John Iadarola

John Matthew Iadarola (born February 5, 1983) is an American talk show host, YouTube personality, and political pundit, and is the creator and host of the daily infotainment talk show ThinkTank along with Hannah Cranston, part of The Young Turks Network. He also serves as the main political fill in host for online news show The Young Turks and leads their weekly Power Panel. He previously hosted the college focused TYTUniversity show alongside Ana Kasparian^[1] and Lisa Ferguson,^[2] as well as Common Room,^[3] a late night talk show, and has appeared as a guest on numerous YouTube and television programs. As of June 2015, he has received well over half a billion video views across multiple channels on YouTube.^[4]

Biography

Iadarola was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of an Austrian-Hungarian mother who worked as a school teacher and an Italian father who ran a printing press. His family identified as Roman Catholic and Lutheran, although Iadarola identifies as an atheist.

In 2001, Iadarola graduated from Central Magnet High School. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from University of Connecticut in 2006. John then enrolled in a doctoral program in the Government department at the University of Texas at Austin with a research focus on the development of ideology and values systems.^[5] While at Austin, he taught courses on American politics, and race in American media, and also ran an experimental political psychology research laboratory.^[6] Iadarola dropped out of the program in 2012 prior to completing his dissertation to work for The Young Turks. ^[7] Iadarola came to the attention of TYT when he submitted regular videos to them about college life while he was at the University of Texas.^[8]

Career

In January 2012, Iadarola became the cohost of TYTUniversity alongside Ana Kasparian and a producer of The Young Turks. When Kasparian left TYTUniversity a few months later he became its main host and executive producer.^[7] During this time Iadarola also began cohosting The Young Turks and other YouTube programs such as What The Flick,^[9] TYT Sports,^[10] TwentyTwelve,^[11] The Point,^[12] Pop Trigger,^[13] and others. In the fall of 2012 Iadarola became the host of the first hour of The Young Turks Friday Power Panel alongside Cenk Uygur and has become a regular fill in host for the show in Uygur's absence.

On January 1, 2015 John Iadarola and new co-host Hannah Cranston relaunched TYT University as ThinkTank, expanding the channel's focus beyond higher education and college life into science, politics, psychology, history, and more.^[14] By late 2015 the rebranded channel had amassed nearly 900,000 subscribers and 330,000,000 views, the second largest viewership on the network.^[15] At around this time, Iadarola began filling in for Cenk Uygur in his Final Judgment show.^[16]

Iadarola has also guested on multiple podcasts, such as Cara Santa Maria's Talk Nerdy to Me^[17] and the Jimmy Dore Show Podcast.^[18]

In May 2013, Iadarola debuted his own eponymous, independent YouTube channel.^[19] Topics typically include domestic and foreign politics, media criticism, technology and social commentary on the news of the day. For long stretches of 2013 and 2014 this channel was only updated sporadically, but during this time produced multiple viral videos, in total amassing nearly 10,000,000 views.^[20][21]

Iadarola's work has been reported on and discussed in a number of blogs, radio shows and websites including The Huffington Post,^[22] Raw Story,^[23] Mediaite,^[24] Ring of Fire,^[25] Crooks and Liars,^[26] Patheos,^[27] and TheWeek.^[28]

John Iadarola, Cenk Uygur, and Ben Mankiewicz filming a live episode of The Young Turks at YouTube Space LA in February 2014.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Iadarola.

• John Iadarola at the Internet Movie Database
• ThinkTank
• TYT Network