You Should Start A Podcast Even If You Hate Podcasts
eat your podcast vegetables
Most people don’t understand why podcasts are good. They think things like “I like reading essays more than I like listening to podcasts, so why would I listen to or start a podcast?” This is missing the main reason why podcasting is worth doing—podcasting is great because, for many people, it’s easier to hit record and ramble for an hour or two than to write up a coherent, structured essay.
These days, it’s really easy to get an automated transcription from Elevenlabs, and then Claude can clean up and edit it for very little added work. That leaves you with a nice written artifact that, while it might not be as high quality as a high-effort blogpost of the same length, is *much* easier to make for many people (including me!). I’d recommend it for anyone who either finds it difficult to turn free time into essays quickly/effectively, or just doesn’t have much free time.
False Equivalence
To talk about a podcast I produced—the choice isn’t between ~50 episodes of Complex Systems vs 50 articles of Bits About Money every year, it’s closer to ~50 episodes of CS vs a marginal ~20 articles of BAM. Even if you prefer an individual BAM to an individual CS episode, this is probably worth it!1
And so we end up with things like the recent episode on Delve, which is easily the best coverage/explanation of the recent Delve scandal I’ve seen, and it might not exist if Patrick didn’t have his podcast as an easy way to put out his thoughts.
Podcasts are also easier to consume, and reach a different audience, which is why I think it’s worth making audio-only versions of your essays available even if you don’t do a podcast. There’s a huge market for “I want to listen to your essay while I’m driving.”
Plus, they’re easier to monetize, especially if you’re doing video. According to the WSJ, TBPN (a daily show about tech) made $5M from ads last year, and was on track to make $30M this year, and I know that other people in the space pull in broadly similar numbers.
Finding Alpha
If you have an interview podcast, you can make it your job to find underrated thinkers/scientists/bloggers/etc in the way that Dwarkesh and Tyler Cowen do. While you can do something vaguely similar by writing a really good review, inviting the thinker on to speak for themselves can be so much better, especially if you put a lot of effort into research and asking the right questions.
This process makes for a great podcast, and provides a valuable service to your guests—Ricki Heicklen was an incredible Complex Systems guest, and her appearance on the podcast helped her launch Arbor, her company which runs bootcamps on quantitative trading.
I still prefer reading essays to listening to podcasts. But the best essay is the one that actually gets written, and for many people, hitting record is the fastest path to getting their ideas out of their head and into the world. If that trades some polish for actually existing, that's a trade worth making.
I’ll be writing more about podcasting soon—if you want a model about how, actually, to start a podcast, subscribe for that.
I originally wrote something like “even though the average CS episode is lower-quality than the average BAM article”, but upon reflection I don’t actually believe this—a lot of CS episodes are really good. (some of my favorite episodes: Ricki, Cate Hall, Yatharth, Habyrka, and his talk to the Bank Of England).