The Invention of the Podcast with Dave Anthony
yasha.substack.com
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For this ep Evgenia and I talk to Dave Anthony, comedian and cohost of The Dollop, about the politics and history of podcasting.
Podcasts are such a big part of our culture now. So we wanted to talk about this phenomenon with one of the people who was there right at the beginning. Turns out that this big boom started with a bunch of desperate, down-and-out white Gen X comedians looking for another shot at getting their careers back on track. And many of them did succeed, including Dave Anthony and Marc Maron. And now the youngsters took over the medium and use it as a jumping board to mainstream show business.
—Yasha & Evgenia
Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.
The Invention of the Podcast with Dave Anthony
Great episode guys! This is another one that I sort of moaned when I saw the title, but it was closer to home in so many ways than is even usual, and entertaining as hell to boot. I know all too well about being an "extra white guy," and don't hold anu grudges toward anyone, needless to say, except for the inhuman system that makes it possible. But being a failure of a person in your middle age or past it, having your life not work out, being one of those guys that "do opioids" having presumably run out of hope for... what? Saying your life didn't work out is a mouthful, and although i can picture a person saying that because their chosen carreer hasn't worked out, i think its at least as likely that the source of this feeling of complete and utter failure has to do with the failure of one's relationships.
I don't see myself as any kind of sociologist with an insight that's in any way new. All I know is, when i turn on the news from Japan, all they talk about is how old people are poor and completely isolated, and how young people refuse to leave their parents' basements bc the world has nothing to offer them and no one outside is eager for their company. Here in America, we don't talk about these things. But being immigrants, we are in a privileged position to observe the breakdown of social ties from our parents generation to ours, to that of the next generation. Its hard to talk about in any number of ways, it happens at different rates in different places and among different groups (for example i realized mid-life that west coast has had the social breakdown in prgogress for decades before it finally reached the midwest where I live; some places are perhaps still relatively untouched by the breakdown- i don't know). But the driving force in all these disintegrations of social ties is the same, in a general sense--it's capitalism and its myriad mechanisms for getting people away from helping each other and toward competing with one another.
In so far as one of capitalisms primary mechanisms is to destroy communities and undermine interpersonal relations, replacing them with distrust, competition, and exploitation, it's no wonder that people would look to podcasters and media fidures in general as friends and family-- we're lonely as hell and at least these "celebrities" don't ask anything of us except the occasional $5 which we are free to give or not.
But if you want to be an artist, comedian, journalist, anyone in the humanities, you are completely at the mercy of the capitalist sysytem. We just assume that we have to do what we have to do to make our art, compromise as necessary- in fact, compromise may well lead you where you want to be. Which begs the question, where do you want to be-- a success, or an anti-capitalist crusader. The two are apparently completely incompatible, and most people I know have given up trying to pursue anything like ideals, there's just not enough time and energy to do that and also put food on the table.
Im speaking for myself and the people i know. You guys, some of your guests from what I can tell, Eileen and Dolores, Mark and John, and a number of other people are apparently eaking out a living, ideals proudly intact. Thank you for that, you make my life immeasurably better. But even though ive heard all of you mention the disintegration of social bonds at one point or another in your work, no one has focused on it as a subject. I don't know, it may be too broad or too obvious to everyone except me, or i don't know what.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to get it off my chest. Keep up the good work!
D