Why Chat Podcasts Rule (According To Wired)

My favorite podcasts have always been the ones that make me feel that, “Oh, hey, wow, I’m a fly on the wall for this?! This is so cool. I can’t believe I get to hear this.”

The advent of the podcast was the advent of me having something besides music to do while I did things no regular human wants to do but as an adult one must do.

Dishes. Laundry. Commutes to soulless jobs. You know the drills. The boring things in between the boredoms.

Podcasts represented a way to be a part of cool conversations when my life had far too few of them.

So when Wired runs an article titled, Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will I’m inclined to say, “duh.”

But, the difference as a person who now creates and consume podcasts I feel when reading this article is worth mentioning too.

The listener wants to be a fly on the wall, not getting swatted out or praying to be swatted at, because the conversation isn’t one they’d otherwise have a chance to drop in on.

I’ll keep seeking that. I’ll keep seeking to create that. Duh.

And as a host, I’ll keep seeking to promote that ethos. Healthy, para-social, pro-social, public performance pieces. Aka good podcasts. 2024 isn’t so bad after all.

ps. the whole Wired article is worth a read, there’s some really interesting stuff to think about in here, as an “industry”

h/t Justin Carbonneau and Jack Forehand for bringing this up in our strategy conversations. And, I’ll stick by it, even if you start creating stuff in NotebookLM, which really is crazy impressive, those bots are definitionally not a good hang (yet, at least, despite having better chat chops than 90% of the podcasts I come across when I explore).

Terminator X-it.