There is a goddamned lot of podcasts. As a fan, it seems that while the demand for podcasts is increasing, the supply of shows available is growing exponentially faster. To become a competitor in the deeply saturated market, new podcasts have to market themselves well, but podcasts have less tools to advertise themselves than most other products. Few media journalists are reporting on podcasts, and you’re not going to find an advertisement for Serial on a bus stop. There is ultimately a dearth of tools to help increase a podcast’s popularity; most podcasters rely entirely on word of mouth recommendations or a unique show concept gimmick. A podcasts structural gimmick helps to differentiate it from the dozens of others on the cluttered screen of any podcast app, not unlike Colgate’s bright packaging attempting to draw your attention away from other toothpaste brands on a grocery store shelf. For a lot of podcasts, this flashy packaging masks each episode’s lack of worthwhile conversation.
Max Temkin, Merlin Mann’s, and Alex Cox’s Do By Friday podcast could have fallen into this trap, because their podcast initially relied heavily on their gimmick concept. The podcast was founded on the concept of the hosts challenging themselves to do a certain task by friday each week. Fortunately, the show avoided becoming clickbait by expanding the show into a mostly free formed discussion with only a dash of weekly challenge talk to be the cherry on top of each episode. While the weekly challenge structure is the podcast’s raison d’etre, what really makes Do By Friday infectiously hilarious and thought provoking is simply how much the hosts love to entertain and charm one another.
Recently, the word “challenge” has been co-opted by viral Youtube videos that usually result in schadenfreude inducing bodily harm, but luckily Do By Friday’s challenges do not include consuming milk, cinnamon, or ghost peppers until the point of torrential vomiting. Instead their challenges are more along the lines of reading The Art of the Deal, throwing something away to declutter, or sous-vide-ing their shoes. The wide range of challenges performed on the podcasts result in a fascinating variety of conversations: throwing something away led the hosts to discuss their own blind consumerism, reading The Art of the Deal allowed them to meditate on why Donald Trump’s competition based world view attracts his political supporters, and sous-vide-ing induced a whole lot of giggling about Alex’s melted bra.
Do By Friday has always had a strong concept backing it up, but as they evolved they stopped feeling the need to cater to window shoppers. Recently, Alex, Max, and Merlin have loosened up and began flexing their witty-conversational muscles in a more casual conversational format. In the less challenge focused episodes, all of their personalities bloom. Merlin is a weird dad, a professional podcaster and writer who is endlessly quick witted, theatrical, and culturally well versed. Max Temkin, a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, is intelligent, politically charged, cynical, and probably a little too young to be as curmudgeonly as he is. Alex Cox also works at Cards Against Humanity and ironically plays the straight man. She is an expert at winding up her co-hosts, letting them go, and then laughing contagiously in the background as Max and Merlin spiral into insanity. With all their personalities combined, the trio creates an endless buffet of energetic and playful conversations for our listening pleasure.
While their chemistry has been their since the beginning, the original challenge focussed format occasionally dampened the group’s conversational potential. In the original format, some of the challenges favored one host’s interests, leaving the others in the dust. This issue came up when their challenge was to play a videogame called “Really Bad Chess”. On this episode, Merlin admitted that he doesn’t really like games and he noticeably struggled to add anything of value to Max and Alex’s conversation, which kind of left the podcast running on only 66% of it’s potential. Broadening the conversation has allowed the hosts to create more dynamic conversations about anything that matters to them. Their day jobs and hobbies aren’t the sole focus of the podcast (they aren’t reviewing new board games every week), but their passion for technology, comedy, art, culture, politics, games, and mocking American society melts together to become the lense through which they see and discuss the world around them.
The basic DNA of any immersive, entertaining, and fascinating conversation is its ability to progress in directions that you were unable to be predict at the beginning. We’ve all had that kind of wonderful conversation where you don’t know how the hell you went from talking about KFC to the theory of ego depletion.
The more I analyse podcasts, the more I realize that the building blocks of any good podcast is simply a good conversation. What makes a podcast great isn’t the concept behind it, but the conversations within each episode. Where the hosts explore the topic at hand end up in a completely unpredictable destination. We’ve all had these wonderful kinds of conversations, where you don’t know how the hell you went from talking about the KFC menu to the theory of ego depletion. Do By Friday isn’t doing anything groundbreaking, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s insightful tangents, winding rants, and endless riffing are why I keep listening to the show week after week. All they do is have a great conversation, and where the hosts consistently arrive at a surprising conclusion that couldn’t of been discovered without the improvisational journey there.
Review By Taylor Kalsey, written in sociology methods and french social theory classes. Podcast listened to during data entry at work.
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