Why every company wants a podcast now
38:01 Share

Support for this episode of Decoder comes exclusively from Stripe. Everyone who owns or runs a business knows that deciding how much to charge your customers and when to do it is complicated. Even when you start with something simple, like charging $50 a month for a phone plan, it gets messy. But this is Decoder, so instead of just saying that, let's game it out. Over the course of this episode, our ads will get into the nitty-gritty of how payments get really complicated, really fast.

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm David Pearce, the editor-at-large at The Verge. As you may have noticed, we're dropping some extra episodes in the Decoder feed this week. You'll have Nilay back on Friday and for next week, I promise, as we run towards the end of the year. Lots of good stuff still coming.

But I'm really excited to be here with all of you today because I get to talk about one of my very favorite things, podcasts. There's something strange happening these days in the podcasting world. Actually, there are kind of a lot of strange things happening in the podcast world. It's been a wild year in general. One thing I've really noticed is the way that companies that deal in money have started using podcasts in kind of unusual ways.

It's something we've seen actually for a few years now with venture capital firms, just to name one example. Not only do most of the top level VC companies have their own podcasts at this point, but

but also people who do podcasts about venture capital end up going into it after meeting and talking to all of these folks. Have you ever heard the joke that like anytime two dudes go into a room, they end up accidentally making a podcast? It's kind of true. And it's becoming a strangely central part of business in more ways than you might think.

It's a strange, complicated web that goes both ways, and it's not getting any less weird or any less complicated now that you can add stuff like crypto and politics to the mix. So I just needed somebody to help me talk through all of it. So I asked Nick Kwa to come on the show and help me untangle all of this stuff.

These days, Nick is the podcast critic for Vulture, which is one of The Verge's corporate siblings here at Vox Media. He also originally started Hot Pod back in 2014. So he's been following this stuff for a long time and really knows what he's talking about.

I really wanted to know what he's seeing in this space in general, but I also had lots of questions. Why would a major investment firm like Elliott Management make a podcast to make a point in a fight over the future of Southwest Airlines? What is the point of starting your own podcast in 2024 in general? Was this really the podcast election, as everybody has been saying for the last few weeks?

Are all podcasts just videos now? And if they're just videos, are they still podcasts? What is happening? And does Nick have any idea of what's coming next? For now, I think at least this thing we're doing right now still counts as a podcast. But we'll see what Nick thinks. Let's get into it.

Nick Kwa, welcome to Decoder. My pleasure. I'm sorry I'm not Nilay, but I'm very glad to get to do this with you. So I want to talk about a bunch of things because we're at a really interesting moment in the podcasting landscape where we're a few weeks away from what everyone has kind of agreed and then litigated was the podcast election. We're also in a moment where podcasts are still growing really fast, but the business has been really messy for the last couple of years. We have a lot to talk about. But the thing I want to start with is

This new type of podcast that I have been noticing and has started to crop up

which is like the B2B podcast. Like, I don't even know how else to describe it, but there was one particular example of Elliott Management, which was picking a fight with Southwest Airlines, and they launched a podcast to make their case. And there have been a bunch of stories recently about venture capitalists using podcasts, not just to sort of make content and get their companies out there, but for much more straightforward reasons.

And I guess my first question for you as somebody who pays attention to this industry is how big a phenomenon is this really? Where are these new kind of like ultra business focused B2B? I almost want to call them nefariously businessy podcasts coming from.

I read about Elliot Management's effort, let's call it, on Axios. And I was like, this sounds super weird, what's going on here. And the immediate question then comes, what is the bigger punch here? Is the bigger punch here the headline about it, or is it the actual thing that is being created? And I think, you know, it's actually, it's largely the former more so than the latter. The novelty of the existence...

of a capital firm trying, launching a podcast in order to advance an activist shareholder campaign. It's a strategy. It's a little ploy. It's a gambit. I think you're touching upon something really interesting here in the sense of we just lived through this quote unquote podcast election

in which there's a very clear display of, let's call it alternative media power, in the sense of like, a stakeholder of certain powers trying to express their will without having to go through mainstream media and going directly whatever that means. In this case, pretty much it was the Trump campaign going through to their sort of constituency of young white men through these, you know, very robust built up alternative media platforms.

And here, what you're describing, I think, is an expression of a misunderstanding of the big lesson here. The lesson is not to start your own silly little podcast, to engage with whatever constituency you want, to express whatever will you want. The lesson there is to look at the state of play, look at where people actually are, and go to them where they are, as opposed to making your own thing. That makes sense to me, but I do think there's some...

really interesting shift that has happened there where a generation ago on the internet, all of these companies and, you know, analyst firms and whoever, they all would have started blogs and that would have been the thing, right? Or they would have, they would have made Instagram accounts about this. And that would have been the thing that they tried to make to reach people. Now, overwhelmingly, I think the trend that is true is,

is that it's podcasts. I think there are more CEO vanity project podcasts than ever. There are more venture capitalists out here starting podcasts. Like in the same way that if you are a, you know, 22 year old trying to break it in the music business, you start a, you start a TikTok channel. If you're 52 and looking to become a partner at your firm, you start a podcast. Like that I find, I find so strange and interesting. And I'm curious why you,

podcasts would be that thing. There's this progression, right? It used to be blogs, maybe it was a newsletter at some point, CEOs wrote books or whatever. But the question there is that, has that mode of expression, has that mode of communication or propaganda, whatever you want to call it, has it ever been effective? And what is the sort of frame and the lines of attack for that particular mode of outreach? So the example you gave, if you're a 22-year-old musician rolling out your music on TikTok or

a couple of years ago, SoundCloud, right? That is a different power dynamic, right? That musician has no power. So they're essentially just pulling the slot machine levers of the internet to see if they can increase their power again in front of more people. When it comes to something like investors trying to shape a message, trying to build their brand, they already have a copious amount of power there. And what's actually happening

If they do carve together a following or community around whether it's a podcast or their blog, it is more of just sharpening their image in front of a pretty well sort of bought-in following. Because we live in a country and a world that there's no shortage of people who view VCs as godly figures, who kind of treat them as idols and stars. And so the power dynamic there is just brand management. One of the things I've been trying to figure out as I piece through this is whether the appeal of a podcast...

is that it's relatively straightforward to make in that you can just stick two people in front of a microphone and they have a meeting and it might not be interesting, but it is, it is a thing. You will have an object you have made at the end of it, right? In a way that even writing a very good blog post is kind of more abstract for folks who are not used to doing this kind of thing. The other side of me thinks that we're still trying to figure out

what it is that is magical about a podcast that makes everything more interesting when it's a podcast. I say everything pretty loosely. There are a lot of really bad podcasts out there, but there is something to the idea that like, if you want to reach people and seem human and serious and interesting over a long period of time, that actually like a long form podcast interview about activist investing is kind of the right way to do it. You know, we'll start with a couple of layers here.

I do believe in this sort of like way of consuming media that like for every piece of media, there is somebody who will love it. No matter how badly done it is, which a lot of these are, no matter how poorly edited these are and how esoteric they can be. And yes, to some extent that is interesting, right? Like, and it does come from the sort of historical tradition of what a podcast actually is, which is just an audio blog. Like at the very beginning of its inception, it was just people kind of publishing, uh,

without having to go through any mediators, just anything they wanted to get to anybody who would want it. And there's something inherently powerful about that. And yeah, there's definitely going to be a community of fanboys and fangirls and fan people who are really into whatever two VCs want to say because they want to be VCs or whatever. Like, there's something generally interesting there. But is there something more interesting about just hearing two VCs shit to shit? And, you know, and...

Galaxy Brain it out loud versus reading a sort of composed blog? Maybe. Maybe there is. Again, it sort of really depends on what exactly the situation is because, like...

I can listen to a badly edited three-hour-long podcast about the Oklahoma City Thunder because I'm a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder. And I do do that in my own personal life. And I'm sure for some people, that is true. If they're really into the VC world and they listen to people that they maybe admire or want to do business with, talk out loud. There's a certain kind of performance of transparency there. There's also a performance of hanging out there. There's a lot of these sort of dynamics that kind of roll into it. The venture capital thing, I think, is...

the one that at least I am most sort of qualified to call a real trend. And I think it is a real trend and you're, you're seeing it,

kind of in both directions, right? Like in, in my world, we've seen a lot of VCs start podcasts and then a lot of podcasters turn into VCs. They like meet people. Acquired is the big one I think about. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And, and these folks are like, they start making content and then they meet the people who are making the things and then they make the money and then they give the people. And then Harry Stebbings, the 20 minute VC guy is another good example. He built this huge thing, just interviewing venture capitalists and like along the way became a venture capitalist there.

There's something in that to me that feels both really interesting in terms of like what a podcast can accomplish for you, but also totally different from the way that we think about podcasts as a sort of fundamental entertainment product. It's like actually what's happening is

You're listening to someone interview someone to be a funder for them, but neither of them know that that's what's happening. Yes, actually, yes. This is becoming familiar to me. There's also this show that first launched many, many years ago called The Pitch. But this also reminds me of like...

JJ Redick hosting a podcast at LeBron and then suddenly becoming the Lakers head coach. I'm also on YouTube. I sometimes watch this YouTuber called Dunkey, and he recently created a video game studio publishing house after years and years of making content about video games. This, I think, yeah, it's interesting. There's this sort of, you're right, it's this two-direction meeting in the middle or like both things happening at the same time.

I do find it lazy to say that, oh my gosh, late stage techno capitalism, but it really is kind of that. And it's like, everything's a bit of a performance and one can help that this is another expression of vertical integration because that's exactly what it is. But to circle back to your specific question about these, about these tech people, these VCs that, you know, this particular style of B2B podcast. Yeah. There's always going to be a lane. I think there's always, there is a very specific, uh,

producer and a classic consumer. And within that space, I think there's still quite a bit of potential. Sure. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. This episode of Decoder is brought to you exclusively by Stripe. Let's go back to our hypothetical phone company.

To recap, this phone company needs to charge $50 a month for their plan. But it's not exactly that simple. Because even though your business starts with a flat monthly charge, you also bill based on usage. International calls might be $2 a minute. International roaming, $10 a day. Or extra lines, $10 a month. So now you need a database that tracks usage events and turns them into a comprehensible bill. Oh, and by the way, you're dealing with real people who do real people things, like starting or ending plans in the middle of a month.

So you'll probably need to manage prorating. Okay, let's recap. You're going to need a mix of flat and usage-based billing and a way to keep track of everyone no matter how often they begin and or change plans. There are a lot of potential problems here, so much so that we haven't even gotten to what Stripe does yet, and it's the second ad break. Well, the solution to all your hypothetical woes is coming up next. Stick around for more or get all the info right now at stripe.com slash billing.

Welcome back. I'm talking with Vultures podcast critic Nick Kwa about why so many capital firms and CEOs are spending their time and money making podcasts. Right before the break, we were talking about how making podcasts or YouTube videos for long enough can be kind of a job interview, a way to build your brand and ultimately break into the field that you talk about. But there's another way that podcasts work too. It's just good old-fashioned marketing.

Do you think about those podcasters as fundamentally the same as like the people who are on Twitter hawking their book all the time, right? Like to some extent, it's the same energy, right? Like I have a thing that I care about that I am going to probably financially gain if I can make you care about. And now it's just that podcasts are...

Yeah, you know, if you're hawking crypto, like you can do that in a lot of different venues. But I mean, flip it around, right? If we're not thinking about this just through the lens of the platform, podcasting in this case, it's not that different from what I would get just by tweeting nonsensically about the crypto coin that I'm hoping will go up.

And in 2024, an appropriate medium game plan for any creator, for any artist, for any person who wants to reach people is to be platform agnostic to some extent, right? And to some extent, this is an expression of that. I can talk about how good my investment strategy is over Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever, but you want to go to where people are and you also want to go to and build out spaces where you can have a deep, loyal following if you're thinking about it, right? You just got to have many spaces that you can attract people and you got to be where people are.

I think the other thing that we've spent a lot of time talking about the last couple of years is open questions about how big the podcasting business and audience is going to be. There are more podcasts than ever. It's, it's still growing, but it is, I would say increasingly hard to launch and grow a podcast. Uh, for a lot of the reasons you're describing, like the, the upside of if you're a 22 year old musician starting on Tik TOK is that Tik TOK will show your stuff to people. Podcasts don't work quite that way. It's, it's a,

big open space, but it's also kind of a harder nut to crack than it used to be. It seems to me, do you think these people are actually making a real effort to, you know, make a dent in this business right now?

I can't speak for what happens in the hearts and souls of other people, but there's a very contained, specific lane here. I think about it in three layers. We're speaking in December 2024. The first layer is the fact that the first mover advantage is over. In the same way that if you start a sub-sec now, God knows if your sub-sec is going to be big. There's always a benefit to being first to a medium that's kind of buzzy or first to a platform that's kind of buzzy that's going up. And the other layer of podcasting

The layer I think about is that podcasting is just an expression of the internet. It's hard to launch a new podcast not the same way it's hard to launch a new website now. There's just so much territory claimed. There's just so many competitors in it, so many participants. That doesn't mean that you can't carve out your space in the universe, that you can't go from zero to one in any of these pockets. But the other layer here is that podcasting over the past decade

one, two years, it's gone through a pretty radical transformation. On the one hand, it's gone through a huge sort of period of contraction after Spotify and a lot of big money came into the business. But also now it's just being sort of absorbed and eaten up by video. Like it's, it is emerging in many senses with YouTube as an ecosystem in ways that I think folks who need to build businesses in this space are embracing because it means more guaranteed money. But it also means that its identity is kind of little like,

a little squishy right now. Is it audio? Is it video? Is it YouTube? Like, what is it not within YouTube? I had not thought about this until you were just saying that, but given this sort of platform flattening that's happening, I

you can kind of make a podcast and then turn it into everything else. Like so much of what I see on TikTok is clips of podcasts. And so much of what's now hitting on YouTube is long form podcasts. So I have podcast in my head as like hour long interview that I'm listening to through headphones while I drive to work. But actually what you're saying is, is maybe we should be defining podcasts much bigger and broader across media than we have been.

This is precisely what I'm referring to when I'm sort of talking about this identity crisis that podcasting is going through over the past year. Yeah.

Is it video? Is it audio? Historically, in the past 10 to 15 years, when we're talking about podcasts, we've mostly thought about it as an audio-first medium. Of course, that was never exclusively the case. For example, Joe Rogan, for as long as he's been making podcasts, has also been taping and posting those interviews on YouTube. So this strand, this species, this substrate has existed for a very long time. And now it's becoming...

centered because it is for many reasons economically more viable and economically more lucrative to do that. But to your point, reading study after study or like reading interview after interview of that like kids these days or young people these days. The youths. Podcasting is

equivalent to video. And a lot of the new audiences that come into the space are equating podcasts with video. I think it's phenomenal that's specific to podcasting. I think very similar conversations, though not in such bold terms, are playing out, say, in movies and business. Like, what is television? It is streaming? Is it streaming? Is it...

you know, a thing that you get on your idiot box. And also this whole notion of Netflix considering YouTube a primary competitor and also YouTube being considered a major streaming competitor to Netflix and everything else. So we're in this space where everything's kind of just piled together into a giant sludge. How do you define it for yourself now? You're a podcast critic. Do you have to have a clear sense of what is and is not a podcast? Yeah.

this is my struggle. This is the thing that I've been sort of working through in 2024. Because you can take one or two positions. You can take the position of what you believe historically a word should mean, or you can attack it from a position of what people think the word means. And I am discovering in 2024 that the story, the story is how the word has shifted, how the concept has shifted. I am still a huge consumer of podcasts as an audio

distributed over the RSS feed in the open web and a certain culture that emerges from that. But I also understand that language is flexible. The way we think about platforms, the way we think about any medium that's decentralized, it's still, I would say, for podcasting, you have to sort of like take it as...

as how people are engaging in it. So for me, I am just using the term pretty liberally to attack the question. But yeah, I'm confused as the next person because I think the word is confused and I think the community is confused. We're all confused together and we'll hopefully narrate ourselves out of it. Yeah. Well, and I think if you take it that way and you kind of let podcasts kind of be everything and nothing at the same time, then just to keep going back to Elliot management for a second, right? Like the idea of doing that

all you're really talking about is like a new file format in a certain way, right? Like it's, it's a different structure for doing something, but it's not necessarily totally different. I'm not saying my goal for this content is to reach you while you're driving to work because that's what podcasts are for. It's just a different way of making the same kind of thing that they've been making forever, whether it's shareholder letters or angry tweets or whatever. This is just the next version of that because this is the media that people are consuming now.

And they're consuming it not just in their headphones in Spotify, but everywhere. And so if you want to make something that lots of people see, actually making a podcast is about as quick and easy a way to get there as you can. Yeah, I mean, the only reason that we're talking about the outlet management story there is that it's the novelty of the fact that they did it as a podcast, right? Like if Warren Buffett turns around tomorrow and goes like, yo, the next...

Brickshare Hathaway, Addle Report, I'm going to drop it as an audiobook only or a podcast only, then it's a much bigger story than what it was. But, you know, the thing is, it's an attention-grabbing thing and it succeeded for what L.A. Management did. It's like they got access and a bunch of people to write about it. We're going to take another short break. And when we get back, we're going to start tying all of this stuff back together. Back in a minute. This episode of Decoder is brought to you exclusively by Stripe.

OK, we're back. It's time to deploy our pricing strategy. Your phone company charges $50 to start, but you'll almost certainly want to test and eventually deploy new pricing models as your product evolves. If that goes well and you decide to change your rates, you probably don't want to hike everyone's monthly bill overnight. You'll keep many existing customers on their old plan.

That means that your billing system has to track the entire history of your pricing matrix, running many different versions of your pricing scheme at the same time. And of course, it's not all sunshine and daisies. Your system needs to handle failed payments. That requires striking a balance between holding non-paying customers accountable while also protecting hard-won relationships with paying customers whose credit card details occasionally lapse.

You'll probably want a customer service team that can view, explain, and modify almost every aspect of a customer's billing state just to be safe. Got all that? Good, because we're going to help you pull it off in our final break. Stick around for more or get all the info right now at stripe.com slash billing.

Welcome back. I'm still here, still talking with Nick Kwa, the podcast critic at Vulture. Right before the break, we were talking about what even is a podcast at this point? Is it audio? Is it video? No one knows. Do we even need the word podcast anymore? Who's to say? But what we do know is there's still a sense of novelty to it in the worlds of business and politics. And the newness means something.

Let's put that back together with this idea of we came out of the podcast election and whether you're a business or a politician, where you go seems to be different now when you want to talk to, quote unquote, the people. With now a few weeks of distance from the election and the chaos surrounding it, what do you think we're going to take away from this?

what happened kind of in that last few weeks before the election and where the candidates in particular chose to go. Two caveats. One is I have no political analyst. Two, I think still it's pretty important to try to hold space for the fact that there are two separate things going on. There is just like the larger political math of the election. Like,

There will be books and books and books and hours and hours of people gabbing about basically conducting the autopsy of this. To what I said, was it political communication? To what exactly was it just the nature of the economy? That will be sorted elsewhere. But I think from the very specific lane of if you are a national political candidate,

and you're engaging in a political communication strategy, if it is not apparent, if one has not internalized the fact that whatever you mean by the old school traditional textbook of how you put a campaign out, if that hasn't already been rethought and did, this is the election that should switch every political communication advisor's book straight up.

It's not enough to do the broadcast networks. It's not enough to do the national papers. It's not enough to do the local papers, to the extent that local papers still exist. One has to sort of internalize and grok the fact that everything that we've been saying that has become truisms but not quite felt about media being fragmented, about

political polarization expressing itself not just in media products, but media platforms. This is all true. And if podcasts like Jurgen or whatever are not held in equal standing as something like the New York Times editorial opinion board, you're not quite caught up with the way things are right now. I think the other big learning for me, the other sense that I got from this election is that

it is important, perhaps now more so than ever, to really truly engage people where they are, which could mean if you were the Harris campaign or any Democrat at this point, to go on a show like Rogan, to go on even say The Daily Wire, like Ben Shapiro's a very huge show. Go increase your presence because it's one of those things where like if you are not in that show or if you're not even in that ecosystem, you've immersed that foot even as an antagonist,

Chances are, I don't think anybody knows that you even exist. And that's kind of the expression or the result of a society in which there are multiple media realities, right? I think one of the bigger, maybe overarching theoretical question here is that, do we still have mainstream media or do we have multiple mainstream media? Do you think it's as simple in that case as just this is where the audience is now? Or is there still something about

the form of the podcast itself that feels different. Like I'm still hung up on this idea that spending three hours with Joe Rogan is different in some meaningful way that I have trouble putting my finger on than even doing a, you know, six minute TV hit on CNBC, even absent the audience stuff. There is something about

Particularly these long Joe Rogan or Call Her Daddy, these very personal podcasts that seems to do something that no other media does. I'm sort of in the beginning process of thinking that maybe actually, I don't want to read too much into the uniqueness of the podcast interview as a form because radio exists, right? Broadcast radio exists, but...

the thing that we're kind of, I think, still unpacking is specifically Trump's appearance across the atmosphere, right?

The sort of crown jewel appearance there is his appearance on Jorgen, but Trump also spent a ton of time kicking it with flagrant, with Andrew Schultz. Like, he spent a lot of time, he went to Adan Ross's kickstream and was gifted a Tesla. There's a certain, what's the word, performative difference there. There's a certain kind of experiential difference there.

And you can actually sort of start drawing out that analysis by just comparing how Harris did when she went on to uncall her daddy, right? She sounded exactly like she does if she was on the television. She sounded exactly as she was when she was on Charlamagne's show on the radio. Whereas Trump, and here I want to sort of, before I move into this caveat that maybe we're just talking about him specifically being very good at this, but the whole hanging out thing is...

really works. And the whole hanging out thing contributes to the sense that I assume a lot of American voters were looking for about like, that person is a real person. And that person I can connect with and empathize more so than any other politician that really has to watch what they have to say. Again, is this a new replicatable political communications strategy?

I don't know. I don't think I've seen anyone. Maybe Federman. John Federman has done something that is close to Bernie, definitely. He's very good. I'm not so sure he hangs out as well, but he is pretty charismatic in very long stretches. But that is the thing I think you're kind of touching on, is the qualitative difference of being a good guest in a very long podcast format. That is something very few people can do.

I think if you can do it, we're learning it's very powerful. And I think what we're seeing with a lot of these things all the way up and down the line from huge celebrities who are trying to have podcasts all the way down to like, again, these B2B folks there, the upside is to me, at least you seem real and human and genuine. If you can figure out how to hang in those spaces, that is really hard to communicate.

Otherwise, there's something really powerful about what you gain by being able to like be in those spaces in a way that feels real and human and authentic that I just don't think even your point like the broadcast radio interview just doesn't seem to allow for quite that same thing.

I agree. I also want to make sure that we orient ourselves in a sort of analytical space where it's multifactorial, right? It's not just the fact that Trump was a very uniquely good baby. Yes, right. And there is a difference between being a good podcast host and a good podcast guest. A sort of mental test that I play is that nobody cares if...

a Democratic candidate goes on Crooked Media. I think you walk into that episode as a listener, more or less knowing what you're going to get. I think part of the appeal here, part of the interestingness here is the novelty itself, right? This is a presidential candidate who went on a bunch of podcasts, like who the fuck knows what a podcast is, like in certain parts of the country, hosted by a bunch of boys and men. These were not political players. So the novelty of that

to bring it full circle, not like the novelty of outlet management, advancing a share, active show campaign using a podcast. The novelty there, I think is part of the power here. And so I want to read a lot into this, but I also think that there is some distance and some like self-restraint about reading too much into this. What's your sense of the next turn in all of this? We're in this moment where everything is a podcast and nothing is a podcast. Podcasts have all these new uses. The business is weirder than ever.

Are we just headed toward more of this same kind of context collapse and YouTube is going to eat podcasts and that's just where we go from here? What I'm looking for is specifically that question. You're right. Whether YouTube is going to completely and fully eat podcasting in terms of just like its identity and sort of what that means for like who are the major players that kind of come out of that, right?

And obviously, setting that within a larger context of like, is all media just going to be this? Like, will we see just a collapse of anything that resembles good journalistic form, etc, etc? Things can change really quickly, right? Like, who knew that

Twitter slash X was going to become like this a couple of years ago. But specifically within the timeframe between now and the next midterms, I think it's pretty obvious that there will just be more attention paid to whatever, however you define like both podcasts and YouTube, I want to say like create this kind of species of creators, creators that have, uh,

cultivated a very sizable audience among listeners that can be considered quote-unquote news avoiders or who are not reading the papers, who are not watching broadcast television. That's all in play. That's all, I think, that's table stakes at this point. It might change in terms of who is up and who's down. Audience sizes might change. But that dynamic, from a coverage standpoint, just from thinking this one through, it's like...

how big is Jorgen going to go? And who else is going to be as important as this person? Is this some sort of return to an era which it's radio first, right? Radio first columnist style people are sort of the major sort of powerful voices in this country. That is something that I think...

will be what I'll be watching out next couple of years. In addition to just like what happens to the rest of the podcast ecosystem. As all of this grows and changes, especially as it runs into this like big teaming content ecosystem that is YouTube, I find myself wondering if it feels like the thing that has made the podcast industry feel human and authentic and real in the way that we're talking about really risks going away.

Like Tim Ferriss, just to name one, is a public speaker and podcast host and an investor and so on. And he wrote this blog post a couple of weeks ago about taking a sabbatical from podcasting.

The part of it that I'm really thinking about right now are the new rules he set himself for doing it because basically he was getting bored. One of those rules was no book launch episodes because this is what everyone does, right? If you have something to promote, maybe you used to do the TV junket, but now you do the YouTube and podcast junket. Or there's this set of people whose entire job is now just kind of podcast speaker where they're like someone you've heard of mostly because you heard them on some podcast and they make the rounds and they show up everywhere.

And Tim basically said he's not sure he wants to do any of those things anymore because he feels like he used to be able to do interesting stuff because he wanted to. And now it all just feels like a big grind. And so I wonder, as you talk about with politicians and so on, if we're going to see them start to be really choosy and strategic about where they go and who they talk to.

If podcasts are going to lose some of that magic thing that people like about them, which is just that sensation of two people sitting there chatting together, can we have both of those things at the same time? There are people who built institutions.

and there are people who find out what the next thing is. And maybe it's not just the media space, it's anything. The first social media platform started and then the game becomes how do you institutionalize it? And there's always going to be that tension and there's always going to be some coexistence between the two spaces. Right now, yes, I think the sort of conversation that we're having or the thing that's interesting now is how does this particular style of outreach and political communication and communication at large, how does it institutionalize? How does it become the norm? And

and will it become boring? Will it become predictable? We're having not dissimilar conversations in television movies, right? For a while, like, are all movies going to be three hours long and IP-based? For a while, it seems like that's all we're ever going to get. But at some point,

it becomes stale, becomes expected, and it collapses into itself. And then new things emerge from the ashes. And that is going to be the case here as well, if it's not within podcasting, whatever it looks like in three to four years. I think the more tricky question is, is it going to happen really quickly? But I do feel like, no, nothing stays in place forever.

If you're running a company or running a campaign or something right now, you have a brand you need to make people like in some way, shape or form. Is the move to launch stuff or to go to this new place where the audience is, at least for right now?

I genuinely believe it is so much hard to launch stuff that it returns there ultimately. If your business model, your goal, the outcome you seek is to build an institution that outlives you, go for it. But if the goal, if the outcome that you seek is to increase your presence,

If it's a political candidate, it is to increase presence such that you can win an election. If you're an executive, if the goal there is to increase your presence so that you might be considered for a CEO job at another company or whatever, don't build your own stuff. Just go everywhere. Be ubiquitous. I think the large way that we've been thinking about media ecosystems over the past couple of years is that everybody's building their own little fiefdoms. Everybody's in their little fiefdoms and everybody lives in their own alternate reality.

What's better than that? What's what's if a billion dollars better than a million dollars, what's better than building your own reality is to be in everybody else's. That's the game. Thank you to vulture podcast critic Nick Kwa for joining me in the show. And thank you for listening. Really hope you enjoyed it. Really glad I got to be here again. If you have thoughts about this episode or stuff you'd like to hear more of, or you just want to finally explain to me what a podcast is, you can send a message to decoder at the verge.com. The team really does read every single email.

Ne-Li is also going to be answering some reader questions for the last show of the year. So if there's anything you want to ask in the whole world, make sure to send your question as soon as you can. Also, find us on TikTok. Check out our TikTok at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun. It's just a lot of Ne-Li yelling, which I very much enjoy. And if you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe anywhere you get podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt, and our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time. This episode is brought to you exclusively by Stripe. Everyone who runs a business knows that deciding how much to charge your customers and when is complicated. Even when you start with something simple, like charging $50 a month for a phone plan. And what if your hypothetical phone company is a global operation, which means customers in each country will want to pay with their preferred payment methods.

Some are push payment methods like sending a bank transfer. Some are pull, like pulling money from a credit card. Only some of them support recurring payments. We've come a long way since the first ad break, and the first time ever we might actually recommend you go back and take a listen. See the whole journey our imaginary phone company has gone on.

All of a sudden, it's easy to see how a seemingly simple proposition, charge $50 a month, gets super complicated for any business operating in the real world. So what's the answer? It's simple. Stripe. You can discover how to turn complexity into growth for your company with Stripe and their advanced Stripe billing software at stripe.com slash billing.