Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media

Maybe the best place to start is which seemingly was the most common question. Mm-hmm. Rowe asked it and a couple of other people on Twitter: "How do you source stories?" That's a really good question, and it's one that we are sort of working to answer more systematically.

So right now, stories have come like, sort of like, well, store it like this: part of it is like we're not sourcing stories, we're sourcing podcasts. Uh-huh. So on one level, the people who are sourcing stories are the actual teams themselves. So like their nod, one of our podcasts, has a whole editorial process around finding stories that they're going to do, and Startup has a whole editorial process, and Reply All has a whole process.

So that's team by team. Those teams know sort of like what their shows are about and what their audiences are into. So they have a process by doing that, and it's sort of a normal process of just sort of reading widely, talking to people on the phone, going out, hearing stories at cocktail parties, whatever it is, you know.

It's sort of like finding something in the news that piques your interest and making some phone calls. Like that's always, that's the way stories work. There's no magic formula to it; you just try to be curious about the world.

So then thinking about sourcing podcasts, are people pitching you? Sourcing podcasts is a very different thing because it needs to be sort of like—it’s like it's not the actual plotline; it's this sort of like...

I remember this: somebody I know, for a while, like somebody at This American Life was friends with one of the people who started Friends, the TV show. Yeah, and Alexa was her name, and she was on the show a couple of times. She did a couple of episodes, and I remember I think somebody was telling me a secondhand story about how she talked about sort of coming up with the idea for Friends.

She was like, starting a TV show is like—you want it to be just specific enough so that there's something that you can remember about it but then also very, very open. You always need a couch. [Laughter] It's sort of like where action can happen, you know?

And so I feel like sourcing a podcast is sort of similar to that. You know, like what's it needs to be about something, but the concept can't be too binding; otherwise, you're not going to be able to find enough stories to sort of keep it going.

Now, sometimes it can be sort of a limited series, and we do a couple of those, and we go back and forth in sort of like what the model is for that and can they be profitable or not. So some of it goes back to economics, but if like the basic unit is the regularly occurring sort of weekly or almost weekly podcast, I would say that's the basic model of podcasting.

Those come to us a couple of different ways. Sometimes people inside the company have ideas, and we sort of do a piloting process to try to see if we can sort of make it, we'll make it, and see how it sounds. People pitch us from the outside; sometimes we will acquire shows that already exist out in the world, and we've done that in a bunch of different ways.

Yeah, because it's sort of—it's not all that different from someone interested in doing a startup sizing a market. When someone pitches you an idea, are you like, "Hmm, intuitively this feels like it has legs," or do you do any kind of analytical process around picking a show?

We don't do any kind of analytical process around it, and partly because it’s not like it’s—we don't, right now, the main capital we need to start a show is human capital. Uh-huh. Right? We need somebody who has a vision, has expertise, and can sort of make it happen.

So we need somebody who can take it and run. A lot of times, what we're looking for is somebody who has a vision. Okay? Like that's—it’s like sort of the startup equivalent: you bet on the founder. I think that's even more the case in podcasting, if that's possible.

Just like—because, and that was one of the mistakes I made early on. I sort of had a background in doing this. I'd worked on This American Life; I had helped start Planet Money with Adam Davidson. Like I had this experience doing this, and so I sort of just thought, "Okay, I can help start all these other ones," but I don't have enough time or bandwidth to sort of be involved within more than one or two.

If the company is growing, I don't have any bandwidth to do that anyway. So we need people, sort of like showrunner types, or hosts who can sort of lead the vision. And so that’s a complicated set of qualities you need: they need skill, they need a vision, they need leadership ability, you know.

It's tricky. So we're looking for people like that. And what do you look for in acquisition content? Are there particular numbers that you look for when you're going to make an acquisition?

Yeah, I mean, we're looking for somebody who could be a good fit. Yeah, obviously, we're looking for somebody who pops. So like Wendy Zukerman is a good example; that was a show that we acquired. Her show is called Science Vs. Okay? And that was something that she was doing out of Australia, and we heard it and we really liked it.

She was clearly just like a magnetic. Yeah, right? Like she's just like—she's so funny, so smart, just so engaging. And the premise seemed really good. We talked to her about what her audience was like, and it was pretty solid, especially given that she had been doing it all by herself.

Is that like a hundred thousand downloads? Is that ten thousand downloads? A million? Two million? No, I mean, I think if you’ve gotten over, if you've gotten up to a hundred thousand independently, you're doing really well; you're big-time.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. So it was like, and we’re looking for some blood. Like if you're getting somewhere close to that number independently, that's a pretty good sign. Okay? And then it's just a matter of like how much can we help, how much can we expose, how many more people can we expose you to, how much—sort of like how much can we help with marketing and stuff.

So with Wendy, it worked really well. We were able to sort of take her audience and multiply it several times over and surround her with a team to make it possible for her to get more work out at a quality that she was striving for, but you know, just like by herself it was really, really hard, you know, because she didn’t have the luxury of sort of auditioning different experts on topics and finding the best one. You know what I mean?

She had to go with the expert that she got, and sometimes they were just dry as dust, and so yeah, and that shows in the product. So if she can sort of cycle through a couple of experts until she finds the one who's like more engaging to talk to, that's a win.

It's a huge advantage because I previously, before YC, was doing a podcast on my own with my friend, and you know, we were fortunate in that we knew someone at MailChimp; they would help out. And that's great, but it really becomes a grind when you're doing it on your own.

So observing you guys from afar, I was like, "Oh my God, this is such a perfect opportunity to start acquiring content.” Yeah, this is a sole creator; you have like no support behind you.

Well, and that's exactly—so our latest acquisition is The Pitch, I'm sure your listeners are familiar with, and that's a perfect example of that. Like Josh Moja, you know, started this podcast sort of like by himself out of his—him and his wife sort of working from his house in Florida.

And he's exactly sort of like—he's got this drive; he's got a vision for what he's trying to do. He's been tweaking; he's been learning, and it's like sort of like learned all he can on his own. He's read every single thing that's ever been put up on Transom, you know, this radio website, and he was just ready, you know?

There's sort of like—have you know—to take it further and like sort of go to the next level with this show. And so that it was just like it seemed like a very obvious sort of fit.

And what about the new people? What about someone who's maybe just graduating college and wants to work at Gimlet? Like what are the qualities you look for in them to be like "Oh man, you might be a fit here?"

We're looking for a couple of things: we're looking for creativity, obviously. We're looking for the ability to get stuff done and do trial. We have—like we have an application process. A lot of times with a lot of the jobs that we do, we'll have some sort of homework assignment that we'll give people, like a trial.

You know, sort of like edit this interview or sort of like give us, you know, sort of like critique this story, something like that, just to sort of get a sense of how they think.

Editorially, curiosity is really important; sense of humor, you know. We just—and empathy is a big, big part of what we believe is important. Like you have to—you have to be motivated by a desire to understand and, you know, as much as a desire as any other desire.

Like sometimes a lot of people get into sort of like this line of work for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's like they really want to—they feel passionately about an issue and they want to sort of bring attention to that issue, and all that is true.

But we want it to proceed from curiosity and understanding. And are you guys kind of agnostic to what issue that is? Because historically, I always thought NPR and then, you know, all the NPR diaspora, like people working on their own content, had a certain type of generally left-leaning audience that fit into Brooklyn or wherever.

Yeah, do you guys care? Or like, you know, it’s completely different than that? We don’t, so this is—I mean, I think honestly this is a sort of a complicated issue now for media companies that I'm trying to grapple with.

Like I feel like at NPR we were perceived as being liberal; probably like the majority of the people working there would sort of like call themselves liberal. But we really did strive for objectivity, or at least trying to understand both sides of the issue.

We would never just sort of like, yeah, you know. And I think the listenership wasn’t as—like I think it was pretty even. It wasn't like it was down in the middle, but that was like, there was something like 30 to 40% of the listeners who identified as conservative.

And it was a pretty big surprise I’m not... but it's—it was—it's a surprising number. Yeah, and certainly, the feedback I get, like for the first season of Startup, you know, it seemed pretty, you know, sort of like evangelical pastors and sort of like Brooklyn hipsters and everybody in between were listening to Startup.

And I think, you know, we’ll still occasionally, like on Reply All, there was like—they had something that sort of let listeners understand how one of them felt about Trump, you know. And we received a couple of letters saying like, “I voted for Trump; I love the show; why are you, you know, sort of like why are you saying that?”

So it’s like, yeah, it’s not—I don't think so. I don't—and honestly, like I like that. Like I feel like I understand there's a lot of fear and anger, especially among communities that are not white, right?

Like especially, like—and I think—and so I want to give voice to that, you know what I mean? I think that—we do live in a racist society, like and there is white supremacy, and like that is real. And it's not a political statement; it's a fact, and it’s based on historical, you know, things that happened, you know, hundred years of slavery, yeah, and a civil war that we never dealt with and like, you know.

And so like, that is all—that's not political in my mind to say that. So—but people perceive it politically. And so when you—and so when you—so one of our shows is, you know, a show about the Civil War.

Mm-hmm. And I'm shocked by how, when I listen to it, by how fresh and unusual it sounds. And it sounds fresh and unusual. We just did the most recent episode called The Takedown, and it was sort of like a live show that they put on at the Bell House.

It was crazy! Like it was a feature there: Nicole Hannah-Jones, who just won a MacArthur Grant, and who's like a prominent podcast host, and Christy Coleman, the CEO of the American Civil War Museum. And then the host, Chenjerai Kumanyika, and his other host, Jack Hedd.

And what was—and it was like—they were talking about the most pervasive myths about the Civil War that they constantly encounter on Twitter. Hmm. And what was—and the shocking thing that felt so fresh and new about it was that four of the five people on the stage were black.

And like that almost never happens, you know, in conversations about the Civil War, which was about slavery, right? Now, and so—and by the way, that's one of the myths: that it wasn't about slavery, it was about slavery.

And like that’s sort of crazy there; like you have so much conversation about the Civil War and how often black voices are not represented in that conversation.

Yeah, when black people in America were at the center of the conflict, and the legacy of America results from the Civil War. And so, and I know that, and I know people listen to that, and like, you know, we, you know, every once in a while we'll get a comment like that feels political to people.

And I guess it is, but it just feels like true, right? Like it just feels like this is crazy that, like it’s 2017 and this feels new that we have like four of the five intellectuals on stage talking about the Civil War who are black. And that feels new and revelatory.

So yeah, so I think I have a media company now, and there are a lot of voices that don't get represented in media, and it feels like, yeah, I want to use that platform to help represent those voices, right?

Because I've kind of been wondering how you're driven. You know, obviously there are podcasts like that one, maybe like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, that are super educational, and where you guys are kind of drawing the line in terms of like, this is our mission; we're educating about certain issues; or it's just about compelling storytelling, or maybe it's something else entirely.

Like do you guys have a defined goal as to what your products are and what they do? Right. I don't, so we don’t—I would never want to say that like—we take engagement very seriously, so anything that is like is really informative but isn’t very fun to listen to, that's a lose. You definitely want to be—you don’t want people to feel like they should listen to it but they don’t want to.

Yeah, be like the, you know, the Thomas Piketty of podcasts. So, but I feel like there’s—here's the way I think about it is sort of like, there’s like—I think there are three big buckets of why people listen to podcasts.

One of them is just for companionship; like they like the hosts and it’s fun to hang out with them. And like there's a whole bunch of podcasts that are like that; like Joe Rogan, I think, is a great example—great, like just people—Howard Stern, like Rush, you know, sort of like—you feel like, "Oh, they're your buddy; you know we all speak, we're all talking together, and it's fun to hang out with you and you guys are funny."

And even like the Slate Gabfest, a lot of those are sort of like—they’re friends that I feel like friends to the hosts. So that’s one. Second, I think they just want to be told a good, gripping story. We've been telling stories to each other since we came up with the ability to speak, and like podcasting is just a sort of extension of that.

And so like I feel like you get Dirty John, a lot of the big party was like—of our stuff—a lot of like the sort of like S-Town, you know, it’s just sort of like, like just in there—it's like the bulk of it is just narrative.

And then the third big bucket is like they want to learn something. So a lot of—podcasting is one of the things you can do when you're not doing something else. You don’t need to be at a screen, so you’re cleaning the house or working out or, you know, sort of like driving to work or whatever, and it’s—you feel like, "Oh, I'm multitasking now; that’s productive,” and so I get to learn something.

And so like, you know, like a big example—and so learning, I think, is a big use case for podcasting. So we just try to figure out like, okay, what are we doing, and right now we try to do all of them.

Like the big ones can sort of bring storytelling, bring that companionship and bring something that you learn, and those feel like, you know, and I feel like Reply All does that. They definitely have the companionship, and they definitely have the storytelling to handle a lot of times—you’re learning something along the way as well, you know?

I think so. A lot of our podcasts are doing—all trying to do all three and might focus more on one or the other. Interesting! So a lot of our listeners are also founders and are also thinking about spaces as both just like interesting, but markets where they could potentially build something.

So maybe it does make a little bit of sense to talk about the podcast industry more specifically and just the content stuff. Mm-hmm. You guys started three years ago?

Mm-hmm. How has it changed since you started, and where do you see it going given, like, the current proliferation of audio stuff in your home, AirPods, all that kind of stuff? Right. So it’s—I mean it’s changed quite a bit.

Like I think—I think it has changed much more quickly than I thought. Like I was in this for a long time, you know, like starting like—I remember when we first put our first put out This American Life as a podcast, and there’s like I think five thousand people listened to it or something like that, you know?

And then, you know, sort of like I was doing Planet Money for like five years before leaving, and it was sort of changing and evolving and growing but not at the clip. And then sort of like then we started and Serial came along, and then BOOM! Everything just like sort of—I think in large part because of Serial, in large part because of us, I think.

And then just sort of timing; like all the ones who were already there were sort of like started picking up, and it just became just a lot more mainstream awareness, a lot more advertising dollars flowing into it, and a lot more content creators coming on board. So that’s great. I mean overall that's fantastic.

I think the ecosystem is growing; it changes things a little bit like in terms of sort of like you've got to bring your A-game when it comes to sort of content, but also sort of like have a much more robust marketing strategy.

And when you—you know, it becomes a little bit more sort of like a traditional media company where you’ve got to be able to figure out like, “Hey, what’s your marketing plan here?” You can’t hear your partners and, you know, sort of roll it out, that sort of thing.

And then I think the—I think people are paying more attention to it; like the platforms are paying a lot more attention to it now. So like Spotify, TuneIn, and of course Apple. Apple was the dominant just sort of like by accident; they created the category and sort of created this whole ecosystem.

But like the ecosystem, even that was getting larger by our standards, by Apple standards, was still like a tiny, you know, sort of rounding error. And now it's gotten beyond rounding error status, and so they're starting to pay attention as well, which is all, you know—so like I think now there are—the platforms are like starting to sort of like compete a little bit, and you see like sort of like deals around content happening and that sort of thing.

So, so that’s also really exciting because distribution is so difficult still. I mean it’s been hard, but now it's like both hard to discover and competitive.

Yeah, and so what do you guys do when you have a brand new show, and you're like, “We need to start this out with, I don't know, like whatever your benchmark is for like a good amount of listeners in the beginning”? How do you make that happen?

Yeah, I mean that’s changed a little bit. Like we—it used to be that we didn't have to do as much. You know, I don’t—the landscape has gotten more crowded. I think also like politics has become a much bigger storyline, and you've got shows coming out like Pod Save America and The Daily that have brought a lot of new people into podcasting, but that’s like a—you know, they’re focused on sort of like the craziest story that’s putting right now, which is, you know, sort of like—the presidency, and so that’s—that’s been interesting.

Yeah, so but what we do is what we—you know we have a nice network now of, you know, sort of of listeners, and we have, you know, millions of unique listeners now that we can sort of put new shows in front of. That works.

Mm-hmm. We also need to start finding other audiences, right? So like we have, you know, sort of millions of unique listeners, but then there’s like lots of other people who sort of would listen but don’t know about podcasting or don’t know.

And those people are like sort of like there—there’s like this continual drift. You know, right? The category is growing for sure, but that just takes more work. And it’s just sort of like a longer sort of like—it’s like you’ve got to give shows time, basically.

Like we’ve got a—we part of it is like you’ve got to get the editorial sort of like where it’s cranking. And so like shows—almost every show that we ever launched has been sort of like a little editorially wobbly thing as it gets its feet.

It’s like it’s a crazy—it’s crazy. It’s like exactly—there are startups; their own little startups. So they come out, they get solid, they start producing, we sort of work at a consistent quality, then they get written about, maybe they become guests on other shows. Maybe they sort of like start doing partnerships with other publications, you know, just sort of like getting their name out into the well.

Maybe they do like a joint production with some larger podcast out there. There's all sorts of strategies.

Like, I mean, the best place to find podcast listeners is on other podcasts; that’s still true. We haven't figured out a great way of sort of migrating people from sort of like the realm of Facebook and Twitter into the realm of listening.

Yeah, you know, it’s tricky. Well, we can, but we do YouTube for that executive, and it’s been super effective.

How does that work? So tell me about how it works.

Yeah, totally. So like I said, with the podcast I did previously, we were always struggling with your same issue: like how do people find it? And then how do people find the episode from like two years ago?

Right, which it sucks! It's still bad. Like there are lots of things you can do around transcription, right, which is somewhat helpful, but if you Google anything, look where the videos show up in their ranking.

Yeah, super high! Yeah. So like the actual way it works is we record video when we do the podcast, I edit the video, which is then exported to the podcast, right? And then I title that like, you know, “Interview with Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media,” and then I cut up the video into like five more videos that have very specific titles, for instance, “How to Make a Podcast,” “How to Market Your Podcasts,” “How Gimlet Works,” right?

And those numbers will dwarf like the actual interview listeners. Our podcast numbers are still really high, but this, like you don’t have retention data, so I don't actually know, 'cause there’s just subscribers.

Right? You know, like you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but how engaged are they? Yeah, so basically what we try and do is like use YouTube as marketing for the podcast, right, and just own those like subscriber channels.

And it’s been pretty good so far! And especially when you get a big-name person, right, with the little names, it’s like it’s still not the same, but yeah, it’s been super effective.

So how much more, like how many more views do you have on the YouTube segments than you do listeners on the podcast?

So our podcasts do like ten to a hundred thousand downloads per episode, okay? And then the YouTube views will, depending on the person, be about the same. Uh-huh.

Which is amazing! Yeah! Because I don't think they’re the same people, and I think a lot of people are finding the podcast through that because those often get shared whereas the podcast don’t get shared, right, in the same way, right?

Yes, podcast sharing, it’s hard to share podcast—it's sort of—it’s really—it’s very, very—you don’t—you can't just like shoot it at work and—and part of the problem, I think, so one of the, to me, I think this is like one of the paradoxes, one of the many paradoxes of sort of building a media business based on audio.

The great thing about audio is that it does exist in this sort of separate realm, right? Like when you—most of the time, if I’m at my desk or I'm on my screen or I'm looking at something, I’m using my eyes to, say, read an article. Hmm.

I’m like that article is competing for my eyes’ attention with a gazillion other things. It’s competing with Facebook and Twitter and movies and like, oh, every single, you know, sort of like name on the planet who’s launching their prestige television series and like every, you know, sort of like everything out there is competing for my eyes.

Then you've got like audio which is over here. You're not going to—you're not going to necessarily listen to audio while you're streaming it while you're like sort of on your phone looking through Twitter or whatever.

You're going to listen to audio while you're mowing the lawn, what you can't be doing those other things. So it’s separate, and like in a nice way. You know, you're driving to work; whatever, you can’t be looking at the screen.

So all audio is competing with is other audio or music basically, you know? Right? So that's great for us; like it feels like much more like we don’t have nearly the menace that every—if I was launching sort of like a digital media company right now just sort of like like trying to write articles or video or whatever, that landscape is so crowded.

So it’s good. The bad part of that is that like you don’t—like in this world when you were driving to work, like you're not going to just be like, "Oh, that's funny; I'm going to put it on my Facebook."

There’s not like—a mechanism even to share. Yeah. If you wanted to, it’s consumed in a different way, so it’s harder to even figure out—like you get lost in it, and you're not like—the distractiveness of media is that like—is its advantage when it comes to sharing.

You’re always like starting checking something out, you’re always doing two things at once, and so it’s easy to sort of like be watching something and then pop it over into your Facebook feed and share it like instantly.

Sharing doesn't even capture the magic. It’s like if you were to tell me a joke and then I were to write one line down and share it, and it was usually—that's only used against you.

Yeah. You see comedians complain about this all the time. That was out of context. Yeah. And similarly with podcasts.

Like, yeah, yeah. You know, you have this great conversation and one part is particularly funny only if you know the background. Yeah. And so you’ve had all the build-up to it and everything that—and like the moment by itself won’t work unless you've had all of it.

Yeah, no, I mean, that’s the—that’s the problem with narrative. So, so in one hand it’s our advantage and I feel like it sort of allows us to build this business, sort of pioneers in this space. On the other hand, like how do we get people into the space? How do we get other people who are already in the space to know about us?

Like that’s still a challenge that we’re trying to figure out. Where do you guys fall now on? Because in season one of Startup, you’re talking a lot about technology, maybe building technology.

Yeah. How has your thinking changed in the past couple of years around that? So, well, I think early on we made the decision that sort of like to focus on our strengths.

And if you look around here, we’ve got like, you know, we've got 80-some people here, you know? The vast majority of those people are editorial.

Yeah. It's like they're making podcasts, either brand new podcasts forgetting the creative or editorial podcasts for Gimlet Media. And up until like a couple—up until about a month ago, we didn’t have one technology person on the team.

So we were very old-school. At this point, we have recently hired somebody ahead of product, and we’re going recently—we’re—and I think that's gonna be—that will definitely be a larger part of what we do.

Yeah. How exactly we use technology is still TBD. Yeah. It seems less likely that if we were ever going to build like our own platform that seems less and less likely.

Like just because you know the Spotifys and the Tunins and the Apples are definitely—like for a while, like they weren't really paying attention. Now they’re definitely paying attention.

And so it just seems like—that space now, it just seems like—that’s to take that space now, it just seems like you're—it's like a big long shot. And we're not at all set up to even try to do that.

Right, especially to you because like individual podcast hosts are incentivized for downloads, so they actually don’t want to be captured by platforms.

Mm-hmm. And so if I’m a host, like I don’t care where I put it. This is not obvious to people who download podcasts from iTunes, right? It doesn't work the same way as a song. It’s an RSS feed.

Yeah. And so it’s just—you can point it at anything, and I have a go out there. Yeah. And I think the only people right now are just doing maybe like paid apps.

So like I think Marc Maron still does this, right? He has a Maron app, so you get 50 most recent episodes; it can get the old ones, right? Maybe that’s good for individual creators. But for you guys, yeah, I don’t know.

No, we would want to be—and I think there is a—we would like to go direct to listener somehow and like sort of like just because like that’s—you know, like we want to deepen our relationship with the listener.

And like we want you—and then—and I think there might be other sort of revenue opportunities associated with like a direct, a more direct connection with the listener.

But how exactly do we do that? What's the mechanism? It will involve technology, but how technology will look like we’re still not sure off.

So one question that came from Twitter, I want to get their name right, yeah, is Swing Ventures asks, “Are you concerned about how the podcast landscape may change when more analytics become available? For example, chart beats impact on journalism?”

I mean, I'm concerned about—and that is one of them. I don't know. You know, it's—you know, like everything, there's a good side and a bad side, right?

So like right now, there's a lot of advertisers who would be interested in advertising in podcasting who are sitting on the sidelines because you just can't provide the same kind of analytics that you can in other forms of digital media.

So they're just like, "Well, until we know what we're getting with our money, we're not gonna spend here." And so analytics will absolutely help the overall sort of like advertising landscape, which more advertisers being interested in space should theoretically, you know, help us.

Like that will—more demand for the inventory should mean a higher price for the inventory, even if we discover that like there are certain listen-through rates that are different than what we expected or whatever, right?

I don't think we're gonna be that surprised. Like we have—some of that information already through some of these other platforms; like, you know, some of the other platforms let you sort of see like what the decay rates are, that sort of thing.

So we—we can see the analytics are getting better. Yeah, a lot better! Yeah! So we sort of know, and then a lot of the—and then for a lot of the advertisers, especially the direct response advertisers, like the Squarespaces and the MacPaw’s and people like that, like where it’s sort of like—it's not like, “Oh, this is a murky sort of like proposition— we’re like, we’re gonna advertise here and hopefully if people feel better about us.”

It's a very much like a—like people signed up for Squarespace; it's a formula. Yeah! And if they know like, "Here's how much we spend, here's how many customers we get, here's the lifetime value of this customer," right, it’s worth it for us to advertise at these rates or not.

Right? And so, so that's also a pretty good market test. Like people are advertising at the rates that we're charging, and they continue to sign up.

Yeah! And so that means that, you know, it’s working. Do you have strong opinions on what type of content is gonna—is—will be doing well in the future?

Like the landscape has seemed to have shifted a little bit. I mean, it's probably just broadening, so there’s room for everything.

Yeah, but are you seeing trends in like certain types of content, whether it's like subject matter, lengths, a type of host, style of host, mmm—that's just like coming out of nowhere and really dominating?

Yeah, I mean, well, clearly like crime and—people love crime! Yeah! It took—and I think that was like sort of like Serial inadvertently sort of like cracked that open and—it’s just been sort of like—it’s been a non-stop ever since.

So like after Serial, and I was like, I don't think that was—I know obviously I'm very close with all the people who worked on the Serial team, and that was—that was a story that they were interested in personally, but they don’t have—they're not like interested in true crime as a genre. Yeah!

So it was like largely an accident, all, I think. But—but that, like ever since Serial has been like total sunrise. Simon Léa, they've all done very well, seemingly.

Sort of like across the spectrum. I'm sort of like produced, non-produced, sort of like, you know, there’s some that are like talk shows just sort of discussing sort of like what they find online; there are some that are sort of like following a single case throughout as interns.

And there's some all in the middle and like they all—they all do pretty well. You know, we launched a—you know, sort of a crime-related show, Crime Town, which is sort of like about crime and politics and sort of the interplay between the two.

And that did really well for us, you know? I think there’s a lot of mobsters and gangsters, and you know it’s, you know, it’s interesting. You know?

What about stuff like, like Lore? I saw that they haven’t, I think it’s an Amazon show. No, is that—that transition to video interesting to you guys?

Oh yeah, absolutely, we're doing that! I mean, there are a couple—we have a budget; we have a bunch of projects in the works sort of translating stuff that first appeared in audio into video.

There's notably, I guess, is the ABC sitcom, Alex Inc., which is gonna come out, I guess, this winter which is based on season one of Startup. And sort of like the Alex character is played by Zach Braff.

Yeah, there’s—our fiction podcasts, our first fiction podcast, Homecoming, is going to be made into—we got a two-season deal with Amazon that’s gonna launch sometime in 2018, and that’s exciting! That’s starring Julia Roberts in the lead role.

Maseo, life is weird! What about the stuff you had to kill, or you just decided to kill along the way? Like how are you making those choices?

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is sort of like it all comes down to sustainability, okay? And that could mean a couple of different things.

Like, sometimes, the concept is like just too complicated to pull off at the frequency we need to need to pull it off. And it's hard! Like I come from this background of like sort of like when we were first pitching this.

I was talking about like sort of like how we were going to be distinguished like, you know, several years ago I was pitching investors, how are we gonna distinguish our material from like podcasts out there?

And I was just sort of like how I was gonna be produced and we’re gonna like sort of like, you know, we’re gonna like hire teams and we take this very seriously, the craft of it.

And one of our investors, I remember saying so—it’s—he's like, "So it sounds like you're just saying you're gonna do whatever else does but just—that's gonna be a lot more expensive to produce."

And—and the hope is—which has been somewhat borne out by the facts—yeah, largely borne out by the facts—is that like when you take the attention to detail, you crack through to a different realm of the audience than something that isn't as highly produced.

Yeah. Now there’s lots of caveats: number one being like you can have like a talk show. Joe Rogan is a perfect example where it's just like it does monster numbers; it has monster engagement; and like—there's not—it doesn't take months to produce each episode.

No, yeah, and it's great! You know what I mean? And it's like it's great—like there’s—there's great live. A lot of the great things about like that are showing up in our episodes are showing up on, you know, in his podcast as well.

And like there are some people who are just great live and like that’s sort of lightning in a bottle; those people are—that isn’t.

Much harder than so much respect for that—doing this video stuff is is an absolute education in holding conversations with people.

Because before, when I did just an audio podcast, editing is magic, and all of a sudden, everyone's smarter and funnier, and it’s just like really zippy.

Yeah, and now I've really had to learn about how to control the energy in a room when you're having a conversation. We edit this, but not nearly as much as we used to.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, so anyway, so—but that—we're making these sort of more expensive, but then like sometimes like the—like, and—and like a lot of times like you can have like this amazing sort of concept in it, and it’s like, yeah, it’s thrilling, and everybody—it becomes the thing that people discuss and people want to hear it.

But if we can’t—if it can’t be sustainable, if it can’t come out a certain number of times a year, then there’s no way to make it.

Money, sometimes it’s sort of like, are the—is the team passionate about the thing that they're doing? And if not, it doesn’t make sense to continue.

It’s better to find something that the host is passionate about rather than trying to sort of match the host with some sort of material that you think could work. And that was a lesson we learned early on.

Interesting! I think with you know with Sampler for example, it was a—it was like a podcast about podcasts, and the host was Britney Loose, who we’d heard, you know, sort of hosting another show for Colored Nerds.

And we—it really is—she's great; she’s got this great energy on the mic. And so we were like, "Hey Britney, come and host this thing." And she was like, "Yeah, that’s great," but it's like—and it was a—it did—it was fine; it was a pretty good—it was a pretty good podcast, and she did a really good job, and like we liked it, but it wasn’t like her passion.

And like it was doing fine, but it wasn't doing gangbusters, and so we were like, "Well, it’s just—let’s just have you host a show that you would like, and let’s see if we can do that."

And so we sort of shut that down, restarted, and hired her other co-host, Eric Eddings, and we launched The Nod, which is sort of like a celebration of black culture. Their sort of tagline is "Blackness as Biggest Fans," and like that show is like, you know, that’s—that and—and like the energy of that show and just sort of the feeling of it is just like, it’s really exciting.

So like they just—they just feel it, and they're like—it’s like it’s got a lot of energy. I think that's so critical; people underestimate how important it is to just come in really strong and have that vibe because most podcast listeners have picked their favorite shows, in my experience, because they just bond with this person.

Like you were saying before, then that first category—there's that like Joe Rogan type person where folks just bond with them. And when that’s done poorly, it puts people off.

And more often than not, when I talk about like, "Hey, we do a podcast with I see; you know, we interview people,” they're interested in tech or kind of in that space, they're like, "Oh, is it just a bunch of like dudes talking around mics, like goofing on each other?”

Right. And that’s like—that’s put a dent in the podcast world; it’s like it’s loaded down quite a bit. Yeah, more often than not, that's how people were introduced to it.

Yeah, that’s how people think of podcasts: it’s just sort of like a bunch of people sort of like, you know, pontificating around, you know, mics, you know, to each other and cracking jokes or whatever.

And like I think there’s a lot of great—like a lot of people—there’s a lot of podcasts like that that have like very devoted fan bases that like that love that. And like if you love the subject matter that like those that people are wisecracking about, then you're down for that, like that’s great!

And you know, you make a habit of listening to that podcast then and those—those grow and do well; it’s just like to cut through to get beyond like the small group of people that are gonna be interested in whatever it is you're talking about, you know, just already.

Yeah, like you need to bring—you need to bring some production to it to sort of like grow the audience beyond that.

So, if I wanted to start a podcast today and I was a solo person, not affiliated with a big company, not within a podcast network, mmm, what would you recommend I do to educate myself before I get started?

So I think, well, there’s like a lot of online resources. Good, of course, I did—of course, on CreativeLIVE, which was pretty much everything I know combined into two days of listening and watching, which I think is definitely still available.

And it’s like you have to buy it, but it’s like, yeah, sometimes they run specials. And yeah, I’d say it's definitely worth it. There are like a bunch of free resources on Transom, goerge, which is like a—it’s run by this great guy Jay Allison.

He's like a longtime public radio sort of like mensch, basically. He’s just been early—he's like he’s great, and he was like early on in my career he was like really helpful, and he’s just—he runs this invaluable thing called Transom where he just gets everybody from across mostly public radio, but like a lot of like the best sort of most exciting people inside the public radio world, they just sort of lay out these manifestos where they just sort of talk about their tricks.

They also have like field guide recorder reviews and sort of like it’s just invaluable stuff like that.

There’s a guy Pat Flynn who does like the Passive—I think it’s called the Passive Income Package, I watched some of that one.

Yeah, yeah. And he has a couple YouTube tutorials, I think, that are just sort of like here’s how you set up your system to do it. He’s focused much more on sort of like the sort of daily—here’s how you tackle, yeah, yeah, but that’s—but it's like, he’s—they're good solid like, you know, sort of like tutorials.

And then, I think just doing it! Like to me, the big thing is to find a friend who is who you trust and who’s easily bored and just like do it. Get better at, like, just try to just build stuff, like whatever you want to do.

Like whoever your hero is, copy them and understand that you're gonna be so much worse than whoever your hero is, and you're always gonna be different, and you're gonna think you're copying them, but you're not. But that’s okay; you'll get to the difference later.

Just try to be as close as you can in the beginning, and I think that's—I mean Ira Glass gives us advice, you know, sort of who’s my mentor and sort of like—which is sort of like you have to start with some—with a vision of what you want to be, and then like you copy that.

And then eventually you'll find your way to your own voice through copying! Yeah! But like if you're just starting out on original—I'm gonna do it my way! Like it’s really hard.

I think there are people who can do that, and maybe you will be the TSLA of podcast, I can actually publish your masterpiece of twenty-one, and like that’s fine! But I don't think that happens that often.

Much more often, I think you just—you try to copy somebody who you admire, you suck at it, and along the way you learn some things.

You learn a lot because you know, you talk to someone, and so many things go unsaid because either they’re assumed or it's just style, and it’s like innate.

Were there any things that kind of like non-obvious interviewing strategies that you picked up, whether it's here or at NPR?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think so. A big part is like I think—I think interviewing—what people respond to when you’re interviewing somebody.

So if you're doing the kind of podcasts that we do, yeah, mostly the fundamental building block of that kind of podcast is the interview, and the fundamental building block of a good interview is two things.

One, you want like people to tell you stories. Like there was this one thing that happened to me this one day; I was at home, I went outside, blah blah. You want like a story—it has a beginning, it has a middle, it has a punchline.

That’s building block number one! If you have people who are telling you stories, that’s great. The other fundamental building block is emotion—it’s like emotional honesty, where people are talking in a real way about something.

And some people are just good at that. And generally, they talk—they talk—they’re emotionally present when they talk, and those people are generally better interviews.

But then some people are like more guarded; most people are more guarded, but occasionally you’ll get to a moment of genuine emotional honesty. And I’m not talking about it has to be sad; sometimes it can be happy.

Sometimes it's gonna be laughter; sometimes it can be confusion—whatever! But something real that you're that’s—the other building block of an interview.

And so, I always say that like a good interview is like—it’s like a good therapy session. We're just trying to get people to put their feelings into words.

And so a lot of times if you’re talking about something that has any kind of emotional stakes to it, there’s a moment where you’re going to sort of like hear something in somebody’s voice and you're going to want to press further, and you're going to want to try to get to like, "There was a—there’s a funny feeling in the thing that they said," and you're going to want to try to explore that funny feeling and that’s where the gold is.

Hmm. So try—and training yourself to sort of be aware of that and sort of like getting people to talk about it without prying and we have—being confrontational but just sort of like getting them to open up about it and feel comfortable opening up.

So part of the best thing you can do in an interview is listen. Like that’s the number one thing: be yourself. Understanding that like you as the interviewer are part of the drama.

Like there's—like a great question with a great answer is riveting. Nobody will turn it off if you ask a great question.

Like I remember there was this—when I'd sort of more—sort of transform, like a big turning point in my career was this show I did for This American Life. Me and Adam Davidson did it together; it was called The Giant Pool of Money.

It was about the mortgage crisis; it was like an hour-long sort of explain, or "C'mon 2008," sort of like, "What’s going on with the housing bubble and sort of all that stuff that’s happening?"

We—it was this big long thing we reported out for months and months and months, and there was—it started with this question where this guy had—we were talking to this guy at a foreclosure or sort of like event where he was like sort of talking about like this massive loan that the bank had given him.

And he was saying like at the time he didn't have a full-time job; he had three not very steady part-time jobs.

He was making a combined income of maybe $45,000 a year, and he got all and he got a half-million dollar loan from the bank without any paperwork, basically. They didn’t ask him any questions.

And he was telling us about like how weird it was, and so he's talking about like, “Yeah, they didn’t ask me any questions. They didn't—there was paperwork and stuff like that, but nobody asked how much money I made, how much money I had in the bank, anything like that, what my job was.”

And I asked him, I was like, "Would you have loaned you the money?"

And like the minute you hear me ask that question, nobody is gonna turn off the radio, right? Everyone wants to hear the answer.

And like—and he was like, "No—nobody—I know would have loaned me the money. I have guys that are criminals who wouldn’t have loaned me that money."

And it was great! Good! Because like I remember like, you know, it was sort of like that and it was this great answer and it was sort of perfectly set up the whole question, which is sort of like "Why did the banks loan people the money when they themselves wouldn’t have loaned the money?"

Right? Like what’s going on? So—but like that drama of the question and the answer is something that’s very real. And if I had screwed up the question, if I’d just been nervous about it, or if I hadn’t asked it right or whatever, if I hadn’t been like present and just sort of like taking my job seriously and just asking the questions, I would have, you know, I would have—it wouldn’t have worked.

So that’s—that’s the thing to also keep in mind is just sort of like you in—in audio, more than anything, you are part of the—you are part of the show.

Mm-hmm. And so just remember that. I think that's a great place to wrap it up.

Yeah! Cool! Awesome, man! Alright, thank you!