Too lazy to notice: 10,000 downloads (or more like 17,873)
Earlier this week, Buzzsprout sent me one of those cheerful automated emails that platforms send when they want you to feel good about yourself. This one worked: Too Lazy to Read the Paper has passed 10,000 downloads.
I never really made the podcast to have an impact. As a tenured professor, I have the luxury of being able to do fun experiments, such as podcasts that don’t need to be successful. So I don’t have to worry about listeners or traditional success metrics. To be completely honest, it was more an excuse to ask my favorite scientists questions about their life choices and careers that might feel weird or intrusive in an everyday conversation.
And while 10K downloads is tiny in the grand scheme of podcasts, for a scientist who does occasionally think about impact and citations of my academic outputs, I think this is a pretty wild number. Ten thousand downloads is a lot of “attention”, especially considering the relatively small amount of work going into the podcast relative to a paper … since the podcast consists of unedited, hour-long freewheeling conversations with friends and colleagues.
But maybe I should back up a bit and explain what the podcast is even about: the pitch of the show is that the author of a great paper in network science or data science explains that paper to me, in conversation. That has two advantages: First of all that I don’t have to read it (although, secretly, between you and me, I actually do read it). Secondly and more importantly, a conversation is the perfect way to explain a paper. It’s more direct and honest. Papers are sometimes formal in a way that gets in the way of the ideas. When two people just talk, the work tends to land faster.
I ran two seasons – ten episodes over Zoom in the spring of 2021, ten more (mostly in person, mostly audio) in 2022 – and then the show took a restorative 3.5-year nap (I need to do real work sometimes too, you know) before coming back this June with a conversation with YY Ahn about agentic coding, under the temporary title Too Lazy to Figure Out How to Use Claude Code for Science.
If you’ve never heard the show, the season trailers are a terrible place to start (you should just go to an episode featuring your favorite scientist). BUT they’re my attempt to be funny, and I hope you’ll agree, so I’ll include them here anyway. Here’s Season 1:
And the Season 2 trailer, which features me on a ukulele singing a lightly edited Justin Bieber song1:
And here’s another important point. The 10,000 number is only audio downloads on Buzzsprout.
The 13 episodes that also live on YouTube add another 7,873 views resulting in nearly 18K views total. (I buried the lede a bit here, but I only counted the YouTube views after starting the post.)
On YouTube, Season 1 does most of the heavy lifting (88% of the views), with Marta C. González’s episode 1 leading the pack at 1,404. And the eight audio-only Season 2 episodes don’t appear in the YouTube numbers at all, so if anything the true reach is pleasantly undercounted.
None of this happens without the guests – twenty-three generous scientists across twenty-one episodes who sat down and explained their work to a host who had, by design, not done the reading. Thank you. And thank you for listening.
You can catch up on both seasons (plus the comeback episode) on Buzzsprout or Apple Podcasts. If the revival grows into a proper Season 3, you’ll read about it here first – give or take a few years.
Footnotes
-
It also aired a week after the first two episodes of the season had already aired, which tells you everything you need to know about our marketing department. ↩