Podcast Pioneer PJ Vogt’s Second Act: Less Budget, More Control

20:29Peter Kafka:That I can't. I can't imagine how you do it. Now you're making a movie. Yeah. And if you're making a movie, you have more impact. You have more reach. Maybe it's more vivid. And there's releases and budgets and all this time and all these other people. and what's nice about podcasting is you can go like fast and far and you can give somebody not all of but a lot of the feeling of having watched a good movie but you can do it in five weeks one thing i think a lot about is is because of the pandemic everyone got used to doing these interviews with a camera in front of them yeah they're doing remote and now the majority of time when i'm setting something up with a podcast if there's a pr person involved yeah they will always ask, is there going to be video?

21:11Peter Kafka:Where is the video going to be distributed? And that is a complete change. There was no expectation there was video. Now they all sort of assume there's video. So part of me thinks, all right, the people I'm interviewing are ready for it. That's okay. But I keep thinking, there's lots of people that I want to talk to who won't be good on video or won't be comfortable on video. Or if I only talk to people who are sort of ready for video, then I've really limited the people I can talk to. And I'm already limiting people I can talk to by who's good at talking. He's a good speaker. And so you're narrowing it, narrowing it, narrowing it to people who basically look good on a screen.

21:46But then it's strange because you think, okay, if you think of these jobs as, I mean, they're not entirely just this, but if you think of them in some ways as service jobs, like your job is to help strangers understand things, well, where's audience and like our internet that we professionally matured on is a text internet it's like a text audio internet and it's clearly now a front-facing camera internet and i feel like jd salinger for just not being on tiktok like i feel like this grumpy strange hermit because i'm i just i just

22:22Peter Kafka:want to record my voice for if we wait long enough maybe like it comes around and then we become like cool old-timey podcast the way the kids are into vinyl these days maybe my younger son got into vinyl and i'm like oh that's sure and then i realized vinyl is now 40 dollars vinyl is 40 dollars yeah because you're buying a totem yeah and also yeah they can get away with charging you 40 bucks for and is your kid putting vinyl on a turntable and listening and flipping the record yeah i mean as a novelty we could have careers connected to blue teeth and that's great we're right back with PJ Vogt, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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24:11In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built the Daily Wire into a conservative media empire.

24:16Peter Kafka:He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for deplatformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming a judgmental puppet named Zoodles. Zoodles. Zoodles. Who shares Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows. This year, though, the empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the lo-fi figures. Web traffic is plummeting.

24:49Peter Kafka:And recently, Shapiro laid off 13 % of his employees. Asked by The Washington Post what had happened, Shapiro accused other conservatives of click-whoring by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill, and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. The kids still got it. On Today Explained, the fall of Ben Shapiro. Today Explained drops every weekday afternoon. And we're back. So let's talk about the actual economics of the show. We talk about the structure. So you make 40 shows a year. Yes. How big is this to have? There's four of us full-time. It's me, my editor, and two producers, and one sort of part-time Armin Bazarian, who does both the sound mixing and the music.

25:33Peter Kafka:So four full-time plus someone freelance, and I assume you bring in people periodically to help with different kinds of projects. We work with fact-checkers, and then we'll have contributors do stories. But it's like, I mean, even for this era of podcasting, even for this show designed to survive in this era of podcasting. It is a very lean. And that's all hands on deck to produce basically one show a week. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's full time. Yes. Do you make money? Are you profitable? We are very close to profitable. Like basically what's going to happen right now is we're going to, I think, get a little bit more headcount, which will take us away from profitable.

26:15But imagine a ticker just going between black and red. If we had to be profitable, we would be profitable.

26:21Peter Kafka:And is that all revenue from ad sales that you're splitting with Odyssey? No. This is the craziest thing that's happened. It's two-thirds ad revenue. And then I think six months into the show, we announced that we were doing a premium tier, which really does not—the most significant thing it offers is support the show. People get ad-free episodes. They get some bonus stuff. But it's really support the show. They like what you're doing. They're giving you some money. There's no expectation on their end that you're going to get a special audience with PJ. We offer that stuff. Like, we're doing a salon at some point for the, like, super subscribers.

26:57I should not say that out loud because we do actually have to do it. But they really seem to be doing it to support. And it's a third. Like, it really took us from, you know, the first year of the thing, you're just like, is this a folly? Is this going to be a big public failure? It took us over that, which is crazy.

27:15Peter Kafka:And was that part of the plan? Like, we'll have some audience support from the get-go? It was part of Shruthi's vision of the plan. Shruthi felt that what we should really be doing is 50-50 between ads and subscriptions. I was very skeptical, and I was wrong. When you were doing Reply All, was anyone giving you money then from the audience? There was a Gimlet membership that was never very loved, but I think it was harder to ask people to subscribe to a network than to a show. And I think there was a feeling from Matt and Alex, I don't want to speak for them, but I remember a feeling at the time that they wanted to differentiate themselves from public media.

27:52Yeah. And so I think like turning around and saying like, hey, chip in for this venture capital backed company felt like strategically or spiritually wrong.

28:01Peter Kafka:And so you thought you would do it. You turned it on. Was there something? Did it click right away, the audience support? Yeah, it did. A lot of people came in right away. And then the surprising thing was it has mostly just kind of kept going. What I was told, and this is the most interesting thing I've learned about audience support. Somebody we met with, there's all these companies that will be a vendor that will just sort of process your subscriptions. Like the same way there's Substack for print, there's Supercast, there's Supportingcast, I think there's others. You can go to Patreon. And so you have these meetings and everyone's really friendly and you can do a little bit of information gathering.

28:38And at some point from somebody, I was just like, what is the actual conversion range? If you're not -

28:44Peter Kafka:If I have 10 ,000 listeners, how many of them are going to pay me? And this is, I think whoever said this would regret having said this to me, but they were like, it's really probably between 2 % and 5%. That's what I would have guessed. Unless you destroy your free product. You know what I mean? but two and five percent can be really meaningful and what we've found is that like if you hawk the thing constantly and you talk about how the lights are barely on and you know like you're wearing threadbare clothes whatever it nudges it a little bit if you casually mention it exists like there's not that much of a difference unless i think you were really really committed to making it great and one of the things i'm curious about in this sort of more mature version of our show is what does it look like to make it great?

29:28Like, I think it's live events, honestly. Like, how do you give people something that they actually would feel like they're missing out on if they didn't do it? But it's an easy thing to turn on. And if you're the kind of outfit where you really clearly are independent and we're clearly, you're not just like, give us more money because we'd like to have it, but like support us if you want us to exist. I think that pitch is pretty clean and honest and effective for the people who it's gonna, like basically in any human population, there's a certain amount of altruists, and it's due to 5%.

29:58Peter Kafka:Altruists slash hardcore fans slash whatever. Yes. It's weird, because the same numbers convert for Candy Crush players. That's so funny. Yeah, or any of those products where it's free to play, and they expect a very small minority to actually spend money. And then, if you really want to nerd out on this, you can go. There was a minute when Candy Crush was part of a public company called King, and you could go look at their numbers and you could see exactly, again, it was two to 5 % were payers. And then within that, it was like Wales and Las Vegas, like a very small percent of those people were spending all the money, like compulsively and sadly and gross, right?

30:41Peter Kafka:Because like, why would you spend thousands of dollars to play Candy Crush? Well, and I think one of the things that honestly I think about is, presumably anything that has a fandom has its version of whale. So you know what I mean? There's people who really love the thing so much. And I feel like I want to make sure that we're giving people the opportunity to, the opportunity, the profitable opportunity. That like if people want to pay to keep the thing alive, I want to open that door. I don't, I want to create though, I think a media, a piece of media should serve its audience as equals. Like I don't think you should feel as a listener Like there's important listeners.

31:20Peter Kafka:There's stuff that I'm missing that's behind the VIP rope over there. I don't love it. And I certainly don't want it to feel like there's one super fan and they're the best. And we're somehow they've like willed their home to us. And I don't know. It's just you want to think of your audience as one group of people that you're treating pretty equally to the degree that that's possible. Right now you're making 40 episodes for people and change per episode. when you've got a crew that small, what does that prevent you from doing? You guys don't travel generally for these shows. We don't travel. You went to Germany once.

31:57Peter Kafka:You kept referencing it all the time to go to Berghain. Is that the? Berghain, yeah. Berghain, the club that both Elon Musk can't get into and I'm sure I could not get into as well. You'd be surprised. Maybe there would be some kind of niche appeal for me. But generally, you're not traveling. Generally, we're not traveling. And in fact, anytime the show has had travel reporting, it's been because I had a social commitment or vacation and I just reported on the thing. So we're not traveling. I mean, the real thing with podcasting, narrative podcasting, is your budget is just production hours. It's like if you have a staff of 10, we would have six more people to run after stuff, try stuff, do interviews that might not work, do pieces that had more interviews.

32:39And so at 40, you have to do more things where you're relatively sure it's going to work and you're relatively sure it's going to work quickly. And then we just try, and this is less strategic and more by intuition to make sure that at any given time, there's a couple of things we're working on that we're gathering string on that take time that feel like one of the big ones. But the weird thing about the show, when I was working on Reply All, the theory of how to grow that show was you did a bunch of doubles, like in baseball terms, like just like standup doubles, decent episode, had a couple of funny moments.

33:15Not going to change the world. And then every once in a while, and people never knew as a listener when it was going to happen, you do a big, crazy reporting quest. And people would be like, holy crap, I didn't expect that. And they'd share it with their friends. And then they'd come up. They'd come for those episodes and they'd stay for the camaraderie or the vibe or whatever. With Search Engine, when we've gone on these sort of quests, you see it in the numbers they do better. But the better conversations also do better. Yeah. In a way that I did not understand. and I'm still kind of wrapping my mind around.

33:47Peter Kafka:Do you, I mean, how much are you looking at your numbers and going, oh, well, let's do more of that? That topic, that style, that thing, that did really well, that popped, or they all kind of do about the same, or you can't, if we knew what the hit was, we'd only make hits and nothing works like that. I have a more of a belief that I usually, the amount of excitement I have working on the thing and the team has working on the thing equals audience response, which is great. I watch the numbers definitely to check just like, am I still right and where am I wrong? The numbers are all about the same.

34:23It's not huge breakout anywhere because it's subscription. But you see it, and there's been a few this year where I was like very confident, like this one's going to kill and then it's like done fine. And that's always like good to know.

34:38Peter Kafka:If you had more body, if I doubled your budget, you had eight people, 10 people. Like, what is something tomorrow that you go out and go, we couldn't do this before, now we can. It would just be more two-part reporting projects. Like, the weed stores, two-parter we did. There's stuff in New York City that I'm curious about. There's, like, a big development fight happening in South Brooklyn. And sometimes our show just makes itself a New York City reporting show and forces people to listen to it, and they mostly tolerate it. But I would do more, there was like, we got a listener inbound about a, it was sort of like a mysterious arsonist in a small town in New England, where I was like, yeah, if you had a reporter who could spend four months working on that, I think it would be fun to be a true crime show for 10 minutes.

35:21We always like genre experiments, but it's sort of, unless everyone's willing to talk right away, you're just like, ah, that's like an expensive bet. So it'd be more reporting projects, but I also think as the show grows, I don't want to abandon. I like that it's a hybrid. I like that it's an interview show. It feels, I don't know. Some of the listeners are definitely like half the time disappointed. Most of them, I think, understand what we're up to. And I want to make the show for those listeners who understand what we're up to.

35:51Peter Kafka:It seems to me that in many of your episodes, I've been listening to everyone, one hack you do is the people you're talking to are often professional podcasters. Yes. Or at least talkers or writers. and sort of they've either done some of the research, it's literally what they've done, and they're sort of telling you about it anyway, or they just, I was listening to days, right? But the guy who wants to make a barbecue scrubber in the U.S., it's a great episode, you should go listen to it. He's also a professional YouTuber, right? So he's like, of course you want that guy on the show because he knows how to talk to you.

36:21I mean, that guy, not only does he know how to talk, it's like he's been gathering archival, like that's like a real, yeah.

36:26Peter Kafka:Yeah, when he's like going around the plant watching his friend's kids or his partner's kids, but that's stuff that he accumulated on his own. You guys didn't have to go out there and get that. No, he sent a timeline of his production process. I was like, man, if every subject you ever interviewed had a functional timeline with Archival, we can make 50 episodes a year. And the flip of that, right, is that if you rely on those people, then again, you're only getting a certain kind of participant. And it can feel canned. It can feel like there's questions that we run after where genuinely at the beginning of the reporting process, I feel like I deeply want to know this as a person and I have no idea what the answer is.

37:03And there's ones where you're like, we should do something about inflation. I find inflation confusing. If we talk to an economist who has a podcast that talks well on the podcast, we will have something. And this week will be not so hard and we can buy ourselves time for a quest that genuinely starts in a place of not knowing. But the thing that's so frustrating and also cool about the podcast is that the episodes that we care the most about that are the hardest to make almost always have the best listener response. And the ones that are a little bit easier tend to have a cooler response. And so, of course, it pushes you over time to just want to do what's hard.

37:41Peter Kafka:There was a period, and you still hear it sometimes, general people who don't know the business that well, it's like, oh, the way we're going to make money in podcasting is we're going to turn these things into TV shows. Yes. Gimlet, that was a big push for them. And you'll still hear it. And people do still turn podcast ideas into things that eventually become movies or television shows. Is that of interest to you? I always felt like it was kind of a distraction. I feel like for the people who it works for, that's great. Like there's entire podcast companies that seem to have really figured it out where they're just like a pipeline and they're finding great IP and telling the stories well in a way that's so cinematic that it works.

38:17but it always felt to me a little bit too fragile to be at the mercy of a whole different economy where if Hollywood slows down, you're in trouble. If they decide they're over your genre, you're in trouble. I don't know. Do I actually believe what I'm about to say? I feel like at least with books, I can tell when I've read a piece of fiction that was just designed to be a film. I don't know if that's true with podcasting or not, but the stuff we like.

38:46Peter Kafka:There was a guy at Wired who only wrote magazine articles that were optionable, basically. He was really good at it, too. I mean, and there's an argument that's fine. It's like the Wired readers get an amazing story that is going to get optioned. The, like, Hollywood gets a film. Like, it's not bad. It's just I like doing stuff that's kind of small stakes and weird and personal. I'm always surprised when people want to adapt our stuff. It happens, and it's great. And please, like, give search engine money to make more podcasts. but I'm always surprised when people can hear a movie and something that we're doing.

39:19It feels like it's the size of a podcast.

39:22Peter Kafka:What's your dream project that you have not been able to tackle for time or money or both? I feel envious of people who get to step away from regular production and work on a miniseries for a really long time. I think sometimes those things can feel more writerly, and I really like the writing part of the process. Like S-Town, which I would not try to make, But to have the amount of time to make something that was inspired by that would be really cool. I'm not sure that that's where my career is pushing me. But that's always the fantasy for me. Did you watch the podcast election discourse that started last summer and continued through last fall?

40:03Peter Kafka:Maybe people moved off on it and people sort of wonder, what Joe Rogan's a, you know, but he's a video. Is it a video? Is it podcasting? Why is Donald Trump spending all his time on podcast? Why isn't Kamala Harris doing more of that as someone who's been in this world forever? What was your reaction watching that? I thought it was weird, honestly. Like, I was just like, of all the things you could say about this election, and there's like a lot of things to say. I think it was true that on the left, the moment where Ezra Klein went to the New York Times and said, I think Joe Biden's too old. I think that was meaningful.

40:43And I listened to Trump on a lot of his appearances, and it was a moment where I understood why the people who like him like him more clearly than I do filtered through the media in which I normally encounter him. You know, he was like on Theo Vaughn. It was like him and Theo were just kind of orbiting each other's eccentricity in a way where I thought most of the Democrats I follow would just be a little bit too uncomfortable.

41:11Peter Kafka:It felt the most real of any presidential interaction I've seen in a long time. Yeah, there's a part where he's asking Theo Vaughn about what cocaine's like. Yes. I can't remember the line. It was so good. It's like, turn you into a damn owl. I think it was the line. It was so good. Theo Vaughn has a, I don't know if it's accidental or intentional, but there's a poetry to some of his jokes that's very strange. There's this riff where he's talking about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that's one of the best 45 seconds of writing on someone's feed I've seen in a very long time. But yeah, I mean, like, yes, does it...

41:49Are podcasts important in politics now because it gives people a place to talk long form in front of people with huge audiences that are not going to be very adversarial? On the right, definitely. On the left, like, I don't know. It felt the fact that Kamala didn't go on Joe Rogan, I'm sure was not what decided the election. Listening to Trump and how comfortable he was on Rogan, the thought I had was it's hard to imagine the Harris campaign doing this. And maybe that's a problem.

42:16Peter Kafka:And there's some backstory about how she wanted to do it, but Rogan didn't really want to do it. But I also just can't imagine, I don't know her at all, just watching her, that she'd be comfortable talking at length. And also it's a double standard, right? Which is Trump can say up is down and black is white. And nobody cares. No one cares. And if she misspeaks once over the course of over many hours, she's going to get pilloried for it. Also, she's going to have a harder time with Rogan because if you're on the left and you talk to him, there's more. What is my audience think about the thing he just said?

42:46Yeah. And do I need to tell him that actually vaccines work? Yes. So I can imagine for all sorts of reasons. But yeah, I think it was a little bit. I think this is media talking about the part that media is interested in. But it's not that I didn't think it was true. I was just like, the podcast election. I think it's a bunch of different other types of elections, too.

43:08Peter Kafka:We'll be right back, but first a word from a sponsor.

43:32This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. That Sounds Like A Lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

43:42Peter Kafka:Buy Now, Pay Later is everywhere. And honestly, we need to talk about it. 60 % of Coachella goers put their tickets on Buy Now, Pay Later this year. You can even pay off your DoorDash order in installments now, like your sushi. So this week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm breaking down exactly how these companies are making money off of you, why missing one payment can flip your interest rate from zero to nearly 36 % overnight, and the uncomfortable truth about what it really means when you need to split a$200 purchase into four payments. Plus, I'm answering your questions, including what to do if you're already in over your head.

44:17Peter Kafka:Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.

44:28Peter Kafka:And we're back. So you've been running this independent media project for three years now, right? Yeah. Anything you would have done differently if you go back and start over? Everything. Which things are, like, okay to say public way?

44:48Oh, God. It's like its own podcast. We've made a lot of mistakes. Like, I think, like, I have a lot more appreciation for people who run businesses. I have spent years being the artist baby side of it. And you're just like, oh, it is its own art. It is its own creativity. It's really hard. Shruti does most of it at Search Engine. I contribute. Let's give some now Shruti's full name. Shruti Penamanani. I mean, she's both editing the show and running the business of the show. But I have more visibility into that and more decision making than I did. And it's really hard. And you just negotiate something wrong.

45:22And you're like, oh, that was 10 % of our budget.

45:24Peter Kafka:Does that make you go back to however many years ago when you were the difficult employee? Oh, my God, I gave this person so much crap and they were right or I didn't understand what they were doing. I've apologized. Yeah. And then also just like the amount of times where I was like, well, I don't think we can do that many episodes because I don't think they'll be that good. Sure. Just make them. I think. So, yeah, just a greater appreciation of how hard the business is. A greater appreciation in some cases of like just reading small contracts carefully, like spend the money on the lawyer, even though the lawyer feels expensive.

45:53It's like way more expensive to not have a lawyer. Nothing horrible, but like little stuff. The thing we did the rightest that I'm the happiest about, nobody interviews Ira Glass about how he runs a business and they should. He's like very thoughtful about the business side of this American life. One of the things that they do is they have an enormous employee handbook that really sets out the worldview of the business and the editorial of that show. And we did a similar thing with ours. and a lot of it was about kind of not, I mean, both here's the days off and here's what private hearing looks like, but also like, here's what you should do if you disagree with someone editorially.

46:32Here's what you should do if somebody said something in a meeting that felt kind of screwed up to you, but you're not sure what their intention was. Like, here's how we want to disagree.

46:41Peter Kafka:Normally I think of those handbooks as some combination of, here's literally like to find out where the bathroom is. Yep, yep, that's in there. And the rest of it is just legal ass covering. We have to tell you this stuff because eventually if we end up in a courtroom, we have to say that we made you read this book and you signed it. And so we're we've got that on our side. We have 60 pages for that. And it says, you know, you can't get high at work. And, you know, this is what it would look like if you were on a performance improvement plan or whatever. And then it's like 40 pages of like what's editorial culture.

47:12Because I think that stuff in the earlier part of my career, I thought was so corny. but now I think is really important.

47:20Peter Kafka:So we've talked about you leaving Gimlet a couple times. Basically, I would say you were canceled. You were forced out. You left. Employees were complaining about the workplace culture in general. You're part of it. How much of that employee handbook you're talking about and sort of setting up expectations is a direct connection to that experience at Gimlet? Oh, a lot of it. I mean, I think my experience at Gimlet, But it definitely shaped wanting to set up a workplace that felt, I don't know, as good as we can make it, as thoughtful as we can make it, knowing that, like, the institutions humans build have human problems.

47:57And then just also, weirdly, the show a lot is not about, like, cancel culture or anything like that. But I think everybody who reports would benefit from the experience of being reported on. I think it really makes you... One of the things we used to do at Reply Hall that I'm, in retrospect, not super happy with is we had a segment on the show called Yes, Yes, No, where we would do internet culture explainers. It was just a fun, breezy way to say, this thing happened. This person stepped in it, and some people said this, and some people said this. This guy fucked up on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:34These people felt this way, and these people felt this way, and here's all the good jokes, and then we'll say something trenchant and get out. It's like TV recaps, but for real lives. We didn't call the people. And it was okay, we thought, because they'd given comments elsewhere, reporting it happened elsewhere. And I think, like, in this phase of my career, I really want to do reporting that is really curious about all the people in the story. It's not, like, pattern matching where even if somebody is immensely powerful and you think they would never care about our dinky little podcast, like, we'll reach out.

49:08We'll reach out every time. And it complicates our stories a lot. And I feel really good about that.

49:13Peter Kafka:The asymmetry between the person telling the story and the person whose story it is, it's really tricky. You can never really, I think, solve it satisfactory for anybody. But I think more people should be conscious of it. Yeah, and it's funny. I think there's this default. I certainly had this as a younger journalist where I thought that when in doubt, adversarial journalism is better. The less the person you're interviewing knows about what you believe. And your responsibility is to the audience, not to the person. Yeah. And what I've learned is like, while there are totally interviews that are appropriate adversarially and like, it's not like if you have a really have the goods on a company that's been, you know, dumping toxic waste in a kindergarten, like you're going to let them know late because you don't want them to front run you.

49:56Sure. If that's not what's happening, the amount of times where doing like a no surprises call where you say to somebody, we talk about you in the story. This is what we say. This is how we characterize it. What it does to my writing, our writing, in terms of taking cheap shots out is pretty immediate. And also you just get to a more complicated truth. When you have to say to the person, this is what I'm about to say about you publicly, you end up with a different story. And I think that is service to the listeners, readers, whomever. Like, yeah, we like, because it is easy to say shit. And it's really scary when you picture the person.

50:31But even our podcast, which to me feels very small, you know, like the people we talk about into a microphone are going to have to walk around in their communities. They're going to have to deal with this little version of them we've drawn.

50:44Peter Kafka:Yeah, it's one of your 40 shows that year. And for them, it's their whole life. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like you never get it perfectly right. Everybody makes mistakes. But it feels really important, and we try to do a good job of it. One more Gimlet question for you. I was going back and reading stories about that time, and it's not a novel observation, but such a striking change between the workplace culture and the just political culture of 21, 22 and where we are now, right? Yeah. Where the Department of Defense is getting rid of the Enola Gay picture because it has the word gay in it, right?

51:17Peter Kafka:Yeah. You could debate how much of a sea change there really is, but do you think, do you spend time going back to 2021 and going, boy, if this was 2025, none of this would have happened because we just don't have that kind of discussion in the workplace right now? Honestly, I mean, of course, but I think what, like, there's a lot of labels, like, it's weird. It's hard to even talk about 2021 because the language itself has been so infused. But one way you could tell the story of that moment is that there were a lot of conversations that maybe in the past people wouldn't have been able to have at all they wanted to have.

51:54But we didn't actually have very productive or healthy ways for people to have these disagreements. And once those disagreements hit the internet, anyone's ability to reflect, come to like an agreement, come to any kind of peace, it's just out the window. And I think if you're in one of those situations and then you end up having all these conversations with other people who experience them, one of the understandings I came up with is that a lot of things that looked like deeply political and cultural were oftentimes better understood as just disagreements between people and about personal relationships.

52:29And so, yeah, in 2025, if somebody says, I think this person just acted badly in a workplace, is that going to knock somebody off the Internet, help have all these consequences for a company, et cetera, et cetera? Institutions have figured out how to not let conflicts rend them apart. But I think it's still important to be able to— Like, I think 2021, we were like, these things are important. We need to do something about it. I don't think the way the system reacted was very good for institutions or the people in them. The counter reaction, though, is very hard to celebrate. It's terrible. And like the people who are like, oh, this goes too far.

53:14I don't think we're asking for whatever this is. And so I don't know. Like, personally for me, my takeaway was with a small institution that talks a lot about values and cares a lot about conflict resolution, you don't have to get to a place where even if someone could go on Twitter and lodge a sort of HR complaint with Twitter, they'd want to. We'll see. But it's something that I think about every day. Thank you for talking to me about it. I appreciate it.

53:43Peter Kafka:Yeah. PJ Boat, your show is great. What's the next episode on? Well, the one we put out today, I would love for people to check out. It's about a gentleman who was like, what happens if you just try to manufacture something in America? Even though everybody says that wages are too high and it's impossible and we've lost all the skills and tooling, what if you just tried? So it's called The Puzzle of the All-American Barbecue Scrubber. It's excellent. Thank you. It's excellent. Can you tell me what next week's is? Next week is about, we're interviewing science reporter, science journalist, Carl Zimmer.

54:20He has this book called Airborne, but there's one story in it that's really good. And it's basically about how the fact that influenza can spread contagiously through the air is something that health authorities didn't acknowledge until December 2020. But it had been discovered in the 1930s by this brilliant married scientist couple. and part of the reason it was not, it had not become consensus is because this couple was so annoying and difficult that people did not want to deal with them, which I find to be a wonderful fable.

54:51Peter Kafka:Okay, you got range. You've just demonstrated it right there. I'm a fan. Thank you for coming.

54:59Peter Kafka:That was good, right? I've got another present for you next week. See you soon.