What Even Is a “Podcast” Anymore?

Key takeaways

• The word "podcast" was a 2004 accident, coined by a Guardian columnist from "broadcast" and "iPod" after the MP3 and RSS feed made cheap, gatekeeper-free audio distribution possible. Early podcasts were genre-agnostic: blog-style talk, confessional diaries, field recordings, and repurposed public radio shows. For listeners like Paskin, the appeal was simple time-shifting, described as "the VCR of audio."
• Serial (2014), a This American Life spinoff, proved a serialized story could hold an audience week to week and triggered a boom: The Daily, a wave of true crime shows, Marc Maron landing Obama in his garage, The Ringer, and Decoder Ring itself in 2018. Podcasting became cool, and "podcaster" became an actual job separate from radio.
• The money never matched the hype. Narrative podcasts were funded as if they were blockbuster movies but economically behave like journalism, too labor-intensive to return 10x and lucky to break even. When ad spending contracted in the early 2020s, Spotify folded Gimlet after paying a reported $200 million for it and Anchor, and Amazon gutted Wondery. Decoder Ring shifted to a biweekly schedule in 2024 to stay viable for advertisers.
• Cheap, frequent chat and interview shows turned out to be where the real money was, from Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy to Amy Poehler's Good Hang. The hosts got more famous while the format got easier and cheaper to produce, and a stranger-on-the-street definition of "podcast" moved from Serial to celebrities hanging out.
• Video took over through YouTube's competition with Spotify, pandemic-era celebrities comfortable on camera, and TikTok and Instagram Reels making short clips the main discovery engine. YouTube is now the top podcast platform, ahead of Spotify and Apple. The oversized studio microphone became a prop and visual shorthand (lavalier mics have hidden the hardware for decades) now attached to the audio-free Pete Davidson Show on Netflix, CNN anchors, cat litter ads, and AI-generated dog channels.
• Turning Decoder Ring into video would mean essentially producing documentaries, adding B-roll and graphics, and cutting output. Shows like Howtown already make a polished "video Decoder Ring" but decline the podcast label. Chung is loyal to sound as a craft; Paskin is agnostic about format, sees genuine value in the chat format for conveying ideas, and fears the reported narrative genre is being defined out of existence with no new name to replace it. They end unresolved but committed to the show.

Notable moments

• "A few years ago, I would have thought a video podcast was an oxymoron."
• Chung's late-night radio awakening as a kid, discovering Ken Nordine's "word jazz" and a film-school sound assignment spent silently recording a diner for 90 minutes.
• The SNL parody of Sarah Koenig narrating a child's Christmas morning, marking the moment podcasting went mainstream.
• Obama to Maron: "You can't pretend like you're some little guy in a garage."
• Chung admitting he felt embarrassed around 2018 to call himself a public radio producer because podcasting was the cool label.
• The observation that the big microphones in front of podcasters "are really just functioning as props."
• The Pete Davidson Show described as video-only, with no audio version, watchable solely on Netflix.
• Paskin's closing reframe: the real mystery under every episode is "what's the best way, if we're lucky, to keep on being this one."
• A post-credits confession that making their own video chat segment was "an endurance test" and "really hard."

Time saved: 45 minutes.