Game Tape #8: Podcasting as scenebuilding

"The Other Stuff" podcast

Happy new year my loyal Attention Heads,

I tried my hand at a 2025 reflection, but I couldn’t force my kaleidoscope of a year into something that resembled a neat and tidy personal essay. It was just plainly one of the best years of my life. In 2026 I’m excited to build some really fun media businesses, host some more glorious events, and have a lot of fun. I can’t wait.

I’m still experimenting around here, so I’m testing a slight change for this week’s Game Tape. Instead of analyzing a new media business/property on my own, I transcribed a lightly edited conversation I had with Jihad Esmail, the founder of Native, a narrative studio that helps founders define their worldview. He’s one of the rare voices on Tech Twitter who stands for real principles in his pursuit of great work, and I’m lucky to call him a friend.

Today we’re talking about “The Other Stuff,” a show where InternetVin surfs the web with his friends. The show is only a few months old, but has already had all-star guests like Aidan Gomez (CEO of Cohere, co-author of “Attention Is All You Need”), Alex Danco (Editor-at-Large, a16z), and Greg Isenberg (CEO of Late Checkout). It’s not a technology podcast, but by the end of 2026 it’ll be one of the hottest shows in tech. I could write an entire essay on the intricate worldbuilding that had to happen before this show could exist, and how it was born from and for a very particular moment in time for Canada (SF’s most lucrative pool of tech talent.) But that’s for another day.

Without further ado:

I. Scenebuilding as a competitive advantage in podcasting

I’ve been pulling on some loosely related threads around influencer-as-artform, timeline control, and homesteading your corner of the internet. To some degree this all culminates in “scenebuilding as a competitive advantage,” and it feels like some of the hottest media businesses of the last few years have all been excellent at this: TBPN cornering tech, Feed Me cornering NYC strivers, and maybe to some degree Red Scare at its peak and Dimes Square before The Fall. The ability to both be born of a scene and cultivate it in return feels like directing a documentary in real-time: which characters are worth elevating? Which stories should we export from *our* world to *the* world?

Jihad and I discuss how this impacts which podcasts are worth our time:

SHAIYAN

Podcasts began as a way to listen in on your smart friends having a conversation. But other mediums are constantly evolving into more interactive versions of themselves, like early TikTok transforming video with remixing: somebody would post a video of them singing, the next person remixes it and adds a bass line, the next person remixes it and adds some adlibs. Then nine people later it’s this whole orchestra, this collaborative piece of art that the original person would never have imagined would come out of their original video.

So it’s not surprising that podcasting is evolving into something more like a Twitch livestream show, art by committee. Is that “spectator social”?

JIHAD

I think spectator social is the purest version of giving people a peek into the world that is the brand or the scene. I don’t think The Other Stuff [henceforth “TOS”] is meant to be a top of funnel show, in the same way as some podcast clipping itself on TikTok. If it’s your first time seeing a meme or seeing a reference, it’s really difficult to get a grasp of what is going on, right? It’s not until you see many different versions of this meme, or until you see the original, where you realize, oh, now I understand the context here, and I can start engaging with the derivatives.

The same is true for spectator social. It is not until I have an understanding of the existence of the characters and the players of a particular brand or scene, then I want to go deeper and actually see what are they doing on the day to day, how are they engaging with each other, etc.

SHAIYAN

The term spectator social feels incorrect, then. “Spectating” is actually the thing that we’ve been doing for so long, just watching the thing. The most interesting part is when this becomes participatory, which at least in podcasting is relatively new. I’ll bring it back to TOS in a second, but I look at TBPN and how participatory that world has become. They’re announcing your friend’s marriages, and they’re talking about your friends tweets, and news is being broken in their Live Chat. TOS is similarly borne out of the Toronto-adjacent tech scene.

JIHAD

I don’t think I would view myself as much a part of the scene [around Toronto] if it wasn’t for the “spectator social content” that came out of it. The podcast helps me feel like a part of the conversations that are being had, and get to deeply know a lot of the personalities. Podcasting is a documentary medium that lets you participate in a scene as it’s happening.

In the early internet there wasn’t really a sense of geography, people were interacting on forums and later on social media and the geography was just the site or the feed itself. And now I think we’re seeing a retreat back to the importance of localism and local communities. San Francisco is the home of tech. If you’re someone that wants to participate in that scene and you can’t physically be in San Francisco, what do you do? You might not actually personally know the people being discussed on TBPN. Those might not be your friends, those might not be your weddings that are being announced, but TBPN is not that different from the conversations that are being had in Silicon Valley broadly.

TBPN is a reflection of the conversation that is being had in the tech scene, just like TOS is a reflection of the conversation that is being had in the Toronto scene. Local scenes or locality will continue to become more important, and then spectator social is a lens through which folks who are not geographically a part of the scene can plug into it in a way they otherwise could not.

II. The atomic unit of the podcast is now interactive

Outside of TOS I don’t listen to many podcasts. Who has time for a three hour conversation! Who is listening to all these podcasts! The clip, as frustrating as it is to see the tech milieu claim this as some recent invention, certainly helps the podcast become a more interactive form of media.

Jihad and I discuss how this is changing the range of relationships that people can have with their favourite podcasts:

SHAIYAN

There’s something here about the atomic unit of the podcast now being “the clip.” Clips have been around for a long time and it’s annoying when people think that clips are new, but a few years ago when most people were consuming podcasts in their entirety, it was difficult to give your input on a particular slice of a podcast. What, someone’s gonna listen to the whole two hour thing to understand your one-sentence quote retweet? But now we quote retweet very particular slices of the conversation with our own commentary. And so back to your point about localities, it feels far more accessible to get involved when the atomic unit is something you can actually talk about.

With TOS in particular, I think they do a good job of creating other artifacts in their broader ecosystem, like the language that people borrow from them: “Thank you for everything” or “My bad.” They made that Alex Danco meme [which is now his profile picture!] where he has the three fingers up, like the Inglorious Bastards clip. People are now playing around with that picture and dunking on MARS, the Canadian tech incubator. It’s becoming this world you can get involved with.

JIHAD

 Yeah I agree I don’t think that clipping itself is particularly novel, but because clips often lack so much context, I’m able to shape them into whatever I want. The smaller and more digestible an idea, the more people are able to project their own reality and thoughts onto it.

What I do think is unique to podcasting as a medium is the synchronous live nature of the conversation. Even if I’m listening to the recorded version of it, it still represents an actual moment in time. If I’m listening to a conversation between Vin and Alex Danco, they sat there for hours on a particular day and they were having a conversation, and that conversation was rooted in the zeitgeist, the stories of that day, of that week, et cetera.

And it’s in a particular location. There is a setting to a podcast that does not exist in other forms of content. Going all the way back to this idea of spectator social, I think that podcasting is a very unique form of media in that the setting is important and therefore a clip is more of like a slice of the setting rather than a slice of any particular idea in a vacuum like a tweet or something of the sort. I’m actually getting the energy of this particular moment of the scene that I’m trying to participate in.

SHAIYAN

 It’s like Walter Benjamin’s idea of how the aura of a piece of art diminishes with the reproduction of it. Podcasts capture a moment, and they have context, and they exist in a period of time, whether they’re live or not. They have an auric property that maybe a book or an essay do not.

On the second point, “podcasting is a conversation with your friends,” Clayton Christensen says new competitors compete on emergent qualities that they’re structurally better equipped to compete on. No shade to a16z “New Media,” but it feels like that’s an example of applying 15 year old mediums, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, to new contexts, like product launches or whatever. But to me that doesn’t seem like you’re competing on new determinants of quality.

A better example of that is Opal, a screentime app, who has an in-house creator named Olivia Unplugged. She runs an Instagram account as though she was a knowledge creator, makes these videos about unplugging from your phone and, and brain rot and all these relevant contemporary things. She just happens to be employed by the company and have their link in bio. They’ve created an entity that is structurally better equipped to build parasocial relationships, which is of course an emergent determinant of quality in contemporary media.

It feels like that is what TOS is competing on.

JIHAD

I love the Opal case study because I think it’s a great example of “context as media.” Opal the company benefits from people having shared context about attention, brainrot, digital detox, etc. As the number of people who have that context grows, their addressable market also grows, so they don’t need Olivia to sell the product directly. They need her to build context.

The same is true for TOS. Right now, that context is Toronto, and Vin is interviewing fellow Torontonians. But as more people become aware of the scene and learn the lore, the city exports itself. The context expands. There are more people who are now part of the Toronto scene that can meaningfully participate in conversation, even if the convo has nothing to do with Toronto as a city.

So I think podcasting is going to be seen more as a direct vehicle for exporting a scene/culture. And I think TOS does that for Toronto. TOS not only becomes the cultural export of Toronto, but it becomes the vehicle through which Toronto is seen to the world. Spectator social allows people to move localities without moving geographies.

Hope you enjoyed! I’d love to read your replies to this email with any feedback on the new format.