"We should start a podcast"
is a frequent joke sentence that my friends and I occasionally say to each other, usually in the wake of riffing on stupidity. Though for others, the prospect of starting a podcast might actually be something they are really interested in. Those cases, I actually do encourage them to give it a try, though the podcast scene today is beyond inundated with low-effort bullshit that gets started because it has become the go to way to produce clips for social media.
It's bizarre how podcasting has gone from a niche subject format in the 2010s to one of the largest media industries out there. It's not even a joke to say that everyone has got their own podcast, because so many people do have their own podcast.
I admit that I am a sucker for talk radio programs from my university station because I feel that those are curated and the fact that they originate from my local community gives me some level of connection with the content.
But most any schmuck has a podcast these days. Podcasting is marketed as a way to grow your brand and, especially recently I've noticed, farm clips of people talking about shit, cut it down to a minute or two and post it on social media. Most videos that you see of people talking into a Shure SM7B come from a podcast of some kind. Clip farming is a disease.
The fact that "anyone can start a podcast" is great, but it becomes plainly obvious that some people just do a podcast because they can and not because they have anything interesting to say on a subject.
The most recent and parodied example I've seen is the Talk Tuah podcast, which yes, sucks. It feels like the self-satirical pinnacle of podcasting for the sake of clip farming and marketing growth. Not only was Hawk Tuah an over-sensationalized video to begin with that made no sense how it actually got popular, but the podcast shows how much marketing has grip onto the medium as a way to capitalize on opportunity.
I say marketing because it is clear that nobody on the Talk Tuah podcast actually knows why they are there. Every conversation hinges on a weak personality speaking about a 10 second video for about an hour and asking the opinions of other weak personalities what they think about it.
Repeat this formula ad nauseam and you get the bulk of podcasting in the 2020s. It feels useless to even try to list all of the podcasts that have done this recently because, chances are, you probably know of one already. If you open up your preferred platform for short-form content (Instagram Reels, TikTok, Youtube Shorts, etc.) there is a very good chance that a horrible nothing-burger podcast clip will appear on your feed after scrolling for a few minutes.
There are, of course, good podcasts out there. People who are genuinely interested in the niches and subjects they occupy that are fantastic personalities and thrive in the medium. Those are not the kinds that you generally see shovelled through social media feeds.
It is easy to claim this as the death of podcasting, the chasing after supposedly "easy" money on social media. Though it is hard to say that the soul of it has died. It has surely just been obfuscated. Sturgeon's law dictates that 90% of anything is crap. If this is so, we are just exposed to that 90% far too often.
I guess this is just a really long winded way to say that when I say "we should start a podcast", I am actually just making fun of people who have nothing better to do and are after money, not people who actually care.
-bzg