And I quote from Seth Goding @sethgodin.com, the following observation: “There are more than a million podcasts. The good news is that it’s easy to start one. The top 1% of all podcasts account for 99% of all downloads. That means that if your goal is reach, the long tail isn’t going to help much. The short head, even in a medium as wide open as this, dominates consumption. Lots of podcasts to choose from, but most people don’t choose."(https://seths.blog/2026/06/the-relentless-math-of-the-long-tail/)

He makes a much longer point about fat heads and long tails, but there is another point Seth doesn’t emphasize, which is worth pursuing. The actions, behaviors, understanding, and thinking that make the algorithm that controls reach, give, or take away from a podcast creator operating on the fat head, are not the same actions, behaviors, beliefs, understanding, and thinking that reward podcast creators who want depth on the long-tail.

In principle, what this means is that podcast creators have to be willing to think, write, create, and distribute using the mechanics of platforms like Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and others, without succumbing to the seductive pull of those platforms' reductive logic. What has really brought this idea home has been my reading a collection of essays by the great playwright and Hollywood director, David Mamet, and his 1987 collection of essays, Writing in Restaurants.

Mamet deeply understood, even in 1987, that the theater building, the production company, the stage itself, could not be confused with the acting, writing, directing, or even the marketing of the play, the movie, or the television show. And even at a deeper level, he understands that creators must get comfortable with the philosophy of the thing they are doing, rather than confusing that thing with all the infrastructure surrounding that thing. He even parses these distinctions with regard to critics and their critical writing about theater productions. In other words, Mamet understood at a level deeper than most modern “content creators” exactly what he was creating, for whom he was creating it, and what the trade-offs were going to result in, in terms of opportunities, freedom, and, of course, money.

In our time, podcasts are probably the last pure Internet-based medium that, through its various rises and falls over the last twenty-five years, can support the kind of thinking and philosophizing that theater itself grew to support in the 1960s and 1970s in this country and globally. The kind of thinking and philosophizing that Mamet grew to a sharp point in the 1980s. This means it’s probably time for podcast creators to start writing, talking, and publishing about not the mechanics of podcasting, the vagaries of YouTube, or even the flood of commercial shows in the market sucking up audience attention; but, instead, beginning conversations about what it means to podcast. And what it requires of a creator at a real level.

Maybe these conversations are happening in places this author and podcaster is unaware of. After all, other than talking to my guests, I don’t have interaction with other podcast creators or producers. So maybe that’s on me. There is a way to do podcasting, after all, where the host/producer/creator is, for all intents and purposes a man +1 show. But if these conversations are happening, among the more than a million podcast creators in the world, they are happening in such a muted fashion that they aren’t breaking through the zeitgeist of podcasting itself in any meaningful fashion.

Maybe this is all “inside baseball.” But I think the best way to become more impactful in podcasting is to go out further and further on the long tail, reveal the inside mechanics to the outside audience, and stop chasing the seductive idea of optimizing more and more for the platforms–or the stages and the production companies, if you will–and really getting down to brass tacks.

I think guys like David Mamet would appreciate that.