On the final episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca—who is leaving to assume an executive role at a still-undisclosed institution—lamented the passing of an older form of media. He spoke about the intimacy of hearing a voice without being forced to watch it. A voice enters your home stripped of spectacle. It asks for attention rather than demanding it. It does not require jump cuts, dramatic lighting, animated captions, exaggerated facial expressions, or an algorithm trained to hijack your dopamine receptors. Pesca admitted that one reason he was ending The Gist was simple: he no longer wished to compete in the circus.
He spoke warmly of Julia Turner, whose Culture Gabfest has also come to an end. He noted that Marc Maron has little interest in becoming another video personality. Although Pesca didn’t mention them, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported have similarly resisted reshaping their podcast into a YouTube product. Pesca observed that the retirement of Maron, the disappearance of Culture Gabfest, and the end of The Gist signal “the end of an era.”
Listening to him, I realized I have been mourning that era for some time.
Shortly afterward, David Greene closed an episode of Left, Right & Center by announcing the retirement of NPR’s Don Gonyea. Another unforgettable voice was disappearing from my daily life. I found myself oddly saddened. I wasn’t losing a face. I was losing a companion. Don Gonyea will be missed. So will Marc Maron. So will Mike Pesca.
It finally dawned on me while listening to Mike Pesca’s farewell episode of The Gist: I spent fifteen years making YouTube videos, but I was never really a YouTuber. I was a radio man trapped inside a YouTube video.
I have never formed a deep attachment to YouTubers or Instagram personalities. I connect with voices. I grew up in the age of radio, when a voice carried enough authority to build an audience and enough warmth to become part of a family’s routine. I still remember the oversized preset buttons on my parents’ turquoise Chrysler Newport as Dionne Warwick asked if we knew the way to San Jose and The 5th Dimension floated “Up, Up and Away” through the speakers. In the 1970s, my mother’s Panasonic RF-1080 seemed permanently tuned to KGO 810 AM. Jim Eason, Jim Dunbar, and Ron Owens narrated our days with such consistency that they became as essential to the household as breakfast. When we visited my grandparents in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson drifted through the house while conversations about politics, books, and current events unfolded around him. Living among ideas was not an extracurricular activity. It was simply what adults did.
Some of my happiest childhood memories involve nothing more than lying on a couch or sitting on the porch while an AM radio broadcaster called a baseball game. Those voices carried me into a dream world more comforting than the one outside my front door. Even now, I suspect that paradise sounds less like angels singing than a baseball announcer calmly describing a lazy fly ball to center field.
When podcasts emerged in the early 2010s, they felt like radio reborn. I loved the voices. I loved the predictability. A good podcast possessed architecture. It opened with one segment, moved naturally into another, and arrived at a satisfying conclusion. As a writing instructor whose life revolves around lesson plans, outlines, and coherent arguments, I appreciated that structure. A podcast respected the listener’s attention instead of treating it as prey.
Video rarely shows the same respect.
Too often, it reshapes personalities into algorithmic caricatures. Everyone speaks with theatrical urgency. Every thumbnail depicts someone whose eyes appear to have witnessed the Second Coming or an alien invasion. Every headline promises that everything you believe has just been DESTROYED. Outrage has become less an emotion than a production budget.
The internet has perfected a new facial expression: the clickbait gasp. Apparently, no thought is complete until someone opens his mouth wide enough to swallow the thumbnail.
I find the entire performance exhausting.
When I think back to watching The Dick Cavett Show as a ten-year-old, I remember almost nothing about the visuals. I remember Cavett’s voice—curious, literate, skeptical, and wonderfully patient. He made intelligence sound inviting rather than performative. Listening to him, I wanted to inhabit a world where thoughtful people spoke in complete sentences, entertained competing ideas, and considered nuance a virtue instead of a liability. Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of elitism in me. If a conversation lacked subtlety, I assumed it lacked seriousness.
Reflecting on Pesca’s farewell forced me to confront my own fifteen years on YouTube.
Technically, I have always been hopeless. More than once I filmed a watch review so badly that the watch itself remained stubbornly out of focus while the comments section delighted in informing me of my incompetence. As YouTube evolved into an increasingly polished medium—with cinematic lighting, drone footage, elaborate editing, and graphics worthy of cable television—I never evolved with it.
Nor, I eventually realized, did I want to.
My interest gradually shifted away from close-up glamour shots of luxury watches and endless “State of the Collection” videos. I became more interested in why we chase possessions than in the possessions themselves. My videos became essays disguised as watch content. The algorithm, understandably, was unimpressed.
Recently I noticed that six weeks had passed since I uploaded a video.
I am not abandoning the channel. But I have become suspicious of speaking merely because the algorithm demands another upload. I have no desire to become someone who mistakes constant broadcasting for having something worth saying. Every new video should earn its existence. It should contribute something I have not already said. It should reflect genuine conviction rather than anxiety about disappearing.
Perhaps that standard is impossibly high.
Or perhaps it is simply what growing older feels like.
I am sixty-four now. The older I become, the less interested I am in producing content and the more interested I am in producing thought. The algorithm rewards frequency. Age rewards discrimination.
If I have learned anything from listening to voices like Mike Pesca, Don Gonyea, Dick Cavett, Jim Dunbar, and Marc Maron, it is that the medium was never the point. The point was never to command attention. It was to deserve it.
Maybe that is the real end of the era—not the disappearance of podcasts, but the fading belief that a single thoughtful voice, speaking without spectacle, is enough.
I hope it still is.
Cinemorphosis 
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