Decoder with Nilay Patel - Why every company wants a podcast now

Why every company wants a podcast now

Dec 11, 2024 - 38m 01s

There’s something strange happening these days in the podcast world — in particular, the way companies that deal in money have been using podcasting as not just an entertainment medium, but a unique kind of hybrid of marketing, thought leadership, and networking. Guest host David Pierce and Vulture podcast critic Nick Quah break it all down. Links: How Venture Capitalists Use Podcasts to Lure in Founders | Vanity Fair Your Next Podcast Interview Might Be a Meeting In Disguise | Bloomberg Elliott launches podcast in attack ploy aimed at Southwest | Axios How podcasts became the new battleground state | Vulture In the “Podcast Election,” Trump talked to vastly more people | Edison Research Podcasts become politician magnets | Axios Founders of podcast ‘Acquired’ are raising an investment fund | GeekWire Podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings raises $400m for third fund | Sifted Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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AI-Generated

The Evolving Landscape of Podcasts

David Pierce, the host, introduces the episode by discussing the strange occurrences in the podcasting world, especially regarding how businesses engage with podcasts beyond mere entertainment. A notable trend is the rise of B2B podcasts, particularly among investment firms. He mentions Elliott Management's podcast, which serves as a tool in their activism against Southwest Airlines. The conversation highlights the shifting perceptions of podcasts, now viewed as vital marketing and communication tools and how this has led to a complex interaction between media and business.

Podcasts as Business Tools

Nick Quah delves deeper into why companies and venture capitalists are leaning into podcasts. He explains that these platforms serve not just for promotion but also for brand management and community building. There’s an increasing trend where traditional mediums like blogs are giving way to podcasts, which have become a simple yet effective format to reach audiences. The effectiveness lies in their relational dynamics, allowing for a more personal touch in communication.

Challenges in the Podcasting Ecosystem

As the podcasting landscape grows, launching and maintaining podcasts becomes increasingly challenging. Quah points out that while the first-mover advantage has faded, audiences are still looking for authentic voices. This authenticity becomes more critical as the space becomes saturated with content, making it harder for new voices to emerge. The importance of creators being platform agnostic is emphasized, as they have to engage audiences on various platforms beyond just audio.

The Intersection of Politics and Podcasting

The discussion transitions to the insights gained from the recent 'podcast election', emphasizing how politicians are adapting to engage voters where they are most active—often in podcast spaces. The unique nature of podcasts allows a level of authenticity and connection that traditional media can’t replicate. Quah also explores how different media strategies are evolving in response to changing audience behaviors, highlighting the need for politicians to invest in this medium to remain relevant.

Future Predictions for Podcasts and Media

Pierce and Quah conclude with a look toward the future of podcasts, raising questions around identity, reach, and mainstream acceptance. They discuss whether podcasts will retain their unique purpose amidst a growing trend of integration with video, particularly on platforms like YouTube. The idea of podcasting as a deep communication tool remains powerful, but the landscape may continue to shift and evolve, requiring adaptability among creators and users.

Transcription

Everyone who owns or runs a business knows that deciding how much to charge your customers and when to do it is complicated.

Even when you start with something simple, like charging $50 a month for a phone plan, it gets messy.

But this is Decoder, so instead of just saying that, let's game it out.

Over the course of this episode, our ads will get into the nitty-gritty of how payments get really complicated really fast.

That monthly charge will be different for business users.

And both of those numbers will be different for customers living in Ireland and different again for folks in Canada.

And don't forget sales tax or that.

How the heck do you go about implementing those changes?

More to come in our next break.

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm David Pierce, the editor at large at the verge.

As you may have noticed, we're dropping some extra episodes in the Decoder feed this week.

You'll have Neelye back on Friday and for next week, I promise, as we run towards the end of the year.

Lots of good stuff still coming.

But I'm really excited to be here with all of you today because I get to talk about one of my very favorite things, podcasts.

There's something strange happening these days in the podcasting world.

Actually, there are kind of a lot of strange things happening in the podcast world.

It's been a wild year in general.

One thing I've really noticed is the way that companies that deal in money have started using podcasts in kind of unusual ways.

It's something we've seen actually for a few years now with venture capital firms, just to name one example.

Not only do most of the top-level VC companies have their own podcasts at this point, but also people who do podcasts about venture capital end up going into it after meeting and talking to all of these folks.

Have you ever heard the joke that like any time two dudes go into a room, they end up accidentally making a podcast?

It's kind of true, and it's becoming a strangely central part of business.

in more ways than you might think.

It's a strange complicated web that goes both ways and it's not getting any less weird or any less complicated now that you can add stuff like crypto and politics to the mix.

So I just needed somebody to help me talk through all of it.

So I asked Nick Quatt to come on the show and help me untangle all of this stuff.

These days, Nick is the podcast critic for Vulture, which is one of the Verges corporate siblings here at Vox Media.

He also originally started hot pod back in 2014.

So, he's been following this stuff for a long time and really knows what he's talking about.

I really wanted to know what he's seeing in this space in general, but I also had lots of questions.

Why would a major investment firm like Elliott Management make a podcast to make a point in a fight over the future of Southwest Airlines?

What is the point of starting your own podcast in 2024 in general?

Was this really the podcast selection as everybody has been saying for the last few weeks?

Are all podcasts just videos now, and if they're just videos, are they still podcasts?

What is happening?

And does Nick have any idea of what's coming next?

For now, I think at least this thing we're doing right now still counts as a podcast.

But we'll see what Nick thinks.

Let's get into it.

I'm sorry I'm not Neely but I'm very glad to get to do this with you.

So I want to talk about a bunch of things because we're at a really interesting moment in the podcasting landscape where we're a few weeks away from what everyone has kind of agreed and then litigated was the podcast election.

We're also in a moment where podcasts are still growing really fast, but the business has been really messy for the last couple of years.

We have a lot to talk about, but the thing I want to start with is this new type of podcast that I have been noticing and I started the crop up, which is like the B2B podcast, like I don't even know how else to describe it, but there was one particular example of Elliott Management, which was picking a fight with Southwest Airlines and they launched a podcast to make their case.

And there have been a bunch of stories recently about venture capitalists using podcasts, not just to sort of make content and get their companies out there, but for much more straight forward business purposes.

And I guess my first question for you as somebody who pays attention to this industry is how big a phenomenon is this really?

Where are these new kind of like like ultra-business-focused B2B.

I almost want to call them nefariously-businessy podcasts coming from.

I read about Elliot Management's effort.

Let's call it on Axios.

And I was like, this sounds super weird, what's going on here.

And the immediate question then comes, what is the bigger punch here?

Is the bigger punch here the headline about it, or is it the actual thing that is being created?

And I think, you know, it's actually, it's largely the former, more so than the latter, the novelty of the existence of a capital firm trying and lodging a podcast in order to advance an activist shareholder campaign.

It's a strategy.

It's a little ploy.

It's a gambit.

I think you're touching upon something really interesting here in the sense of we just lived through this quote unquote podcast election in which there's a very clear display of, let's call it alternative media power in the sense of like the stakeholder of certain power is trying to express their will without having to go through mainstream media and going directly whatever that means.

In this case, pretty much it was the Trump campaign going to a dare sort of constituency of young white men to these very robust built alternative media platforms.

And here, what you're describing, I think, is an expression of a misunderstanding standing of the big lesson here.

The lesson is not to start your own silly little podcast to engage with whatever constituency you want to express whatever you want.

The lesson there is to look at the state of play, look at what people actually are and go to them where they are as opposed to making your own thing.

That makes sense to me, but I do think there's some really interesting shift that has happened and there where a generation to go on the internet, all of these companies and analysts firms and whoever, they all would have started blogs, and that would have been the thing, right?

Or they would have made Instagram accounts about this.

And that would have been the thing that they tried to make to reach people.

Now, overwhelmingly, I think the trend that is true is that it's podcasts.

I think there are more CEO vanity project podcasts than ever.

There are more venture capitalists out here starting podcasts.

Like in the same way that if you are a, you know, 22-year-old trying to break it in the music business, you start a TikTok channel.

If you're 52 and looking to become a partner at your firm, you start a podcast.

That, I find so strange and interesting, and I'm curious why podcasts would be that thing.

There's this progression, right?

These would be blogs, maybe it was a newsletter at some point at CEOs wrote books or whatever.

But the question there is that like, has that mode of expression, has that mode of communication or propaganda, what do we want to call it?

Has it ever been effective?

And like, what is this sort of frame and the lines of attack for that particular mode of outreach?

So the example you gave if you're a 22-year-old musician rolling out your music on TikTok or in a couple years ago, SoundCloud, right?

That is a different power dynamic, right?

that musician has no power, so they're essentially just pulling the slot machine lovers of the internet to see if they can increase their power again in front of more people.

When it comes to something like investors trying to shape a message, trying to build their brand, they already have a copious amount of power there.

And what's actually happening if they do carve together following our community around whether it's a podcast or their blog, it is more of just sharpening their image in front of a pretty well, sort of, bought in.

Oh my, because we live in a country in a world that there's no shortage of people who like view VCs as gauntly figures, who kind of treat them as adults and stars.

And so the power dynamic there is just brand management.

One of the things I've been trying to figure out as I piece through this is whether the appeal of a podcast is that it's relatively straightforward to make in that you can just stick to people in front of a microphone and they have a meeting.

And it might not be interesting, But it is it is a thing you will have an object you have made at the end of it right in a way that even Writing a very good blog post is kind of more abstract for folks who are not used to doing this kind of thing The other side of me thinks that we're still trying to figure out What it is that is magical about a podcast that makes everything more interesting when it's a podcast I say everything pretty loosely.

There are a lot of really bad podcasts out there but there is something to the idea that if you want to reach people and seem human and serious and interesting over a long period of time that actually a long form podcast interview about activist investing is kind of the right way to do it.

You know, we've got a couple of layers here.

I do believe in this sort of way of consuming media that for every piece of media, there is somebody who will love it.

No matter how badly done it is, which a lot of these are, no matter how poorly edited these are, and how esoteric they can be.

And yes, to some extent, that is interesting, right?

And it does come from the sort of historical tradition of what a podcast actually is, which is just an audio blog, like at the very beginning of its inception, it was just people kind of publishing without having to go any through any mediators, just anything they want to get to anybody who would want it.

And there's something inherently powerful about that.

And yeah, there's definitely going to be a community of fanboys and fangirls and fan people who are really into whatever two VCs want to say because they want to VVCs or whatever.

Like, there's something generally interesting there.

But is there something more interesting about just hearing two VCs shit to shit and, you know, and galaxy brain and out loud versus reading a sort of composed blog?

Maybe.

Maybe there is, again, it sort of really depends on what exactly the situation is because like I can listen to a badly edited three-hour-long podcast, but at Oklahoma City Thunder because I'm a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

And I do do that in my personal life.

And I'm sure for some people that it's true if they're really into the VC world and they listen to two people that maybe admire or want to do this.

This is with talk out loud.

There's a certain kind of performance of transparency there.

There's also a performance of hanging out there.

There's a lot of these sort of dynamics that kind of roll into it.

The venture capital thing I think is the one that at least I am most sort of qualified to call a real trend.

And I think it is a real trend.

And you're seeing it kind of in both directions, right?

Like in my world, we've seen a lot of VCs start podcasts.

And then a lot of podcasters turn into VCs. They like meet people.

A quiet is the big one I think about, yeah.

Yeah, totally.

And these folks are like, they start making content.

And then they meet the people who are making the things and then they make the money in, then they give the people.

And then Harry Stebbings, the 20 minute VC guy, It's another good example.

He built this huge thing, just interviewing venture capitalists and like along the way became a venture capitalist.

There's something in that to me that feels both really interesting in terms of like what a podcast can I accomplish for you, but also totally different from the way that we think about podcasts as a sort of fundamental entertainment product.

It's like actually what's happening is you're listening to someone, interview someone to be a funder for them, but neither of them know that that's what's happening.

Yes.

Actually, yes.

This is becoming familiar to me.

There's also this show that, first launch, many, many years ago, called The Pitch, but this also reminds me of like, J.J. Reddick, hosting a podcast in LeBroad, and it's suddenly becoming The Lakers' Head Coach.

I'm also on YouTube.

I sometimes watch this YouTuber called Dunkey, and he recently created a video game studio publishing house after years and years of making content about video games.

This, I think, yeah, it's interesting.

There's this sort of, you're right, it's this two direction meeting in the middle or like both things happening at the same time.

I do find it lazy to say that, oh my gosh, late stage techno capitalism, but it really is kind of that net.

It's like everything's a bit of a performance and one can help that this is another expression of vertical integration because that's what exactly what it is.

But to circle back to your specific question about these tech people, these VCs, that this particular style of B2B podcast, Yeah, there's always going to be a lane.

I think there's always, there is a very specific classic producer and a classic consumer.

And within that space, I think it's still quite a bit of potential, sure.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

This episode of decoder is brought to you exclusively by Stripe.

Let's go back to our hypothetical phone company.

To recap, this phone company needs to charge $50 a month for their plan, but it's not exactly that simple.

Because even though your business starts with a flat monthly charge, you also build based on usage.

International calls might be $2 a minute, international roaming, $10 a day, or extra lines, $10 a month.

So now you need a database that tracks usage events and turns them into a comprehensible bill.

Oh, and by the way, you're dealing with real people who do real people things like starting or ending plans in the middle of a month, so you'll probably need to manage pro-rating.

Okay, let's recap.

You're going to need a mix of flat and usage-based billing, and a way to keep track of everyone no matter how often they begin and or change plans.

There are a lot of potential problems here.

So much so that we haven't even gotten to what Stripe does yet, and it's the second ad break.

Well, the solution to all your hypothetical local woes is coming up next.

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Welcome back.

I'm talking with Vulture's podcast critic, Nick Kwa, about why so many capital firms and CEOs are spending their time and money making podcasts.

Right before the break, we were talking about how making podcasts or YouTube videos for long enough can be kind of a job interview, a way to build your brand and ultimately break into the field that you talk about.

But there's another way that podcasts work too.

It's just good old fashioned marketing.

Do you think about those podcasters as fundamentally the same as like the people who are on Twitter hawking their book all the time, right?

To some extent it's the same energy, right?

Like I have a thing that I care about that I am going to probably financially gain if I can make you care about.

out.

And now it's just that podcasts are the sort of deepest way to reach people on that front.

But it's not that different from what I would get just by tweeting nonsensically about the crypto coin that I'm hoping we'll go up.

Yeah, you know, if you're Hawking crypto, like you can do that a lot of a lot of different venues, but I mean, you know, flip it around.

If we were not thinking about this, just through the lens of the platform, podcasting this case.

And in 2024, the meat, the an An appropriate medium game plan for any creator, for any artist, for any person who wants to reach people is to be platform agnostic to some extent, right?

And to some extent, this is an expression of that.

I can talk about how good my investment strategy is over Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever, but you want to go to where people are and you also want to go to and build out spaces where you can have a deep loyal following if you're thinking about it, right?

You've got to have many spaces that you can attract people and you've got to be where people are.

I think the other thing that we've spent a lot of time talking with the last couple of is open questions about how big the podcasting business and audience is going to be.

There are more podcasts than ever.

It's still growing, but it is, I would say increasingly hard to launch and grow a podcast.

For a lot of the reasons you're describing like the upside of if you're a 22 year old musician starting on TikTok is that TikTok will show your stuff to people.

Podcasts don't work quite that way.

It's a big open space, but it's also kind of a harder nut to crack than it used to be.

it seems to me.

Do you think these people are actually making a real entered effort to, you know, make a dent in this business right now?

I can't speak for what happens in the in the hearts of souls of other people, but there's a very contained specific lane here, right?

I think about it in three layers at in we're speaking in December of 2024.

The first layer is the fact that like the first mover advantage is it's over, right?

In the same way that like if you start at a sub-sack now, god knows if So if there's going to be big, like there's always a benefit to being first to a medium that's kind of busy or first to a platform that's going to Busy that's going out.

And the other layer of podcasting, the layer I think about is that podcasting is just an expression of the internet.

It's it's hard to launch a new podcast.

Not the same way.

It's hard to launch a new website now.

Like there is just there's just so much territory claimed.

There's just so much so many competitors and it's so many participants.

That doesn't mean that you can carve out your space in a universe that you can't sort of go to from zero to one and Anybody's pocket any of these pockets But the other layer here is that podcasting over the past one two years has gone through a pretty radical transformation On the one hand, it's gone through a huge sort of Pair of contraction after Spotify and a lot of a big many kind of came into the business But also now it's just being sort of absorbed and eaten up by video like it's it is emerging in many senses with YouTube as an ecosystem in ways that I think folks who need to build businesses into space are embracing because it means more guaranteed money.

But it also means that its identity is kind of little like a little squishy right now.

Is it audio?

Is it video?

Is it YouTube?

Like what is it not within YouTube?

I had not thought about this until you were just saying that but given this sort of platform flattening that's happening, you can kind of make a podcast and then turn it into everything else.

Like so much of what I see on TikTok is clips of podcasts.

And so much of what's now hitting on YouTube is long form podcasts.

So I have podcast in my head as like our long interview that I'm listening to through headphones while I drive to work.

But actually what you're saying is is maybe we should be defining podcasts much bigger and broader across media than we have been.

This is precisely what we're referring to when I'm sort of talking about this identity crisis that podcasting is going to happen in the past year.

Is it video?

Is it audio?

Historically, in the past 10 to 15 years when we've been talking about podcast, we've mostly thought about it as an audio first medium.

Of course, that was never exclusively the case.

For example, Jerogen, for as long as he's been making podcast, has also been taping and posting those interviews on YouTube.

So this strand is the species.

This substrate has existed for a very long time.

And now it's becoming centered because it is, for many reasons, economically more viable, and economically more lucrative to do that.

But to your point, yeah, reading study after study or like here, reading interview after interview, that like kids do these things, or young people do these things.

Yeah, they use, they are, podcasting is equivalent to video.

A lot of the new audiences that come into the space are equating podcasts with video.

I think this phenomenon is supposed to be to podcasting.

I think very similar conversations do not in such ball terms are playing out, say, in movies and business.

What is television?

It is streaming?

Is it streaming?

Is it, you know, I think that you get on your idiot box?

And also this whole notion of Netflix considering YouTube, a primary competitor, and also YouTube being considered a major streaming competitor to Netflix and everything else.

So in this space where everything's kind of just piled together into a giant sludge, how do you define it for yourself now?

You're a podcast critic.

Do you have to have a clear sense of what is and is not a podcast?

This is my struggle.

This is my thing that I've been sort of working through in 2024 because you can take one or two positions that you can take the position of what you believe historically a word should mean or you can attack it from a position of what what people think the word means, right?

And I am discovering 2024 that the story, the story is how the word has shifted, and how the concept has shifted.

Like I am still a huge consumer of podcasts as an audio file distributed over the RSS feed in the open web and a certain culture that emerges from that.

But I also understand that language is flexible.

The way we think about platforms, do we think about any medium that's decentralized?

It's still I will say for broadcasting you have to sort of like take it as what people help people engaging of it So for me like I am just using the term pretty liberally to attack the hop to attack the question But yeah, I'm confused as the next person because I think the word is confused and I think the community is confused We're all confused together and we'll hopefully narrate ourselves out of it Yeah, well, I think if you if you take it that way and you kind of let podcasts Kind of be everything and nothing at the same time then just to keep going back to Elliot Management for a second, right?

Like the idea of doing that, all you're really talking about is like a new file format in a certain way, right?

Like it's a different structure for doing something, but it's not necessarily totally different.

I'm not saying my goal for this content is to reach you while you're driving to work, because that's what podcaster for.

It's just a different way of making the same kind of thing that they've been making forever, whether it's shareholder letters or angry tweets or whether this is just the next version of that because this is the media that people are consuming now.

And they're consuming it not just in their headphones and Spotify, but everywhere.

And so if you want to make something that lots of people see, actually making a podcast is about as quick and easy a way to get there as you can.

Yeah.

I mean, the only reason that we're talking about the Elliott Management story there is the novelty of the fact that they did it as a podcast, right?

Like, working buffer turns around tomorrow and goes, like, yo, the next, uh, we're which I have to add or report, I'm gonna drop it as an audiobook only or a podcast only, then it's a much bigger story than what it was.

But, you know, I think it's an attention-grabbing thing and it's succeeded for what Ellen Management did.

It's like, they got access and a bunch of people to write about it.

We're gonna take another short break.

And when we get back, we're gonna start tying all of this stuff back together.

Back in a minute.

This episode of Decoder is brought to you exclusively by Stripe.

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Welcome back, I'm still here, still talking with Nick Kwa, the podcast critic at Vulture.

Right before the break, we were talking about what even is a podcast at this point.

Is it audio?

Is it video?

No one knows.

Do we even need the word podcast anymore?

Who's to say?

But what we do know is there's still a sense of novelty to it in the world's of business and politics and the newness means something Let's put that back together with this idea of we came out of the podcast election and whether you're a Business or a politician where you go seems to be different now when you want to talk to quote unquote the people.

With now a few weeks of distance from the election and the chaos surrounding it, what do you think we're going to take away from what happened kind of in that last few weeks before the election and where the candidates in particular chose to go?

Two caveats.

What is I have no political allies to I think still is it's pretty important to try to hold space for the fact that there are two separate things going on.

There is just the larger political math of the election.

There will be books and books and books and hours and hours of people gathering about basically conducting the autopsy of this, to what I said, was it political communication?

To what exactly it was just the nature of the economy.

That will be sort of started elsewhere.

But I think from the very specific lane of if you are a national political Canada and you're engaging in a political communication strategy.

If it is not apparent, if one hasn't not internalized the fact that whatever you mean by the old school traditional textbook of how you put a campaign out, like if that hasn't already been rethought and dead, like this is the election that should switch everybody, every political communication visors book straight up, right?

Like it's not enough to do the broadcast networks.

It's not enough to do the national papers.

It is not enough to do the local papers.

To the extent that local papers that still exist, one has to sort of like internalize and grok the fact that everything that we've been saying that has become truisms but not quite felt about media being fragmented, about political polarization expressing itself in not just in media products but media platforms.

This is all true.

And if podcasts like dragon or whatever are not helped in equal standing That's something like the New York Times editorial opinion board, you're not quite caught up with the way things are right now.

I think the other big learning for me, the other sort of sense that I got from this election is that it is important, parts and now more so than ever, to really truly engage people where they are, which could mean, if you were to Harris campaign or any Democrat at this point, to go on a show like Logan, to go on even say to Daily Wire, like Ben Shapiro is a very huge show.

Go increase your presence because it was one of those things where I like, if you are not in that show or if you're not even in that ecosystem, you've even missed that foot, even as an antagonist, it's just like, I don't think anybody knows that you even exist.

And that's kind of the expression or the result of a society in which there are multiple media realities, right?

I think one of the bigger, maybe overarching theoretic questions, theoretical question here is that do we still have mainstream media or do we have of multiple mainstream media.

Do you think it's as simple in that case as just, this is where the audience is now, or is there still something about the form of the podcast itself that feels different?

Like I'm still hung up on this idea that spending three hours with Joe Rogan is different in some meaningful way that I have trouble putting my finger on.

than even doing a, you know, six-minute TV hit on CNBC.

Even absent the audience stuff.

There is something about, particularly these like long Joe Rogan or call her daddy, these like very personal podcasts that seems to do something that no other media does.

I am sort of in the beginning process of thinking that maybe actually I don't want to read too much into the uniqueness of the podcast interview as a forum because radio exists, right?

Broadcast radio exists, but the thing that we're kind of, I think still unpacking, is specifically Trump's appearance across the atmosphere, right?

The sort of crown jewel appearance there is his appearance on Joe Rogan, but Trump also spent a ton of time kicking it with flagrant with Andrew Schultz.

Like, he spent a lot of time, And he went out to Ed and Ross's kick stream and was gifted at Tesla, you know, there's a certain, what's the word, performative difference there.

This is the certain kind of experiential difference there.

And you can actually sort of start drawing out that analysis by just comparing how Harris did when she went on to, on Call for Daddy, right?

She sound exactly like she does if she was on the television, she done it exactly as she was when she was on Charlemagne's show on the radio, whereas Trump, and here I want to sort of, before I move into this caveat that maybe we're just talking about him specifically being very good at this, but the whole hanging out thing really works.

And the whole hanging out thing contributes to this sense that I assume a lot of American voters were looking for about like that person is a real person.

And that person I can connect with and empathize more so than any other politician that really has to watch what they have to say.

Again, is this a new replicable political communications strategy?

I don't know.

I don't think I've seen anyone maybe Federman, John Federman has done something that is closest Bernie definitely, who's he's very good at, and I'm not so sure he hangs out as well, but he is pretty charismatic in very long stretches.

But that is the thing, I think you're kind of touching on, is the qualitative difference of being a good guest in a very long podcast format, that is something very few people can do.

I think if you can do it, we're learning it's very powerful.

And I think what we're seeing with a lot of these things, all the way up and down the line, from huge celebrities who are trying to have podcasts, all the way down to, again, these B2P folks, the upside is, to me at least, you seem real and human and genuine if you can figure out how to hang in those spaces that is really hard to communicate otherwise.

There's something really powerful about what you gain by being able to be in those spaces in a way that feels real and human and authentic, that I just don't think even your point, like the broadcast radio interview, just doesn't seem to allow for quite that same thing.

I agree.

I also wanna make sure that we are in ourselves in an analytical space where it's multi-factorial, right?

It's not just the fact that Trump was a very a uniquely good baby.

Yes.

Right.

And there is a difference between being a good podcast host and a bit good podcast, yes.

A sort of mental sort of test that I play is that sort of like nobody cares if a democratic candidate goes on crooked media.

I think you go, you walk into that episode as a listener, more or less knowing what you're going to get.

I think part of the, a part of the appeal, a part of the interesting needs here is the novelty itself, right?

This is a presidential candidate who went on a bunch of podcasts, like who the fuck knows what a podcast is like in certain parts of the country hosted by a bunch of boys and men.

These were not political players.

So the novelty of that to bring it full circle, not like the novel deal of all it management, advancing a show, like I'm using a podcast, their novelty there I think is part of the power here.

And And so I want to read a lot into this, but I also think that there is some distance and some like self-assstrained about reading too much into this.

What's your sense of the next turn in all of this?

We're in this moment where everything is a podcast and nothing is a podcast.

Podcasts have all these new uses, the business is weirder than ever.

Are we just headed toward more of this same kind of context collapse and YouTube is gonna eat podcasts and that's just where we go from here?

What I'm looking for is specifically that question you're right, whether YouTube is going to completely and fully eat podcasting in terms of just like it's identity and sort of what that means for like who are the major players that that kind of come out of that right and obviously setting that within a larger context of like is all media just going to be this like fully see just a collapse of anything that resembles good journalistic form etc etc things can change really quickly really Like, who knew that Twitter slash X was going to become like this a couple of years ago?

But specifically, within a time frame between now and the next midterm, I think it's pretty obvious that there will just be more attention paid to whatever, however you define, like both podcasts and YouTube, I want to say, like this kind of species of creators, creators that have cultivated a very sizable audience among listeners that can be considered, quote, to quote news avoiders, or who are not reading the papers, who are not read watching broadcast television.

That's all in play.

That's all I think that's table stakes at this point.

It might change in terms of who is up and who's down, audiences might change.

But like that dynamic, from a sort of a coverage standpoint, just from thinking this one through, it's like, how big is Joe going to go and who else is going to be as important as this person?

Is this some sort of return to an era which like it's radio first, right?

In columnists, radio-first columnists, style people are sort of the major sort of powerful voices in this country.

That is something that I think will be what I'll be watching at next couple of years in addition to just like what happens to the rest of the podcast ecosystem.

As all of this grows and changes, especially as it runs into this like big teaming content ecosystem that is YouTube, I find myself wondering if it feels like the thing that has made the podcast industry feel human and authentic and real in the way that we're talking about really risks going away.

Like Tim Ferriss, just to name one, is a public speaker and podcast host and an investor and so on.

And he wrote this blog post a couple of weeks ago about taking a sabbatical from podcasting.

The part of it that I'm really thinking about right now are the new rules he set himself for doing it, because he basically, he was getting bored.

One of those rules was no book launch episodes, because this is just, this is what everyone does, right?

If you have something to promote, maybe you used to do the TV junket, but now you do the YouTube and podcast or there's this set of people whose entire job is now just kind of podcast speaker where they're like someone you've heard of mostly because you heard them on some podcast and they make the rounds and they show up everywhere.

And Tim basically said he's not sure he wants to do any of those things anymore because he feels like he used to be able to do interesting stuff because he wanted to and now it all just feels like a big grind.

And so I wonder as you talk about with politicians and so on, If we're going to see them start to be really choosy and strategic about where they go and who they talk to, if podcasts are going to lose some of that magic thing that people like about them, which is just that sensation of two people sitting there chatting together.

Can we have both of those things at the same time?

There are people who build institutions and there are people who find out what the next thing is.

right?

And maybe it's not just a media space, it's anything, right?

Like, you know, the first social media platform, like, started and then the game becomes like, how do you institutionalize it?

And there's always going to be that tension aren't and there's always going to be some co-existence between two spaces.

Right now, yes, I think the sort of conversation that we're having or the thing that's interesting now is like, how does this particular style of outreach and political communication and communication with large, how does it institutionalize?

How does it become the norm.

And will it become boring?

Will it become predictable?

We're having not dissimilar conversations in television movies, right?

For a while, like all world movies are going to be two hours long and I'd be based.

For a while, it seems like that's all we're ever going to get.

But at some point, it becomes stale, becomes expected in a clapticin to itself, and then new things emerge from the ashes.

And that is going to be the case here as well.

if it's not within podcasting, whatever it looks like in two to three to four years, like I think the more tricky questions that is going to happen really quickly, but I do feel like no, nothing stays in place forever.

If you're running a company or running a campaign or something right now, you have a brand you need to make people like in some way, shape or form, is the move to launch stuff or to go to this new place where the audience is at least for right now?

I genuinely believe it is so much hard to launch stuff that it returns there ultimately.

If you're like business model, your goal, the outcome you seek is to build an institution that outlives you, go for it.

But if the outcome that you seek is to increase your presence, if it's a political candidate, it is to increase presence such as win election.

if you're a executive, if the goal there is increase your presence so that you might be considered for a CEO job at another company or whatever, don't build your own stuff.

Just go everywhere.

Be ubiquitous.

I think the large way that we've been thinking about media ecosystems over the last couple of years is that everybody's building their own little fiefdoms, everybody's in their little fiefdoms and everybody lives in their own alternate reality.

What's better than that?

What's a billion dollars better than a million dollars?

What's better than building your own reality is to be in everybody else's.

That's the game.

Thank you to Vulture Podcast Critic Nick Kwa for joining me in the show, and thank you for listening.

Really hope you enjoyed it.

Really glad I got to be here again.

If you have thoughts about this episode, or stuff you'd like to hear more of, or you just want to finally explain to me what a podcast is, you can send a message to decoderattheverge.com.

The team really does read every single email.

Neelye is also going to be answering some reader questions for the last show of the year, so if there's anything you want to ask in the whole world, make sure to send your question as soon as you can.

Also, find us on TikTok.

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Decoder is a production of the Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt and our editor is Cali Wright.

Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder Music is by Break Master Sylvinder.

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