Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m David Pierce, editor-at-large of The Verge. As you may have noticed, we’re dropping some extra episodes in the feed this week. You’ll have Nilay back on Friday and for next week, as we run toward the end of the year.
But I’m really excited to be here with you all today because I’m getting to talk about one of my favorite things: podcasts. There’s something strange happening these days in the podcast world — well, actually, there are kind of a lot of things happening. It’s been a wild year.
One thing I’ve noticed recently is the way companies that deal in money have been using podcasts not just as an entertainment medium but also as a weird hybrid of marketing, thought leadership, and networking. It’s something we’ve seen for a few years now with venture capital firms, for example: not only do most of the top-level VC companies have their own podcasts but also people who do podcasts about venture capital end up going into it after meeting and talking to all these folks.
It’s kind of a weird, complicated web that goes both ways, and it’s not getting any less weird or less complicated once you add stuff like crypto and politics to the mix. So I asked Nick Quah to come on the show to help me untangle it all. These days, Nick is the podcast critic for Vulture, which is one of The Verge’s corporate siblings here at Vox Media. He originally started the podcast newsletter Hot Pod back in 2014, so he’s been following this stuff for a long time and really knows what he’s talking about.
I really wanted to know what he’s seeing in this space, and I had so many questions. Why would a major investment firm like Elliott Management make a podcast to make a point? What is the point of starting your own podcast in 2024? Was this really “the podcast election?” Are all podcasts just videos now? And does he have any idea what’s coming next?
If you’d like to read more about what we discussed in this episode, check out these links:
