Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Hey, we have a special announcement about this month's Get Lit With All of It book club. We are reading Lazarus Falls by Richard Price and of course, it takes place in Harlem. Now we can tell you our musical guest straight from Washington Heights will be Lakecia Benjamin. Lakecia is a New York-born and raised alto saxophonist who is up for two Grammys this year. She recently released a reimagined live version of her album Phoenix and I am delighted that she will be able to join us at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, the NYPL Tuesday, January 28th for a special live performance. The event is sold out. You already have tickets, you're in for a treat. If you don't, you can still follow along on the live stream. Head to wnyc.org/getlit for more information. If you scroll long enough on social media, you're bound to find a video of two people with headphones on, usually on a couch sitting in front of a microphone. That's because, in 2024, the latest trend in audio industry was adding video. Videos can make your podcast more discoverable on social media. Many listeners seem to enjoy tuning in to their favorite podcasts on YouTube.

For example, Joe Rogan's interview with then-candidate Donald Trump currently has 54 million views on the platform. Adding video can-- it privileges certain kinds of podcasts and certain kind of podcast hosts. Vulture and New York Magazine podcast critic Nick Quah asked more than 60 people from the industry what they think about turning cameras on in the podcast studio. His recent piece on the subject is titled Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? We'll discuss that piece and get some podcast recommendations for from Nick Quah , who joins me now. Hi, Nick.

Nick Quah: How's it going?

Alison Stewart: It's going forward. Hey, listeners, we want to hear from you. Do you watch videos of podcasts? What do you like about watching videos instead of just listening? We're also taking your podcast recommendations. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. We want to know what are you listening or watching these days? Let's talk about the why switch to video. Why have so many media companies decided that it's worth it to invest in creating video content for their podcasts?

Nick Quah: Well, in a word, it's growth. A bunch of bigger publishers and bigger shows have noticed that when they add a video element or when they also distribute it, in particular over YouTube and maybe break it out into clips for social media, they get a lot more, at least traction, according to the metrics. That has fueled a lot of excitement. A lot of momentum was, I would say, in terms of actually getting or leave it again, in front a lot more people and accessing more advertising dollars as a result. That's the primary engine that's driving a lot of this trend.

Alison Stewart: It seems like it might defeat the purpose of podcasts that you can listen to them on the go.

Nick Quah: That is very true. The thing is, is that part of what's at the heart of this is an identity question, like what exactly is a podcast? For me, at least, I associate a lot of podcasts with, in part, these chatcasts, where it's a bunch talking or an interview show in which one person sits down with another. I also associate it with something that's closer to audio documentary or something that's closer to audio art, something that you can't really represent in a visual medium. For many years, the question of what forms match this ecosystem largely wasn't asked.

It was an ecosystem that could support a lot of things. The podcast business has been in a strange place over the past couple of years, and a lot of the bigger companies were looking for avenues for growth. Now with video being what appears to be an answer, a bit of the tension here is that the identity question is resolving itself to privilege a specific kind of show or specific kind of shows at the expense of the other kinds. Yes, it defeats some purpose or it defeats what I associate with parts of the podcast world, it's a much bigger question at play here, and we can talk a little bit more about what it means for everybody going forward.

Alison Stewart: Video can favor the chat podcast. If you look the top 20 podcasts on Apple right now, many of them are chat podcasts, from Joe Rogan to Smartlist to Kylie Kelce. What is it about the chat podcasts that have become so popular?

Nick Quah: It's an extension of what we've already known. Radio has been a part of our lives for a very long time. The affordance of what podcast at a very basic level gives you is that you can take it on a go or you can access it whenever you like compared to what historically radio was limited to that, which means if you wanted to hear a show, you have to tune on on a certain time and if you miss the first 10 minutes, then you missed the first 10 minutes. There's something very simple and basic there about how chatcasts are supported with podcasts.

It's a layer onto your life kind of argument too. It's more of a lean-back experience as opposed to a lean-in. I think that matches in many ways the grand media experience that we kind of have in 2025.

Alison Stewart: How much is TikTok driving this? Well, at least till Sunday.

Nick Quah: Afterwards you'll go on a red note or something like that. To some extent-- to a large extent, actually. When I talk to a bunch of people about what is fueling the interest, it is this notion that podcasting for a long time had struggled with a discovery problem. It was difficult if you were starting a show to try to get in front of more people. The Internet, as we currently experience it is very visual. A lot of the social media platforms, a lot of the media platforms in general are visually oriented. The ability to cut out clips and run it through social media algorithms, which themselves are like a slot machine. You don't really know why things go viral, but things do. There's that new element of marketing essentially for many of these shows.

Alison Stewart: When you reported your piece, Will Video Kill The Audio Star, what concerns did podcasters have about relying so much on YouTube to help drive traffic to their show?

Nick Quah: On a very fundamental level, it means that podcasters as a whole is more dependent on one platform, in this case, YouTube. There's a larger context here that Spotify is also pushing into video. My understanding of why that's happening is that they want YouTube's juice here. One of the historical advantages of podcasting as an ecosystem is that you're not so mortally dependent on the whims of any one platform. In the media business and the digital media business as a whole has gone through many versions of this.

There are many media companies that rise and fell and fell apart because they were overly dependent on one platform. This was the risk that wass opening up here with a lot of these bigger podcast companies. Then there are also more aesthetic and more substance-based concerns. A couple of people I spoke to had concerns over the gender biases or how the video element or visual element of media means that only a person who looks a certain way shall we say, can benefit from being on screen. It's stuff like that changes the texture of who gets to ''win'' in this new economy.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I had to ask that. What did podcast hosts tell you about turning cameras on and how it affects their work?

Nick Quah: I like to say that I like to make podcasts when I can because like I'm a face for radio. That's one of the textures that has always been there. The concern here is that if you're say a woman, you have to look a certain way in order to track to gain traction on a visual media platform. Whereas men have more affordances. They can be a little sloppier. There's a certain aesthetic to the man bros that host a lot of these podcasts where they don't have to be as done up. There are these sort of really older classical forms of gender biases that come into play now and they get accelerated through this push into video.

Alison Stewart: It also lasts forever. If there's a video of it. I'll be honest, I got we had a little drama at the house. I got about four hours sleep last night. I look like I got four hours sleep last night on the air. I'm really glad there aren't cameras turned on right now. If they were, that video would last forever and ever and ever.

Nick Quah: Absolutely. Again, if you're a dude, that's probably less of an issue, right? [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nick Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York magazine. We're discussing his recent piece Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? We're going to bounce into some podcast recommendations in just a minute, so tell us. 212-443-9692 212-433-WNYC. What you are listening to or maybe something that you like. Someone said shout out to One Can Hope podcast sustainable eco tips and a casual listen.

Alison Stewart: I like the video option though because the sisters have very similar-sounding voices. Oh, that's really interesting. Do you think the-- we'll call it. Do you think the trend to turn to video is here to stay?

Nick Quah: I think so, but it really depends on what you mean. Part of how you can read the ''video trend,'' is that it is merely an ingestion into YouTube. Podcasting has become a subgenre of YouTube a little bit. Yes, it's here to stay because YouTube is here to stay. I think this bigger question is, is the audio-first form of podcasting here to stay as a result, or will it be ground into dust as the result of all these changes? I don't think that'll happen and I just think it'll just be much harder for audio-only podcasts to exist and to find audiences at scale

Maybe staying small is the way to go. I think that's a question that a lot of narrative audio-first podcasters are trying to figure out at this point in time.

Alison Stewart: This says, ''I'm pleasantly obsessed with the podcast, also with video on YouTube of strange coordinates. It takes a brand and finds something interesting about it, be it how it came to be. Always surprising what brands mean and stand in for the landscape of capitalism, sometimes through obscure movies that share a name or its cult beginnings. It's surprisingly hilarious and I always look forward to the next one.'' That's interesting. Podcasts is hard to break through. You know that there aren't too many new podcasts being released right now. Why do you think that is?

Nick Quah: Well, I'll sort of reframe that a little bit. There are new podcasts being made every day. It's more of the first thing you just said. It's harder and harder for new podcasts to break through, especially if you're not a celebrity or you're not part of a bigger operation or something like that. This is the challenge for-- it's not just the challenge that's unique to podcasts. I think that's true for music. There are new musicians every day, but because there are new musicians every day, it's harder and harder for musicians to break through. With podcasts specifically, it's harder for a specific kind of podcast being made, in particular, the narrative ones that take a lot more money upfront to make, and have a harder time, in general, getting money back when they do come out. It's a challenge that has been here around for a while and it feels particularly acute in 2025.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Joseph, who is calling in from Greenwich. Hi, Joseph, thanks so much for calling, all of it. You're on the air.

Joseph: Hi. Yes, thanks for having me. This is a shout-out for a podcast called Hearing Things by Julie and Brad. It is the ADA awareness for hearing impairment living in that world. They started the podcast about three months ago, but it has to be on video so people can read lips and they also have it. What's the word I'm looking for? I'm a little emotional because it's actually my oldest sister, so she's pretty wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Joseph, thank you so much for calling in. That's a good reason to have a video podcast if I've ever heard one. Nick, let's launch into this. You said there's one that just launched in November. It's called System Crash. It's a weekly tech news show hosted by Paris Marx and Brian Merchant. We've heard of tech podcasts before. What's interesting about this?

Nick Quah: As we drift deeper into what feels like a tech oligarchy, we're all more hungry these days for reporting, discussion, analysis, texts maybe that really grapple critically with big tech and how it's sort of wrapped around our lives. The show, which is relatively new and it's a chat cast, my understanding is that there's no video component yet. It's hosted by these two tech journalists who have been critically reporting on and writing about the tech world for a very long time. Paris Marx and Brian Merchant.

What's punchy and what's sticky, to me, at least about the show, is that it really does interpret the latest goings on with the big tech companies through the lens of their power and their efforts to sustain the power. Very, very relevant stuff, and it feels very resonant at this point in time.

Alison Stewart: Another one that you're recommending is Question Everything, which is a new project from our friends at KCRW, and it features Brian Reed, who actually got sued making his podcast. How did that lead to this podcast?

Nick Quah: He didn't get sued making this podcast, he got sued making a previous podcast. Some longtime podcast heads might remember Brian Reed's name as the host of S Town, this remarkable podcast that came out, has it been about eight or seven years now? It was this basically literary, nonfiction, literary journalism to to some extent about a remarkable life of an unremarkable person in sort of the middle of the country. It's a very complicated, ethically complicated in some ways show.

Reed, this project became quite popular and his experiences fed into the opening episode of the show, which Question Everything is essentially a show about journalism to some extent, but it's also a show about truth and a process and a representation of truth and things like that. It's a variety show in some senses. He is asking a lot of really interesting questions about journalism truth. He's asking questions in a interesting way. It's quite a remarkable show that I liked and I didn't really get around to until the holidays.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a listen to a clip from Question Everything.

Brain Reed: It was mid-October, and we told Sam this interview with Trump could come through any moment. We needed a master list of every comment Trump has made about the media since he started running for the presidency in 2015. What Sam came back with was massive. First off, he found this spreadsheet that the US Press Freedom Tracker had put together of just tweets alone from Donald Trump about the media, which totaled well over 2,000. It was overwhelming to behold. My eyes almost glazed over, confronted with it. November 26, 2015, ''The failing New York Times should focus on fair and balanced reporting rather than constant hit jobs on me. Yesterday, three boring articles. Today, two.'' August 30, 2018. ''I just cannot state strongly enough how totally dishonest much of the media is. Truth doesn't matter to them. They only have their hatred and agenda and on and on. So terrible. Such a disgrace, so wrong, so dirty.'' Just row after row after row of vitriol towards the pres, and that was just the tweets.

Alison Stewart: To your point, he is questioning journalism.

Nick Quah: Yes. In a time where everybody's questioning journalism and everybody's questioning everything. It is. These are really tricky times for the journalism profession, and also just the process of trying to figure out if we have a shared sense of reality. It's nice and it's really productive to hear someone very carefully express that confusion and work through it and invite you into the process of working through it. I think that's what's super sticky and super interesting about the show.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Stephanie from Brooklyn. Hi, Stephanie, you're on the air.

Stephanie: Hi. I'm really excited to be on the air. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Stephanie: I have been listening to Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard since It started in 2018, and I'm a huge fan, and I always listen to the audio and they recently started and switched to video and they're now on YouTube. I'm completely refusing to listen to the video and to watch the video because I love listening to it. For me, it's the place that I zone out and I like being able to picture things. The problem with the video switch is that even though they're still on audio, they reference a lot of things that are clearly something you can see.

They try to go back, but I think people are a lot more self-conscious and it's just not flowing as well. I wish that they would just go back to audio-only so people like me could keep listening and not have to feel like we're missing out on something.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. Stephanie. Did you hear that in your reporting?

Nick Quah: Yes. There's actually two things baked in there that's interesting. One is there was this question of, are people actually watching the video when they put up the video podcast? There is some mixed understanding of how the actual consumer behavior works. I myself when I do throw on YouTube videos, sometimes I don't look at it. I just let it play. I use it as a player, to begin with. The other thing that's interesting here is that the act of being on camera suddenly shifts your behavior in the recording.

That's something that the caller there was getting towards that one of the wonderful, amazing things about doing radio spots and doing radio interviews is that I can not have to look at the camera and be presentable for the camera. I can be in my sweatshirt, I can be in my sweatpants. I can be drinking something. I don't really have to worry about how my face looks. The idea is that it makes you more vulnerable. It means that you can really focus in on what you're saying and what you're thinking, what you're feeling, as opposed to having to balance over the camera as well.

I think that's a little bit of what's going on here. It's definitely something that I'm starting to detect as well.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I can tell you many times we've had celebrities come in here and they're very glad that they're not being filmed and they stay longer and we have more intense conversations because they didn't have to get camera ready.

Nick Quah: It feels like we're so surveilled anyway, and to find any way to have a reprieve from being looked or at or seen. That is something that I believe has been historically powerful about audio as a medium and what podcasts was powerful for me for, and so it's a bit of a bummer that we seem to be shifting away from that.

Alison Stewart: I wanted to finally get to a podcast that is ending, Shortcuts from the BBC is saying goodbye. What did you love so much about this show?

Nick Quah: Gosh, it's been around for like 13 years or something like that. For most of its existence, I've largely taken it for granted because I always knew that it was going to be there. It's made by the BBC. It's a wonderful little British gem. For a long time, it's been this repository for, I guess you could call it more experimental short stories. They are often not purely one thing. Each episode generally features about three pieces. Each are somewhere around 10 minutes. They run the gamut. They go by really broad themes. A theme could be moonlight, or the theme could be silence.

Essentially, it's an invitation for three different producers to interpret or find stories or make creations that broadly fit the theme. It's also always surprising. It's always this precious little gem. I think as the BBC is cutting it, due to larger things going on in the organization, we're losing a space to find not just new forms of audio, but also new talent. I think that's the real thing that we're losing.

Alison Stewart: We have some special news about talent. It's a fun fact. Our very own All of It producer Luke Green had a documentary short featured on one of the last episodes of Shortcuts.

Nick Quah: I loved it.

Alison Stewart: Yes. We listened to a clip from it. This is from the Christmas episode, and he is describing a memorable Christmas experience with his family.

Luke Green: The thing about our van is that the mechanics of the doors were also on their last legs. Midway through the bridge, out it goes. All the way up the tailgate goes.

Speaker 1: All of the trash bags of the presents fell out of the back. I don't even remember being that scared, honestly, except by Mom's scream.

Speaker 2: The princess. Oh, my God.

Luke Green: I have this image, and maybe this is wrong, of the trunk flying open and everyone screaming, and Dad swerving back and forth a bit. Then I turn around and I see Mom's butt in the air and her head out the trunk clinging onto the presence and going, ''Ah''

Alison Stewart: That's such a good story. Congratulations, Luke. What do you think about-- Well, final question for you. Let me think. What makes you hopeful about the future of the podcast industry?

Nick Quah: What makes me hopeful is that even with all the vicissitudes, even of all the shifts and the difficulties and how things change, people want this stuff, people want to make this stuff, and the most fundamental version of anxiety is that we're inching towards a system, an ecosystem, where only very few big shows get to live and only a specific kind of show gets rewarded, and it makes it harder for everybody else with every other kind of idea to exist.

The desire and the want is there, and the hunger for something new is always there. The system will reward and support one thing, but at some point, the system has to change. I still have hope and I still have belief that as long as the desires are there, things can change.

Alison Stewart: Nick Quah, podcast critic for Vulture and New York Magazine, thanks for being our guest.

Nick Quah: My pleasure.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, I want to remind you that we upload transcripts of our conversations, so if you missed anything or you want to go back and find the title of a podcast, then check out our website in about 48 hours.