It’s fascinating to me how the whole thing developed. When the iPod launched, most music players (and mobile phones) had an FM radio. FM radios are so cheap to make and tiny that you may as well put them in anything that already has headphones (the headphone cable works nicely as an antenna).

But Steve Jobs hated FM Radio. So the iPod didn’t have one. And, it turned out, a lot of people liked listening to the radio. Someone came up with the idea of sharing a bunch of MP3s via an RSS feed so you could download the latest episodes of a radio show to your iPod when you plugged it into your computer.

So now you have a way of publishing radio shows to iPods with basically no barrier to entry. Something that is to radio what a web page is to a magazine article: cheaper to produce, no scarcity of space. Some will be from people who are fascinating experts on a thing so few people care about that no mainstream publication would devote scarce space to them. Others are random ramblings.

Then the iPod’s entire market slowly died as mobile phones evolved the same functionality. Now most things that play Podcasts are not iPods and have a network available when they are playing them, but the legacy remains.

It’s as if we’d built the web assuming a model of log on, download a bunch of pages for offline reading, and then log off, and this model had persisted to today.

The archetypal podcast is, indeed, bad though. Three American men laughing at their own jokes, forever.

Seriously, though, they're not all bad. Fish(*) of the sea swim together and shit.

(*yeah, I know that dolphins aren't fish...)

The occasional scripted one I found were still 45+ minute long and still really shallow on a subject or just uninformed opinion. No time for that in my life.
@gwynnion

It's been years, but I want those two hours back.

I'm like "write a script!" If I want to hear people shooting the shit, I'll join a Teams call. Otherwise, I'll just read the transcript that's been "edited for clarity" thanks.