 I spend hours each week commuting between my apartment and work, work and my apartment. I live in New York City, one of the world's most crowded places, but I don't talk to anyone during these times. Still, I'm never alone. I'm with some of my most reliable friends. They tell me about their lives, their curiosities, stories they've heard. They tell me how to be a better cook, or what's going on in politics, or which comics to buy this week. They're the hosts of my favorite podcasts, and they've become an important part of my daily life. They don't know me at all, but they're like family. We have shows like Serial, a weekly show that reached 5 million listeners faster than any other podcast ever has, and has spawned a universe of people talking about and dissecting every second of a murder mystery from 1999. We're at the cusp of a talk radio renaissance. Are podcasts the future of radio? What does that even mean? Lots of people are trying to figure that out. Like this guy, Alex Bloomberg, an alum of This American Life and Planet Money, who's trying to build a podcast company, and of course, making a podcast about it. From Gimlet Media, I'm Alex Bloomberg, and you're listening to The Tool Belt, a podcast for amateur carpenters and home repair enthusiasts everywhere. Just kidding. You're listening to Startup, the podcast series documenting the launching of my podcast company, the business origin story you never actually hear set down in real time, and this is the sound of my co-founder, Matt, and his friend, John, a sound engineer, building a recording booth with their bare hands. Why build a podcast company now? We're at the dawn of a second golden age of audio. You know, if you think about what happened with radio, right? You had Orson Welles, and you had all those great things that were going on in the 40s, and the way you consumed radio is you sat around in your living room and you watched the radio. Like that's the way people did it. And then TV comes along, and if you're going to sit around in your living room and stare at something, TV's at the bit of three. It's moving. Yes, exactly. And now everybody has a smartphone, connected cars are coming, so you're going to have these in-dash systems where you can just listen to everything on demand. We have all this capture time when we can't read, we can't watch when we're driving, when we're working out or whatever, and for the first time in history, we now have a way of accessing whatever we want to listen to. And so I believe there's just going to be an immense hunger. So this is one of the more awkward transitions I've ever written, but back at work after the weekend. That was my line, I just ad-libbed it though. It's really fun, it took more work. Oh really? You think I should just do that? That's amazing. All right, done. I'm a huge believer in that what makes things good and rise above is editing time. I read it and then I play the tape for people and then they're going to listen and sort of give me notes about whether, you know, what part of it sucks. And this is something we do every single show. It felt long. Yeah. I mean I felt like a great path that I wish I hadn't. I waited so long for. That early writing was like, that was when I was still a little sick. I feel like, it's like I can feel the difference. Like it got better by the end. Both of us feel that being transparent is a really good thing, that it's a good thing for the company internally, that it's a good thing as a way to tell the story. But sometimes it's like, oh, are we showing too much? Or is this going to raise questions? There have been times when I've been at like literally at cross purposes with myself where like we've been in certain investor meetings where I really wanted them to say yes. But then they said no in a way that as the producer, I was like, yeah, that was a great scene. They really shut that guy down. And I was like, that guy was me. It's interesting just the number of people who are still coming around to the idea of what a podcast is. There was this woman who read this article about us and she had this line that I love, which was sort of like, she was like, people who podcast, podcast hard. And I was like, totally. So what you need is the casual podcaster. Yeah. I feel like we're at the very beginning here of what it even means to be a podcast. And people always have this, they'll say, do you listen to podcasts? And nobody ever says, do you read books? Like after Gutenberg came along, that was a relevant question. Do you read books? And you're like, yes, I have read the Bible. But now that makes no sense. And I think soon that's not gonna make sense in podcasting either. Alex, Matt and the Gimlet team are trying to build a huge, wildly profitable venture backed business from podcasting. But that's not the only direction this business is going. PRX, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been supporting independent public radio for more than a decade and is now doing the same with podcasts. It compiled a network of shows like 99% Invisible and Radio Diaries into Radio-Topia, which is like an indie label for podcasts. This is Jake Shapiro, PRX's CEO. He says podcasts have a lot to learn from public radio. For me, the tipping point moment of like, this is the mainstreaming of the audience for podcasting was Ira Glass on The Tonight Show, where of course it was about the launch of Serial. But it's Ira Glass, it's like Robert Downey Jr. and then Ira Glass. And Ira Glass is explaining this launch of this thing. And Jimmy Fallon is like, so there's a lot of people, and you found it too, that don't know what a podcast is. He's like, yeah, in fact, we made this video. And so he pulls out this video, and it's him with his 85-year-old neighbor who's explaining how to listen to a podcast. Essentially, it just says she has an iPad, and she's like, you press the play button. And congratulations, you're listening to a podcast. I think in some ways, YouTube and Netflix have taught people that on-demand media should be as simple as pressing play, and there's going to be really good stuff you can consume. We figured out that there was actually this need around web audio that hadn't really come to the fore yet. We'd been sort of training for this moment in many different ways over an entire 10 years, if not the last year and a half of planning for Radiotopia. Podcasting was initially totally community-driven, shows by and for people with similar interests. But then everyone started trying to figure out how to make some money. Of course, famously, Odeo got started, which was Ev Williams' attempt to actually make sense of this space. And they did a brilliant job, actually, of trying to create something that made sense of her discovery and the publishing and kind of a navigation of it all. And then iTunes basically scooped in podcasting, because they hadn't invented it. They had nothing to do with it. But they added it as a category. And in doing so, they actually, I think, displaced and kind of quelled a lot of the interesting entrepreneurial activity that was happening and the kind of third parties trying to figure out podcasting. And we recently announced something new for iTunes and iPod, and it's called podcasting. As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. I think we're starting to see this fundamental spread of mobile and adoption and of audio working better and of the supply of really great content. That's just definitely started to hit this tipping point. And some of the things that we're really proud of is that we were able to get enough to say yes to four more shows. Three of them, and maybe even the fourth, we'll find out, are hosted by women, which is something that we think is a huge gap in both technology and podcasting. So it was great to see that. And we anticipate we'll continue to grow it, but try to pace it, because we're actually pointing the Kickstarter was to give the producers in Radiotopia more resources to do their best work to try to increase the frequency of their production. And like I was saying, I think that we're still just starting to get a better sense of user behavior and then beginning to design both the products around that and then try to give producers feedback. So you could imagine designing audio and designing shows for some of those contexts. That hasn't even really been done yet. So you have the mowing the lawn podcast. That's exactly the length of the lawn mowing. And that could maybe figure out, because of the sort of vibrations, that that's what you're doing and plays that show that episode next. That sounds awesome. Just invented something. Yeah, done. The mowing podcast now. You can have that one. MoCast. I'm sorry. The best thing about the mocast is that it would totally work. At least it would if ESPN's bet about podcasts is right. Can I get a shot of you taking a picture of this for the top shelf thing? That'd be a good intro shot. Sure. ESPN's been doing this longer than almost anybody and more successfully. From Bill Simmons BS report on down, it's one of the most popular podcast networks on the planet. ESPN covers a million different sports a million different ways and producers like Joshua Macri have spent years turning sports into podcasts. ESPN's been doing radio forever. But doing a podcast, it seems like ESPN, I think, more than others treats it as something unique and different. We really zero in on a niche audience when we put together a podcast. So for a radio show, you don't want to spend too much time on any one given topic because you want to keep things moving. You want to keep every segment of the audience engaged in something. Because you have these like itchy trigger finger people in their cars. Exactly. Whereas with a podcast, you know that if someone's downloading, for example, our Championship Drive college football podcast, they are hardcore college football fans. A radio show is kind of a mile wide and an inch deep. Our podcasts are an inch wide and a mile deep. In the last five weeks, they've allowed 3.3 yards before contact per rush. That is the fourth most in the league. Why do you think ESPN was in early on this? Like why did it make sense for ESPN before anybody else realized that the word podcast was a thing? Because I think we can be. Because I think we have the luxury of having success with so many other things that we have the ability to experiment with things. And if they don't work, they don't work. There have been plenty of things at ESPN that haven't worked and you can just drop them. Unlike terrestrial radio where there's a finite number of signals and you can own a space, podcasting is infinite. And so the struggle is to try and break through that clutter and figure out how you get enough people to listen to your shows where it becomes financially worthwhile. How many podcasts does ESPN have now? In terms of original podcasts that we produce here in Bristol, it's like 15 to 20. Wow, is that number going to keep going up? You know, I talked about the clutter earlier. It might actually go down because we want to make sure that we're putting our best efforts into the best stuff. I feel like ESPN is big on really producing everything. We're sitting in this sort of big functioning radio with a lot of things going on. But do you need all this to do a podcast well? Our principles are you want to produce it to the same quality that you'd produce a radio show. You know, certainly there are still a couple of our podcasts which are just two dudes and a microphone, but we're, to be quite frank, trying to phase that out in favor of big production elements and segments and things that keep people's attention. Very proud to have the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, on the BS Report. I'm a US Senator, I was way ahead of the curve on the podcast thing. What was this podcast called? I really don't remember. A Podcast with Barack Obama. It's something like that. It's a catchy name. Nobody's job is exclusively podcast. They could be a writer, they could be on TV, they could be doing other radio work, but there's nobody whose job is only to be a podcast host. And it's sort of, you try things with people who have these things. You see somebody and you say, I think they have the personality, they have the talent, where they could really be good in this media as well. I don't know yet if podcasts are about to become mainstream. I don't even know how many people yet know the word podcast. But one thing I do know, podcasts are awesome and they're improving fast. The friends inside my head, the ones teaching me how to cook and what's happening in Syria and making me laugh like a lunatic on the subway, I know them better now and they tell me better stories. The second golden age of audio isn't coming. It's here. And if you're not already into podcasts, listen to that 85 year old woman. Just press play.