As a father of one, two, and now three, I find inevitably a bunch of house chores waiting for me every day when I get home. My infovore dna would rather have me reading or writing something and that's when I started to fall more and more into the podcast rabbit hole.
There is a lot of potential in the medium and I see more and more people waking up to that. There is also a lot of repetition, the typical podcast format is the interview (or dialogue) and the same people get interviewed a lot, especially in tech/VC circle[1]. Some producers are experiencing with new narrative forms (Serial the most famous of them) but I can see in my habits that information/learning still has a preference vs entertainment.
Discovery and recommendation play a different role for podcasting than blogging. First, there are fewer podcasts produced than posts written on a weekly basis. Podcast are also more resource intensive and the barrier to entry are still higher than "just" writing. A newsletter curating podcasts is less useful that one curating written content (a form of curation that has exploded in the last couple of years). People follow (subscribe) to specific hosts rather than picking and choosing one episode at a time. It is rare that the unknown host produces one memorable episode among many not-so-memorable ones. Consistency is much more in the hands of the host than it is in the hands of the blogger. And so on.
With this in mind, I decided to start noting down what I listen to every week. It might end up being useful for somebody to discover new content or just for me as a sort of journal stimulating some reflections on where podcasting is going. Let's see.
Ok, already now this is an issue. Since I listen mostly on my phone (like most people I guess) I don't have an easy way to find links to podcasts I have listened to on my computer. I am now browsing a podcasting app as activity record and wondering how to copy/paste those links into this post. Sounds pretty stupid but here we go, immediately an impediment for podcast curation on the written web.
Update. I figured that I could just move to editing this post on my phone, copying links from my podcasting app and pasting them into the editor in my mobile browser. Fail again. When I paste the link the url is, obviously, that of the specific app I am listening with. This means if my readers don't have that app they are stuck.
Update 2. Luckily, the people at breaker (the app I am using now) have an open web version where you can listen to the podcast without downloading the app, so the experience of clicking through their link is not that terrible. I'll stick to using their links, they are doing a very good job and you should give it a try.
So, this week:
a16z: "From Hidden Figure to Sonic BOOM" https://breaker.audio/e/16959840
Funny enough, I listened to this just a couple of days after watching "Hidden Figures", the movie, with my daughter. I didn't know about this story, it's a very good one.
99% Invisible: "251- Negative Space: Logo Design with Michael Bierut" https://breaker.audio/e/16512648
I listen on and off to 99PI. Roman Mars' voice is the closest I get to guided meditation. This interview is exceptionally good.
The Ezra Klein Show: "David Chang, head of the Momofuku empire" https://breaker.audio/e/4005921
This is another thing about podcasts. Once you discover a new show, you can spend a lot of time going back through old episodes. A good show is likely to have produced consistently good episodes and I like to binge on the once I found one.
The Ezra Klein Show: "Tyler Cowen explains it all" https://breaker.audio/e/17276142
See above comment. This is one is even more, a cross reference between two shows I like a lot recently. First listen to Cowen interviewing Ezra Klein, then to the reverse. Podcasting is a small circle. There is a passage around 18:58 about weaknesses and strengths that I really loved. Writing more about that soon.
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital "a16z's Balaji Srinivasan on Why There Is A Financial Incentive For Truth In VC & Why The Best VCs Invest In Founder To Make Them Richer Than Themselves" https://breaker.audio/e/5044338
I must admit I have been "snobbing" the 20m VC for a long time. Mostly because I try to get a break from VC/Tech/Startup stuff when I am back home, but also because of the style of the interviews. Just a matter of taste I guess. I have to concede that guests are great and they very often drop invaluable knowledge. Like in this case. In this episode, Balaji says something extremely interesting about pocket of values in outdated regulations. Regulatory arbitrage has been the source of (at least) 2 multi-billion dollar businesses in the past years (Uber and Airbnb), what else could be there?
How I Built This: "Power Rangers: Haim Saban" https://breaker.audio/e/17170719
This story is just incredible. Haim Saban is the impersonification of hustling (in the positive sense Haim, don't worry). This quote says it all: "The biggest hits I have had in my life has been always as the result of significant and repeated rejection. So every time i have an idea where people tell me 'don't do that', I think 'ups, I am on to something'". (please allow quoting sound bites!!)
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[1] Incentives play a role here. Lots of new tech podcasts are coming up since techies are the main early adopters of podcasts. All new podcasts try to interview famous tech people (mostly VCs) and they, in turn, have a strong incentive to be interviewed (ego plays a big role too). We end up with multiple podcast hosts trying to boost their visibility by interviewing a smaller number of successful people. The result is a lot of repetition and also a good number of dull episodes where the status gap between host and guest is so high that the entire thing ends up being more an exercise in adulation instead of a true dialogue.