Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Secret Histories of Podcasting

Episode Date: October 22, 2015

It turns out there are (at least) three ways to tell the secret history of podcasting: it is a story about technology, it is a story about a business model for audio, and it is also a story about the birth of a new art form. What’s really cool is that the whole thing is sort of a Rashomon narrative – in this special edition to mark the radiotopiaforever campaign your host attempts to tell all three versions using the same people. Visit radiotopia.fm to join the radiotopiaforever campaign. illustration Celeste Lai

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Secret Histories of Podcasting. The first time I really heard the word podcasting was on October 5th, 2004. This is when my friend, radio producer Mary McGrath, called me up and said, if you don't make your radio show a podcast, you are totally going to miss out on the revolution and you will be the biggest loser in the universe. Those were the days when we used to talk on the phone every day about the burdens of working in institutional media and how much nimble and easier it would be to just kind of work on your own.

And I saw the power of this thing. I know the exact date of this call because after I got off the phone with Mary, I went online and found a blog post on the tech site Engadget, a podcasting 101 guide. It had been published that very day. Now, this Engadget post is one of the only original documents still online. Almost everything else I needed for this secret history of podcasting story, I had to find using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The moment was March, April, May, June 2003. This was the start of the Iraq War against a vacuum of intelligent discussion, a complete

vacuum. And when that didn't work, I hunted down the actual people involved. The lights were going out in American public conversation and democracy. My whole drive was, how do we fight this nonsense? And how do we crush institutional media, which is so stupid? That's journalist Christopher Lydon. Today, he hosts Radio Open Source. He and Mary used to run a public radio talk show called The Connection, but they got fired over an ownership struggle. So they ended up doing a bunch of stuff online at this place called the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

at the Harvard Law School. He wanted to keep talking to people, and he wanted to keep interviewing people and having conversations, and that technology enabled him to do it. And then Berkman built a platform around it, and the rest is history. At the Berkman Center, I got to work with Mary and Chris. We made web shows, we traveled the world recording in strange places like prisons in Jamaica and internet cafes in China. Then, in 2003, this guy, Dave Weiner, showed up at the center. He's the guy who got Chris into audio blogging. And one day, the two started messing around with MP3s and RSS feeds.

Dave Weiner, I feel like a new immigrant in this blogger world where you're a kind of founding father. Walk me around it. Well, gosh, it changes all the time. When we first started doing this, it was just a bunch of people sort of writing Hello World. This is where Chris and I parted ways. I could not get into audio blogging.

The stuff Chris and Dave were making, it made me want to saw my ears off. Welcome to Tonopah. This is something Dave made around this time. Wow, I may have to stop the podcast as we're going through a town right now, and I kind of have been wanting to go to the bathroom. The guy in front of me is driving about three miles an hour.

Anyway, so, let's see. I'm going to hit pause right now. Okay, I tried really hard to get Dave Weiner to talk to me for this story, but he says he's sick and tired of people getting the secret history of podcasting wrong. So he said no. But he did record some thoughts for his own blog. And he said, I could use whatever I want from the audio. So I called my podcast Morning Coffee Nuts because it's kind of what the idea was.

I felt that a podcast was like a blog and that it was something that amateurs would do, not professionals, that it was, that that was the real breakthroughs, that it would open up media to all kinds of people that, whom it wasn't open to before. For Dave Weiner, podcasting is a technological breakthrough. RSS feeds and MP3 enclosures enabled amateurs to post their own audio files to the web. And he believes that podcasting is going mainstream now in 2015 because the technology has finally gotten easier for normal people to use. It's what I'm doing right now. I'm talking into my iPhone. It has a thing called Voice Memo.

And I'm not going to edit it. I'm just going to take the raw audio that I record. I'm going to upload it to my blog and link it in and it'll show up in my feed and all the rest of that. Back then, this was a hard idea to get through to people that individuals would want to do this. I must have attended tons and tons of lunch talks at the Berkman Center where Dave and Chris talked about all this stuff. But like I said, I didn't pay attention until Mary yelled at me on that day in October of 2004. But that's all it took. After I added the MP3s to my new RSS feed, I was ready. My new radio show was now a podcast. This is the moment when Benjamin Walker's theory of everything actually begins. In 2004, you were doing the Your Radio Nightlight,

but it was on a kind of indefinite hiatus, I think. That's my friend Roman Mars, host of the podcast 99% Invisible and our Radiotopia ringmaster. In 2004, he was producing a weekly half-hour show about zine culture called Invisible Inc. for KALW in San Francisco, where he lived. I had the idea that I could turn the hour-long show that I'd been doing in Boston into a half-hour show. And then we could each run both 30-minute programs in our hour-long slots, which would make us both coast-to-coast radio professionals. Is that the way you remember it going down? No. No, no, no. Oh, man. I'm messing up the facts already.

My sort of hour mate in the hour long that I had on KLW was leaving and not going to produce anymore. And I wrote you and asked you if you would make a half-hour version of your show to fill out the whole hour, and then I would send you my half hour for you to play on WZBC. And I would play your half hour on KLW. Okay. I see how it is. You just want to get credit for everything. I see. Well, one thing I know for sure is that when I told you that you should make your show a podcast,

you were like, screw that. Yeah, I probably didn't do it for a lot of reasons. I mean, I produced my first year of producing my show. I produced 44 half hour episodes. So just the thought of doing one other thing was completely like not. It was not going to happen. I was not going to happen i was not going to create a mp3 to put online or anything like that it just was never going to happen it wasn't that much work like i said it only took me a few hours to figure out how to create the feed and put the mp3s in it

i believe the main reason radio producers like roman mars were so dismissive was because mp3s in it. I believe the main reason radio producers like Roman Mars were so dismissive was because mp3s, RSS feeds, that all sounds like tech nonsense. And then there's the name, podcasting. I don't want to die and be remembered for that word. I don't care how many award-winning radio and TV documentaries the talented Ben Hammersley makes. To me, he will always be the motherfucker who gave us the word podcasting. On February 6, 2004, he wrote an article about Chris Leiden and his MP3 experiments for The Guardian newspaper. I had a deadline and I wrote quite close to the deadline

and sent it over, and I got this sort of urgent email with about 10 minutes or so to go until the presses rolled, saying, you know, that piece is great, but it's 20 words short. You know, can you pad it out? Here's the sentence that Ben wrote to pad his piece out. So what do we call it? Audio blogging? Guerrilla media?

Podcasting? It was just filler. So I didn't even think any more of it until, whenever it was, a year or so later, I get an email from the Oxford English Dictionary saying, where did you get that word from? It's the earliest citation we can find. I said, well, you know, I pulled it out my ass, basically. And they're like, oh, yeah, great. You

know, it's word of the year. Because I was one of the first podcasts listed in the official podcasting directories, all of the media tension surrounding this new fad caused my audience to explode. It was a year of podcast mania. I got invited to media conferences. I got paid to be a podcasting consultant. And then in October of 2005, I got to co-present the Third Coast Audio Festival's first ever panel on podcasting. Now, this was the ideal moment. You see, that summer, Apple had added podcasts to its iTunes store, basically putting all the podcast tech startups like Odeo out of business.

People were starting to view podcasting as something other than a tech thing. At least that's what I hoped would happen in that room full of radio producers in Chicago. All right, let's just start then. Thanks everyone for coming to the podcasting session. My name is Benjamin Walker. I'm Todd Maffin from the CBC in Canada. I had this idea that I could get all of my fellow independent radio producers so excited they would start their own podcast. For me, the one goal I have is at the end of this 90 minutes, you will all realize that this is an amazing moment for you. And it is a moment to be seized. And I hope that we will have showed you some ways in how you can seize this moment.

But for some reason, all of my enthusiasm just fell flat. Everyone was very dismissive. All right, so this is an article by Pike Malinowski, written October 22, 2005. I guess I was a reporter for Trainsome.org. This is Pike Malinowski. He's an internationally award-winning radio producer, and he's made a few pieces for my podcast. We actually met and became friends at this 2005 edition of Third Coast. But it's clear in his review of my session, though, that I failed to convince him. The title of the article is What If You Don't Have a Trust Fund?

And it begins, The session Podcasting Believe the Hype, presented by Todd Maffin of CBC and Benjamin Walker of Theory of Everything, opened with the rhetorical question, what makes a good podcast? And they answered themselves, the same things that make up good radio. Go figure. So, and here's the last paragraph of the article. But see, here's my problem with the hype.

Everyone keeps saying how great this tool is for independent producers. Yes, independent producers with a trust fund. Ben spends a lot of time doing his show, The Excellent Theory of Everything, and he doesn't earn a penny. He has a day job. He might have gotten his job because of the show, but, hmm, you know, that is a weird thing,

to ask people to pay him for being him, because Ben's show is so much Ben, I guess. It's so weird to hear you read that. Because, you know, today we have tons of friends and colleagues who are making a living making podcasts, including yours truly. I'm really curious, why do you think you couldn't see it then? Like even as a possibility that you might not one day need a day job or a trust fund to make podcasts?

I think I was very skeptical because I come from Europe and there the model has always been, you know, Socialism. Yeah, socialism. As Bernie Sanders seemed to think. I think also, seeing that article now, I'm slightly jealous of you. Really?

There is a kind of jealousy there, definitely. Well, to be fair, I couldn't see the future either. But I definitely got mad that day that so many of you in the room wanted to talk about monetization. I wasn't expecting that. I really did not see that coming. I think you knew what was coming. The great thing about your approach

was that you didn't care about money. You know? You were in this thing for your own pleasure because you were excited about making this show and because it was fulfilling for you. And that's what, you know, the best podcasts out there are those shows. And plus, this was years before Kickstarter.

The idea behind Kickstarter is that you can raise money in a new way. You know, it's a way where both parties win and something gets created and accomplished that probably could never have happened before. And it very much feels like being a patron. At times I feel like I'm some rich dude in New York in the early 80s and I'm going to Basquiat's loft to view his works in progress. It really very much feels like that.

And to be able to do that on the web, and just for anyone to be able to participate in this, is just amazing. That's Perry Chan and Yancey Strickler, two of the co-founders of Kickstarter. I interviewed them both in 2010 for my WFMU radio show called Too Much Information. At this point, I had moved to New York, and the theory of everything had crashed and burned. All of my podcast dreams had been smashed. When I visited Kickstarter, they were just getting started.

Back then, it was a handful of people working out of a walk-up office on the Lower East Side. I remember, though, thinking when I interviewed them, huh, someone could use this for a podcast. And then in February of 2012, someone did. I remember I sent out a tweet or something like, you know, to my six followers, you know, like, so excited, you know, that we have, that we've, you know, to my six followers, you know, like, so excited, you know, that we have, that we've, you know, reached our goal. And then immediately somebody tweeted back, like, yeah, when's that first episode, dude, you know? And at which point I was like, oh, shit. Daniel Alicante is one of the executive producers of Radio Ambulante. In February of 2012, they raised $40,000

for a Spanish-language podcast. What I'm really excited about, or was very proud of, was that we had more than 600 donors from about 20 countries. But this wasn't the only Kickstarter podcast of 2012. I modeled a lot of what I did

off of their Kickstarter. In October of 2012, Roman Mars a lot of what I did off of their Kickstarter. In October of 2012, Roman Mars, inspired by what Daniel and his cohorts had pulled off, launched a Kickstarter for his podcast 99% Invisible. I saw that they raised

$40,000 and that was very pivotal in me setting mine to $42,000. So you just wanted to make a little bit more. Exactly. This changed everything. The number, like that 170,000, got into real money where you could pay enough, a couple of people,

to put together a show. All of a sudden, it became viable. This Kickstarter, I believe, is the inflection point for the secret history of podcasting. It's really the beginning of everything that's going on today with podcasts, because that $170,000 came from Roman's listeners, not from advertisers, not from investors. It's like Roman intercepted public radio's money ball, and then he thundered off the field with it. And he's still scoring. In 2013, he did a second Kickstarter,

where he raised over $300,000. And then, last year, in 2014, he launched Radiotopia, the podcast network of which this show, the all-new, Than Ever Theory of Everything, is a founding member. We raised over $600,000. Seriously, when you make the secret history of podcasting

into a story about money rather than technology, it becomes much easier to tell a dynamic and exciting tale. It's not a romantic story. It's just a pragmatic story that knowing that I could rely on the audience to take care of us and do the show we wanted to do really just afforded us so much freedom. The fact that we can reach the audience and get paid directly is the reason why the work is as good as it is, like the art is as good as it is.

Okay, so I'm going to interrupt our narrative here because this is kind of the perfect place to tell you about our Radiotopia Forever campaign. It's also my attempt to pull off native philanthropy. We'll see how this works. You see, we're not doing a Kickstarter this year or a high-profile, in-your-face drive to beat our last total. This year, our goal is really simple. We just want to get as many of you out there in listener land

to pledge your support and become sustaining Radiotopia members. If you go to the Radiotopia.fm page, or the Theory of Everything page, you can find a link to the campaign. It's easy to find, and even easier to sign up. For just $5 a month, you can get any Radiotopia t-shirt, including the new Theory of Everything one that I got artist Jillian Tamaki to make. There's a number of things I think that'll entice you, but what we're really hoping is that you'll look at your podcast subscriptions and recognize that, yeah, you listen to a lot of Radiotopia. Maybe you just listen to this show. That's totally cool.

I just need you to stand up and be counted. Because as podcasting barrels into the future, this listener-supported path, that's the one I want to be on. This campaign is really about making the foundation so that we can continue to do sort of the good work that we have sort of proven that we've done in the past year. So we want to make sure that this baseline of support

and sort of the long road that really creative people have to make their shows and to find their audience and to become sustainable, that they have a really strong basis of support. And that's what sustained giving is all about. You know, like people just giving their buck a month or three bucks a month or five bucks a month. Roman's had this line for a few years now

about how he sees the listeners as his boss. And to tell you the truth, I've always thought this was a bit crazy. I'm more of an anti-boss person, no matter who's the boss. But now that I've spent a year making these podcasts with you, dear listeners, I have to say that he's right,

just like he's right about everything else. There's a real strength in making the listener as your boss. It just makes you better at what you do, I think. When you think of them, when you make things, it makes you a better journalist. It makes you a better storyteller. They are a heterogeneous group. They do not expect one thing from you. That's a very good thing. They are pretty forgiving and they want you to do well. So I like that better. it's been a long journey for the theory of everything but thanks to radiotopia i feel like i finally found the home where i can develop this thing and with your sustaining support this

show is going to get even better. This I know for sure. Your support, dear listener, means more great podcasts. Thanks. There are at least three ways you can tell the secret history of podcasting. On the one hand, it's a story about technology. But it's also a story about technology, but it's also a story about money, a new business model for publishing, and it's also a story about the birth of a new medium. And what's really cool is that the whole thing is like a Rashomon narrative. You can tell all three versions using the same people. I was always aware at the New York Times

that you had to learn to write in the voice of Mother Times. You don't have to do that in podcasting. Again, that's the great Emersonian lesson. Every man must be a nonconformist. You have to learn to speak in your own voice. And podcasting is the vehicle. So, let's go back to 2004. Only this time we'll cut out all the references

to technology and money. The big question for me is when and how did podcasting become a new art form or a vehicle for Emersonian self-expression, as Chris Leiden puts it? And how the hell did I miss this? I'll never forget Dave Weiner's reaction when on October 7th, 2004,

I walked into the Berkman Center and told him and Chris Leiden that I too now had a podcast. He got mad, really mad. He said, I didn't get podcasting. Radio and podcasting were two different things. Radio people like me and Chris, he shouted, were too good to be podcasters. This is a very key point, is that while Chris's were absolutely wonderful, I don't want to take anything away from it. In fact,

as I said, you know, they were beautifully produced, but that was the problem. I got into so many fights with Dave Weiner over this. In fact, the only reason I even made it into those early podcasting directories was because he added a radio category, which actually worked out in my favor because people then gravitated towards podcasts that had a radio connection. They assumed they might be good. But as I listened to the audio Dave Weiner recently posted on his blog, his take on the secret history of podcasting, I think I understand

now where he was coming from. If an average person hears Chris Leiden doing an NPR-like thing, they're not going to get the idea that they can do it. However, when I did it, nobody could miss that I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, as far as the audio was concerned, you know, the interviews I did were, one of them had like three minutes dead air. I mean, somehow the microphone got clicked off. I went ahead and read it anyway. Who cares? I mean, the point is, I can do it. That was the point. That audio blogging scene. Ben Hammersley, once again, the journalist who gave us the word podcasting.

That early podcasting scene was, you know, you would get people who would sort of get a voice recorder or a recording app, you know, a handheld voice recorder and sort of mount it on the front of the dashboard of their car and just sort of ramble into it as they were driving to work. I guess this is why in your article you feature Chris Lydon, the professional, and not Dave Weiner, the amateur. But doesn't that mean there's a subtext to your padded-out sentence? So what do we call it? Podcasting, guerrilla media, audio blogging? Isn't it fair to say that your biases kind of handicap both audio blogging and guerrilla media?

No, no, no, no. No, I definitely don't have a bias towards professional media and broadcasting. I have a bias towards quality. Right. And there's a different I think there's a difference between the two. And in fact, in fact, in many ways, what podcasting has shown is that if you have a bias towards quality, it rapidly takes you away from broadcast media and towards podcasting. The vast majority of my favorite podcasts are basically un... Well, they're not unbroadcastable, but they're uncommissionable. You know, I think the main reason it took me so long to grasp the difference between podcasting and radio was because I was just in denial. The kind of programs I make, they've always been uncommissionable. I just had a hard time letting go of the fantasy that eventually some radio boss would notice me and give me a shot.

I feel better now, now that I've learned that most of my friends and colleagues from the public media world who are now making popular podcasts also felt this way. Dave Weiner was right. We were too good. But seriously, the only people I feel don't get enough credit when it comes to the secret history of podcasting are America's public radio bosses. Really, their inability to commission or greenlight innovative programming and invest in talent, it's like they paid for the seedbed from which all of these great podcasts are now growing. I hear you.

Like, I think that it is, there's something, it's very intimate. Last year I took part in this podcast discussion in New York. I got to be on stage with Sarah Koenig from Serial, Alex Bloomberg from Gimlet, and Elise Spiegel from Invisibilia. David Carr was the moderator. This was like a week before he died. And I think it's intimate.

When we talked, I did a story a while ago, right when you were going for done, and you just said to me, it just feels like radio to me. David asked us what we all thought about Sarah's line, that podcasting feels like radio. What do you guys think of that? Does it feel like radio? I feel like it's different. I feel like the things that you can do...

It was so awesome. Elise Spiegel name-checked fellow Radiotopian Leah Tao, and then Sarah took back her answer. This podcast called Strangers, where Leah Tao did this Love Hurts series, which was unbelievably intimate. It would never really get on the radio. Can I change my answer?

Because I feel like what I said to you then is not what I mean. Really? Why would anyone want to make radio right now? The past few years have been like the podcasting equivalent of the renaissance, like discovering perspective or mastering oil paints or something like that, where they just go, oh, holy shit, we can do this. Wow. Okay. And then they hear somebody else from another country or another show doing something else that's even more interesting. They go like,

I never realized we could do that too. And I'm like, okay. And it just sort of accelerated and accelerated. I still hate the term podcasting. Roman Mars again. But I've actually come to some kind of peace with it. And mainly my peace with it has come with one,

the recognition that it as an art form is valuable and that there is some things different going on and that it's intriguing in some way and it isn't just a lesser form of radio. And two, I really buy that. I buy producer or journalist. I'll even say podcaster, which you could not have paid me to say what the art form is But I think what is most exciting and successful And embracing as a form Is this idea of people following exactly what they want to do And there are no rules

Julie Shapiro was the artistic director Of the Third Coast Audio Festival for over a decade. She's the one who invited me to do that panel in 2005. She just spent a few years in Australia running the creative audio unit for the ABC. But now she's coming back home because Radiotopia has just scooped her up to be our new executive producer. We, and I'm counting you in that we, dear listener, are very lucky. I caught her on Skype as she was packing up her things. She believes that the real secret history of podcasting hasn't even been written yet.

There's so much potential now, especially for the forum. You can experiment, you're building relationships with all of your listeners, you bring them along, you can try things out. Maybe one rule that I would suggest is things should not go longer than 30 minutes. That's a personal preference. The whole allure of coming back

into this is understanding how enormous the audience is. It's so far beyond what we've always thought of as our finite audience. You know, some people say, what's Radiotopia about? They all sound different. And to which I say, that's kind of the point to me, is that there are all these ways to do it. And having that range of content, that range of approach, style, and voice feels like the most interesting way to keep everyone excited and coming back to hear what else is coming down, and trusting Radiotopia to bring them new ways of thinking and listening and experiencing the podcasting

age. you have been listening to benjamin walker's theory of everything this installment is called secret histories of Podcasting. This episode was produced by myself, with help from Celeste Lai. Special thanks to Jake Shapiro and everyone else I spoke to for this episode. Radiotopia from PRX