Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of our S enclosures. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting in my car recording a podcast.

So our episode today is all about the early days of

podcasting. We're doing this whole big package of stories on The Verge all

week, all about 2004. The stuff that happened in 2004, the legacy of that year 20 years later, which is a

surprisingly consequential one in tech. It was the year Google went public. It was the

year Gmail was created. It was the year Facebook launched, it was the

year DIG launched, it was the year that Firefox browser became a thing, it was the year of Janet Jackson's

wardrobe malfunction, which was a huge deal that changed the streaming and television worlds forever.

All kinds of stuff.

But for this episode of the Virgcast, we're going to talk about the word podcast, because

the word podcast became a word and came to describe this whole industry,

this whole thing we're doing right now back in 2004.

So we're going to talk about where that name came from, what it has come to mean, and then what might happen in the next 20 years.

But the thing I've discovered in doing all this research and in talking to a bunch of people who were around in those early days is that a surprising number of people were just sitting in their car making podcasts.

Back then they were, you know, talking into microphones or had really crude sort of rudimentary cell phone

setups that they could call into with a phone number and record a podcast that

way. But the acoustics of a car are pretty good. It does a pretty good job of dampening noise and echoes and all kinds of issues.

So the car, it doesn't look great, but it turns out to be a half decent place to make a podcast.

So here I am in the car making a podcast just like our good

forefathers of the podcast years did. So anyway all of that is coming up we're

going to talk about the past, the present, and the future of

podcasts on this whole episode.

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