This Media Entrepreneur Can't Feel Anxious, Really | Mike Pesca

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0:42There's a business book that you really need right now, and it's called Life at the Speed of Play. Launch Products People Love by Mark Pincus. He's an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, known in Silicon Valley as one of the most prolific idea generators. I guarantee you've played one of the games that he has invented. And he's going to give you his book, two for the price of one. If you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, he will send you a second copy for free. If you're thinking about starting an online business, launch before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy.

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2:31I wanted to talk to today's guest when his producer told me that he doesn't feel anxiety. He has a chemical reason not to. And I thought, oh my God, I need to talk to this man. But I wanted to talk to him anyway because he's fascinating. Mike Peska is a veteran journalist. You may have known him for his excellent sports coverage for years at NPR and for his podcast, The Gist. and he has an excess of a hormone called anatomide. It is known as the bliss hormone, which means that he processes, I guess, emotions like anxiety and worry different than we do. And this has been a superpower and it's actually tripped him up because maybe he doesn't perceive risk or danger at work in the same way that a lot of us do.

3:20And he'll talk about that. He will talk about a painful experience when he essentially got canceled. And we also talk about one of my favorite topics, which is how do you make it as an independent content creator? How do you figure out how to promote your craft and your love of your craft, in Mike's case, journalism, in a world that just responds to clicks and a lot of social media videos. So we get into it. We get a little nerdy on the economics of content creation and podcasting. So stick in it for that if you guys are into it. And it's a wide-ranging conversation with a pretty fascinating and curious guy, Mike Peska.

4:01Well, hi, Mike. Welcome. Thanks for having me. I have to admit that you're not my typical guest. And I was just fascinated by two things. The first is that I have listened to you and read you for, I mean, decades, maybe? How long have you been? Yeah. Well, I mean, if 12 years spans two decades, so that counts, right? It depends, you know, where you start and stop the clock with a decade being clocked in. So I haven't been doing it. I guess I've been doing NPR and things like that for over 20 years. I've been doing my daily show, The Gist, for 12 years. It could be decades. I think it's more your writing, your sports writing for NPR.

4:46I mean, I feel like as a dedicated NPR listener, you have been in my ears. When did you start? When did you start at NPR? Well, I was on a show called On the Media, which is an NPR affiliated show. And then I started with NPR proper around 2003 or four. Yeah, let's say three. So 2003 to 2014. And then I mostly did sports for them. Yeah. So no offense, that is decades. That is decades. It's not an offense and a compliment. It's an accomplishment. So that's number one. I've always found you really interesting. I've always listened to you. And then number two is that your producer told me something crazy, which I need to verify, which is that I believe she said that you do not feel anxiety.

5:30Not as maybe many of your guests experience it. So I will tell you, I have an excess of anandamide. Are you familiar with anandamide? I am not. Okay. So anandamide is called the bliss molecule. I, the scientists don't call it that, but the laymen do. And it was more or less recently discovered. I think it was actually discovered a bit of a while ago, but then they started appreciating what it was. It's part of the echocannaboid system. And basically it works like this. The reason that cannabis works on us is that we have a receptor. Now, why do we have a receptor to make us high? It's because our bodies produce this chemical called anandamide.

6:12And different people have it at different levels, but there's a normal level to have it. And when the anandamide hits, it's not exactly like being high, but it's a blissful molecule. It takes away some of the anxiety. And because I have such an excess of that, I don't really worry about things outside my control. That's what I would say the main benefit is. It's also, if you really think about it, there are downsides. I don't probably worry enough about things that should be worried about. I don't worry about things that shouldn't be worried about, but I guess you could say I have a pretty poor threat matrix when it comes to what are the legitimate things I need to worry about.

6:57Now, weirdly, if something is actually a potential physical threat, I'll clock that across the street. I'll get my family to cross the street. I'll say, let's go over here. If there's a person who could be a physical threat, I get that immediately. I don't think that's at all effect. I think that's totally affected by other things going on internally. Well, that's your nervous system, right? Like that's the very most basic way to keep you alive. Yeah. I think that is correct. And the anandamide is mostly, I'm not ruing or stewing or replaying things that are outside my control. And maybe I also have a poor definition of what's inside my control, my wife would tell you.

7:38Okay, this is definitely a first. Okay, so I'm not crazy. They weren't just pull. I thought maybe they were just like taking the piss, you know. This is what they do when they book me on shows. They're like, what's the theme for show anxiety? Oh, he doesn't have that. Well, no, because I said, she said, do you want to have Mike on your show? And I was like, yeah, I said, but you know, does Mike ever talk about anxiety. And she was like, Mike doesn't have anxiety. And I was like, oh, now I really want to talk to you. And one of the funny things is, as I was doing my research for the show, I think I watched a clip of you and Jesse Eisenberg, who I don't think would mind being called a sort of famous neurotic.

8:16Yeah. I mean, it's his brand. If he didn't have that, he wouldn't get cast in his next five movies, I think. And but he was talking about how he had so much sort of successfully medicated away his ability to feel some things and to cry, which is a feeling many of my listeners will be familiar with. And so it was just really interesting to me then thinking about you and that's probably not your issue. No, Jesse and I have talked. He doesn't quite understand how I have the things I have, but I understand his because, you know, I've been watching his movies for a while and reading his book and before him.

8:51I do think though sullied in many other aspects, Woody Allen laid the template for the classic Jewish neurotic and then a lot of the works by Philip Roth. But I do feel like I have to give some caveats. It's not that I don't worry about things. I very much worry about things. And I've had the sleepless night phenomenon. But it's usually about something where the question is, what do I say about this? How do I play this? And it's a real thing that's going on. It wasn't, what if this happens that is out of my control? I just tend not to think too much about that. How has that shaped the career that you have?

9:31Well, one of the things is because I'm bad at threat perception, I'm bad at picking up on environmental cues that conspired to maybe create a workplace where not everyone was a fan of mine. And I thought things were going great, right? I thought, oh, yeah, I say these funny, insightful things and people take them as funny or insightful. And if they don't, they're fine and they move on with my day with their day. So maybe that doesn't happen. Maybe I'm a little clueless when it comes to how I'm always being perceived. I also think that we tend to default to we tend to see others through our own eyes.

10:16and we have these biases that are well-documented about we have similar brain bias. So how I think is how they think. And so I have to be very cognizant of that because when someone seems to be not thrilled or even just confused by what I said, any sort of negative reaction, I maybe chalk it up to, oh, they're playing along or, oh, they didn't get it, but that's okay. and maybe I should be a little more sensitive. Not that I'm an insensitive person, but maybe I should be just in terms of self-preservation, more sensitive to the social threats that are out there in the world. Yes, and of course, you were sort of famously fired.

11:02Canceled. I was not fired. You weren't fired. Oh, good. Okay, okay. It sounds like I was fired. I mean, listen, most people on my show. I was not welcome back to the place of my, they were not going to be having me, But there was a large, there was a long process of me extracting myself from my last employer because the people there, you know, didn't like, essentially didn't like my opinions on just, I think, regular routine matters. Right. Right. And I think also, you know, I work with leaders who don't have your probably same chemical profile, but, you know, may also have a little bit of a not huge awareness of how others perceive what they say.

11:44And, you know, in the digital age on Slack, on things like that, that can really, it can really get you into trouble. And it's something that, that like you have to work on, you know, just like, just like we all have to work on things. Right. Slack is, Slack was, it's not great for, I think, so many things. I think Slack is the worst. I also do think, let me work this through with you, Maura. I do think that there are probably, I don't know, people hearing this might be saying, oh, he's an offensive guy, or oh, he makes people meet him on his terms. With me, it was more the issue of, I was paid to do a show and have opinions, and my opinions were, I think, very well-reasoned, and I would always lay out the reasoning.

12:28But there was a time when that wasn't as accepted or celebrated by everyone in sort of certain communities, right? And I was working for a news magazine that was very left-leaning. It started centrist and became very left-leaning. And so I thought the conception was more like, well, people here definitely don't agree with my political opinions. And my political opinions were ranging from, I think Pete Buttigieg is a good candidate. And they didn't like that, not because they were right, because they were, in some cases, specifically with his policy or identity or whatever, it doesn't matter. But I came to it thinking, we have an overall ethos where a political magazine of opinion, it's about disagreeing with each other respectfully.

13:14There was a discussion where I was entirely respectful, but I disagreed with just a prevailing sentiment. And because of the sensitivity of that, it became one of these flashpoints of a worker revolt. I would say that my chemical composition added to that, but the right thing for me to do would have just been to withdraw, not engage at a time of sensitivity. We're going through a few years of maximum sensitivity. There have been other things for me to do at the time that could have kept me hanging on with my employment? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I couldn't really, I wasn't really, I couldn't really change my opinion to adhere to that of the rest of the group.

13:59So that wasn't an option. So I think I should have just probably not engaged. I think, listen, I was a progressive political consultant for 25 years. This was sort of my side hustle. And I think that we all, you know, I don't want to get into like a woke debate. I think that we are all looking back at a certain period. I think this was at the height of that period where, you know, it was a little bit like, is it safe to talk? What can we talk about? And a lot of generative ideas and arguments that you and I in our generation kind of grew up with became not okay anymore. And we didn't really know the boundaries and it was a really messy time.

14:40So So I think that I think it's interesting. I mean, I would wonder, like, you were kind of paid to be you. And then it's all all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wait, I need to not be me for a minute and just like shut the F up. Yeah, and also the whole idea of like they were not okay anymore true in certain spaces. But part of what I would always argue is that this idea of these opinions not being okay, that's not a good idea. I mean, there are definitely opinions that are outside the realm of acceptability, but that realm got smaller and smaller and smaller. So I was always arguing against that realm.

15:17And when they can't get you on that, okay, maybe in the abstract, he's arguing for some ideas that people will adhere to or they say, why can't we look at a situation through a lens of 10 years ago and maybe take the good parts of that? But anyway, there's this situation where they say, well, we're not going to be able to do that with everything. What we can do is jump on this one opinion that we claim harm over. And it being, you know, late 2020, early 2021, knowing where the politics of our office are, get some satisfaction of driving out the apostate. That's essentially what happened. Yes, you were not alone.

16:07you know and I think also just I mean a theme and this is more for the listeners not for you but you know a theme obviously of of my work if you listen and read it is that your strength can also be your Achilles heel right and your strength clearly is being curious and provocative and thoughtful and wanting to explore explore dig dig dig that's your strength that's why you're a great journalist, and it can also get you into hot water in social situations at work. I see this every day. Pushing back was once seen as a great trait of virtue, and then it began to be seen, or maybe even cynically portrayed as the doing of harm.

16:53That's right. You know, what you need to be doing is listening, which was actually what I did half the time. And then half the time I talked, it's sort of how conversations work. I had Greg Lukey enough on the show recently, actually, because I really wanted to talk to him. He's very open about how his clinical depression helped him become a better leader. But this is a man who is so passionate about free speech that, you know, he's lost relationships. He's really suffered for it. But he will also say that words cannot physically harm people. That is his position, you know, which I don't want to judge, but I think it's a legit position for some people to have.

17:34Right. Under the law, that's true. And then say, okay, this isn't the law. This is a workplace and common sense. Yeah. Yeah. Not a workplace where we're selling car parts, a workplace where we're selling ideas or engaging in ideas. So different considerations are appropriate for all of that. But I definitely think that there was a pendulum swing and the pendulum swung a little outside my area of safety, right? My area. And then my perception of that didn't swing with the pendulum. I do think that had I been finely and acutely sensitized to where the pendulum was swinging, I really couldn't have done my job, right?

18:12Because then are you even saying anything that you believe or you're just trying to tack to where the audience is? Not even the audience, not even your audience. Are you trying to tack to these exogenous forces that could put you in trouble for really anodine opinions. I couldn't do that. And after a while, it was made clear they didn't want to do that with me, my old employees. You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right?

18:50And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month. And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. All kinds of great tools that help me, frankly, take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me.

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22:36So I know where my new driver is, and I know how he's driving. Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to heypolo.com slash achiever or use code achiever and get 40 % off your first year. Enter code achiever at heypolo.com. So you became an entrepreneur. Yeah. I'd love to spend a little time on that because you had, had you ever worked for yourself before? No, not for any sustained period. I mean, I professionally graduated college. I tutored for the SATs, started working as an intern at the public radio station, got a job at the public radio station, got a job at NPR, got a job at Slate.

23:23That's my old employer. And then got a job working for myself. That's it. That's everything. How old were you when this all went down? When you went? I guess it was about 47, 48. Wow. And you have kids? Two. so so so you get you get canceled you are asked not to whatever happens you leave you wake up yeah you're 47 yeah you have kids yeah what do you think well I knew I had in my show a built-in audience and an audience who was clamoring for me to come back and at the time I wasn't speaking to the audience, I thought that I would just let this all play out. We get a new contractual situation where I could take over my show.

24:13And it took a long, long time. And this wound up depleting the audience because you know how podcasting works. If you're not on for eight, nine, 10 months, it's not as if anyone actively rejects you, though I'm sure that happened too. It's that people forget that you're there. The feed withers, yeah. The feed doesn't repopulate itself. And so my last show was for, you know, many tens of thousands of people. And my next show 10 months later, which we called season two, was for many fewer tens of thousands of people. And so, you know, I was hoping and thought that I would build back the show that has proved to be harder than I thought it would be.

24:58But the whole theory of the case was, I'll take it over. I'll do the administrative things. I'll hire the staff directly. You know, I think it works out. I think the spreadsheets dictate that with an audience at a certain level, I'll still be able to be profitable. But I got to tell you, it's been very, very hard. I am similar. I launched this show with Harvard Business Review 2018. I was at HBR, which was very prestigious, if not hugely lucrative. And then in 2021, LinkedIn came calling and made me an offer I couldn't refuse and had four fantastic years being sponsored by LinkedIn and part of the LinkedIn Podcast Network.

25:43And June 30th of last year, they closed the podcast network. Yes. And I cried. Thank you for being part of our glorious but failed experiment. I mean, it was good. We were all like, thanks, LinkedIn. It was great while it lasted. We appreciate you. And similar kind of woke up and thought, now what? You know, and have been independent, I guess, on this June 30th. It will be a year. It's tough. It's painful. It's humbling. It's all the things. And they didn't let you keep your RSS feed, right? Yes. Oh, I owned my RSS feed. Okay, see, that's really important. So let's bore everyone. No, let's do it.

26:25The RSS feed is the string of code that is essentially the analogy is to if you have a well-trafficked pizza shop, that's the physical location of the pizza shop. And people might like Giuseppe's Pizza, but they're not going to search for it all throughout the town. They know to come to the corner to go to Giuseppe's Pizza. So who owns that RSS feed? Who owns the place where the people who listen to the podcast can know to find you is essential? And your owning it was really important, I think. Did you not? You had to start all over again? I had to work out an agreement whereby there'd be ways to essentially lease with an option to buy.

27:10Interesting. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think I don't think we're alone in being people in midlife who are rethinking our business models every single day. This feels like this used to be something that wasn't common. And now I guess maybe it's the people I know. Almost everyone I know is doing this, even if they were employed. And now, unfortunately, they got laid off because they're older and expensive or their industry has fallen apart. You know, what have you, you're what, six years in? From season two, it's been about five years. Five years. So not very long. What have you learned? Well, I learned just how hard it was to anticipate all of the requirements of doing a big show like I do, which is not even a big show.

28:06It's kind of a modest show. We do it on a very small cast. I do more of the generating of the content of the show than any other host of any other daily show that I know of. If you listen to all the credits of all the other daily shows. Oh, yes. They have, you know, three to seven producers. Sometimes if it's the daily, it goes on for 15 producers. And you can tell that daily is an extremely well-produced show, but they're an extremely well-resourced show. So I was thinking in terms of, all right, how does the show have to sound? What do I have to do to get there with my producers and what we have to do with cutting tape, what we have to do with the content of the show?

28:42And what I didn't plan for as much, and I think there is a good explanation for this, is that to get the idea of the show out there, video, Instagram, TikTok. TikTok barely existed when I was doing my thing. Instagram wasn't a big driver. There were all these various pivots to video. So from 2014, when I started the gist to 2020, 2021, I've been through a few pivots to video, but the audio trudged along and the audio was the thing that got the audience and podcasts have never been good at discovery, but to the extent they were, you could do it through audio only means. And then it became very, very, very apparent that video was more than necessary.

29:26In fact, podcasts have become video. So yeah, I didn't anticipate because it wasn't yet clear that the demands of doing a podcast really became the demands of doing video and that having social media producers were just as important as having the actual audio producers. And I wasn't able to staff it to that extent. So I wasn't able to take one of my people off of audio production and say, you're just going to cut up clips. There was a part of me that said, well, that service is getting an audience, but that's not really what journalism is all about. But I should have said the most important thing is to get the audience.

30:05I don't know how I could have done that, but casting or, sorry, staffing a show changed. And the ways that it changed was all in terms of using video and social media to try to capture a new audience. And I think the shows that are popular now show that. And I think some of the older shows that are hanging on, I mean, a bunch of them are just saying, rather than pivot to video, I'm going to stop doing this. Like Marc Maron essentially made that decision. And I talked to other friends of mine who are audio only people. And, you know, they say, maybe we could put an audio version of this up on YouTube with a static image.

30:45I'll tell you that never works. So unless you become a TV show, which a lot of people don't want to do, I don't see how you're going to survive in the audio podcast world anymore. I don't either. It's really depressing to me. I mean, I'm not a journalist. I don't have journalistic ethics. But I am a committed introvert. And I always felt like the beauty of my podcast was that my guest and I weren't, we were in your ear. It was like a privilege to be invited into your ear. It's very intimate. And it's like I had to work really hard for that. I don't – I think I see trends of podcasting just being like yapping on camera like my kids watch.

31:28Yeah. And God, this makes me sound like a snob. But, you know, I'm curious, like, one of the things that I can tell about you is that you are, you are very, very, I don't know, Renaissance man might not be the right term, but you're interested in a lot of things. Yeah. Loved the radio play that you and Jesse Eisenberg did. Actually, I may link to it because it was really hilarious. Marv Alpert as Jesse Eisenberg's therapist. That just hit all the buttons for me, therapy and sports, and it was awesome. Are you an actor as well? No, but thank you for asking. Even Jesse said, my God, are you a thespian?

32:11Do you have your SAG card? Are you a thespian? I guess I am a ham is the technical word for it, which is also a radio term, yes. Totally. You know, you're obviously very curious. You have the craft of journalism. How do you think about that now in a world where, yeah, I agree with you. I just met a really like a household name, content creator, podcaster. His team puts up 100 pieces on social a day across all the channels. Can you imagine? No, I can because I see it. I see how some successful podcasts leverage that. And are they even successful podcasts or are they successful video clips that happen to have a podcast?

32:56Well, they're brands. I mean, I think, you know, I just saw a statistic this morning that six in 10 entrepreneurs also think of themselves as content creators. So to me, that says we're all just brands. Content creators. There's a title to aspire to. I'm a content creator. You are a content creator, Mike. But doesn't it sound like, no, I'm not a chef. I'm a food, I'm a consumables provider. I'm a food creator, yes. Even food creator, like content doesn't even claim to be good content or worthy content. So I think that it used to be great when audio, not even in terms of being intimate, but in terms of you get a couple good mics, you get a decent enough room, and you could do audio just if your skill is there, just as good as the greatest purveyors of audio out there.

33:50Let's say BBC or NPR. Yes, they could do certain mixes, especially in the field and with deeply sound rich documentaries. But if we're talking about a really good interview, you're not as good as Terry Gross or I'm not, but you could try hard and try getting closer and closer. And it doesn't really sound that different. When you add video, especially if it's the person who was, let's say Terry Gross. What if Terry Gross always had to be a TV show, right? If from the second year she was doing it, if you ever hear any of the old Terry Gross, I'm not even talking about when she was on the public radio station in Buffalo, but even if you hear Philadelphia, Terry Gross, she has grown tremendously since then.

34:31But if she had to do video, you know where the resources would go. You know where the attention would go. You know what the notes would be about how she looked. You know how much time she would have to spend thinking about the shot versus sitting down in front of the microphone having read the book or listened to the album or having watched the play. And so that's where we are now. I think there are great podcasts out there and great video. Well, I think there are probably great video podcasts out there. I don't watch them in video. Certainly entertaining ones. But, you know, in the last five to 10 years, that has shifted in some of the great, I mentioned Marc Maron.

35:11It's a shame that doesn't exist anymore. It's up to Marc and Brandon, his producer. But it's a shame that video drove him out. And I think about my friend PJ Vogt, who does this great show that can't be done on video because it was done on video. It'd be called a documentary. And so he does it in audio form. And Search Engine is great, but there could be dozens behind him that don't want to do video, but there really can't be. And that's another, this is, I think, another casualty of the move to video. I don't know how much the listeners know this, but there was a golden era of audio documentaries or long form narrative podcasts.

35:53There'd be maybe an eight part series. Think about, you know, Serial, think about Shit Town, think about all the great podcasts that came in eight or ten parts, the original Slow Burn, and they're dying. They're dead or dying because it doesn't price out. And part of the reason is they're antithetical to video because they're not documentaries. They're audio documentaries. I have so many questions.

36:22So you think that this is purely, this is advertiser driven and the model just doesn't make sense anymore if you're audio only and therefore the question is sort of adapt or die. Yeah, I think if you had a head start, you could still make some money, especially on the Patreon model of audio. And like a lot of comedian podcasts are there. And also, if you look at the top charts of Patreon, which publishes its charts, Substack does to some extent too. There are some with an audio only and not video only component. But it helps to have had a head start. And I think that one of the things is the economics of the narrative podcast are such that it's very, very hard to undertake unless you want to do it as a prestige play, or maybe there are some other justifications for it within like a bigger ecosystem.

37:18But just the idea of I'm going to put$250 ,000 into this eight part series and each of the eight parts will make for me, you know,$50 ,000 to have enough, enough of a profit margin to pay everyone. Not going to work, not going to work 90 something percent of the time. No. Well, and most podcasts I think now are just sort of talk shows, right? They're talk shows and that's, that's the format. And, you know, it's, it's really interesting to me. I think I never And are they good talk shows? I mean, some of them Some are Like one of the most Some are One of the most popular ones The idea is We haven't prepared It's called Smartless And those guys are charming But hey, listen to the pod Listen to the podcast talk show Where we do no preparation You know, I will I do have to say Julia Louis-Dreyfus' talk show I think that's a great talk show Just flat out But the fact that I can pick her out And say Yeah, that one is the exception.

38:19Well, no, I take exception with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Bateman, Will Arnett. Like these are Hollywood stars. Like there's, that's the thing that I think is really hard for us old schoolers, you know, is that we used to be just, you know, we did this for the love. Like when I started, oh my God, I started my first podcast in 2014 with the Forbes network and it was called Hiding in the Bathroom, which was the title of my first book. And, you know, it was just me being really curious, wanting to talk to successful people about all of their foibles and soft spots and weak areas. And, you know, and I was given a platform to do that with Forbes and then with Harvard Business Review.

39:02It was such an incredible, like, honor, kind of deer in headlights moment. I never thought that I would in my brain be competing against, like, Amy Poehler. You know, like the world between someone like me hosting a podcast and someone like Amy Poehler hosting a podcast is not realistic. And so, I mean, I think that's the interesting thing. I think the thing that like everyone's an influencer now, everyone's a brand. Journalists have to be brands now, even if they work for an outlet, right? Yeah, yeah. And one way to brand yourself is to jump on Substack after you've been martyred by the media.

39:40I called it the media martyrdom monetization play. And so many have done that, right? Oh, that's amazing. And, you know, Jim Acosta and Jennifer Rubin. And sometimes you can even see the strings being pulled. You could see the set being moved into place, like with Terry Moran and ABC, who is never, who's a fine journalist. And I don't mean okay journalist, a very good journalist, but never some outspoken guy who was censored because of his crazy opinions. And like the week before, two weeks before his contract came up, he got in a fight, a public fight with ABC. And of course he goes on Substack and things are going well now.

40:23But can Substack create their own stars? There are podcasts that have popped that have seemingly come out of nowhere, but they're all of similar ilks, which is telling the audience what they already want, usually of a certain political valence. Could Terry Gross ever have established herself as someone just starting out and just having the skills and just acquiring the skills and just being put on a network and eventually having people say, this is the best of what we do, and having the audience agree? Can that ever happen now? I won't say no, I just don't see any examples of it. That's interesting.

41:00I don't know. In my field, which is sort of like well-being, mental health and leadership, I do see podcasts that have broken through just by the sheer will and interest of the host. I have to believe in the power of voice. I mean, I don't know, like, what do we do? What do we do with curiosity in a world where we just have to be constantly sort of hawking ourselves all the time? Oh, yeah, it's quite terrible. And so I could, I could give you a solution which relies on doing things in person and having enough of connection, enough of a connection with an audience and cultivating that and then slowing down, doing live person shows.

41:45There is a path forward that way. But if I was just working for the Harvard Business Review and telling you, OK, you're an angel investor. You get to invest in 10 podcasts. I would certainly, if what I cared about was making money or gaining audience, invest in nine podcasts that either had a celebrity host, a very clear political message, mostly about hating the other side. an angle that was edgy, that was emphasizing the looks of the so-called podcast, the looks of the host, the looks of the guest, that sort of thing. And mostly what you'd have to be doing is use it because there's no discovery in podcasts, using a pre-established brand that immediately strikes the listener as, I know what this is or the viewer, I know what this is.

42:41and this guy or this woman fits in with what I already believe. No, you just said there's no discovery in podcasts. Explain for an audience what that means. Well, if you, you know, back in the day when there were networks, whatever the time the network would go out, gatekeepers existed, they would say, here's a show we want to put on the air. And sometimes it would work and sometimes it didn't. But the discovery was there are only three networks or then four networks or a few more networks. With music, there's the radio. There are ways to get with newspapers. There are ways that people can rise up in the world of newspapers.

43:18But there are syndicates. And just the newspaper itself, literally when it's the newspaper, still true online, by giving something a placement, primacy of placement, you get more people to look at it. There's nothing like that with podcasts. It's also, it's more than that, right? So with the newspaper, it's institutions. It's brand credibility. It's curation. It's all these things. Mike, if you're on NPR, if you're the sports reporter, I don't know what your title was, for NPR, then that signals to me that you kind of know what you're talking about. Like, I'm not going to dismiss you as easily if you're some Yahoo in their bedroom.

43:55Although my sons watch this kid who's like 15 years old and just yaps about sports from his bedroom. And he's got like 4 million subscribers. So I don't know. Oh, yeah. They only listen to sports media that is created either by athletes or by young men. Who don't know anything. They, well, who read the mainstream, you know, listen to sports reporters and then recycle it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how you feel about Bill Simmons, but I religiously listen to Bill Simmons. Yeah, he knows his stuff. He knows. He's been doing it forever. I'm from Boston also. So, you know, and they're like, my kids are literally like, mom, you know, they just want to watch some 17-year-old literally yap from his bedroom.

44:46And that's what they want. Yeah. So the discoverability problem, even on The Ringer, one thing a podcast could do is point to other shows on their network. So there are big flagship shows. The Daily could say, listen to this new New York Times show. Exactly. Or The Ringer can do that. but it doesn't always work. You could argue it shouldn't always work. And it's a very, these are shows that exist that can point you to other shows in the network. There's no outside mechanism like TV Guide used to be or just like the front of Netflix, just the shows that were showing in your Netflix queue because Netflix knew it was really important to engage you and get you to watch these other shows.

45:32But with podcasting, the podcaster is happy to have the podcast. And unless there's some incentive to tell you about other shows, like they're part of a network, they could get paid to do it, but they're essentially disincentivized. And the way we get our podcast, what we go to get our podcasts, they have ads, they have some banners that could say, here's a new show, but they're very unreliable. It's hard to crack the code of how to get mentioned there. They're not actively out being curators of the next big thing, even like radio guys were or A &R guys were, mostly guys, with the record companies.

46:12It's just something that the world of podcasting never emphasized. The world of podcasting started off as just Apple iTunes podcasts. Now it's gotten a little bit. Now there's a lot of other places to listen to it. And, yeah, if you go to Spotify right now, there'll be a banner ad saying, listen to this podcast. but that is not real discoverability. You know, that is less discoverability than there is with almost every other medium. And also more content, way more content. Too much content. Of course, yes. So speaking of it, you have four podcasts? Well, I have How To, which is a show I took over from Charles Duhigg, where we pair an expert with someone with a question of how to.

46:50So it's how to get into wine, how to get my kid to be less risk averse while still keeping her safe. how to make friends as an adult, and then the expert will come on. It's about a 35-minute show, and it's exactly what it sounds like, and it's not on the news. There's almost no political content. So that's one show. Second show is The Gist, which is a daily show that talks a lot about politics. And then within The Gist, I have two shows that have become standalone shows. One is called Not Even Mad, which is a debate show, and one is called Funny You Should Mention, where I go and interview a comedian, almost always in the Comedy Cellar studios, a comedian who often plays at the Comedy Cellar.

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51:47That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. How I know listeners are thinking, oh my god, That sounds like so much. What does your day look like? There's the day in front of the mic is fine. And day writing what I have to write for the gist is interesting. It's the nights reading all the books. I give myself this task of, you know, my eyes have to hit every page. Or if I'm every page, my eyes have to hit every page, which is to say. So I just picked up a book. I interviewed Benoit Denizé-Lewis. You've Changed, The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation. It's a 256-page book.

52:31I read that all. But another book I have, which is about how North Korea was actually modeled on Christianity more than we think. It's about 500 pages, small print. I did not read all 500. Yes. I read hundreds of the pages. And then I made sure I kind of scanned through and speed read. But I'm spending hours reading books. And that is, you know, it's inimicable to bonding with other human beings. I do know. And it's like always having homework. I mean, you know, it's funny. I often think about the life of a content creator compared to having a real job. I have not had a real job for about two years now.

53:13All I do is this. I write books. I do my podcast. I do. I speak. I just like coaching and consulting, but mostly right now I'm creating content. And it's such a weird existence. You're always in your head. You always have homework. It's just, it's very different than having a real job, you know, and I don't think I like it. I miss actually being in meetings and having teams and being accountable and not having, it's funny. Yes, I totally agree. I like the interaction of the office place. I like the creativity of being in a group and that alchemy that comes out of bandying around ideas. Definitely.

54:02Interviews are good. They're good for that. They're wonderful. But there are certain kind of, you're not tapping these experts to help you with a new creation outside of the interview itself that reflects a coming together of different people. you're you know just doing an interview whereas when you have a bunch of people in a group the sum total is often much more impressive than what each individual could bring to it and you can't really get that doing what we do we're the individual well okay so the last question i want to ask you is i have a lot of journalists on the show because i'm really interested in journalists how do you feel about all of this your career your craft all the time you invested in a thing, journalism, that seems to be...

54:52It's changed a lot. Yeah, like how do you think about this and then how do you think about the rest of your career? Now we need it more than ever and I think we're getting a worse version of it. I think that there's some great journalism... In fact, it's probably true that there's more great journalism going on now than there ever has been, but as a percentage of the overall content that calls itself journalism, it's much less. And I think the biggest problem is just audience capture and giving the audience what they want. And the audience will demand, no, don't challenge us, either politically or content-wise.

55:27And only one or two giant publications or organizations can say, actually, this is the news. The New York Times can do that. They can't do it too often. But the New York Times has the ballast and wherewithal to do it and probably the Wall Street Journal and maybe, you know, some financial press like Bloomberg. But for the most part, even if you look at Substack, which was supposed to be this great corrective to the mainstream media, it is more niche voices. Some of them excellent. Some of them very, very good who are paid by an audience. and when you're paid by an audience, you have to give the audience what they want.

56:07And so to take an example, Matt Taibbi, who was known for, I guess, slaying dragons on the left or right. I mean, very skeptical. Very lefty originally, like super lefty. Yes, very anti-corporate branded. The giant vampire squid put that branding on, you know, important financial institutions, but also very skeptical of the investigation. it's Trump over Russia. So I think now his people are more the mainstream media is at fault, and they're more there for the, please do more vindication of Trump over Russia than they are, please do skewering of big financial institutions. And so, you know, that's what he gives them.

56:57He doesn't say things he doesn't believe in, but the content is definitely skewed towards one mode. And, you know, everyone, everyone has to be like that, or you lose your audience, and the audience will let you know if they don't want a certain kind of content. And it's important for journalists not to strictly adhere to that, but we're all human, and we do. And that's also where the ever-shrinking monetization lies. Yes. Do you have hope? Since you can't feel anxiety, do you have hope? Yeah, I have a lot of hope. I do think we have to get out of this moment where we look at politics as tribal and as sport.

57:36I think that our politics can start delivering us just life improvements, and maybe enough of us will say, whatever the personalities are engaged in the politics, who are telling you that the other side is villainous. What we need to do is whatever, build a railroad or fund an institution that cures the disease. And once we start doing that and recognizing that or get us unstuck from some of the bad policies of the past. That's very abundance. Yes. Well, I think that's mostly a good move forward. Yeah. And the big part of abundance is it's got to work and it's got to impress people that it does work because good ideas that we fight with the other side, it would be killer to say, look how wrong you are.

58:23And everyone knows it because those shovel-ready projects under that gigantic bill we passed are now in the world and clearly improving everyone's lives. And I don't know that we could say that. We certainly can't say that with some of the things that Ezra and Derek were talking about with like charging stations that barely got rolled out. So what I'm saying is that it would be good if politics started to separate from the personality of politicians and people who look to politics as a sport or something other than, you know, to achieve things. And I think that'll happen. I just think people will get so sick of it.

59:03And they'll still be the news channels, which are all about tearing into the other team because that's fun. But that'll be just a niche way of looking at the overall political picture. And people who want to be elected will stop playing into that. Or people who are elected and want to govern will stop playing into that, even though it feeds their ego and probably burnishes their standing in primaries. And we'll maybe look for ways to cut through that and just do things that improve people's lives. I think we still have the capacity to recognize that. We also have the capacity to do the good and necessary things.

59:38May it be so. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you. Thank you, Mara.

59:47That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.