I have been tossing some thoughts around in my head for a while about what is wrong with podcasting today. There are a number of factors, but last night it all started clarifying in my head a bit: Podcasts have an Evergreen content problem. <rant> 1/

For those not familiar, Evergreen Content is content that continues to be useful for a very long time, if not forever. It isn't tied to current tech, or modern news, or anything, and is usually very directly relevant to the human condition. 2/

Many books are evergreen, they can get recommended centuries after initial publication. People know how to recommend them, they can easily share the parts they like the most, and there are communities built up around every aspect of books. 3/

Videos are a little less evergreen, but with good content algorithms YouTube can still send people to amazing videos from many years back. And videos full of good ideas and wisdom continue to be shared and viewed many years past release. 4/

There is a lot of material that comes from podcasts that could be evergreen. There are incredibly intelligent people that dig very deep into their lives, pulling out nugget after nugget of wisdom. 5/

No other platform has the extent of both candid and deep, 1:1 or group discussions that podcasting does. The barrier to recording an audio discussion is lower than trying to film a good quality video, which means otherwise busy people can still find time to share their ideas. 6/

All of this material is going off into the void. Yeah technically the audio file is out there, and someone who really likes a show can go and binge through the backlog, but very rarely does an episode take off to the extent that it still gets shared five years later. 7/

There are exceptions of course, occasionally there will be a go-to reddit thread about the best @tferriss episodes of all time, and I'm sure @HardcoreHistory will be listened to for a long time, but those feel like the exception rather than the norm. 8/

Additionally, right now I don't know where I should go if I wanted to find new podcasts to listen to. I would probably start by finding a topic specific community and see if they had recommendations, or go to the community for a specific podcast 9/

and see if they can recommend similar, but that assumes there is an identifiable community. Although for some the community is active ( @imyke has done a great job using Reddit for this), sometimes that isn't the case. 10/

And there is no definitive standard, so participating in any significant number of the podcast communities may require signing up for half a dozen different forums and platforms. This is in stark contrast with something like Goodreads providing a unified community for books. 11/

And finally, even if you have a handle on all of the podcasts, and have joined communities around your favorites, the podcast consumption experience isn't aligned well towards truly getting a lot of value from the material. 12/

With a book, you are likely sitting down somewhere, it is easy to have a notebook open next to you, and if you are reading an ebook there is highlighting and note taking built right in. And you can easily skim back over sections to capture key details. 13/

And again, with communities like Goodreads there are hundreds of thousands of people out there sharing their favorite quotes, blurbs, and bits of wisdom from nearly every single book. There are even a few people recently who have started publicly sharing their raw book notes. 14/

Videos are more difficult, but YouTube provides a way of viewing transcriptions of the whole thing, you can skim through and look for visual indicators of what is being discussed, and the comment section occasionally actually links to one or two of the greatest parts. 15/

And again, you are likely sitting down to watch YouTube, so it is still much easier to be in a position to take notes. 16/

Podcasting doesn't have any of those advantages. The ideal format for consuming a podcast is away from the desk when walking around or doing chores with the phone in your pocket. There is no easy note taking, no way to quickly... 17/

skim back through, and without a community, no unified way to discuss, share, and find the best parts of the best episodes of the best podcasts. 18/

The only real way right now that I have seen is to use something like @otter_ai , transcribe the whole thing, then read back through the podcast and highlight the good parts, which is a lot of extra overhead to take notes. 19/

Without good note capture, it is harder to retain the information from the podcasts, which means people are only getting a fraction of the value they could otherwise be getting from the discussions between great people. 20/

It also makes it harder to incorporate into the great processes developed by folks like @fortelabs and @david_perell. Fundamentally there is a barrier between this content and tools like Evernote and @RoamResearch, which severely limits the usefulness. 21/

So yeah, those are most of the reasons why I think podcasts have an evergreen content problem. And there are likely others I'm not thinking of at the moment. And I certainly don't have any fully formed answers just yet, although I am working through a couple of ideas. </rant> 22/