The best podcast of the last decade ended last month.
This is totally subjective, of course, and I’m not going to spend much time defending the assertion.
What I can say is that it was the only podcast I listened to each and every episode of, often the very same Wednesday it was posted. It had a 12 year run. It rarely and barely strayed from its original concept: an hour-long interview with a journalist, writer, editor, creative, etc…Anyone who produced longform work.
Longform being imperative. It had to have substance. Depth. Meaning. The work often bordered on the obsessive. They were projects that lasted years. Sometimes the guest, so burnt out from their obsession, seemed to not even want to talk about it. While the format was familiar, the conversations were ranging.
The three hosts took turns doing the interviews, each with their own style. Others have described the unique styles of the three—Aaron, Max, and Evan—but each was willing to let a conversation take its necessary course. To dive deep into craft through their own form of strategic interrogation. They rarely made it about them (though based on the quality of their individual podcast pursuits, they are natural storytellers too)
I remember precisely when I started listening. It was 2015 and I was on a beach in Vancouver not doing a whole lot of anything. I popped some headphones in and turned on an unheard-of podcast. (This was well before podcasts were as popular as now. I have no idea how I came to it and why I started on episode #130).
Episode #130 of Longform was already a few years into the podcast’s journey. It was an interview with a journalist named Mac McClelland (who has since changed their name). I was totally unprepared for what came next. The episode was a meditation on trauma. A deep, almost painful conversation about what happened to the author investigating a story. At times, silence occupied what seemed like minutes. It was not the polished, heavily edited interviews that were common at the time.
I was enthralled. Not only was it a great conversation but it was one of the first times I had heard a deep exploration of the person behind the journalism. The story of the story. I immediately started listening to all the previous episodes. And then each new one after.
In today’s crowded podcast ecosystem, it isn’t nearly as rare for one to be so niche-focused like Longform was. With so many podcasts come so many corners of the human (and non-human) experience. But it’s still very rare to have done it for 12 years, week in and week out, and to capture some of the best authors doing the best work over that time. It introduced me to countless writers, publications, and other podcasts. It truly featured the best of the best of their craft.
Singularly, what it did better than anything else I’ve listened to—the reason I’ll miss it the most—was it as a podcast entirely dedicated to the pursuit of humans telling stories. And the lengths we’ll go to (sometimes that we have to go to) in order to tell the best, most enduring ones.
ericryangrant.com 