200 Podcasts

It takes ten years to become an “overnight” success. It also takes 100 episodes to become a “professional” podcaster.

The metrics are brutal:

78% to 92% of podcasts fail to make it past their first seven to ten episodes. By episode 3: Roughly 44% to 90% of all shows are abandoned. By Episode 7 to 8: Around 78% of podcasts stop publishing entirely. By Episode 10: Only about 8% to 22% of podcasts are still active.

These stats are from an AI search on Google, but that doesn’t mean the stats are wrong.

The fact is that while there may be around 8 million or so shows on the Internet calling themselves podcasts, the number that make it to the top of the popularity mountain that you’ve heard of is infinitesimally small. And that’s even before we get to the Rogans, the “Call Me Daddy” -ies, and the podcasts hosted by ex-Presidents.

This week, I dropped a panel discussion with the help of my podcast guest hosts, friends all, discussing the state of affairs for leaders in the post-literate world we are all about to inhabit in the West. It was a lively and wide-ranging discussion and, while we all didn’t agree on the conclusions, the conversation itself was the juice. Without gaslighting, strawman arguments, or social media flame-warring.

Imagine that. Twelve adults having a conversation without vitriol or personal attacks. I’m telling you, it can be done.

But even more so, the medium of podcasting allows for the space to do this. Outside of the marketing and corporate shows brought to you so long ago by NPR and its ilk, and now with a zone flooded by marketers and brands, the space of podcasting stands as the lone bulwark against the tide of polarization and seeing people, not as people, but as mere avatars that dance and move across the stage, signifying nothing more than a canvas for us to work out our psychological traumas on. Podcasting, podcasters, and the entire idea of podcast creation contains worlds that have a need to be explored.

Writing, recording, producing, and distributing two hundred regular episodes (in addition to another two hundred and fifty bonus episodes) has taught me many things. Chief among them is perspective. Leadership Lessons from the Great Books is a podcast designed for the leader who is a reader. And it’s designed for the leader who isn’t a reader but has the curiosity to know that there are ideas hidden in books that they may not know about. And it’s designed for the leader who is afraid of reading and just wants to dip their toes into the water a little bit at a time, with a host and a series of rotating co-hosts who won’t disrespect their intellect, insult their intelligence, and converse with about challenging ideas like the adults we know we all are.

And all of that inside an hour-and-a-half to two-hour-long conversation.

Very few people have the perseverance, self-control, discipline, or desire to do two hundred of anything. Particularly where it’s hard to get paid, the expense of time and attention is high, and the accolades are few and far between. The writer and gadfly Wendell Berry, who just died, would understand, though. And he’s one of the many authors we’ll be bringing to our listeners in the future.

I’ll close with these five lessons I’ve gleaned from the last 200+ conversations I’ve had and books I’ve read with people I respect deeply:

Reading is fundamental.

Leaders are readers.

Books are the best technology humans have invented for smuggling ideas across time to each other.

The novel might be on its last legs, but books are not.

And we all owe it to the future to remember that literacy, like freedom itself, is only ever one generation away from being snuffed out.

Thanks to the following guests for their contributions, insights, and sparring over the last three and a half years. In podcasting as in jiu-jitsu, you’re only as good as your training partners:

David Baumrucker, John Hill, Christen B. Horne, Richard Messing, Dorollo Nixon, Jr., Brian Bagley, Hana Kabele Gala, Moumin Quazi, Neal Kalechofsky, Zac Stucki, Tom Libby, Claire Chandler, Ryan J. Stout, Josh Poland, Atlas Aultman, Katie Mestres, Libby Unger, and Harvey Seifter.

…and all of the various authors, thinkers, consultants, educators, and more who have joined me over the last two hundred-plus bonus episodes.

Excelsior!

[Listen to the 200th episode by clicking on the link here.]

Writing About Podcasts in Restaurants

And I quote from Seth Godin @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 optimizing for reach on the fat head are not the same actions, behaviors, beliefs, understanding, and thinking that reward podcast creators who optimize for 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 concerning 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 sharpened to a 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, 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 are 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.