The Great Podcast Famine of the 2020’s

A case for more recorded conversations

You open up Instagram. Scrolling through your feed you see yet another influencer announcing the launch of their new podcast.

“Hah! Just what we need, another podcast,” you chuckle to yourself, echoing the consensus view of a world overloaded with them. Every day it seems more and more people have the gall to think they can contribute to the increasingly oversaturated world of podcasts.

We already have hundreds on every which possible topic–what more is there possibly to talk about? Why can’t people just leave it to the professionals? Between Rogan and Lex and Ferriss and the dozen or so of that caliber, they’re the only ones that can get interesting guests anyway. Everyone else is just drowning us with more noise.

It’s like the legendary mathematician Leibniz said in 1680 about the popular media type of his day:

“That horrible mass of books which keeps on growing, the disorder will become nearly insurmountable.”

With the advent of the printing press, the world was flooded with books. We already had the great books on God but now we had books about the great books. And then there were the books on the sun and the stars and which ones circled which. There were books on mathematics and arithmetic and this new thing called calculus. There were books on politics and social contracts and leviathans. And there were books on philosophy for those who needed to think to prove their existence.

Surely, the last thing we needed was more books… right?

Thankfully we didn’t take this to heart and have since published hundreds of millions of these portable, time-traveling, soul-stirring, ink-covered vessels stamped on the skin of fallen forests. While most were sparsely read and have since faded into irrelevance, those that endured ignited sparks of inspiration in the individual psyche, fanning embers into the collective unconscious, invariably stoking a red-hot inferno of societal change.

It sounds heretical to hear someone say we should have hampered the writing of more books. You can’t put an upper bound on the ideas of mankind. Books are simply the distillation of these ideas. As long as our thinking continues to progress, there will be opportunities to write more to add to the collective wisdom of our species.

And yet here we are, repeating the same naive line of thinking with this new medium. One that is even more accessible as it doesn't require great skill in crafting witty prose, just a propensity to ask good questions.

So, no, there is not an oversaturation of podcasts. There is a dire shortage. We have greatly underutilized this technology as a means to share our stories and propagate ideas that matter.

Morning Commutes with Jamie

It was 2016, the summer after my junior year of college, when I had my first big boy job interning at a bank in Richmond, Virginia. I was living in the house I moved into after a semester abroad, along the James River, a 25-minute commute from the Capital One Campus.

Gone were the days of carefree summers lifeguarding at my local pool. I was an adult now. With that came the responsibility to make something of myself–to provide value, to contribute my skills to the world. In order to do so I’d need to optimize my time, ensuring I was learning, growing, improving myself so that I can look back and say my efforts mattered.

With this infusion of productive desire, I realized I’d have almost an hour every day, 5 hours a week, 40 hours this summer driving. Instead of jamming out to the songs I’d be listening to on weekend pregames, I could make constructive use of this time that equated to a semester’s class.

My roommates at the time were of a similar go-getter mentality and one day I walked into a conversation about this guy named Tim Ferriss. He was someone who had made something of himself as a successful entrepreneur, investor, author and now podcaster. This was a content form I knew very little about but was told it’s like eavesdropping in on the intimate conversations you enviously wish you could be a part of between the people you most hope to meet one day.

I was sold. On my way to work I was transported to smalltown Terrell, Texas in the ’70s following the story of a young African American kid discovering his love for music playing piano for rich white parties, driven by the guidance and wisdom from his grandmother that catapulted him to stardom.

Coming home I got a front-row seat to the untold Hollywood stories of an unknown Kanye West showing up to a party, leaving everyone speechless with a freestyle, then going into the studio nearby and recording Slow Jams on the spot. And how in that same studio a British singer slept on the carpet for six weeks as he was trying to make it in LA and because of that half the world knows the name Ed Sheeran.

In the span of a few commutes to work, I felt like I got to know the real Jamie Foxx–like I got to to pull up a chair in his living room, kick my feet back over a drink while I listened to my new friend regale his life story.

For the rest of the summer, I had the same opportunity with Tony Robbins, Peter Thiel, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Harris, Ryan Holliday, dozens of people I admired and was now able to get a raw, unfiltered look at who they are and how they think.

Up only

Since that fateful summer, the rest of the world caught on to this alternate media form. In 2016 there were less than 100k new podcasts launched and by 2020 that ballooned to over 1 million. They were providing real value to listeners offering engaging content that could be consumed while driving, working out, or walking your dog.

With this exponential rise in listeners came an exponential rise in the revenue opportunity as advertising spend has started to look like the price chart of a mildly offensive memecoin run by an AI agent that got retweeted by Elon.

For creators this became a viable source of income. And an attractive one at that as Spotify was willing to pay $250 million for an exclusive contract with Joe Rogan. With this amount of money being thrown around it's no surprise we’ve seen the dizzying rise in new podcasts being created. Plus, who wouldn’t want to make a living talking to cool people?

While everyone wants to be the next Rogan, the reality is that most fall woefully short. Most podcasters don’t have the charisma or intellect or humor to consistently create great content that will appeal to the masses. So many podcasts end up being relatively bland, uninteresting conversations.

And that’s okay. Just like not every book is meant to be the next Harry Potter, most podcasts won’t be fascinating, perspective-altering episodes listened to by millions.

But that doesn't mean they shouldn’t have been created.

The value in the long-tail

I recently stumbled across a small podcast with a Colombian woman and her American husband geared towards Spanish learners. They’re fairly normal people who discuss different learning techniques, share cultural anecdotes, teach grammatical lessons, and intersperse tidbits from their daily lives.

They’re never the most riveting of conversations. I never finish an episode and think I can’t wait to send this to a friend. But I like to listen to it every now and then because I get tangible value out of it. They're entertaining and quirky and a little bit cheesy but mostly because he speaks like a gringo and I can easily understand his Spanish.

And so for me and the few hundred or so people that listen, it’s valuable. I’m glad it exists.

I can think of countless other examples for niche podcasts I would love to listen to. For example, I’m planning to do the Camino de Santiago next year, a 500-mile walk across Spain. Eager to learn more about it, I read a few novels from authors like Paulo Coehlo who undertook the pilgrimage. I watched The Way with Martin Sheen. I listened to a few podcasts about the Camino. I consumed as much as I could to get a strong understanding and yet I still don’t feel like my curiosity has been close to satiated.

I still long for specific knowledge, for intimate stories from the countless characters who have made the Camino their own. I want to know how it transformed the medieval narrative of its patron Saint James from a quiet disciple into the mythical Moor-slaying "Matamoros." I wonder how it has reshaped the economy of northern Spain, from the influx of local bakeries offering almond tartas to the rise of boutique albergues designed for modern pilgrims. I’m keen to know how it compares to Japan’s Kumano Kodo or India’s Char Dham?

I crave the personal accounts of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who embarked on the Camino alone after selling his startup, trading twelve hour work days for silence and dusty trails; the aspiring travel writer who found her muse in the cafés of Astorga; or the elderly Korean man who brought his late wife’s ashes to scatter on the final stretch in Finisterre. These are the kinds of details that would bring the Camino alive for me.

There’s no limit to the depths of knowledge and experience that I hunger for. And this is just one topic that’s top of mind for me. There are dozens of others. Now multiply that by the number of other curious people out there and you can see how there is still a massive, gaping, unfulfilled void needing to be filled with high-quality, specific content.

To start a pod or not to start a pod, that is the question

In order to serve this demand, we need supply. Someone has to sit down and record the podcast. But why should they?

A few months ago, I had an idea for a podcast. It was content I wanted to consume but I couldn't find anywhere out there. There are hundreds of crypto podcasts, most are pretty general, some are more technical catered towards builders, others more financial in nature focused on investors. But I wanted something for my tiny corner of the industry where companies provide specialized services to decentralized organizations like risk advisory, token economic consulting, treasury management, and other core functions performed by specialist teams.

If that means nothing to you, that’s okay. It’s not meant for 99.9% of people. I’m not looking to grow a huge audience. I’m looking for a forcing function to talk to more people I want to connect with while honing my natural curiosity through conversation. Every month I record a few episodes which takes up an hour of prep work looking into the person I’m interviewing and the company they work for, compiling questions I’m eager to know the answers to, and then once it’s recorded another hour to distill the takeaways for distribution.

Even if not a single person listens to the podcast, there is still intrinsic value–the prep work is like industry research, the interviewing sharpens my social skills, and the summarization helps cement it all in my brain.

It takes up minimal time. It provides very real value to me. And the few hundred people that listen glean very practical, nuanced insights. And who knows if I’m able to consistently make high quality content and have an engaged audience of industry participants there’s a world in which companies would want to sponsor it and I can make some money.

The Great Podcast Proliferation

There are currently around 3 million podcasts. That may sound like a lot but it's a mere 0.5% of the number of blogs in existence. As more and more people discover podcasts they resonate with and find ways to fit this relatively new medium into their daily routines, that gap should only close further. Add on the ways in which AI can drastically improve discoverability by having every episode transcripted, we’re not far from a future in which I can trivially search for an incredibly specific aspect of the Camino de Santiago and instantly get the conversations I’m looking for.

You can imagine a world where millions of people wake up to the benefits of starting a podcast and we’re able to create a burgeoning Library of Alexandria of recorded content readily able to satisfy the eager knowledge seekers.

Like Leibniz and the great thinkers of the 17th century that we’re overwhelmed with the gross output in books, privy to the fact they will never be able to make a semblance of a dent in consuming everything out there, we are seemingly being inundated with podcasts. But to infer that we have come remotely close to the theoretical maximum for valuable content with this new medium is farcical. We have so far to go. So get recording.