Ephemeral Podcasts

In our series finale, we ask some of our favorite creators about the ephemeral nature of podcasting itself. 

Featuring podcasters Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant (Stuff You Should Know), Holly Frey and Tracy V. Wilson (Stuff You Missed In History Class), Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick (Stuff To Blow Your Mind), Ben Bowlin, Matt Frederick, and Noel Brown (Stuff They Don't Want You To Know), and Anney Reese and Lauren Vogelbaum (Savor).

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
A seminal is the protection of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
The most important thing about making a podcast is getting
the tape SYNCD.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Somebody's got a clap with me?

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Do y'all do a clap sync?

Speaker 4 (00:21):
But it's more of the ritual of it.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, oh, I love it all right? Who wants to count? You?
Do it?

Speaker 5 (00:25):
Because you're the boss of this?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
The way do we we count on? Where do we clap?

Speaker 6 (00:30):
Do you just want to go with one?

Speaker 5 (00:32):
Living on the edge?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Nine after?

Speaker 4 (00:34):
So?

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Hurry up?

Speaker 5 (00:35):
What three?

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Two?

Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
We are canceling the show what why Well?

Speaker 7 (00:59):
The algorith of them felt it wasn't hitting the right
taste clusters.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
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

(01:27):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:12):
of the longest running, most successful shows around. At least
with the words stuff in the.

Speaker 6 (02:16):
Title, Welcome to stuff, you should know it's you meet Chuck.

Speaker 8 (02:22):
Yeah, it's about to say.

Speaker 5 (02:23):
Just like the old days, stuff to blow your mind.

Speaker 9 (02:25):
Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert.

Speaker 10 (02:28):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 5 (02:30):
Stuff you missed in history class. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

Speaker 11 (02:36):
Stuff they don't gort you to know.

Speaker 12 (02:38):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nola.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
They call me Ben.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Hello, and welcome to Savor Prediction of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 5 (02:46):
I'm Annie Reach and I'm Lauren vogel Bomb.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
But to me, this show is always Thill food Stuff.

Speaker 6 (02:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
I'm gonna put your right on the spot off the
bat here. How long have you each been podcasting?

Speaker 9 (03:08):
Oh geez, that's a tough question.

Speaker 6 (03:10):
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.

Speaker 5 (03:21):
Yeah, it'd be ten.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
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.

Speaker 10 (03:35):
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?

Speaker 9 (03:47):
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

(04:08):
right now? Wait? Yeah, that would be right.

Speaker 8 (04:13):
Josh has been doing it longer than me.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
But only by a few months. Two thousand and eight
to twenty twenty three.

Speaker 9 (04:19):
Is what?

Speaker 3 (04:19):
This is our fifteenth year? Fifteenth? No, that's not right,
is it?

Speaker 8 (04:24):
This is our fifteenth year in April?

Speaker 3 (04:27):
I think crazy? Yeah, fifteen years, there's your answer.

Speaker 5 (04:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
God bless those fans, the small devoted fans.

Speaker 5 (04:48):
They were so lovely.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
I loved the very buch.

Speaker 5 (04:52):
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.

Speaker 11 (05:11):
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.

(05:31):
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.

Speaker 12 (05:47):
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.

Speaker 11 (05:56):
We really started the pivot toward podcasts with That's when
Nole came aboard as well and for a time edited
what every podcast.

Speaker 4 (06:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
How many podcasts episodes do you estimate you have published
in that span of time?

Speaker 5 (06:34):
One million, thousands?

Speaker 6 (06:36):
Yeah, those thousands over certainly over one thousand, multiple thousand.

Speaker 11 (06:41):
It gets kind of in the weeds pretty quick, man.

Speaker 9 (06:44):
No clue, no clue, there's no, not really a good
way to count, as far as I know.

Speaker 10 (06:49):
More than seventeen less than three trillion.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, wait, why is there not a good way to count?

Speaker 9 (06:56):
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

(07:16):
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

(07:37):
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.

Speaker 10 (07:47):
Somebody would have to just directly go count with a
human brain. I don't know of any automated way to
do it.

Speaker 9 (07:54):
Yeah, and it just better things for human brains to do.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Well.

Speaker 5 (07:57):
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?

Speaker 12 (08:12):
What is it?

Speaker 9 (08:13):
Josh?

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Well, we publish one hundred and four episodes a year,
not including leap.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Years or short stuffs.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
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.

Speaker 5 (08:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
I don't know, like fifteen sixteen hundred episodes, I'd.

Speaker 8 (08:46):
Say, yeah, at least fifteen hundred. I bet it's with
the short stuffs. It's creeping toward eighteen.

Speaker 5 (08:50):
So one million is I'm standing by that number.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
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?

Speaker 1 (09:12):
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.

(09:35):
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.

(09:55):
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.

Speaker 6 (10:05):
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

(10:25):
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.

Speaker 5 (10:45):
It's related to you.

Speaker 6 (10:46):
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

(11:10):
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?

Speaker 5 (11:30):
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

(11:52):
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

(12:14):
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

(12:36):
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

(12:56):
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

(13:19):
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

(13:42):
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

(14:03):
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

(14:27):
me that's got my voice but it's not me, you know.

Speaker 9 (14:33):
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

(14:56):
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.

Speaker 10 (15:14):
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.

Speaker 9 (15:37):
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

(15:57):
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

(16:19):
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.

Speaker 10 (16:26):
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,

(16:48):
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

(17:10):
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?

Speaker 8 (17:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
It's kind of the fabric of.

Speaker 8 (17:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
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

(18:22):
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.

Speaker 8 (18:30):
My daughter asked me if I was famous the other
day in the car, what'd you say?

Speaker 4 (18:35):
I said, not really, we don't get thronged.

Speaker 8 (18:40):
Yeah, And she said, okay, I don't want anyone throng
in us.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
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

(19:05):
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.

Speaker 11 (19:21):
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

(19:43):
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.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
Right.

Speaker 11 (20:05):
People who listen for a long time feel that they
have a personal relationship with you because they know a
lot about you.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
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

(20:32):
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.

Speaker 12 (20:46):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:26):
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

(21:48):
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,

(22:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (22:19):
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

(22:39):
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.

Speaker 11 (22:51):
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.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
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,

(23:34):
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.

Speaker 12 (23:44):
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.

Speaker 4 (23:59):
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,

(24:20):
you know, storytelling device. If they are, it's just as
a selling point to advertise it.

Speaker 12 (24:25):
Make me sad, dude, geez.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
I also do love those very early stuff. They don't
want to know babyface Ben and Matt with the hair
of it is.

Speaker 12 (24:34):
Matt with the hair before I lost it all right.

Speaker 11 (24:38):
So many hearts broken on those cheekbones.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
I'm telling you, I.

Speaker 4 (24:42):
Used to see it right against them. It's a sharp object.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
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

(25:06):
think contributes to the longevity of podcasts like yours.

Speaker 8 (25:11):
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

(25:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
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

(26:11):
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.

(26:33):
As long as everybody else is, you know, kind of
vibing on it. That's that's what counts.

Speaker 8 (26:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
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

(27:14):
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.

Speaker 10 (27:26):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:07):
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.

Speaker 9 (28:15):
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,

(28:40):
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

(29:02):
the people who listen.

Speaker 4 (29:03):
To the show.

Speaker 5 (29:04):
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

(29:26):
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

(29:47):
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

(30:07):
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

(30:28):
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

(30:50):
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,

(31:11):
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

(31:31):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:16):
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

(32:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (32:50):
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

(33:15):
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

(33:36):
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,

(33:58):
if they're not into it, why should like there's just
an exit that happens without you even really participating in
the decision.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
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

(34:26):
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.

Speaker 5 (34:35):
Yeah, I'd agree.

Speaker 6 (34:37):
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

(34:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Many ads, never no such thing.

Speaker 1 (35:24):
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

(35:45):
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

(36:08):
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.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
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,

(36:48):
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

(37:09):
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.

Speaker 11 (37:20):
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?

Speaker 2 (37:37):
Right?

Speaker 11 (37:37):
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.

Speaker 12 (38:01):
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.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
But does it have staying power. Catching on and having
staying power kind of two different things, don't you think?

Speaker 12 (38:21):
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

(38:41):
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.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
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,

(39:13):
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,

(39:35):
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

(39:57):
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

(40:20):
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.

Speaker 11 (40:33):
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

(40:55):
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

(41:18):
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

(41:42):
of those shows spend a lot of time listening.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Right.

Speaker 7 (41:47):
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

(42:08):
to other shows.

Speaker 11 (42:09):
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

(42:31):
enough from the addiction to speak, to learn and exercise
the amazing art of listening.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
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?

Speaker 4 (42:48):
Oh?

Speaker 12 (42:48):
Well, I hope not.

Speaker 4 (42:49):
I hope so, boy, I hope so.

Speaker 10 (42:51):
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

(43:12):
and like try to, you know, listen to the radio
serials from one hundred years ago. I mean a few
people might.

Speaker 9 (43:19):
Well, Alex does, right, this is your thing?

Speaker 10 (43:22):
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.

Speaker 9 (43:37):
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

(43:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
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,

(44:30):
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.

Speaker 9 (44:44):
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.

Speaker 10 (44:58):
It's still going to have ear splitting ads that enrage
people baked in one hundred years from now, I hope.

Speaker 9 (45:04):
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,

(45:25):
that's the you want the authentic media experience.

Speaker 10 (45:28):
I want to watch that vintage easy bakeup and commercial.

Speaker 9 (45:31):
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,

(45:52):
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.

Speaker 10 (46:16):
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.

Speaker 9 (46:23):
And yet he did right right, Yeah, Yeah, that one
seems a safe bet.

Speaker 10 (46:27):
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.

(46:48):
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

(47:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
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.

Speaker 9 (47:43):
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.

Speaker 10 (47:50):
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.

Speaker 9 (48:03):
Yeah, we got to keep the AI and the future
busy with tasks like this.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Oh gosh, God bless the archivis AI or otherwise.

Speaker 5 (48:11):
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

(48:33):
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.

(48:58):
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,

(49:19):
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,

(49:41):
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

(50:03):
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

(50:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Oh you think, like podcasts will go out of fashion
and then they'll come back in fashion.

Speaker 5 (50:51):
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

(51:12):
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,

(51:33):
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.

(51:55):
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

(52:17):
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.

Speaker 8 (52:26):
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

(52:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
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

(53:21):
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.

Speaker 8 (53:38):
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.

Speaker 6 (53:48):
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

(54:09):
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

(54:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
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

(55:08):
is what they're doing.

Speaker 6 (55:09):
They're like, oh, yes, back in the twenty teens when
the when all the kids were podcasting.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
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

(55:36):
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.

Speaker 6 (55:43):
Like like those those little those little right time capsules
are are really cool to look into.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
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.

Speaker 6 (56:10):
Yeah, as far as I know, no one has put
us out on like like cassette tapes.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
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

(56:35):
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.

Speaker 5 (56:51):
Outdated, that's not really what it is.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
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.

Speaker 6 (57:05):
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

(57:27):
dark ages where nobody knows who Madonna was or has
read about her. But what was that sound like?

Speaker 5 (57:35):
We could not tell.

Speaker 6 (57:37):
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,

(58:00):
because I said Cassette tape earlier. But that's like the
least permanent. That's like the least permanent of data.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
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

(58:26):
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.

Speaker 5 (58:48):
Yeah, we're on it, promptest.

Speaker 4 (58:52):
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

(59:14):
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.

Speaker 11 (59:34):
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?

Speaker 3 (59:53):
Right?

Speaker 11 (59:54):
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,

(01:00:15):
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,

(01:00:36):
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.

Speaker 12 (01:00:47):
I'm just glad we made this because this is real.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
Matt's holding up the stuff they don't want you to know.
Book available wherever books are found.

Speaker 12 (01:00:57):
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.

Speaker 11 (01:01:20):
So it's our three men and a baby, you know.

Speaker 9 (01:01:23):
Alex.

Speaker 4 (01:01:23):
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.

Speaker 12 (01:01:43):
Well, you'll find a whole bunch of old iPods. There's
probably in a dump still somewhere. They got a lot of.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
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,

(01:02:09):
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.

Speaker 11 (01:02:18):
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

(01:02:42):
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

(01:03:03):
of thesis?

Speaker 4 (01:03:04):
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.

(01:03:25):
I don't know how to use that analogy or that story,
but for some reason, my brain goes there immediately.

Speaker 11 (01:03:30):
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

(01:03:55):
in perpetuity, which gets some creative people rightly terror right,
and then get some accountants all a twitter paid and
over the moon.

Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
Right.

Speaker 11 (01:04:06):
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?

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
Probably both?

Speaker 11 (01:04:27):
Sorry, Alex, you got three guys who are literally paid
to talk and then say, hey, tell us about yourselves.

Speaker 12 (01:04:34):
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

(01:04:56):
the storytelling and sound design.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
It's just wonderful.

Speaker 11 (01:04:59):
Yeah, I think it's what podcasts could be.

Speaker 12 (01:05:02):
You know.

Speaker 11 (01:05:03):
I am beyond proud to play any sort of little part.

Speaker 4 (01:05:06):
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.

Speaker 11 (01:05:17):
Yeah, we're not letting go of the vinyl thing.

Speaker 9 (01:05:19):
No, that's going to happen.

Speaker 11 (01:05:20):
It's a good idea.

Speaker 12 (01:05:21):
We know a guy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
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

(01:05:45):
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

(01:06:06):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:06:23):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:06:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
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

(01:07:24):
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

(01:07:46):
at iHeartMedia dot com, and we're on social media at
ephemeral show. Avida's aim.

Speaker 11 (01:07:55):
Always at worst.

Speaker 3 (01:08:00):
I don't doubt.

Speaker 8 (01:08:01):
It, but I realize it's true.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
So I just dropped into Say Goodbye.