Podcasts used to be good

I’m a big fan of podcasts. I’ve been listening to them for over 10 years. Podcasts have become quite popular now, but back then there weren’t many. The first podcast I ever listened to was The Ricky Gervais Show.

I used to listen to this show on the loop constantly. Whether I was working, or commuting, or trying to go to sleep. An episode of the Ricky Gervais show was always on. Fast forward to today, when we millions of podcasts which are longer and with more episodes, but none of them is nearly as good. What went wrong?

I think a general idea today is that if you take any celebrity, give them a mic and a camera and let them talk for an hour, it would be an interesting podcast. Which is why today we are seeing each and every standup comic coming up with their version of a poorly thought out low-grade “podcast”.

Jerry Seinfeld was a comedian, and he created one of the biggest sitcoms ever. But that doesn’t mean that just because someone is a comedian, they would be able to create a sitcom just like him. So why wouldn’t the same logic apply to podcasts as well?

The reason why The Ricky Gervais Show worked is that it wasn’t just any comics sitting and talking about random things. The main star of the show was Karl Pilkington. He was a nobody, just a normal guy from Manchester, who happened to crossways with Ricky Gervais by sheer luck. The comedy that came out of their conversations was different and pure. So much so that many people didn’t believe that Karl was a real person, and they speculated that it was an actor who was playing a character.

Podcasts back then had a uniqueness to them, they had substance. On the contrary, there are people with podcasts now that take pride in not preparing anything in advance and just talking about random things.

So please, I request you all not to be satisfied by these diluted conversations people try to pass off as podcasts these days. Go and check out The Ricky Gervais Show, or the Opie and Anthony show (it’s a radio show, so not a podcast technically, but still extremely good), or WTF with Marc Maron.