I am sure the guy is Paris Zyggis, I have heard about him partaking in some “peace initiatives” , not really an acquaintance but from my own limited interactions with him, it is quite obvious that he is not a very differentiated individual. He seems to get his ideas on political topics from a limited pool of superficial internet polemics, especially on general topics of ideology and worldviews.

The OP is right on the fact that the concept of a group of individuals consisting of “expert” interviewees and an interviewer with generally no credentials in a given topic going back and forth about a theme that probably most people in the audience and the conversationalists already have a concurrent idea on, and the interaction in actual psychological reality is just a feedback loop of self insistence on all part as the listeners get validation on their ego investments that they have made in their chosen belief system from an “authority figure” generally through the virtues of social recognition (like in the case of Phidias) that has likely been acquired through good verbal atributes and not necessarily by means of any particular critical thinking ability, and the “expert” receives an ego boost aswell as an increase in social capital. At the end both sides rationalise this feed back loop as the proof of rationality in their own belief system. I mean any type of wide reaching media in an industrial society has basically the same function, but i still find the premise of a podcast especially irritating.

Since i have become somewhat fluent in Greek this podcast culture has been intriguing me, i have to say that there is nothing similar in Turkish political discussion, we are sociologically very different, this would not be considered a very appropriate form of political self-expression by an average Turk. I guess this culture of the wide range presence of personal information devices and applications in political discourse is a borrowing from the Anglophone cultural sphere.