The Hatred of Podcasting

By Brace Belden

Very few podcasts are successful, but Brace Belden hosts one of the chosen few. In our latest issue, he scatters some pearls of wisdom.

THE EDITORS AT THE BAFFLER want me to talk about my job. They want me to humiliate myself in the pages of this magazine. Very well: I am a podcaster.

What is a podcaster? It’s someone who makes money from talking, often by means of selling dick pills. I don’t do that part, but I still obscure what I do whenever possible. Maybe it’s the newness of the profession; in terms of recency, I slot it in with UX designer and the guys in the Philippines who respond to OnlyFans messages. When asked about my job by strangers at parties, I tell them I “work in media.” I make sure to say that in the kind of way that forbids questioning, like I’m the guy who bathes Bari Weiss or a janitor at the New York Post.

But I would never lie to you. Not only is my job a podcast, but the podcast is successful. I’m a white man with brown hair and glasses in his mid-thirties having fun and making money. My podcast is called TrueAnon. At the time of this writing, it’s the 172nd-biggest news podcast in America and one of the most subscribed-to podcasts on Patreon. Originally a ramshackle effort to track news about the famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the show now covers any number of things broadly contained in the “news and opinion” category: Alan Dershowitz’s feud with a pierogi stand, rumors regarding Elon Musk’s robotic penis, Jerome Powell’s problems with Trump, etc. I get stopped on the street almost every day. They say to me: “You do that podcast!” And I say: “Yes, I do! Thank you so much for listening!” Then they say: “I thought you were five foot three!” And I have to explain to them that I lie about my height on the podcast so listeners resent me less for making a lot of money just for talking into a microphone twice a week.

I heard a podcast for the first time during Obama’s first term. (For reasons that will become obvious, one must temporalize podcasts via presidents.) I had been working at a flower stand on the side of the highway since 2008, but I wanted to be a sailor. A girl I knew in San Francisco had gone off to the Bronx to attend a maritime college in Throggs Neck. I looked up the school on the internet occasionally, but I couldn’t stop taking OxyContin. I rarely left the city. At night, I’d walk from my basement apartment in the Tenderloin up over Nob Hill, staring into doorways and windows, taking in expensive couches and giant houseplants, tidy desks topped with triple monitors. I’d end up at Aquatic Park, where I’d sit on the steps and look at the lights bobbing on the water.

“Podcasting during Obama had a wondrous feeling: we Americans had finally untangled the more vexatious knots of modernity by electing him and were ready to train our curious minds on the minute problems and the major shortcomings in society.”

It was 2011. I was dopesick and shivering in the passenger seat of my girlfriend’s car, heading up the interstate back to San Francisco from Los Angeles. It turned out I couldn’t quit OxyContin by staring at the Bay. Once you pass Coalinga, a grim conglomerate of roadside cattle feedlots causes the highway to stink tremendously. I was no good for conversation and she must’ve been tired of music, because she put on WTF with Marc Maron. I was too weak to resist. Listening to this semifailed comedian who was either talking about his divorce or complaining about his life to a much more famous and successful guy, I thought, Wow, I could do that. It sounded humiliating but was certainly a situation I could easily find myself in. When we got back to San Francisco, my girlfriend realized I was stealing money from her bank account.

Three years later, I listened to a podcast of my own free will for the first time. I was looking for a job. After being asked to leave a rehabilitation facility in the North Bay because of my bad attitude, I had detoxed with clonidine patches alone in a basement apartment that I was being forced to vacate. Everything had become exorbitantly expensive, so a friend on Haight Street let me crash at his house. I was thin and pale and hated almost everyone in San Francisco. There were hunched men in vests walking around in a hurry and freaks wearing Google Glass. One got the sense that something terrifically digital was happening.

I’d walk around the city, handing out résumés and listening to new episodes of Serial. The show felt like prestige radio, a serious enterprise compared with farts-and-Sybians shock jocks like Bubba the Love Sponge or Howard Stern. The lady hosting Serial laid out some evidence that maybe the guy accused of killing his girlfriend didn’t do it. She sounded urgent, but the NPR-style somnambulant tones made the stakes seem low (unless you were Adnan Syed, I guess).

Podcasting during Obama had a wondrous feeling: we Americans had finally untangled the more vexatious knots of modernity by electing him and were ready to train our curious minds on the minute problems and the major shortcomings in society. (At least this is what I assume people thought; personally, I was broke and miserable.) The shows that were popular around then—like Serial or Invisibilia, which debuted the following year with a pledge to explore “the intangible forces that shape human behavior”—all had a very Eagle Scout approach. This was a house style inherited from Serial’s coproducers, This American Life. That show began, of course, on public radio, but when it added an RSS feed in 2006 it dominated a market filled with shows like MuggleCast and Diggnation. (This American Life has cemented its place in the liberal canon of podcasts; see, for instance, Time’s recent one hundred top podcasts list, which includes the show alongside other stalwarts like Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and 99% Invisible.) It made a certain kind of sense that the pathetic pseudo-intellectualism of the Obama years would spawn shows hosted by similar-sounding hosts bewitching listeners with gentle urgency to slow down and look at the details. In 2015, if you said, “I heard it on a podcast,” you were trying to sound smart.

In 2025, it’s better to lie.

Continue reading “The Hatred of Podcasting,” an essay by Brace Belden, on our site.

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