hobby of beekeeping.

Ten minutes in, it’s clear that The Forward Podcast’s billing as “a weekly show featuring a variety of guests” is perhaps deliberately vague.

Other topics tackled over the course of the show include “the first time dudes have shown up at the house” to hang out with Lance’s daughter (they all watched Zootopia); League’s cinema (at great length); and Uber withdrawing from Austin after the city brought in tighter regulations.

Aside from a couple of very brief mentions, one thing they don’t really talk about is cycling.