Podding Like It's 2008
I recently became nostalgic for the podcasts of the past. I think this came about from my desire to relive the golden age of the Giant Bomb video game site. Although it may be fine now (I don't really know), the current cast and site just isn't for me. I do check in with the OGs on their various spinoffs and solo endeavors, but those don't hit the same way either. I discovered that various YouTubers uploaded selections or entire past episodes of the Giant Bombcast. I quickly fell down a nostalgic rabbit hole, led by the Lucha Deer.
And then I started to think about how podcasts aren't well served by modern players. There are numerous apps to discover and subscribe to the current shows, but what about the old stuff? There's still value there. With movies, TV, and music, most past work is readily available or at least somewhat easily accessible. We watch old The Simpsons episodes, so why don't we listen to old episodes of Tom vs. Comics?
Some old podcasts are evergreen. Discussions on old comics have as much value today as they did then. Some podcasts are outdated, but hearing how wrong or misdirected experts or enthusiasts were can be very amusing in its own way. It wasn't talk radio, which wouldn't hold up on repeat listens beyond the time-capsule novelty. On the other hand, my favorite podcasts were free-form, open discussions among fans.
I started to wonder how I could go about re-listening to older shows. Many podcast apps let you sort by oldest to newest, but only manually. And they don't let you download a few of the oldest at a time. You can download everything and listen to it chronologically, but that's not practical for a show with hundreds of hours-long episodes. I wondered if I should build my own app. I'm not a programmer, so I poked around with Claude and figured it may be feasible.
But then in a strange twist of fate, Overcast, my podcatcher of choice, released an update that addressed this very concept. You can now re-listen to a show, starting at the beginning, and download as few or as many of the earlier episodes as you wish. Now I'm listening to some of my favorites like it's 2008 all over again.