[00:00:00] So here's the thing about podcasts. It seems like they're all new, right? You need a smartphone to listen to them. There's a bunch of huge celebrities making podcasts now. People don't read books anymore. Plus the whole idea of listening by yourself with headphones on while you're jogging or cleaning your house or something.... it all feels very modern. But in fact, podcasts represent a form of communication that says old as

[00:00:30] time itself. Do any of these titles ring a bell? Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad 1,001 Nights. The Torah, the Koran, the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh, all the original Greek tragedies, the Bible, Turtle Island. Every culture, every language. Every religion, they all have their own version. And while we can think of these as religious texts, or ancient tales of adventure or

[00:01:00] even grandiose exaggerations of some previous event, what they all are, originally is stories. And more specifically, they are oral stories. Over time, they've been written down, codified, modified, and then adopted by different religions, cultures, or academic institutions. But these stories, these texts, they were not written down for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. So back in 587

[00:01:30] AD they were told. Before the Gutenberg printing press began to mass produce books, which was not until the early 1400s, all stories were shared at gatherings, around a campfire or an amphitheater or in a court.

Oral storytelling is the original way that humanity shared important information. It's how we created heroes to worship, how we warned of danger, how we told our children about the adversity we once faced. Since the beginning

[00:02:00] of time. So while podcasting feels new and what we think of, radio feels very old timey, what's clear is that by any measure, listening to stories is absolutely hardwired into our being.

So if you wanna get technical, the idea of sitting around listening to a story rather than reading it or watching it, is in fact the oldest form of communication and entertainment and knowledge transfer. And maybe that's why podcasts and

[00:02:30] audio books appeal to so many people, because in some way they're able to access our deepest cultural roots.

A little broadcast lesson here. If we talk about mass media, that is the ability to transmit voice and later image over the air via a broadcast signal. A broadcast signal being one to many, one signal to many devices. Radio was the original method of broadcast [00:03:00] Guillermo Marconi, an Italian inventor sent the first over-the-air radio transmission in 1897.

Turns out Marconi's invention caught steam, and by the 1920s AM radio signals were being sent over long distances, and that was the beginning of the radio era. And what's interesting is that the invention of television actually shared a similar timeline. It was also invented in the early 1900s. And by the 1940s and fifties, television shows were.

[00:03:30] Being broadcast widely, but it took longer for television to become popular like it is now.

Well, why would that be? Televisions were very expensive and there wasn't an amount of programming that made the investment worthwhile. Not like radio. Radio had a ton of programming. It had local programming, it had national programming, it had popular shows with radio stars.

We get to 1970s, television is king. By then, I guess a lot of people could afford them, and there

[00:04:00] was plenty of programming to have: sitcoms, game shows, news hours, drama, soap operas, there was something for everyone, and they were all available on a weekly schedule, which was published in the TV guide.

As television geared up, radio switch gears, people started listening to the radio differently than they watch television. And this is where public radio flourished. People came there, they wanted news and information. They wanted call in shows. They wanted popular music

[00:04:30] to be played in their cars while they were driving.

As satellite technology became more affordable, broadcast networks began to launch entire platforms of content. So that was somewhere around the year 2000...

And then new television companies, like HBO, began to disrupt what television looked like, what the experience was. And instead of weekly series, there were new series like The Sopranos or Six Feet Under, and they were told by the season. And in a way, they stole that format from old soap operas,

a [00:05:00] never ending story. And then something happened in the world of radio in 1995. The NPR station called WBEZ, in Chicago, allowed a young journalist named Ira Glass to experiment with a new kind of radio story. A story that was told through a narrator and didn't shy away from odd events or uncomfortable moments. This became the show, This American Life, 1995, which by 1996 was syndicated by over 500 NPR stations across the

[00:05:30] US. And then somewhere around the year 2005, RSS was created, you're probably wondering what that stands for. Well, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. That's true. I'm not making it up. It does, and the concept is that with a small string of code, this small little internet address, different shows would have a unique URL, or individual internet address, and each of these addresses would contain the information it needed to [00:06:00] deliver. So if you signed up for this RSS, it would be delivered from a server computer. To an individual computer without anybody having to manually do this.

And while that sounds kind of boring and maybe kind of normal to you now, it was actually massively innovative. What it meant is that the internet could now effectively act as a broadcaster, and it could distribute, based on a set of criteria and demands, an audio

[00:06:30] file at any time, at any place, from one location directly to another. I guess the thing you need to know about broadcasting, the traditional broadcasting is that it's extremely expensive. It's highly regulated, and you need to do a lot of work to get what's called a broadcast license, which is a complicated and expensive thing to explain. But now, basically, instead of having a license, which involves government and applications and a ton of money and technology,

[00:07:00] a physical satellite in the universe. With a simple technology, a small piece of code, you could effectively deliver content. Real simple syndication, or RSS, turned out to be a major disruptive technology. And that was how the podcast industry was built. During the first 10 years that RSS existed, which was basically 2005 to

[00:07:30] 2015, the world of podcasting slowly came to life. It was, at first very small and very niche. The big radio players were the first to use it, and by here I mean the NPR, the BBC, the CBC, the A BC in Australia, they all began to repurpose their radio shows into podcast episodes. Then some savvy individuals realized that they could do this too. After all, the barrier to entry was just figuring out how to create your own show, and then how to distribute it.

[00:08:00] This was a radical departure from the traditional broadcast world. And then in 2007, something happened, which cannot be understated for the importance of the podcast world. That was when the first iPhone was released. And it had this brand new thing in there, it was called a podcast app, and it was baked right into the homepage.

It took a few years for it to catch on, you know, they were also very expensive, these iPhones, but somewhere between 2010 to 2012, iPhones

[00:08:30] and now lots of other smartphones, moved from being a luxury device to something that was commonplace. In 2014. Another disruption came, and it was again from the offices of WBEZ, This American Life, and these producers decided to do an audacious experiment. They borrowed an old radio concept from the 1950s. It's basically a murder mystery story. One story

[00:09:00] told week by week. From Serial, the modern version of true crime was born. Maybe it's more accurate to say it was reborn, but there it is. To date more than 300 million people have downloaded Serial, and just for some reference, it took until around 2007 for the Super Bowl, the biggest television event of the year, to hit 100 million viewers. Well, despite the success of it, podcasts grew slowly at first.

[00:09:30] And then by 2018 the market exploded. Comedy shows, game shows, celebrity interview shows, self-help shows, shows to teach you how to launch a business, a giant array of true crime. There are billions of podcasts now, about anything and everything.