Skipping music to jump straight into the content today: I know we can all recite podcast ads by heart (here’s looking at you, Haesue Jo) but have you ever heard an ad for a podcast? Well, you’re about to. NPR and Spotify are launching ad campaigns for podcasts in general so networks can “help more people discover” their high-quality programming — which is code for “leverage listener numbers for even more ad dollars from BetterHelp.” And ’round and ’round we go.

On that note, if we’re going to put something in our ears today, let’s make it a pod. Two friends of mine have really excellent shows out right now, and what better time to plug.

1. Bestie Allison Behringer is in the third season of her show, Bodies, about ailments in the human body and in the (social, medical, economic) systems around it. This season has a lot more voices than seasons past, but in keeping with the show’s history, episodes are at once dark and illuminating. Find them all here.

2. Avery Trufelman just dropped season 2 of Nice Try! a show about failed utopias. The new season is all about the home, and in her words, “the lifestyle products that have been sold to us over and over, and the promises of self improvement they have made, kept and broken.” The listening experience is like if 99 Percent Invisible* sat on a Lorem — in other words, right up your alley.

*which Avery also used to make

Podcasts are cool but are you following the scripted Tik Tok drama? The Tok is now home to a growing number of fictional influencers, brought to life by entire creative groups who are ready to monetize their characters’ intersecting life stories. A company called FourFront is behind the storylines that are getting the big press at the moment: “Last week, Sydney, Ollie, and the rest of the characters — Tia, who discovers her boyfriend is African royalty; Carmen, a self-described sugar baby and bimbo; Chris, a father and army veteran; and Billy Hundos, a “finance fuckboy,” among others — convened IRL in Los Angeles, ostensibly to participate in a contest to win a billion dollars. This also acted as FourFront’s “big reveal,” in which the characters hosted a live Zoom event and showed that they all exist within a single universe. In total, the characters have a combined 1.9 million followers and 281 million views.”

Kind of makes you wish you had an audience guy behind your socials, right? Though, if you were making a go as an influencer, you probably would. My favorite thing about this (besides being a pretty smart new TV format — disperse the sitcom!) is that it underscores how a similar a fake Tik Tok star to a real one— it takes a lot of planning and production to make (and keep) any character famous; it’s just that a show has a credit roll.

If every content platform is suffering under the reign of Tik Tok, YouTube is having the hardest go of it. Compared to a quick Tik Tok hit, a ten-minute YouTube explainer feels like a print encyclopedia. That’s why YouTube is prioritizing Shorts (that is, short, vertical Tik Tok ripoffs) in their algorithm these days, and paying creators to make that kind of content in place of whatever else they were doing. Seems like the move would have been to buy Tik Tok 5 years ago — but maybe the fun is in the chase?