A seminal is the protection of iHeart Radio.
The most important thing about making a podcast is getting the tape SYNCD.
Somebody's got a clap with me?
Do y'all do a clap sync?
But it's more of the ritual of it.
Yeah, oh, I love it all right? Who wants to count? You? Do it?
Because you're the boss of this?
The way do we we count on? Where do we clap?
Do you just want to go with one?
Living on the edge?
Nine after?
So?
Hurry up?
What three?
Two?
One? Then clap? That's the most involved clap for the time being, at least in its current home. This is going to be the last episode of Ephemeral.
We are canceling the show what why Well?
The algorith of them felt it wasn't hitting the right taste clusters.
It seemed like the right moment to tackle a question I've been curious about since the very beginning of this show. How ephemeral are podcasts in twenty twenty three. It's easy to assume their ubiquity. I've seen it estimated that between three and four million podcasts currently exist, most available to essentially anyone, anytime, anywhere. But if this feed went dark today and disappeared from every podcast player. What then, don't worry that's not going to happen, at least not for
the foreseeable future. But it makes me wonder just how much ownership any one of us has in this dynamic, and how history might look back upon this era in which people have recorded, distributed, and archived for their own voices to an unprecedented degree. Surely there's no shortage of opinions on this. People that could talk about the business, the tech, the cultural ramification, Google how to make your
podcast successful, and see how many hits you get. But I am most interested in what other creators have to say, and luckily I happen to know the hosts of some of the longest running, most successful shows around. At least with the words stuff in the.
Title, Welcome to stuff, you should know it's you meet Chuck.
Yeah, it's about to say.
Just like the old days, stuff to blow your mind.
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick.
Stuff you missed in history class. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
Stuff they don't gort you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nola.
They call me Ben.
Hello, and welcome to Savor Prediction of iHeartRadio.
I'm Annie Reach and I'm Lauren vogel Bomb.
But to me, this show is always Thill food Stuff.
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Lauren Vogelbaum and I'm Annie Reef and we are your hosts of this a new show from How Stuff Works.
I'm gonna put your right on the spot off the bat here. How long have you each been podcasting?
Oh geez, that's a tough question.
I would have done the math if I had done. This was going to be one of the questions. I guess I've been working with the company for about twelve eleven years, So I guess I've been podcasting for about nine.
Yeah, it'd be ten.
That sounds about right, because I started in twenty ten. You started a year after me. Okay, right. I haven't always been a host of podcasts, but I've always been working in some capacity on podcasts since twenty ten.
Oh wow, hoof, I think I started in twenty twelve. I think I've been on Stuff to Blow your Mind since twenty fifteen. Is that right?
That sounds about right. I know that in twenty twenty put out a ten year anniversary special of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. So going back to when it was Stuff from the Science Last that I hosted with Alison Loudermilk. So yeah, what going on fourteen years? Does that sound right now? Wait? Yeah, that would be right.
Josh has been doing it longer than me.
But only by a few months. Two thousand and eight to twenty twenty three.
Is what?
This is our fifteenth year? Fifteenth? No, that's not right, is it?
This is our fifteenth year in April?
I think crazy? Yeah, fifteen years, there's your answer.
The twenty eleven when we started that sounds about right right around there. Yeah. We had a different podcast called pop Stuff that we worked on for a couple of years that had a very devoted but also very small listenership.
God bless those fans, the small devoted fans.
They were so lovely.
I loved the very buch.
We moved on to Stuff You Missed in History Class in twenty thirteen, So we are coming up on our ten year anniversary. Yeah, but I had done some episodes in twenty twelve. All right, so I think I already passed mine, you did, WEFs didn't even notice.
Matt and I were in How Stuff Works before How Stuff Works started messing with podcast We had someone in the marketing department of How Stuff Works say, Hey, this is shiny new thing. It's called podcasting. We're going to do podcasting and it'll only be five minutes long. Everything. We'll have stuff in the title right, and it'll refer directly back to these articles because we're a print edutainment company or a digital print company. And we quickly realized we had misjudged our scope.
Well, yeah, we were making a show called brain Stuff with Marshall Brain I think that was in two thousand and seven, because Stuff you should Know officially started in two thousand and eight.
We really started the pivot toward podcasts with That's when Nole came aboard as well and for a time edited what every podcast.
It was twenty thirteen when I started more producing podcasts and then gradually started being on Mike And now I've kind of pivoted from producing to completely just you know, talking on the things. So definitely been in the you know, it's so hard to get on the ground floor of anything these days, and I think all three of us, hell all four of us, we're really lucky to be able to do that for podcasting for the most part.
How many podcasts episodes do you estimate you have published in that span of time?
One million, thousands?
Yeah, those thousands over certainly over one thousand, multiple thousand.
It gets kind of in the weeds pretty quick, man.
No clue, no clue, there's no, not really a good way to count, as far as I know.
More than seventeen less than three trillion.
Yeah, wait, why is there not a good way to count?
You know, because it's like, over the years, the new episodes you were, and then you end up running repeat episodes, and initially they were in a very hap dash sort of fashion, you know, just whenever you needed some, and then vault or rerun episodes became more of a standard part of the production. And yeah, and then just over the years, you know, sometimes you go back and take out an old episode that just doesn't hold up anymore. So there's there's not any like really solid record keeping
of the core stuff to blow your mind episodes. And then eventually we reached the point where we're doing all sorts of extra content as well, like short form episodes, listener mail episodes. We've been in two years of weird House cinema episodes on Fridays talking about strange movies. So like, where do you count? How do you cut it? To do the count is just yeah, years of content.
Somebody would have to just directly go count with a human brain. I don't know of any automated way to do it.
Yeah, and it just better things for human brains to do.
Well.
We do two new ones a week every week. We'd never take hiatus. We've done this math before of like you know, two times fifty two, So one hundred and four a year?
What is it?
Josh?
Well, we publish one hundred and four episodes a year, not including leap.
Years or short stuffs.
N Oh, you're right, actually, so yeah, there'd be one hundred and sixty carry the one now one hundred and fifty six. So we published one hundred and fifty six a year.
And then we also do classics, which we record intros for, but those aren't really new. They're the three runs, three runs, three runs with a new frame, no, four times fifteen.
I don't know, like fifteen sixteen hundred episodes, I'd.
Say, yeah, at least fifteen hundred. I bet it's with the short stuffs. It's creeping toward eighteen.
So one million is I'm standing by that number.
Yes, math checks out for me. Do you ever reflect on how much of your likeness is just floating around out there on the internet, out there in space? And if so, I mean, what do you what do you think about that? What does that bring to mind? I do?
I do, mostly because I've talked about things on the show that I have never talked about with, like my family, my closest friends, And I think about that sometimes of like the impact or outcome of a family member perhaps stumbling upon that and thinking, oh, well, I know everything about her because she's in my life, and then they don't. There is sort of your professional voice, or you're the person you put out there that might not necessarily be
entirely you. It's mostly you, but it's sort of like a performance you're doing. It's sort of like a thing you're doing. And so sometimes I wonder about that, and I wonder about what people who know me think about that. I don't know, I get in my head about people analyzing it, which is probably just saying more about me and analyzing me than anything else. But yeah, I do, I do think about it.
I mean, it's an aspect of you, for for sure, but right's it's not all of you. I kind of like grew up professionally doing science videos on YouTube and being the moderator for those, which, if you guys have never been in the comment section of a YouTube video, it is a wretched hive of scum and vilany. It can be really harsh there, and especially towards ladies who
are doing anything. That was a very harsh but a very useful mindsetting kind of jellification of what it is to have this avatar of yourself out there running around on the internet through people's lives that is not you.
It's related to you.
It's something that you did. You know, you went into that room for half an hour and recorded a video that got cut down to five minutes. But just because someone consumes that they don't they don't know you, And that's like kind of a point of view that I really had to develop in order to just preserve my own skin. But so after that, I guess it does not bother me. What other people might think of this like weird facet of myself that I put out there.
But knowing how different I sound on different shows is really hilarious to me because I've had people who know me and who don't know me tell me like like you sound so different, like this is such a different thing, and like like what's the real you?
And I'm like, oh, it freaks me out a little bit sometimes, Like there was a period where I tried to get verified on Twitter. This was way before the current drama of Twitter verification, but I felt like people had a way to access me twenty four to seven in some cases to tell me the minutia of what they thought I had done wrong, and it was me out a lot, And I was like, maybe if I could make this a verified account and have it be like my official work thing that is only work and
not personal stuff, maybe that would help. But Twitter said I didn't meet the criteria to be verified, and then I was like, I'm just going to use this publicly facing thing less and turn off notifications for people I don't follow, because it can really be a lot one. I mean, I almost feel like more of my Internet presence, at least on social media has to do with Star Wars, and it does history and sewing and sewing, and so I almost feel bad for people who follow me for
history content and get like NonStop greedo discussion. But I also am highly cognizant of the fact that my age has given me the gift of not having my youngest and just most stupid behavior captured on social media. Same so I'm kind of like, eh, whatever at this point, Like I'm an old my world is settled in terms of like where I live and who I'm with and all of that. Like, I don't feel quite as much fret about things in that regard of like how will
a future person that meets me perceive me. It's like that ship is saled. I'm good. I'm but really, I think if you in the future when aliens come, they're gonna find more pictures of me, like in an Amidala
costume than they are doing anything historical. I think the thing that's been troubling me more recently has been the just lightning fast development and quality of artificial intelligence and that kind of stuff just over the last few years, because like I know, when we were doing like writing and editing articles every once in a while, there would be this push to try to get like an automated editing software, and ten years ago it was terrible, like
the results would be very bad. But there's stuff that's being turned out now that seems like almost indistinguishable from something that is created by a human being. And some of the stuff that's going on now is specifically about recreating the sounds of people's voices. And I'm like, how long is it until there's just a fake version of me that's got my voice but it's not me, you know.
I was just listening to an audiobook of Jory Lewis Borges's short stories in the Car, and one of the stories is about him contemplating the difference between himself and the version of himself that he that has been put out into the world via his writings, and I've got it rather insightful. It's definitely worth a read for anyone contemplating this sort of thing. But he sort of like looks at it almost kind of like there's this sort of antagonism there, like there's that guy, there's that Borges,
and then there's me. But then by the end of the story he acknowledges that he's not really even sure which Borges has written this story, written this little essay, if you will.
I certainly have that experience if I listen to an old episode. I mean, I know writers have this experience all the time where you read something that you wrote more than I don't know, two years ago, and you don't it doesn't feel like something you wrote anymore. It feels like you're reading something somebody else wrote, or at least I have that experience. I think this is common to writers. Rob would you say the same thing, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I always consider it so weird when you have an admirable I guess when you have like a writer or some other somebody involved in some sort of creative process where they have something that they made years ago and they still kind of like stand by it. It's like still out there and they're like, yeah, that's me. Where it's like, I just don't feel that connection to anything like that. Like I have a real hesitancy to even put an episode in for a rerun, a Vaulved episode
that's more than a year old. And part of that is science. You know, our understanding of the world moves along and you have to worry about was this was this evergreen have there been updates? But then other parts of it are just like, I don't really know who this guy was that did this episode, say three or four years ago. I mean, especially now, it just seems like such a long time ago.
I mean I wasn't even necessarily talking about would you still stand by it or would you still make the content the same way you did? I mean, regardless of that, I just mean like the kind of basic alienation from anything that comes out of your own creative process over time. You know, I read something I wrote a couple of years ago, and it doesn't have that same level of familiarity,
you know how you like, you can't. It's hard to catch your own typos in something because it's still a part of you, and so when you read over it, you don't see the mistakes. But after a certain period of time, I think, whatever it is that finally lets you see your own typos also makes it feel like an alien piece of writing that you didn't actually write. And I'd say the same thing is kind of true
of podcasting. If I listen to an episode I did a few months ago, it's like, oh, yeah, that's still me. I remember thinking all those things I remember, you know, I can still kind of like feel the texture of where all these words and the sequence I spoke them came from. But if I listened to something from several years back, I don't feel that at all. It's just like, who is this person talking?
I would say that it's something that you grow more comfortable with, especially a show like ours, where we end up telling anecdotal fun stories about our lives and our families and loved ones and friends and things we do in the real world.
It's kind of the fabric of.
The show, and so a lot of stuff is out there, so you kind of have to kind of think about what you want, you know, a couple of million people to know about you when every time you open your mouth, Yeah.
What's is we we're like podcasts famous, so that means we can walk down the street in basically any town or city in the world and not get recognized. But we still, you know, have lots of listeners and people that like to write into us and you know, share their stories with us and all that. So I feel like we have the best of both worlds because we never get thronged. Although I think even if we did get recognized we probably still wouldn't get thronged anyway, but I think you get the point.
My daughter asked me if I was famous the other day in the car, what'd you say?
I said, not really, we don't get thronged.
Yeah, And she said, okay, I don't want anyone throng in us.
I mean, if somebody wanted to take the time to sift through all of that, they could probably find us telling the same story fifty or more times. You know, we're saying the same little turn of phrase. I think about that. You know how many times I've said the exact little thing like it was me saying for the first time. That bothers me and keeps me up nice.
But also you can't let it too much. You have certain shows where it'll be listeners that go back and mine old episodes and find little catchphrases and things that the hosts say and sample them and put them into songs. I think it's kind of cool, but it also freaks me out a little bit that all that stuff is available for the taking.
It's like any other skill, right there becomes this sort of reflexive muscle memory aspect to some things. But then you have this huge consideration of you know, being on for lack of a better phrase, a permanent record, right, and you begin to think more carefully about what you put out in the world. And different people react to that in very different ways. We are pretty open about the fact that we only exist because an audience exists, right, So we want to, to a reasonable and healthy degree,
allow those folks in. It's weird because then you encounter parasocial phenomenon.
Right.
People who listen for a long time feel that they have a personal relationship with you because they know a lot about you.
And sometimes they feel entitled to tell you what you should or should not say or do, because they feel like they've got skin in the game, you know, and and and you you can let them down, you know what I mean, and like you know, and while you don't want to let that cripple you and and make you scared to say anything. Uh, it's certainly always in the back of your mind, or at least in the
back of my mind. And I think I probably speak for most of us when I say that it's a calculation that goes into how we how we you know, comport ourselves on Mike as to not quote unquote let down our audience by saying something stupid.
I feel like every time I talk to you officially on Mike, Alex, I end up getting really emotional. H But this, like this made me think about my son and thinking about the amount of things that I've said into a microphone, number of conversations I've had with these guys and you and others, and like, it's weird. You can hear me get older and evolve on Mike, Like anyone that has access to a computer can hear that. Right now, you can hear me change and like went
we went back. We were going through our classic episodes to get all the Illumination Global Unlimited ads, and going back through those episodes, you could hear Ben and I and we're not kids, but we're pretty fresh out of college guys like trying our career, doing the best we can do, making this thing happen, and creating something of our own. And then to hear us, you know, now we've been in a career for a long time and we're still thriving and we're still bringing new things to
the table. But we're very different people. And when I think about my son, sometime in the future, anytime in the future. He can go back. He can hear what I cared most about in twenty fourteen. He can learn about how I thought about things in twenty seventeen. He can hear the dogs on Mike in the background that are probably long past, you know, He'll hear like Penny and Meadow. He could hear that if he wanted to,
you know, well after I'm gone. He can hear me having a conversation with a couple of my best friends. Thousands of times we watched.
Like actors, for example, grow up on long running television series, you know, like the Sopranos. You know, you got like AJ starts off as a little kid, and by the end of it, he's like, you know, in his twenties, and it's similar to that. But it's also not because it's real. You know, where we are, who we are. We're not playing characters. I mean, you can't help but bring a tiny amount of the tiniest amount of affectation when you're doing this for a living, you know, But
I don't think we do very much. So we really are to your point, Matt, you know, kind of growing up on Mike, and it really is the real version of us that you're experiencing.
There is something beautiful about it, and nobody really knows how far this is going to go. Keep in mind that although the big corporations got involved with casting very early on, the industry is still so young that there aren't a lot of people who've retired from it, which I think is amazing. You know, the luminaries, the big names are still very much there.
And Alex, the question for you is which ones end up getting committed to wax cylinders and shot into space. You know, Like the show is called ephemeral. You know, it's like it is. It exists purely digitally, and so it's not an object you can pick up until somebody commits it to that for you know, whatever future time, whether it be an apocalyptic event when you know, the infrastructure goes away, for someone to pick it up and play it on an old Victrola that they crank.
You know, dude, you need to do that, Alex. This you need to print all of your ephemeral episodes onto vinyl and then you could sell like that collection. That would like so that would be so freaking cool. It's that would be a dream come true.
But that's like us thinking as like archivists, you know, and thinking of the future, whereas advertisers and like executives. It is a disposable medium, and as much as it can be recommodified and re monetizes the word that's used, that's the only value it has to them. They're not thinking of it in terms of some sort of big picture, you know, storytelling device. If they are, it's just as a selling point to advertise it.
Make me sad, dude, geez.
I also do love those very early stuff. They don't want to know babyface Ben and Matt with the hair of it is.
Matt with the hair before I lost it all right.
So many hearts broken on those cheekbones.
I'm telling you, I.
Used to see it right against them. It's a sharp object.
You guys have made obviously a lot of episodes of this. You've also worked on a lot of other shows, a lot of other podcasts and other kinds of projects. I'm curious, what do you think gives any kind of media or creative project staying power, like something that makes it stick around in the culture, And what in your experience you think contributes to the longevity of podcasts like yours.
Boy Alex said is a great question, and I think that anyone who says they have that answer is lying or owns a marketing firm, right, because if the formula were out there, it's like saying, go make a viral video. You can't do that. I think it's a show like stuff you should know has. I think there are some things that can lend to lasting power, and one is sort of what we call in the industry evergreen content.
In other words, it's not super of the moment and newsy, and in one hundred years somebody might want to learn about something that we've talked about, so hopefully we've got some staying power.
I mean, the difference is putting Chuck and I together. That's what we've always been told. And at first, I remember when we first started kind of getting popular, we were trying to figure out what that was, you know. I mean, I think it's a pretty normal desire to try to at least capture understand like what it is that's making things successful. But we figured out we can't
see it, like we don't. We don't. We feel like, you know, connected to one another, but we don't see that chemistry that other people who are listening to us, you know, get to hear or get to witness, and we've just finally just taken it on faith that it exists and it's fine and we don't need to understand it. As long as everybody else is, you know, kind of vibing on it. That's that's what counts.
I totally agree with Josh, and I think I even had less of an interest in examining that years ago than he did, because I'm one of those sort of people who's just like, I don't know what that is, but it's working, so I don't want to examine it too closely.
Well, I remember the reason I was I wanted to so badly is because I was so terrified about that sophomore season curse. You know, I'm saying, like, when a new TV show comes out and it's a big hit in its first season, it becomes really self aware, and very often the second season isn't nearly as good as the first. So I was really scared we were going to do that. So I think that's why I wanted
to understand it. But at the same time, I think giving up on trying to understand it helped us get around that second season thing.
I guess I would make a distinction between a podcast having longevity in the sense that the same show is continually putting out new episodes for many years, versus the same finished product, like a piece of audio, having staying power in the sense that people keep listening to it over the years. I mean, there are some shows that you know go on for a long time. I mean that you know, The Simpsons has been going for however many seasons. But I would say that some episodes of
The Simpsons really have longevity and others do not. I mean, everybody's going to remember episodes from season or whatever for decades and decades, and you know who's going to remember that episode from season seventeen. I think it tends to be something that has a has a unique or distinctive quality, something that separates it from everything else that was being produced in the same genre.
At the same time, there's sort of a number of different questions wrapped up in it, right, like why do people listen to the show? Why do people keep listening to the show, or why did new people start listening to the show? And I guess all of those are all kind of unanswerable in their own ways, right, I mean, you just can just kind of guess at these things and hope that the sort of standards you stick to are the reasons that all of these people have listened,
are listening, or will listen in the future. And I guess on that count, like we just try and be honest ourselves, approachable and engaging in curiosity, like honestly engaging in our own curiosity, and sort of hoping and trusting that that level of honest cureiosity will be embraced by the people who listen.
To the show.
I mean, the bottom line is that, like for something to have a cultural moment, it has to grab the attention of like X number of people to begin with. But there are lots of things that do that and then they kind of vanish, Like so much of our show is that, like did you know that this person was super super famous in nineteen twenty and you've never
heard of them? Like that happens all the time. But in terms of staying power, I think there has to be some element to it that is either controversial, which would be my less favored version, or just so rock solid in terms of consistency that people know that they can continue to access that thing and that it's not going to be suddenly a completely different thing that they have to learn and understand. Like there's a comfort level
to it. It's got to be one of those too, right, Like I don't want to ever be part of one of the controversial ones. But those are the things that like sticking people's minds forever. And you see it happen in the Twitter cycle all the time, where someone will do something stupid and terrible and then it'll kind of fade away, and then like six months later, someone will go, do you remember when so and so did this stupid thing? We should rehash that versus the quieter version is the
consistent version, which is fine with me. I think some of it is really just luck, and some of it is having the people who are working on something really care about what they're doing. I think it's hard to make something that really captures people's attention if you do not care at all about what's going on. But at the same time, I know a lot of people who have really poured their hearts into projects and those projects
have never taken off in a big way. Right, So there's an element to it that I don't know that anybody necessarily has control over it all, and to return to Holly's example, there are so many people that are just doing thoughtless, obtuse things on social media all the time, and only like a tiny ninety fraction of them becomes the main character of social media for the day, you know, So some of it I think is just random chance.
The other thing though, that I think separates the podcasts that have longevity and have legs versus that don't, aside from being able to just stick to making them, is that I always say that like, your ear can perceive disingenuous sound faster than your brain can process it, and so if it's something that's like a nonfiction like what We Do or whatever, you have to be more real than polished in my opinion, you know what I mean, Like there are shows where people sound completely perfect, and
it's like your brain buzzes right out of it, like it just doesn't stay engaged. And even I think in cases where you're making something that is more produced or more fiction oriented, it's the same thing they teach actors all the time, like, yes, you're playing a part, but you have to be in that moment for it to
really play. And it's kind of the same thing like there just has to be a level of engagement, a genuine intellectual engagement with the material that carries forward to the listener because remember they're listening in We always talk about intimacy in the podcasting industry, Like, it's not like when you go to a movie theater and you watch something on a screen, or even when you're in your house and it's on TV where you're at a remove, it's usually in your bubble of your car or right
on your person. So there's such a depth of intimacy to it that I think that's why that divide of like genuine versus not feels so big in podcasts.
Yeah.
One of the many jobs that I had before becoming a podcaster, which is still a little weird to me ten years in, twelve years in whatever, I was a
massage therapist. And one of the things that we learned in massage school is that when you are doing a massage, you need to be really present in the room with the person and like part of what is healing and restorative to for lack of a better, less new agy word about getting a massage that somebody is in the room with you, being present with you and paying attention to you the whole time, and when you're getting a massage, if the person is just mentally checked out and on autopilot,
you can tell. And I think the same is true about listening to things that people have created. Somebody is tossing something off without really engaging with it. As Holly just said, it's audibly evident, even if the person thinks they're doing an okay job of phoning it in on
their on their show. Yeah, it's like your brain without you having any conscious part of it, your brain goes well, if they're not into it, why should like there's just an exit that happens without you even really participating in the decision.
M Well, my knee jerk. Very business answer is relevance. But essentially, the staying power to me is really about storytelling and connection. That idea of I'm connecting to a story or an experience or something with other people, getting lost in it and enjoying it and thinking about all of the people who For me, I think about the people who made it and the time it was made.
Yeah, I'd agree.
I'd say that the staying power of anything depends on how easy it makes it for you to write to connect to a story and to connect to the people who are creating it, to just really, you know, shoehorn yourself into the mind of someone who you find brilliant or delightful or terrible or you know whatever, all the whyever else you're consuming, whatever type of content. I've hate watched enough things that I don't mind. If that's why
you're listening, that's fine. And so I think that when a medium starts failing to do that, it's when you've made it too difficult to access, that you've put too many loopholes, too many ads, too many you know, pop ups or whatever it is, that it is too.
Many ads, never no such thing.
Because I started in podcasting when it was like first getting off the ground. A lot of people will ask me like, well, how do you get into podcasting? And my joking answer, which I don't always say out loud, is get a time machine because we were on the ground in the beginning, and so we built those those audiences. I will say, though, if somebody loves the thing that you did, I think it can still be lasting if it has a passion of fan base, and they will
work to preserve it and share it. And that is something that I love because I do that kind of stuff too. I don't want to lose this. I'm a very like physical I have to have some copy of this somewhere in case it goes away one day. And I think there are people out there like that. So I do agree it's mostly like timing and resources and all kinds of things like that. But I also think that smaller things that have these sort of niche, very passionate audiences can last too because of that.
Yeah, you know the same way that you can have a sleeper hit that doesn't do that, doesn't like do the numbers or make the money or whatever it is that you're ostensibly going for at first, can stick around in a way that you know, maybe maybe it's a year down the road and someone goes, oh, I'm cooking plantains, and didn't Anny and Lauren talk about plantains, And oh,
someone just mentioned this dish to me. I wonder if they've ever heard that episode about it, like let's And it's not always in linear way that I think, especially in like a corporate version of this job that is pleasing to all of us involved, like we want it to do those numbers, we want it to do that successful thing. But what a success is in terms of making a creative piece of work is a large, large category.
Art does not exist without an audience, right, So podcasting is just the same, despite the commodification that happens with any form of art, education or entertainment. So I would say, from an audience perspective, you're looking for three things. You're looking for identification, Do I see myself in this?
Right?
You're looking for participation, Am I an active part of this rather than just a passive observer? And from there you get to this idea of ownership. Right, don't talk bad about Ira Glass, that's my guy. So I would just, at least from the audience perspective, I would say identification, participation, ownership.
I think it's changed a little bit. I think it's now about shareable snippets, literally, that thing that gets posted on TikTok or an Instagram story or whatever. I think that's how things catch on now.
But does it have staying power. Catching on and having staying power kind of two different things, don't you think?
You're absolutely right? But I think that's how big audiences grow to create a show that has staying power, Right, I think that's one of the only ways that you get in. And it does worry me because it becomes a strategy for content creators or people who are actually making things, wanting to have something that lasts for a long time or it gets big. You're like you're grasping at those little things on purpose, or you're trying to crafter content to those things.
Yeah, I mean, you know again to the name of your show, you know, I mean the content has become increasingly ephemeral, but also increasingly disposable. I mean, I guess I don't know if i'meral and disposable are kind of similar, but not really. It just means like fleeting. You know, it's not something that you can put your arms around all the time, but at least in the past. You know, there's this nostalgia tied to like old mediums and these cycles.
The technology goes in and now, like vinyl is huge again, I think as a backlash largely against things like streaming that feel too ephemeral, and it's like, I don't feel participatory in this because it's too hard to wrap my arms around. And if I own a Vinyl record, then I'm participating in it, and I'm having ownership of it, whereas no matter how many streaming services I subscribe to, I don't ever feel like I own that music. So it's and it's just much more of a playlist kind
of culture, you know. So when I buy a record, it's like I'm participating in that art, and I feel like I'm you know, I'm filing it away in my own personal library of congress. I think that's a sad thing. But also there's always going to be backlash. I saw this article in the New York Times the other day about how I think it's in New York public school.
There these kids the start of this thing called the Luddite Club, where they're like completely eschewing social media and and uh and smartphones, you know, so that they can walk around and look at like a street art and listen to the sound of you know, the birds and street musicians. Has experience the world kind of untethered. So there's always going to be the backlash. And I think gen Z or whatever the other one is on the cusp there, they're the ones that are going to kind
of pioneer that. And as much as they've grown up on the internet, I think they know how to use it in a much healthier way than we give them credit for.
I agree with the observation about the cyclical nature of things, right, I would also I would also posit that the danger for a medium like this is one of the most beautiful things about it. It's democratized, right, It's relatively simple in terms of time and in terms of materials to create a show and to put that show on. But that same beautiful democratization lends itself to what may be one of the great achilles heels of podcasting overall, which
is that people like to talk. Listening is a skill people have to learn talking pushing it out. Uh, that's something people naturally like to do. There is a tremendous, uh insidious sort of validation in this, right Uh. And so I think if you look at a lot of the shows in this medium that that do well, that speak, that have that stame power to which we're alluding, then you'll find, as counterintuitive as it may sound, the creators of those shows spend a lot of time listening.
Right.
The the there's always you know, gloom and doomy forecasting stuff about uh about a saturation point, right, what what will there ever be a threshold at which every person you know has their own podcast and they're not listening to other shows.
Right because they need to they need to make their podcast, right. I hope that does not become the case. But again, I think that's the primary I don't even want to say danger anymore. The primary obstacle to longevity for some of these things is to the point about untethering. Untethering enough from the addiction to speak, to learn and exercise the amazing art of listening.
What do you imagine for the long term future of podcasting, Like, do you think in a hundred years people could be listening to podcasts that are made now or archiving them?
Oh?
Well, I hope not.
I hope so, boy, I hope so.
To be honest, I mean i'd be I'd somewhat doubt it because people actually consume very little media from one hundred years ago, and most of the things they do consume are kind of standalone works of art, like a single movie or a single novel. People rarely go back and like try to, you know, listen to the radio serials from one hundred years ago. I mean a few people might.
Well, Alex does, right, this is your thing?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so maybe some people with very Nietzsche obscure historical interests might still enjoy our podcast the same way that some people today might want to go back and listen to some kind of obscure radio serials.
Yeah, and I think that's fine. Like I'm mostly like, I just I hope people are listening a year from now, two years from now. I don't really think a century out. And I don't know, I guess I've kind of I kind of I'm cool with the idea that like one hundred years from now that that you know, nobody's gonna remember me. Maybe you know, people there will be some connection looking back on you know, like family connections to me or something. But you know, that's just that's just
how it goes. That's really, I guess how it's supposed to go.
I mean, the other thing that I think about is if the if they'll even be available right like, like you know, there's some serious work that goes into like archiving stuff that's one hundred years old now, archiving and also like making available digitally usually or in physical archives for people media that's that old. And like with podcasting, we kind of think, like with our model it's like, oh,
it's everywhere and it's always available and it's free. But I wonder, you know, I wonder how true that is long term for a variety of reasons.
Yeah, because who owns it, who's paying for it to be stored somewhere? You know, generally digitally speaking, But I guess you could look at it from a physical standpoint as well. Yeah, like, where where is this stuff one hundred years from now? That it's anywhere, so.
It's still going to have ear splitting ads that enrage people baked in one hundred years from now, I hope.
So I mean that really that's probably going to be the main reason they're going back and listening to the show. Like you know, nowadays, we look back at VHS tapes and we're like, oh, man, whoever recorded this off TV? They were thoughtful enough to cut out all of the advertisements. And that's the only reason I wanted to find it, you know, because you can get a better cut of whatever movie they were taping. But it's those ads you want, that's the you want the authentic media experience.
I want to watch that vintage easy bakeup and commercial.
Yeah, but there's also there's also just no accounting for taste in the future. Like how many, like how many of the films we've talked about in Weird House, some
of the lower budget productions. I mean, sometimes you had someone with a very high estimation of their talents and worth involved in it, But for the most part, did any of them think that, well, you know, decades from now, people are going to be remastering this and putting it out on a pricey blu ray, and there's going to be a section of the population is just going to gobble it up and want more so, and then there are other things that, you know, they're obviously down the
other end of the spectrum. There are plenty of big budget movies that came out with aspirations to just be like real cultural touchstones, and just nobody cares about them today.
That's a great point. I mean Edwood might have thought he was changing the world, but the guy who made Robot Monster probably did not yet.
And yet he did right right, Yeah, Yeah, that one seems a safe bet.
I feel like the organization of the content is also going to be a problem for future listeners because a big part of the experience of listening to a podcast like ours I think at least is not just hearing a discrete individual episode, but having heard the episodes from the previous months, and like that episode appearing in a context. We'll often refer back to things we've talked about previously, or of course, we have listener mail episodes which are
almost entirely retrospective about things we've already covered. So each like audio file is kind of enmeshed in an ongoing experience of relationship with the listeners and coming back to and thinking about different topics in different ways. So I feel like that would also be lost if you just like pull out a random episode from you know, one hundred years in the future.
Yeah, I mean sorting out archival materials can be very very tricky and stuff to bliw your mind. Would be a good candidate for a really hard I mean what you were saying earlier about how there's so many different things and a different name in the beginning, the format has changed all these different times. It would be a real like if you just got it dumped like in a box with no dates, no context, no index.
Well, now you've got me thinking, we need to start doing time capsule episodes. We need to start producing a show that will be popular one hundred years from now.
Oh that's interesting. Now, another way to look at it is that we are we're creating jobs for future archivists by establishing these problems. You know, this is this is good problems to solve.
Yeah, we got to keep the AI and the future busy with tasks like this.
Oh gosh, God bless the archivis AI or otherwise.
Listen, there are still people tracking down wax cylinder recordings and listening to them. So like some very very hyper focused person will figure out a way to find old podcasts and listen to them and probably be like those ding Dongs didn't have a clue what they were talking about in the context of the future. Beyond that, I don't know. I do think about it all the time
because we get so much discussion. I mean, you're part of it a lot within our company, where there's an awareness that we kind of came in at the beginning of a new industry and us kind of figuring out how any of us, either as individuals within the company or you know, media companies, are charting where that industry goes. That I almost feel like, even though we probably feel
like we're the old, seasoned hags of this business. In many ways, it is still in its infancy right when you think about where television was, say fifteen years into it being a media versus where it is now. Obviously, like that seemed still like the infancy to us. So while we feel like we've been doing this for a very long time and we're in it and we know
what it is, we don't. So it's very hard when I think about it in that context of like how we look back at other media historically, we don't know because we don't even know the world that will be right, Like will holograms stand there and say the words that someone has input into a some format where like there's a version of me that looks like a Pikachu that's still talking about like how people discovered color blindness. I don't know, but that sounds cool. That works for me.
Just in our own limited time span. I mean, we still get emails from folks who are listening to the whole archive of the show who will sometimes send in questions about incredibly early episodes that at this point are more than a decade old, and it's you know, a small number of people, but a meaningful number of people. So I have to imagine that one hundred years from now still going to be a small, dedicated, meaning like but meaningful group of people plowing through old recordings of stuff.
They're going to bring it back, like vinyl, because what do you mean, Well, like vinyl was not the thing for a long time, and now people are into vinyl again.
Oh you think, like podcasts will go out of fashion and then they'll come back in fashion.
It'll be retro. Well I don't even know if it's if out of fashion is the right word, but it won't be the most popular method of conveying that information, right, Like whether that means that things like what we do are gonna have to be married to visuals or I don't know, some other thing. I have this great vision.
I don't think this is real. It's just what goes on in my freaky imagination of like sound experiences where people have like almost your like inside of a lava lamp, but the things are moving in time with the things that you're hearing. Like to me, I'm like, oh yeah, that would be a great way to experience audio, you know, even if it's just people talking about like how a
car works or whatever. That sounds great to me. Something completely different than anything any of us can imagine will evolve and be the way that that these things are communicated, and then eventually someone will be like I found this old technology called an iPod, and who knows what will happen. Then somehow that made me imagine those immersive art exhibits the I love it, and like, we went to one when we were in Paris and it was honestly one of the best things of the trip. I loved it
so much. But like, I'm imagining a world where people walk into a warehouse sized space with projections on the wall and it's our voices, and it's honestly a little nightmarish to me. Those poor people, I'm so sorry and advanced future people.
Here in my older middle age, I've started to think a little bit about legacy and don't want to dwell on that kind of thing, but it enters my psyche occasionally, and I think, like, the best legacy I could ever ask for is that there is a school classroom in one hundred years where a teacher has dug up our show and is playing it for you know, the robot students of the future, all wearing silver jumpsuits exactly.
Yeah, I think that there's probably plenty of episodes that we have recorded that would still hold up in one hundred years. I think it would also be interesting, maybe from like an anthropological standpoint, to look at all the episodes that don't hold up and figure out why. I'm interested to see what we've said, what we've covered, what topics are just completely antiquated, you know, one hundred years
from now. But I do think that that there's a pretty decent amount in those fifteen hundred episodes that you could listen to one hundred years from now and be like, get virtually the same thing out of it, at least information wise as people of to day. And I think that's pretty cool.
Yeah, that'd be really interesting if one day people were like, look at this quaint show, remember when there was bitcoin and democracy things like that.
Those are the days that would be wild to me. That would be absolutely completely bizarre. However, you know, it's twenty twenty three. Certainly consume media from about one hundred years ago, especially when it comes to music. I love
music from that era. I honestly kind of hope that they aren't because I feel like the cultural references that we're making, and even just some of the stuff that we're saying about people in culture will have changed so vastly, like the appropriateness of all of that, will have an understanding of all of that will have changed so vastly as everything does. So I guess if they are I hope they're kind to us. I'm a very paranoid soul, and I memorize movies and stuff in case the apocalypse happens,
So I'm not sure. I feel I have grim outlook for the future.
But that being said, I do think it could be one of those things where people in the future are kind of like, oh, hey, look what they were doing this time, or sort of a very yeah time bubble encapsulation of this is what they were talking about, this is what they're doing.
They're like, oh, yes, back in the twenty teens when the when all the kids were podcasting.
Yeah yeah, or like you know in like survival horror games where you rifle through people's stuff and they have the diaries and it's such like a good example of oh, this is what they were worried about, this is what they were doing. I think podcasts could have a similar thing, hopefully not in the zombie Apocalypse. But you know, a good like snapshot of hey, this is what people were doing, what they were thinking about, what they were talking about, and that is always valuable.
Like like those those little those little right time capsules are are really cool to look into.
I wonder if they will exist still. I was just watching the New Blade Runner and they've just got this convenient blackout that like happened at some point in in the two movies where it's like, oh, like everything, even the hard drives and stuff like lost basically all the data. It was just the paper stuff that survived this thing.
Yeah, as far as I know, no one has put us out on like like cassette tapes.
So yeah, it's it's one of those things where it's hard for me to envision because there's a part of me that thinks, you know, audio is such a good for a lot of people. It's a very good way of communicating things. I feel like we still use radio in a lot of ways, and that's pretty old. When I explained to like my mom, for instance, who still doesn't know what a podcast is, I'm always like, it's
radio essentially on the Internet. So it's hard for me to imagine it goes away completely, but it definitely already feels kind of like the name podcasts, for example, is very like, hmm, that's.
Outdated, that's not really what it is.
So I don't know, I feel I feel like something. I feel like something like it will still exist. I'm not sure it will be this form.
And it's so hard to say with just the amount of data loss that humanity has experienced over you know, the course of human history, and how much more human history we would have if we hadn't lost all of that stuff. So it's easy to imagine that some kind of sunflair would take out everything and right we would have this like return to a to a kind of dark ages where nobody knows who Madonna was or has read about her. But what was that sound like?
We could not tell.
But it's also with the amount of backups and the way that tech has been advancing, it's also completely reasonable to think that we have it a little bit better down now than we previously have. I don't know, I mean, yeah, let's what we really Okay, Annie, what we need to do in twenty twenty three is get a record pressing. Yes, because I said Cassette tape earlier. But that's like the least permanent. That's like the least permanent of data.
That's pretty good that probably run into it because thatttes is something to play them on exactly. Yeah, well you hit seth up. He'll make records for you low five
mono records for reference. See our episode Handmade Records. Oh a right, Okay, Well, I think I like the idea of nothing else of yeah, some maybe idiosyncratic young person one hundred years in the future that doesn't want to learn about Pineapple from like, you know, their hollow book education system and prefers to listen to the you know, archaic musings of Annie and Lauren about the subjects. So I'll hold out hope for that, but get those records pressed.
Yeah, we're on it, promptest.
It all depends on if the infrastructure, you know, remains, and if people are treating it correctly and backing it up and backing it up onto physical medium. And I think there's only enough room for only certain ones, you know, not everything goes in the Library of Congress, just the important stuff. So who decides that does stuff they don't
want you to know get to participate in? That is it about rank, you know, is it about listens, is it about audience size, or is it like, you know, the items that we choose to send up into space that go on that gold disc, that are important enough to us that we think maybe extraterrestrials or whatever, you know, will understand us through participating in that.
It's kind of you know, let's let's look at it through comparison. Let's say a hundred years ago, you went to a you went to a Ford factory. You found some people working on that factory line, and you ask them, you know, hey, what do you what do you think is going to happen to this car?
Right?
They won't think in terms of well, what about this car specifically, they'll think of all the other cars they made. And the answer, as we've seen, as history has proven, is that something like those cars still very much exists in innumerable forms. In that specific car when you showed up and dropped by their lunch break and ask them, that car maybe in a museum. Right, the odds are very high that it is not always on the road as a daily driver, but the platonic form of it
exists and is very much alive. So something like the ability to communicate to a large mass of people does exist, and hopefully it can preserve the depth of communication that we're able to explore when we're free from a radio clock or a social media real limit.
I'm just glad we made this because this is real.
Matt's holding up the stuff they don't want you to know. Book available wherever books are found.
This is a book is authored by Bold and uh, it's a thing. It's a real friggin thing that you can hold and you you know, while it isn't us having a conversation, it's born from our conversations, right, and from the same research that we use to have our conversations. And it's like the spirit or the soul of the show.
So it's our three men and a baby, you know.
Alex.
In the description for your show, I always love this. You talk about how you know, I forget the way you phrase it, but you refer to like the town dump, you know, and like where what you know, where all this stuff goes ideas you know, culture and all that stuff, and like you're never going to find a podcast in a dump, but you can find a book you a dump.
Well, you'll find a whole bunch of old iPods. There's probably in a dump still somewhere. They got a lot of.
If the battery is dead, you can't crack it, if you don't have the right plug, and if there's no electricity. You know, just saying they're in there, in there, but they're inaccessible. They're locked up like so much you know, geological data and an ice core. You know, if you can't get to it, does it really exist for you? But the book, you know, exists. And you know, also, let's forget about language. We're talking about long enough timeline.
You know, books obviously decomposed, but language might change and it might be completely undecipherable.
We're doing Beowulf, Yeah, we're doing Canterbury Tales in the original form. It also reminds me of music. You know, there are are some of the most influential songs in history. They have one admitted author, but there are many many variations, right, especially when you get into oral folklore in that form of communication. So are we then to define the existence of something by the person and the guitar they had
when they first sang it? Or we and then are we going to say because that guitar is gone, because that person has passed away, that song no longer exists. I guess, I'm I guess, I'm like lazily, I'm taking the slow route to uh, what is it? The ship of thesis?
The same thing? I was literally, it's yes, is it? If the thing is replaced piece by piece by piece? Is it the same thing? And that also kind of refers to audio and like a story or whatever, like is it if you're not hearing it from a person's mouth, you're hearing it digitally reconstructed? Like is it the thing? That's more of a philosophical question, But ben you hit on what I was just thinking, the exact same thing.
I don't know how to use that analogy or that story, but for some reason, my brain goes there immediately.
And then of course, going circling back to the very beginning of our conversation, if there comes a time, right, which I think we all believe is on the way, if there comes a time when it is possible to plausibly automate the creation of something like this, then not just this show, but every show ephemeral could just continue in perpetuity, which gets some creative people rightly terror right, and then get some accountants all a twitter paid and over the moon.
Right.
That's the thing, man, It's so it's so it's still so new, even though we've we've all been in the trenches on it for a lot of our adult lives. It's still so new that anybody who says they are an expert in the field is lying. They'll question is are they lying to themselves or to you?
Probably both?
Sorry, Alex, you got three guys who are literally paid to talk and then say, hey, tell us about yourselves.
I just want to add a note here wants thank you Alex for making this show. I think all three of us are major fans of what you create. When you put out an episode of this, you and Trevor Max, the work you guys put in is just it's beautiful to listen to. You become immersed every episode in both the storytelling and sound design.
It's just wonderful.
Yeah, I think it's what podcasts could be.
You know.
I am beyond proud to play any sort of little part.
And while it makes me sad that it's ending, you know, for the time being, there is a silver lining in that there's not so much of the stuff that you couldn't just make a vinyl box set of the whole damn thing.
Yeah, we're not letting go of the vinyl thing.
No, that's going to happen.
It's a good idea.
We know a guy.
You know. There's just one thing that I just was thinking of. It's not a question, but it's just a little footnote on something that Noel said, and it echoed a conversation I had a couple of years back with a kind of Ian Nagoski about how we think of preservation efforts or like archiving efforts, as we all have.
We have a tendency to think of them as the sort of responsibility of these big cultural institutions like Nash shooting stuff out in this space, so the Library of Congress, but so much archiving of ephemeral media that I've come across, like early television, early radio, or obscure music and all
kinds of other things. It's very often is from like someone that worked on it, or descended someone that worked on that project, or a fan of Van you know that was just recording that day, you know, on their VCR and got something or you know whatever. And I wonder, if you know, I would hate to see a world like this but there's one hundred years from now and stuff they don't want.
You know.
It's like the book is out there, but they can't find any record of the podcast. And then one fan eden's great great granddaughter comes forward or writer's great great grandson comes forward, like I have I have the first episode.
Yeah, some of them may be actually because we don't think to do that. Because it's streaming, it's everywhere all the time, until it's not.
Thanks to Matt, Ben, Noel, Annie, Lauren, Robert, Joe, Holly, Tracy, Josh, and Chuck for talking with me this episode and for all their support of this show since it's very inception. Thanks also to Trevor Young and my brother Max who joined me as co hosts in the second season. And more gratitude than I can hope to express to the countless guests, friends, and especially listeners that have made this entire project possible. I never really like long goodbyes. But
what do you think we should do next? There's certainly no shortage of stories left to tell about everything lost, Transient and Ephemeral. You can write Twist directly at Ephemeral at iHeartMedia dot com, and we're on social media at ephemeral show. Avida's aim.
Always at worst.
I don't doubt.
It, but I realize it's true.
So I just dropped into Say Goodbye.