Come Cry With Us on Gadget Lab’s 500th Episode Extravaganza

MC: Oh, you’re warming my heart over here. Well, OK. So of all the changes that you instituted to our institution, what do you think is the most lasting contribution to the podcast?

DP: So the thing that I still find myself loving, and I get no credit for this, except that I like made us have the meeting that I think led to this, if I remember correctly, was the recommendations thing that, at the end, everybody’s just going to say something that they love. That was your idea, I’m pretty sure, in, “How do we structure this podcast a little more, conversation?” I’m pretty sure you were the one who was like, “Let’s just end with recommending stuff we like.” And that’s still as a listener now, it’s consistently a thing that I love, and I’ve found books and TV shows and weird apps, and Arielle is always sending people to new places to get their horoscope, and it has always been one of my favorite parts of the show. It was fun to do when I was on the show, and it was really fun as listener. I think that’s structurally sort of the thing that I liked the most.

AP: That’s quite a legacy. In fact, I would say that some listeners only come to the Gadget Lab podcast for the recommendation. So one hell of a legacy.

DP: Again, I get no credit for it. My job was literally what Mike described, I sat down in a room one time, I was like, “What if we just paid attention to this a little bit more for a second?” And then Mike had 50 great ideas, and now the podcast is awesome.

MC: I’m sure I grumbled a lot. I’m sure I was like, “Oh God, no, that just sounds like work.”

DP: Yeah. There was a lot of that, especially at the beginning. And we would be sitting there right before we started recording and you’d be like, “Do we have to do the whole loop introduction thing?” And it’d be like, “Yes, Mike, all you have to do is just say welcome to the Gadget Lab podcast, I’m Mike Calore,” and you’d be like, “Fine.” And then it would be great every time.

MC: So you’re at Protocol now.

DP: I am, indeed.

MC: Or as we refer to it, Techilitico.

DP: Techlitico, Polititech, Techlitico, it’s all fair game.

MC: Do you do a podcast there?

DP: I do. It has had many forms in the time that I’ve been doing it. A strange thing about podcasts is it turns out that they’re a very different beast than most other formats. Learning how to make one has been a really interesting process, learning how to grow one is a really interesting process. It’s all been very strange, but I host a podcast, it’s called Source Code. It’s not nearly as good as the Gadget Lab podcast, but we also haven’t done 500 episodes yet, so I have some time to catch up, but we’ll get there.

MC: You also do a newsletter, right?

DP: I do.

MC: Yeah.

DP: Every day.

MC: Every day? You do it every single day?

DP: Six days a week. I had somebody when I was-

AP: It’s so good.

DP: When I first signed up to write a newsletter, there was a person in media who pulled me aside and was like, what I always tell people who are signing up to do a daily newsletter is that, “You have no idea how many days they are.” And I didn’t really realize what that meant. And now, were are at 15 months into writing a newsletter every single day, and there are just a lot of days.

Source