690. It’s Show Business, Baby!

Podcasting started as a niche-nerd pursuit. Now it’s a $9 billion industry. Is that a lot? The strange economics of this thing we do.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 2:48Speaker 01

  AI is so stupid.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  You think?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Oh, come on.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  All right, let's hear about that.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Tell me when you want me to stop trolling. You know, I'm a natural-born bully.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  I've come to see that.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I believe in justice. I do bullying for justice.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  This person, this bully for justice, is my friend Jenna Weiss-Berman. She is a podcast producer. We'll get to her very strong feelings about AI later.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  What's this episode about?

• 3:19Speaker 00

  It's a podcast about podcasts. We get about 10 to 20 emails a year of people saying, I listen to your show, and I don't understand how it works. It sounds like you all work kind of hard, but like, how do you get paid? Do you get paid?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  No, you just do it for free. That's so sweet.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  For the record, no. We don't make this show for free. So how does it all work? Let's pull back for a second. The entire podcast industry grosses maybe $9 billion a year globally. As industries go, that is relatively tiny. It's smaller than the bowling industry, smaller than the US pet grooming and boarding industry, it is much smaller than the US funeral home industry. But we're also talking about a relatively new industry. 2004 is generally considered the year that podcasting started. As of today, there are an estimated 620 million global listeners. For some people, it replaces talk radio or TV.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  For others, it opens new windows onto totally new worlds and new kinds of conversations. And for some listeners, a podcast is a place to ask questions. For instance, a Freakonomics Radio listener named Jerry recently sent us this email. There often seems to be a conceit that podcast hosts are scrappy individuals who are running the podcast from their home, she writes. But recently, I've been paying more attention to the long list of production credits that are acknowledged at the end. Who is funding all these people? Jerry had a lot of other questions about podcasts. Maybe you do, too. So today, on Freakonomics Radio, a producer, an agent, an economist, a media executive,

• 4:58Speaker 00

  and an AI evangelist walk into a recording studio and tell us everything they know about podcasting. Maybe we should start with some etymology.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  ... emerges iPod, which you can only buy in porn stores now, with broadcast, which it isn't. So both words that emerged to make podcasts make zero sense to anyone.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Do you have a better word?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Until there is a better word for it, this podcast starts now.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  I met Jenna Weiss-Berman a few years ago at a party for, big surprise here, people who make podcasts. So what exactly does she do?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I like to help people figure out what their podcasts are going to be. I'm a pod doc. Oh, my gosh. Cut that.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  That word is worse than podcast.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  No, do you know what's worse? A podcast doula. I could have said that.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  You just did, and we have it. Perfect.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  That's what I do. I help people bring their podcasts in the world.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  These days, Weiss-Berman runs a production company called Paperkite Audio, an offshoot of Amy Poehler's Paperkite Productions, and she's executive producer of the hit podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler. So what makes a podcast host a good host?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  I think a person has to be very curious, a good listener. They have to be really passionate about doing a podcast. Amy Poehler was always going to be the best at this. Like, I knew that the day I met her.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Do you need to make a good podcast to have a financially successful podcast?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yes, you do. And that does not mean that you need a famous person at the head of it. Sometimes it helps.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Says the person whose podcast won a Golden Globe.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  I don't know about award shows, but when they get it right, it makes sense.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  No, that's not why it won a Golden Globe. It's because she's so great at it, and she's so committed to it.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  I want to say that I know I am new to this game. I have great respect for this form. I have great respect for all the people that I am nominated with. I'm big fans of all of you, except for NPR.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  Just a bunch of celebs phoning it in, so try harder.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yes, a celebrity might bring an audience one time. They will not keep an audience.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  There was a period where there were a lot of celebrity-hosted podcasts being launched. Obamas, Harry and Meghan, and many, many, many, many others.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  I think some people hear about the gold rush of podcasting, and they think that they can do it because they're famous and they can jump in and get an audience. And a lot of them come into it with no ideas, and they're sort of hoping that the people around them will come up with ideas. But hosts themselves have to be invested, really invested, like, really excited. Amy and I talked for two years about her show before we pitched anything.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  You're kidding?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Tell me about that conversation.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Well, she listens to absolutely everything. She understands what is really goofy about podcasts, what's funny that isn't maybe intentionally funny sometimes.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  What is funny that isn't intentionally funny?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Just some of the self-helpiness of podcasts. Not yours. Yours is actually helpful.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  We don't help anyone.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Well, actually, that was kind of a goal of Good Hang, which is like, we're not trying to change you. This is not like a self-betterment space. This is just a place that you can, like, have some fun. We love the audience, and we just want them to be happy and be able to escape from the horrors of the world. People think of these things as very effortless. As you know, they're not. Good Hang takes a ton of work. I, like, really meticulously edit every episode. I go to every recording, so if you hear someone giggling in the background, it's me. You know, I do a lot of prep stuff. I deal with our advertisers, and we do live events.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  So how much do you know and care about whether a podcast will be successful when you start working on an idea?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I always know.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Okay, so how do you know? Because that sounds made up.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I know, but I do. I just, it's the only thing I know how to do.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Have you ever made an unsuccessful podcast?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Oh, well, then you didn't know.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. Sometimes I've made podcasts that I was hired to make that I didn't think were going to be hits, but I still had to make them.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  How does one go from a non-podcast, young person graduating from college to becoming the podcast? What was the word you used? Doula? Was it queen? Was it doctor?

• 10:02Speaker 01

  I just make podcasts. I'm a producer.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  What was your first real job in audio?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  First real job in audio was an internship at StoryCorps. It's essentially like an oral history project that is affiliated with NPR and the Library of Congress. I would go to an internship there in the mornings from like 9 to 12. And then I was a collector at a corporate law firm from like 12 to 9 PM, basically.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Were you good at that?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  I was so good at it. I loved making people give money that they owed. The checks would be addressed to me. I would get like a $4 million check from the biggest corporation. It was absolutely exhilarating.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  What was it about audio or radio that made you want to keep coming to that? Were you an NPR kid?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was. Like, Western Mass NPR kid. But I just liked audio storytelling more than anything else.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Why?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Because you could use your imagination. You can build a world. I just said storytelling and world building, which are two other terms I hate so much, but whatever. I feel like all good audio is like a good story, right? It doesn't matter to me if it's a chatty show, if it's a little comedy thing, if it's like a very complicated narrative series like I used to make with my company, Pineapple Street, that we would spend like a year and a half crafting eight gorgeous episodes. All people want to hear is a good, well-told, well-edited story.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Weiss Berman founded Pineapple Street Media in 2016 with fellow producer Max Linsky. At the time, she was running audio at BuzzFeed.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Max and I just kept hearing from interesting people who were like, we'd love to have your help making a show. I think Gimlet had just launched. There were a couple of networks at the time, but there was nobody who was doing like high-level production with partners. We didn't necessarily need to own it. We just wanted to help people. Mostly, we wanted to help people who were already operating at the highest level of what they did. So we started with the New York Times. You know, they do what they do pretty well. They didn't have podcasts yet.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  Well, they had had podcasts and they kind of abandoned them. Cause I started my podcast while I was at the New York Times.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  You did? Freakonomics?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. At the time, the Freakonomics blog was on nytimes.com. They just licensed that from us. And so I started the podcast and the Times said, well, we can distribute it. So we said, great. And then it was successful. And then I said, hey, do you want to go into business on this? And they said, you know, we tried podcasts for a few years and it really didn't work.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  This is so many places. We tried podcasts for a few years and it didn't work, but everyone tried them so half-acidly. Can I not say that on the radio?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm only laughing because you pronounced it so beautifully. Half-acidly.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Half-acidly. Podcasting for absolutely everyone, for all media companies for so long, was a thing that companies did not invest in or take seriously at all. For Pineapple Street, we sort of wanted to like level that up where it's like you have all these amazing journalists. Podcasting is becoming a thing. We can help you make good things. It doesn't just have to be something that you're like passionate journalists are doing in a closet in their free time. That's also how so many of the best podcasts got started. Reply All became a massive hit and was started as a side project of some people at WNYC. WNYC didn't want it. It went to Gimlet and it's probably the reason the Gimlet sold for so much money is that show.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  How long was Pineapple Street around? And tell me about the exit.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  I think we probably sold it a little early. Yes, you're giving me a big nod.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  I'm nodding in sympathy, if not in agreement.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Weiss Berman and Linsky sold Pineapple Street in 2019 to a company called Entercom, which was mostly known for its AM and FM radio stations. Today, that company is called Odyssey. The sale price was $18 million. That same year, Spotify decided that podcasting was a big deal and they bought several production companies, The Ringer and Gimlet and Parcast. Gimlet alone went for about $200 million. Where do you put us right now in 2026 on the arc of podcasting as a medium and as a business? Are we like early golden age? Are we way past golden age?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  I think this is the golden age. So many people thought that podcasting had its golden age, whenever it was, like eight years ago, when you were seeing all these companies selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. Wild, but that was really all speculative money and it was venture money. Some of the places that were selling were highly profitable and others were very early in trying to figure out their business models. It was a very frothy time, but it wasn't real money. It wasn't ad dollars. Like the ad dollars really weren't there yet.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  So what was it? It was just getting market share so that when the ad market or some other market matured that they'd be there?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so podcast listenership was growing rapidly, but podcast ad dollars were not growing rapidly. There would be these networks with 200 shows and they were supposed to sell ads on them, but then they would forget about 100 of them. And then there were also on the network sides, there were these huge minimum guarantees, is what we call them, which is essentially an ad advance that's structured kind of like a book advance, where you get a guaranteed amount of money from a network and then they have to find the advertisers to actually get that money. A lot of those deals started off really crazy, like where it would be a show that didn't yet exist with somebody who had some level of fame and suddenly they were getting,

• 15:59Speaker 01

  you know, $8 million a year to make something that they hadn't even decided what it was yet. And that really screwed these networks because they didn't have the download numbers to bring in the advertisers that they needed.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  So a lot of shows got shut down. A lot of people were fired.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say a lot of them, you know, had a great time for a few years and then they were restructured in a way that didn't make them happy, but some of them stuck with it, understanding the actual economics.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  What share of podcasts would you consider profitable?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  I'm including every guy in their parents' basement.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Sure. Why is it always only the guys in the, do women never live in their parents' basement?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  No, I'm just being honest. Women do not live in their parents' basement. I don't know, probably like 1% are profitable.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  This is probably a good time to say that one of the many quirks of the podcast business is that there is no industry-wide tracking system. So firm numbers are hard to come by. A lot of people do cite the same figure that Weiss Berman cited, that only about 1% of shows are profitable. If that's the case, can we really be in the golden age of podcasting?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Golden age of podcasting? There's so much housecleaning to be done in the podcast industry before we can talk about golden age.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  That is Will Page.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  I'm an author of the book Tarzan Economics, retitled Pivot as a paperback.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Tarzan economics, as in you have to let go of the old vine before you can grab the new one.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  And I'm the former chief economist of the Performing Rights Society, the equivalent of ASCAP or BMI in the United States, and then Spotify, a very famous Swedish music streaming service.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  And what did it mean to be chief economist at Spotify?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  So you would go from commercial negotiations work, willing buyer, willing seller, trying to establish a trade between labels, publishers, telco deals, and right the way across to artist work, artists who are furious at Spotify, who need to be convinced about the merits of the model in its early days to join the platform, bands like Radiohead, who famously called us the last dying fart of a stinking corpse, winning them over to be a participant in the platform.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Page was at Spotify when it went on that podcast buying binge, not just production companies like The Ringer and Gimlet, but some podcast tech companies like Megaphone and Anchor.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  The economics is really looking at what would it bring to platform? So if you invest in this bet, and this is a bet, some bets pay off, some bets don't, what's the retention like in the platform? Do you get people to join Spotify, which otherwise wouldn't? Yeah, I'm fine with BBC Music. Oh, you got podcasts now? Now enter that £12 a month subscription fee. I always think about streaming platforms as shopping malls and what makes you park the car, get the kids out, get the trolley and enter the mall? You know, that's what customer acquisition is about.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  So how did the bet pay off and which components paid off well, which didn't? And overall, was it a good bet for Spotify?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's not a taboo subject to say that the podcast bet has been watered down somewhat since those heady days. But I think the big ones were Anchor and Megaphone, investing in the tech stack. What Anchor especially, plus Megaphone allows you to do is for Spotify to control the insertion of the adverts so that the platform has skin in the game. We'll also offer distribution models where imagery, gifts, for example, can go with a podcast too. So modernizing the pipes of podcasting was definitely a bet worth investing in.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  Does podcasting look like a bubble to you in any way?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  It just needs to figure itself out. Just take a look at the casualties in the podcasting world, like the Wondery exit, like. $300 million, you've got the fingers burned with that.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Wondery was a podcast company started in 2016 by a former TV executive. It found huge success with narrative storytelling, especially true crime. Their idea was that a podcast could be just the first incarnation of a bigger media property, a movie or TV show especially, the same way that books traditionally have been. And it worked. Their hit podcast, Dirty John, produced with the LA Times, became a hit TV show. In 2020, just four years after it was founded, Wondery was sold to Amazon for about $300 million. Last year, Amazon restructured Wondery and laid off hundreds of employees. Spotify also had a big period of contraction after its buying spree.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  I remember working on the original Spotify podcast bet. And how an economist looks at things is different from the way that the lawyer, the commercial minded person would look at things. One example was if you'd ask the industry, is YouTube a podcast platform? They would say, no, it's Spotify and it's Apple. They're the podcast platforms. Then you ask the consumer, what's your number one venue for podcasts? And they all said YouTube. That's a great example of where the economics kicks in is the consumer and the creator are not speaking the same language.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  So what does the YouTube example tell you about what's knowable and not knowable, especially in a new industry?

• 21:03Speaker 02

  There's a lot of known unknowns in the world of podcasting. I'm fond of calling it the Wild West because there's so much noise out there that people are trying to make sense of. We reckon there's about 5 million podcasts out there. That's episodes, not shows. Spotify would estimate higher, Apple would estimate lower. That's interesting. What's really interesting is the scale of supply. So I calculated this for you this morning. Currently, there's a new episode going on to the unlimited digital shelf of Spotify and Apple every 0.9 seconds. What's the business worth? The highest estimate I've seen is $9 billion. There's lower ones as well. But one word or expression that I want to kind of land on your listeners to capture how I see podcasts is it's a sea of niches.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  I mean, there are big podcasts, but they're big niche podcasts. The confusion we're going to uncover in this conversation starts with that observation. It doesn't behave like other media industries have behaved in history. Profit is not necessarily the modifying podcasting.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Will, I have heard you say that you, and this is a quote, don't understand the economics of the podcast industry and that it, quote, doesn't make sense to you. So I was surprised to hear that because I thought if anyone should understand the economics of the podcast industry, it would be you. So please tell me what you don't understand.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I'll come up with a term here called prune juice. Alan Sugar, an entrepreneur of some fame, bought Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. He said, running a football club is like prune juice and that all the value goes around the sides of your body and out the other end. This is a graphic description for podcasts.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  Yes, it is.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  But if you think about the RSS feed, where the adverts, the monetizable asset is locked into the podcast, then where is the value for the intermediary in distributing it?

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Let me pause here for a second to focus on what Will Page just said. If the advertisements on a podcast, the monetizable asset are locked into the podcast, which historically they have been, then what does the distributor get? By distributor, Page means Apple Podcasts or Spotify or the many other podcast platforms. And when he mentioned the RSS feed, that stands for really simple syndication, which is an old but still reliable publishing format that gives each podcast a unique web address. And that's where the platforms can find the show and make new episodes available to listeners. RSS is a big reason why you can listen to a given podcast on nearly any platform.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  That's not the way it works for TV or music or pretty much anything. So if we're thinking about why podcasting is spread so far, so fast, it's partly because nobody really controlled it.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  That's one example of the Wild West of podcasting of just how can that be a functional supply chain?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  These were choices made by platforms. So Apple, for instance, rarely does anything for free. But Apple Podcasts was essentially a free service to the consumer, but also free to the producer.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  It's the greatest free lunch in media history. It could have been different, but it stood the test of time. But let me just add to the warped nature of the supply chain. Let's say you're paying for one of the music streaming platforms, Amazon, YouTube, Spotify, Apple. And all you did last month was listen to podcasts. At no point did you stream copyrightable music. Do you know what happens to 70% revenue share to record labels and publishers?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Nothing. They still get their money. So there's no real incentive, monetary incentive for podcast consumption on the platform because it doesn't affect the gross margin structure of the streamer. When you step back and look at those two observations, A, nobody has to pay a penny to get to market, even though there's lots of costs involved. And B, even if you're paying $12 a month to Spotify and all you do is listen to podcasts, the record labels are none the wiser because they're still getting their 70% revenue share. You want to step back at that and say, I don't understand the economics of podcasting.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  If the platforms are not making money off the podcasts, then what's their incentive to make their interfaces better, their discoverability mechanisms especially better? I would think there is zero incentive.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Right. Purely on the P and L, there'll be zero incentive because it just doesn't add up. Then we have to step back and look at the competitive landscape. What's the value of a moat? What's the value of acquiring a new customer? Spotify's move was to bring new customers in and keep them stickier. YouTube has its purpose as well. We are a huge player in the world of podcasts, perhaps the biggest of them all. YouTube is like the Death Star eating the world of media right now. But what is the value of a podcast? Zero. What is the value of a moat to protect this multi-billion dollar business? And that's what we have to kind of unpack here.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 26:11Speaker 00

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• 28:59Speaker 00

  This podcast was born in 2010. It is still mostly a do it yourself project. I have a small production company that employs the producers and editors and engineers. And over the years, we've had a few different business partners for distribution and ad sales. In the beginning, we partnered with two public radio outfits, WNYC and American Public Media. Then we moved to Stitcher, a for-profit that was founded by a former WNYC executive. Stitcher ultimately got bought by Sirius XM, a publicly traded audio entertainment company. As the person who makes this show, I try to keep my distance from the business side, which I can do because of this person.

• 29:43Speaker 06

  My name is Ben Davis. I'm an agent at WME.

• 29:48Speaker 06

  Well, I was thinking, as much as I talk about the podcast business for over a decade now, I've never actually been on a podcast.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Seriously?

• 29:56Speaker 06

  Yes, this is the first time.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  How can that be?

• 29:59Speaker 06

  No one's asked.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I literally find that impossible to believe.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  Well, I'm not used to being on, Mike. I should say, you know, it's not our natural habitat as agents.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Davis is a senior partner in the digital group at WME, and he represents some of the biggest names in podcasting. Renee Brown, Andrew Huberman, Malcolm Gladwell, Hot Ones, Jay Shetty. I was one of Davis's first podcast clients, and I'm pretty sure I'm his favorite.

• 30:26Speaker 06

  I don't have favorite clients.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  I think he's just saying that to protect everybody else's feelings. Anyway, I asked Ben to answer the question we got from our listener, Jerry. How does the podcast industry work? And where does the money come from?

• 30:43Speaker 06

  It's simply through ads, right? If this was a show on a cable network, they would sell the ads, they would pay their executives, pay for the real estate, and then negotiate with the host to pay them as little as possible so they can retain the upside.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm familiar with that model.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  You're familiar, but in this case, you no longer need someone else's real estate to reach your audience. So you are the host, but also the owner and the network. And so those ads are sold by a third party, Sirius in your case. But then it goes to you and your company to invest in continuing to make this.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  And how are podcast ads priced?

• 31:20Speaker 06

  CPMs are the way that ads in general are priced. Cost per thousand impressions. And podcast CPMs tend to be around $17 to $22, which is sort of back of the napkin for your average show. In general, those numbers have gone up. But the CPM for the biggest shows have gone up tremendously. If they're in a valuable category or a tough to reach audience, they could go as high as $100 CPM. So for every 1,000 people, they pay $100, and it could go higher than that.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  How does CPM, cost per thousand of ad sales in a median podcast compared to CPM in, let's say, terrestrial radio?

• 31:56Speaker 06

  It's much higher.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Why is that?

• 31:58Speaker 06

  Well, one, the host read ads. So there's a relationship that you're lending your voice to read an ad, which of course exists on the radio side as well. But there's more of a direct relationship with the audience, such that the ads perform better typically. I think that there's better tracking than many of those mediums. It's intimate. It's more pull than push, right? You're seeking out your favorite shows, and you're spending time with it week in, week out. I think that what the podcast industry gets wrong, it thinks too small about the world that it's living in. When you zoom out, this is really just self-distributed shows. Where we're going to see a lot of growth in the coming years are talent applying the podcast style model

• 32:39Speaker 06

  to new kinds of formats, formats that might have existed in television prior.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  When we see the big dollar deals, Dax Shepard, Smart List Guys, Alex Cooper, Joe Rogan, Jay Shetty, if these numbers are in the, let's call it $50 to $250 million, describe what goes into that and what comes out of it? Like, what's a platform getting for that for $100 million deal? Let's say, what's the term of that deal? What's the frequency? How is the money earned back? Do those deals typically earn out, et cetera?

• 33:11Speaker 06

  So every deal's different, but typically, these are multi-year deals. They could be three years, four years.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  And they're typically licensed and not sold, correct?

• 33:19Speaker 06

  Correct. These are rentals. So they're getting a fixed term where they have sales and distribution rights. Every single one includes ad sales rights. It might also include bonus content that's exclusive to one platform or another. It could include the obligation to do a certain amount of events over the course of the term, sponsorship rights to those events, social media posts, every surface that a podcast touches. Oftentimes, they include obligations on the talent to still deliver the goods. So these often include download minimums or impression minimums where the guarantee is contingent on delivering a certain amount of audience. Every situation is different. The leverage is different. The buyer is different.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  What share of podcast industry revenue is from ads versus subscriptions, donations, any other non-ad-supported model?

• 34:06Speaker 06

  I would guess around 80%, but there are some shows where it's the opposite, where they maybe are in a certain category or have a super loyal relationship with their audience, and they super serve them on Patreon with multiple episodes per week, and they make the majority of their money through subscription.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  In this way, the podcast business model has started to look more like the magazine or newspaper model, or the newsletter model, a blend of advertiser revenues, subscription revenues, live events, merch, et cetera, et cetera. Here's Will Page again. This interview took place in June.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  We're now in a business where it's not how many downloads did you get? It's how much monetizable users do you have? Headline which just dropped today, I'm not sure if you picked up on this, is that Patreon, one of the many crowdfunding models out there, has announced they've paid $629 million to podcast this last year, and that's up by a third.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Wow. What's that compared to the? Well, the platforms pay zero typically.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  How does that compare to the ad revenue that's going to podcasters?

• 35:15Speaker 02

  It's significant, and it's going to the fewer as opposed to the many, because, you know, there's a podcast every second going on to the platform. Not all of these can form membership groups. So you have the filtering, the bifurcation of the market. Joe Budden, he's announced that he's doing a million a month on Patreon. I mean, that's serious cabbage when you think about it.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  I think that companies have and continue to experiment.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  And Ben Davis again.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  What is the version of that? Where there's value that can be conferred on a platform, where the audience become a Sirius subscriber or a Spotify user, or whatever it might be? And there's been various experiments around how to do this in a way that makes sense. Initially, I would say it's sort of blunt force, but that will continue to evolve. And I think that there'll be ways that work, and it's really show by show.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Do you ever, like me, find yourself thinking that the word podcast is just a horrible word? And that it's too bad there wasn't something better?

• 36:08Speaker 06

  I totally agree with you. I think it's minimizing, and I think that it has this connotation which doesn't do justice to what people are doing. You know, I'm in a company where it's like, I'm a movie agent. I'm a book agent. I'm a theater agent. I get to say I'm a podcast agent. I mean, frankly, I'm actually, I say I'm a digital agent, which is IT to some.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  The way I choose to define it is it's a digitally distributed show.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Nice. A digitally distributed show. This is Jim Bankoff.

• 36:42Speaker 07

  I'm the chair and CEO of Vox Media.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Vox is a privately held media company that Bankoff helped build out of a network of regional sports blogs. With venture backing and then investments from big media firms, Vox turned into an acquisition engine. It now runs a vast collage of digital media properties, and it has a substantial podcast division.

• 37:06Speaker 07

  We're just about at 50 different shows that we run, or 50 different groups of talent that we work with that produce shows. I think if you look at the audience size, it's roughly over half owned and operated shows. But if you look at the number of shows, it's predominantly partnered.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  I assume you don't give out revenues publicly?

• 37:27Speaker 07

  No, we don't.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  So can you tell me what share of revenues are from ad sales versus subscriptions and/or other sources?

• 37:34Speaker 07

  In our case, as it relates to the podcast business, it's predominantly advertising. There are other sources, and those other sources are growing faster than advertising. Those other sources include live events, they include subscriptions, they include license fees that we get paid by distributors. But first and foremost, it's advertising. If you look at the rest of our business, we have successful subscription businesses, notably around New York Magazine, which has over 400,000 paid subscribers and growing at a nice clip. And then we also have Vox and The Verge, which offer subscriptions and are just launched a little over a year ago and are doing really well. And then some of our podcasts also offer subscriptions or membership programs.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  All that news is good news for Vox, but it's not the big news. The big news is that earlier this year, they sold part of the company, including the podcast division, for a reported $300 million.

• 38:29Speaker 07

  Long story short, we split the company. Half of the company roughly will be owned by Lupa Systems, which is the investment arm of James and Catherine Murdoch. I will be the CEO of that company. That company will continue to be called Vox Media, and that company will be comprised of Vox, we sometimes call it vox.com, which itself has great podcasts, including Today Explained and Gray Area and several other big podcasts. Also, under Lupa will be New York Magazine.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  And very soon after selling off that portion of Vox Media, Bankoff sold the rest, including The Verge, SB Nation, and Eater to Penske Media. That price wasn't disclosed, and it's worth noting that Jay Penske's company had already invested in Vox, $100 million, back in 2023.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  We've been working closely with them as a partner for many years, and they got to know the business very well. Jay has a lot of different businesses that he manages, but one of them is what I'll call this publication business. They have an outstanding portfolio as well. They have Variety, Rolling Stone, Hollywood Reporter, Rob Report, their list goes on. And so the idea is to take their publications, create a new company that encompasses theirs and ours.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  So Vox Media, back in 2015, had a valuation for whatever that's worth of about $1 billion, I understand. And now you just sold the podcast and magazine parts for, let's call it $300 million. That seems like a, I don't even want to say a devaluation, it's just a different animal. If you especially compare the price you got for Vox Podcast to what Spotify paid for the three production companies that they bought at the time, Gimlet, Parcast, and The Ringer, what does that say about the valuation of podcast networks or producers themselves? Does it feel like that was bubble and now we're normal? Does

• 40:28Speaker 00

  it feel like it was a crash from which there won't be a recovery? Does it feel like this is another early day in what you think will be a longer term rise in valuation? How do you see it?

• 40:40Speaker 07

  I'm not going to be the first to say that valuations ebb and flow, just like the stock market does. I mean, listen, we're very privileged and fortunate to build something that commands so much value in so many people's eyes because of all the hard and smart work that goes into it. But what we really want to do is continue to have an economic model that enables us to grow and create outstanding work. These transactions are focused on the long term.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  I've always been a little bit surprised that Apple, which likes to make money, Apple is an amazing company that's really, really good at making money by making stuff that people really want. But from the outset, Steve Jobs just kind of decided that it would be cool to have a podcast app on the iPhone and instantly created this global, instant, free distribution system for someone like me, which is a remarkable gift. I mean, it reminds me of in the early days saying, I'm going to build railroads everywhere around the world, and anybody who wants to can put their trains on them and take them anywhere. Like, that doesn't happen, except in the digital world. But Apple decided not to really

• 41:53Speaker 00

  try to get a piece of the podcast action. What do you think might have been different about the industry if they had?

• 42:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's an important question. I think it would have stifled growth and adoption, or it would have, at minimum, left the door open for other entities to come in. Podcasting grew up on an open distribution system, much like the web grew up in an open distribution system. There have been movements to close the web ecosystem.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Well, there were movements to close the podcast.

• 42:25Speaker 07

  And there are movements to close the podcasting one over time.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Why do you think those efforts failed, Jim? Because these were the big players, Spotify, Amazon, and so on. After acquiring a podcast studio, they would make some of their shows exclusive to their platforms. You couldn't find them on Apple or elsewhere. Ultimately, they reversed that walled garden approach. But why do you think it didn't work?

• 42:49Speaker 07

  One thing I've learned over time is the platforms are going to operate in their best interest. And it's in their best interest to have a wide variety of content out there, a wide variety of creators contributing to their platform. And an open ecosystem encourages that, more so than a closed ecosystem.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  I keep reading that within the podcast economy, there's something like $1 billion of advertiser demand sitting on the sidelines because the industry can't agree on how to measure audience exactly, number of listens or number of listeners, or the share of an episode that is consumed and so on. Can you just talk about measurement itself as an issue?

• 43:35Speaker 07

  I think the industry, and frankly, the platforms, need to do a better job. YouTube might have one way of measuring Spotify, Apple, RSS. There's a lot of different formats. And so it's often left to us to stitch them together and be direct and honest with our advertisers about what's going on. If anything, I think we're all being undervalued right now, and I look forward to helping fix that problem.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  When you realize there's no real audience measurement figures still to this day, and we've had podcasts for over 20 years, it's the Wild West.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  That, again, is Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Are we going to stick to this RSS feed, which has served podcasting since 2004? Are we going to adopt something new? Are we going to stick to these flaky audience figure measurements? Are we going to adopt something new? Are we going to stick to multiple subscription models, Patreon, Kickstarter? Or are we going to have a common currency where I can subscribe to three or four podcasts in a simple click? Can I say, we just jump across media verticals here, it's not dissimilar from the book industry. You know, why can't I go to Amazon and have one press, one transaction, own the hardback for my shelf to impress my friends, the Kindle, so I can read it on a beach, and the audiobook, so I can hear it on my commute? We've had Amazon books since 1997, and I still can't do that. That's not consumer centric at all.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I mean, is that the first step? And then a kind of more organized industry can coalesce around it, you're saying?

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we need to let go of the old vine of the amateur podcast and reach out to the new vine of the professional podcast, separate out the filler from the killer. And that's going to involve some hard choices for an industry that's been brought up on the RSS feed, brought up on hobbyism. You want skin in the game. If you want the platforms to take this format seriously, I think the industry itself has to take it myself more seriously. And I think you'll see more walled gardens, more exclusive arrangements, more investment in video, more competition with television.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  This summer, Oxford Road, one of the biggest podcast ad agencies, convened the AMP Accords, the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting. Their main claim is that podcast advertising measurement is broken. "Our agency spends more than half a billion dollars a year inside podcasting," Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger said. "And I still cannot tell a chief marketing officer with confidence what counts as an impression. Television solved that in 1950, digital solved it in 2005. Podcasting is the only major medium left where the platforms ask advertisers to take their word for it, and advertisers still do."

• 46:14Speaker 00

  So the podcast industry is trying to mature, let's call it, but how long will that take? Because something else is already happening.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Two large language models walk into a bar, okay?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  What does AI do to podcasting? That's coming up after the break. This is Freakonomics Radio, and my name is Stephen Dubner. I appreciate your listening.

• 46:46Speaker 00

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• 48:27Speaker 00

  Over the past year, the podcast ecosystem has been flooded with AI-generated content. Here again is Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  It was already easy to get to market as humans. It's so much easier to get to market with so much more volume when you're just AI slop, when there's no human in the mix. So let's imagine an AI-automated show produced in real time. It could be a tragedy or a big event and news happens, so you can knock out that podcast before any human can get to market. Let's say it gets just 200 plays, okay? And you've got a $20 CPM on those 200 plays. That means you've earned, mathematics here, $4. And let's just slap a marginal cost down there of $3 in production costs. So that means you've made a dollar profit. And it's the ability to flood the market because plays mean money. It's got nothing to do with retention.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  So is this a substitute or a complement to human-made podcasts then?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  So this is where it gets quite spicy. Dilution theory is real. A song lasts for four minutes of my time, a podcast lasts for 40. AI slot podcasts, if it lasts for 40, is 40 minutes that I can't give a human-created podcast as well. So it has real effects in terms of dilution because it's competing for so much of the clock. The big discussion point in the world of podcasting is, of course, Inception Point AI.

• 49:50Speaker 06

  My name is Janine Wright. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Inception Point AI. We make AI-generated personalities and AI-generated content that those personalities release into the world.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  And how much content is Inception Point making? Here's what Wright told me when we spoke in May.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  We have about 15,000 active shows, more than 300,000 active episodes.

• 50:15Speaker 00

  But it seems like all those podcasts aren't really the point.

• 50:18Speaker 06

  We think of ourselves as a tech company, not a media company or as a podcast network. We have built the underlying platform that allows us to work with other third-party companies to allow them to make AI-generated content and AI-generated personalities.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Janine Wright has been in the podcast industry for a while. She was co-founder and COO of Simplecast, a hosting and distribution platform that was acquired in 2020 by SiriusXM. And she was COO of the podcast network Wondery that we mentioned earlier. But she sees Inception Point AI differently.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  Right now, the overwhelming majority of the content that we're making is in audio, but we are also in video. We're on YouTube and the social media platforms. And we are also in beta on real-time personalities, so being able to talk on the phone, text, live chat with our personalities.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Okay. Tell me where your funding comes from.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we raised 5.2 million in our seed series. We raised quite quickly in an oversubscribed round. And that was our seed funding in order to really give us an opportunity to be able to build what we believe is the platform for the future, the way that we think most content will be made in the future is AI-generated content and AI-generated personalities.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  You mentioned 15,000 active shows, 300,000 episodes. Give me a sense of listenership. Maybe take your five biggest shows. Tell me how many downloads or streams or listens or however you want to measure that each one gets in, again, whatever window of the metric you want to do, one day, 30 days, 90 days, et cetera.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  That's, I think, an interesting question because it's kind of what we believe is fundamentally broken about the business model for many traditional media companies is you become very dependent on a very small number of hit shows. It works much more like a VC portfolio where you're hoping that you have a few big ones that break out and you invest a ton of production and marketing resources in trying to get those to break through. But because we have really radically reduced the production costs, we think about it on a portfolio basis. So we're now reaching more than about a million downloads a month across our portfolio. But the overwhelming majority of our shows are small in comparison to what you would

• 52:37Speaker 06

  traditionally think of as a hit or a success in the podcasting business.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  So, no offense at all, but a million downloads a month across a portfolio of 15,000 shows is, you know, terribly low compared to established podcasts. So I understand the portfolio argument, but when VCs invest in a portfolio of assets, they're investing quite a bit of money, or at least, you know, enough money for the startup founders to do what they need to do, which is, you know, real estate, hiring, the tech stack, et cetera, et cetera. Your costs, though, are astonishingly low. It seems close to zero. I've read that you make an episode for about a dollar. Is that right?

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, so on an aggregated basis, it comes out to about a dollar an episode. I get your point with respect to the business model and the number of listeners that we're reaching. I mean, first and foremost, the business model is not designed around monetization of our own content. The vision is that we are building a tech company that will make the overwhelming majority of our money from our relationships with enterprises and enabling them to be able to use our platform to do the same.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Is there advertising on your shows?

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you've caught us in a little bit of a weird time because we're migrating platforms and so we're getting the new systems set up. But, but yes, previous to this, we have been supported by programmatic advertising.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  For people who don't know what programmatic advertising is, just describe that quickly, please.

• 54:01Speaker 06

  So that's advertisers who are not looking to advertise in any particular show or with any particular host, you know? So it's not somebody who went to sign up to advertise on Freakonomics or to have Stephen Dubner read an ad spot or endorse a particular product.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Just to be clear, I don't do endorsements, but thank you.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  Okay, sorry.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  No, that's okay. I'm a little boy scouty about that.

• 54:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so these are advertisers who have said, we just want to reach particular kinds of audience. We want to reach audiences that like, audiences that live in California or audiences that might like outdoorsy kind of content, right? So they're buying audiences in big buckets of content and they really don't have a particular preference as to the shows that make up that bucket. We think that content in the future will be more niche, more micro-community, more personalized. So we do pollen reports and ski reports and local music scenes, all sorts of things about weather or news or local community updates. And then when we find markets that work, then we roll them out into 100 different markets.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, where's the information coming from? How is it turned into content? And then how is that content meant to be found by a would-be consumer?

• 55:16Speaker 06

  So we are not a model maker. We're an AI orchestration layer. So we are pulling from a number of different LLMs and we're pulling from a number of different data sources, depending on whatever the topic is that we're creating content around. If we're going to do, for example, a local crime report, there is local data sources that are available that are very influential in that content. So we'll pull from a direct data source.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  A police report, for instance, in that case?

• 55:44Speaker 06

  Police report, court filings, even sometimes publicly available police blotters, all sorts of things like that.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  Let me go back to your pollen example. What about fact-checking and any other version of something like fact-checking to assure that you're actually disseminating the information from the right place, the right date, with the right intensity, with the right nuance, et cetera? How do you think about that?

• 56:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that's a lot of what I think is the secret sauce of what we have built. Nowadays, you're seeing it's pretty easy for somebody to just go to, you know, NotebookLM or even today, you can go to your Alexa and say, you know, make me a podcast. And the next 10 minutes later, it will make you a podcast. We have built into our system various QA processes throughout.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  QA meaning quality assurance?

• 56:30Speaker 06

  Quality assurance that allows to do a bunch of gate checking.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  How much of that is done by humans versus other AIs?

• 56:38Speaker 06

  None of it is done by humans today. Half of my team is creative, so yes, we have creators. The creators spend the overwhelming majority of their time at the very tip of the spear, the front end of the process. They're designing the personalities, they're designing the formats and the recipes, and they're figuring out what the story arcs are going to be. And then they are reviewing and making sure that these processes at the beginning are producing the quality of the content that we want. And then we have our tech systems that come in and automate everything about the process that it possibly can.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  With 15,000 shows, I would think there's at least, you know, a few hundred humans there involved in this whole creating, checking, generating, disseminating, monetizing, et cetera, et cetera, process. How big is your staff and payroll?

• 57:26Speaker 06

  We just hired our 11th employee. So there's about five tech folks, five creators and me. We also have eight agentic employees we've created that work for us full-time in service of the work that we're doing.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Why are they called employees if they're agentic?

• 57:41Speaker 06

  They have names, we assign them roles, they have specific tasks.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Are they paid?

• 57:46Speaker 06

  They are not paid, no.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  They don't have benefits?

• 57:48Speaker 06

  We pay somebody for them. They don't have benefits, no. But being able to leverage these agents to help work for us helps make us more efficient and makes it so that, you know, we just rolled out our first 401K.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Congratulations.

• 58:02Speaker 06

  Thank you. Actually, I referenced your nudge theory episode when I rolled it out.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Got it. Plainly, you're building a company around the idea that AI-generated content of a fairly high level is legitimate and will have an audience and will be valuable and most of all make a lot of money. Tell me what persuades you that's actually true.

• 58:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard for human brains to even comprehend the amount of data that is going into these underlying models that are feeding the information that we're then using to generate content. And being able to check one model's outputs against other models' outputs really makes those outputs then in and of themselves more reliable. I think it's also, you know, the fact that this is the most invested in technology of all time. You literally have millions of people hours, hundreds of millions of dollars. Going into improving this technology every single month and our processes are getting better at leveraging the technology over time.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  So you've got one show called Jason and Travis Kelsey Football Brothers. There's an image, which I assume is AI-generated image. Jason looks pretty much like Jason. Travis looks not that much like Travis. How would you describe that show? What's the need? What's the audience for an AI-generated version of a Travis and Jason Kelsey show?

• 59:21Speaker 06

  It's people who are wanting to have regular information about those people. And we've helped provide that information by aggregating information that is news and updates that have happened about these folks and then putting it together with a personality in a storytelling type way that people like to consume.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  I'm curious, has there been legal action either threatened or taken by the Kelseys? Or has there been legal action taken or threatened by anyone else who is the underlying subject of podcasts that you've created with AI?

• 59:54Speaker 06

  I mean, not really. Every once in a while, we'll get somebody who doesn't like the news coverage about them. We do a lot of stock trackers, for example. And so when a company's stock is declining, sometimes we'll get a brand that will reach out and say, oh, we don't love this stock tracker that you're doing about this. Could you not use our brand name?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  What do you do in that case?

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  Most of the time, we change it or we take it down. When we're operating at this kind of scale, even if we believe that we're squarely within our rights because this is a public figure or the newsworthiness protections, it's not worth it for us on a single show basis to contend.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  What happens to your business model if the underlying LLM providers are successfully sued for how they've ingested data from copyrighted sources?

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  We rely on the data that we're receiving from our providers. So if they are sued or they engage in or enter into, for example, license agreements with third parties to provide content, then their costs in order to deliver the content to us go up and our costs go up as a result.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  It seems to me that humans love technology, but they love humans even more. Do you remember when Deep Blue, the computer made by IBM, beat Garry Kasparov in chess? And it was this amazing technological breakthrough and people who understood chess were knocked out by it. And the predictions were that human chess was finished. Why bother when the computer will always win? And yet, it didn't happen at all. People still overwhelmingly prefer watching humans play humans as opposed to watching a human play a computer, certainly two computers play each other. So with an AI-generated podcast where the content is coming from a pool of publicly

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  available knowledge, essentially, and where the voice and the intentions are different than the human elements that we're accustomed to, what makes you think that people want what you're making?

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  I think that we're in an interesting moment in time where people want there to be two different categories. They want there to be AI-generated content and not AI-generated content. And that line is becoming very blurry because more and more people are starting to use AI in all sorts of different aspects of their content creation processes. And then you start getting into this sticky situation of trying to find out what is it that creators and what is it that consumers actually care about being AI-generated, right? Is it really that they have a problem with a synthetic voice? Or is it they have a problem that the script is generated in an LLM?

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  Or that the production process has become more automated and there's not a real-life person in there? Or that there's no real-life fact checker or real-life researcher? And when you poll a crowd, I think you would get very different answers across the whole spectrum.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Yes, I would agree with Janine Wright on this point. When it comes to content that is primarily generated by AI, yes, you will get very different answers across the spectrum. For instance, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Janine Wright is the podcast producer Jenna Weiss-Berman, who we met at the start of this episode. I asked her if she is familiar with Wright's company, Inception Point AI.

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I think they're the devil, and I'm happy to say that.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Well, you just did, so I hope you're happy.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because what are we doing here? Like, what are we doing? Art is art. Like, this medium is creative. Why are we trying to bring in artificial intelligence? Stephen, artificial intelligence? Aren't you more interested in human intelligence, in actual intelligence? Also, like, the friction that is needed to make good and creative and interesting stuff? I don't understand why I'm supposed to be excited about something that has the potential to kill a ton of jobs. I love working with humans. I love hearing their ideas, like Amy Poehler. Like, AI can't copy Amy. What are we doing?

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  A few weeks after I spoke with Janine Wright, the CEO of Inception Point AI, the firm rebranded itself as Liquid Studios. Here's what Wright told us by email. The biggest lesson we learned was that betting on one model or even a handful is a death sentence. She said that Liquid Studios will still be using AI tech, but it will be directed toward existing content. We don't start from a blank page anymore, she wrote. We start from something a human already cared enough to make. Jenna Weiss-Berman, meanwhile, has just launched a new, very human-centered podcast with Ina Garten, the cookbook author and longtime host of Barefoot Contessa.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  It's called Happy Hour. She'll be mixing drinks and explaining how they're made, chatting with fun, interesting guests, and she's just so sweet and lovely.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  And was this your idea or her idea?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  We started talking about it two years ago. I always, it's gotta take two years.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Two years for me seems like nothing. I've been making Freakonomics Radio now for 16 years. Would happily take another 16. This project has allowed me to learn so much, to speak with so many interesting people, to solve so many puzzles. So I think podcasting is the best invention in the history of the world. I do hate the name, though. I went back to my friend and agent Ben Davis for one last try. Do you have any suggestions for better names? Have you ever heard anybody refer to their podcast as something different that you think was promising?

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Shows. These are just shows, right?

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Wait a minute, have I been in show business this whole time and I didn't know it?

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  You're in show business, baby. Yes, come on.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  My thanks to Ben Davis, Jenna Weiss-Berman, Janine Wright, Jim Bankoff, and Will Page for today's conversations. Also, thanks to our listener Jerry for the idea. And since I now know that we are in show business, maybe it's time to take you behind the scenes. We're going to try a new occasional episode called Ask Us Anything. You can send an email with any kind of question or observation or complaint about this show, and we will answer it. Our email is [email protected]. In the subject line, write Ask Us Anything.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  You can ask about how an episode actually gets made, why we asked this person that question, or why we didn't, why we haven't followed up on something you've been waiting eight years to hear about. Again, Ask Us Anything, questions, complaints, old grudges, they're all welcome. Write to [email protected]. Meanwhile, coming up next time on the show, David Rubenstein seems to be what you might call a virtuous billionaire.

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  I got everything I need. I'm just really trying to give back to society. I got very lucky in life. My parents were not college educated. They weren't even high school educated.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  His list of philanthropic involvement is exhausting, although he is no longer chairman of the Kennedy Center.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  I'm the only person ever to be fired by a president and succeeded by him at the same time.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  And now Rubenstein owns a baseball team.

• 1:07:41Speaker 06

  It's very frustrating when you lose because you feel like you're responsible for it, but you can't really make many changes on it.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Mandy Gorinsteine, was edited by Ellen Frankman, and mixed by Jake Loomis with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Dalvin Abawaji, Claire Keenan-Kurgan, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Pete Madden, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Here's my favorite podcast joke. What's the best way to keep a secret, Stephen?

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Put it at the end of a podcast?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

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• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  Game day always tastes like a win with crave-worthy seafood from Gorton's. From beer-battered fish to coconut shrimp to new taco tenders, Gorton's has been making seafood worth celebrating for over 175 years. Straight from the freezer to the air fryer or oven, it's the easy and reliable way to keep everyone fed without missing a minute of the action. Because when the snacks are this good, everybody wins. Visit gorton's.com to find more restaurant-quality recipes. Hey, it's Kelly Ripa. And if you don't know, I have a podcast where I get to say whatever I want. Hold on, let me get a shovel and a body bag. I envision doing a podcast with the conversations that happen in my dressing room, off camera, where people feel free to talk. No hair, no makeup.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  This is my kind of job. Only Kelly Ripa can ask me these questions. I'm flipping the script and saying what's really on my mind. We're seeing a different side of you.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  It's a little bit more honest. When the cameras go off, the real fun begins. Get my hair done over here. Hey! This is an off-camera podcast, so it doesn't even matter. It's unfiltered conversations and unexpected confessions. My mom, it says. Woody, I knew your dad. Stop the press. I would like to volunteer to administer any and all DNA tests. Maybe that should be part of the show? Let's talk off-camera with me, Kelly Ripa. You just put that in the universe. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.