Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

If you had anything to do with podcasts a decade or more ago, at their frothy peak of hype in the US, you might have had an encounter like the one I’m about to describe. My encounter happened in 2017, following the successful second season of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, a show I freelance edited at the time.

Memories of the meeting are a bit hazy, like the foggy day in San Francisco when it occurred. The gentleman worked with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and he had reached out about making a podcast series on the history of data. 

He’d just flown in that morning from meetings in some faraway place. He wanted to know how many people, at a minimum, it took to make a show about big ideas. He wanted to know what it cost. Warning him I didn’t really know the big picture, I gave him my best estimate.

“That seems like a lot,” he said.

I asked him more about the format of the show he envisioned. As I recall, he said that he (or maybe one of his bosses?) had a lot of ideas and observations, so he thought he could record them, and that would be the basis of the show. No script, just off the cuff brilliance.

Our meeting wasn’t going well. I tried for a beat to explain the challenges of making what basically sounded like a series of voice memos into a successful podcast. But he wasn’t interested. 

He confessed that he had already approached some production companies for estimates and was shocked at the quotes they gave him. It seemed like a scam, he complained — and was disappointed I didn’t share his view that more zeroes should come off the price tag.

Most of us who came from the nonprofit public-radio world were never versed in what you might call the business arts. It’s only after years of observation that I figured out one should redirect or deflect questions about numbers until more trust has developed, and the potential client understands the realities of the profession they’d like to make use of. This process takes patience and skill.  

A few savvy producers understood that early on and are now rich. The rest of us could have used some help. Industry rate guides are great, and I refer to them often. But I’m talking about psychological help: when it comes to matters of money, you want to be propped up by something impressive; by a potent chunk of external validation just casually displayed. 

You want Fortune Magazine, May 1938.