Why Podcast Clubs Don’t Exist Yet (And Why They Should)

There are roughly 5 million book clubs in the world. Goodreads alone has 90,000 active ones. Reese Witherspoon has a book club. Oprah has a book club. Your mom’s friends have a book club. Even the New York Times runs one.

How many podcast clubs are there?

I tried to count. The honest answer is something like a few hundred, total. Most of them are subreddits about a specific show. A handful are paid Patreon tiers. A vanishingly small number are private group chats where 4 people text each other “did you listen to the Dwarkesh one yet.”

This is strange. People listen to podcasts roughly ten times more than they read books. A heavy podcast listener consumes 10 to 15 hours of audio a week. A heavy reader finishes a book a month. We have a vastly bigger shared cultural diet in audio than in print, and yet the social format for talking about that diet barely exists.

I think podcast clubs should exist. I think they will exist. I think someone is going to build the version that works, and I think it’s going to be a big deal when it happens.

This post is the long version of why.

Why book clubs work

To understand why podcast clubs don’t work, you have to understand why book clubs do.

Book clubs work for four reasons, and none of them are obvious:

1. Books are containers. A book is a finite, well-defined object. You read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. We can talk about it because we both finished the same well-defined thing. The boundary of “the book” is clear.

2. Books are synchronizable. Even if we read at different paces, we can agree to finish by Tuesday. The text doesn’t change between us. The chapter you read on Monday is the same chapter I read on Saturday. Discussion happens after shared completion.

3. Books are quotable. When you want to point to a moment, you write it down. “The line on page 147 where she says...” You can highlight. You can transcribe. You can screenshot. The medium is text, and text is shareable by default.

4. Books are commitments. Reading a 300-page book takes 6 to 10 hours. That’s a real investment. The investment creates the social expectation: we’re all in this together, we should talk about it.

Now look at podcasts. Almost none of these are true.

Why podcasts don’t naturally form clubs

A podcast is not a container. It’s a stream. New episodes drop weekly. The boundary of “the show” is ongoing, not finite. There’s no natural “we finished it” moment.

A podcast is not synchronizable. The most popular shows (Acquired, Dwarkesh, Invest Like the Best, Lenny’s, Founders) release at their own cadence, and listeners catch up at their own pace. By the time you’ve finished the Microsoft episode of Acquired, I’m two episodes ahead and they’ve already released a new one.

A podcast is not quotable. The medium is audio, and audio is famously hard to share. You can’t highlight a sound wave. You can screenshot the player but the screenshot has no content. Spotify clips exist but are clunky. Most listeners never share anything.

A podcast feels like a low commitment. It’s something you do while doing something else. Walking, working out, cooking. The casualness is the appeal, and it’s also the killer of the social ritual. Nobody schedules a “podcast finished” Sunday brunch.

So podcast clubs don’t form on their own. The medium is structurally resistant to them.

But podcasts have something books don’t

Here’s the asymmetry that makes this interesting: podcasts have orders of magnitude more shared listening than books have shared reading.

When the Howard Marks episode of Invest Like the Best dropped, hundreds of thousands of people listened to it inside the same week. When Dwarkesh interviews Demis Hassabis, the entire AI Twitter ecosystem hears it within 72 hours. When Founders releases a new David Senra deep-dive, the same set of operators all listen on the same morning walk.

Books don’t have this. Even a bestseller takes months for readers to catch up. A book club’s “everyone finishes by Tuesday” is an engineered synchronization. With podcasts, the synchronization is already there and we’re not using it.

The substrate for podcast clubs already exists. The thing that’s missing is the ritual and the tooling.

What’s been tried (and why it didn’t stick)

A few things have been attempted in the podcast club shape. Most haven’t worked. Here’s the honest scorecard.

Subreddits. r/AcquiredPodcast, r/HuberMan, r/IntoTheImpossible. These exist for popular shows. They function as forums, not clubs. The format is one-to-many post-and-comment. There’s no shared cohort, no shared moment of listening, no intimacy. They feel like a comment section, not a club.

Discord servers. Some podcasts (especially in the crypto/AI space) run official Discord servers. These work better than subreddits because of the chat format, but they’re tied to a single show’s ecosystem and they fill up with parasocial fan-noise rather than substantive discussion. Hosts are present which changes the dynamic. The “club” is really a fanbase.

Patreon paid tiers. Some shows offer paid community access. This filters for engaged listeners, which is good, but the audience is still measured in thousands, not the 4-8 people that a real club needs to function.

Snipd’s social layer. Snipd has tried to build social around shared snips. The product is good. The friction is that people don’t naturally want to broadcast their snips to strangers. The taking-of-notes is intimate. The sharing-of-notes works best with people you actually know.

Twitter/X threads about specific episodes. This is currently the de facto podcast club for the tech world. Someone posts “the Acquired Microsoft episode is incredible,” and a hundred replies argue about it. This is real, but it’s broadcast, not club. There’s no cohort. No follow-up. No second episode.

So everything that’s been tried is either too big (a forum, a fanbase) or too anonymous (broadcast on Twitter) or doesn’t fit the medium. Nobody has built the small, intimate, friend-shaped version yet.

What a real podcast club would look like

Here’s the version I think actually works. I’ll lay it out as a product spec, because that’s how I think about it.

Group size: 4 to 8 people. Same as a book club. Small enough for everyone to have a voice, big enough that you don’t feel obligated when life gets in the way of a week’s listening.

Trust: closed and invite-only. Strangers don’t make good clubs. The whole point of a club is that you can say something interesting without performing for an audience. The friends-only constraint is a feature, not a bug.

Format: a shared episode per week (or per cycle). The club picks one episode per cycle. Everyone listens during their normal week. Discussion happens after.

Capture: each member marks moments while listening. This is the missing primitive. Without it, people show up to discuss the episode and can only remember the general thesis. Specific moments evaporate. Marking is what lets the club discuss specific things, not vague impressions.

Discussion: asynchronous, anchored to the moments. The club’s chat or feed shows what each person marked, at the timestamp they marked it. When you scroll through the club’s view of an episode, you see Anna highlighted minute 23, you see Mark wrote a long reaction at minute 47. You can reply to her highlight or his note specifically. The conversation lives in the margin of the episode itself.

Cadence: weekly is right. Monthly is too long, the conversation cools off. Daily is too much, people can’t keep up. Once a week mirrors how the podcasts themselves drop, and matches the rhythm of book clubs.

No host. This is important. The club isn’t moderated by the podcast’s creator. It’s a small private group on their own. The host is not present. The dynamic is between members.

That’s the model. It’s basically a book club, ported to audio, with the missing technical piece of marking moments added.

Why now is the moment

Three things have changed in the last few years that make this finally buildable.

1. Spotify opened its API. Until recently, third-party tools couldn’t see what you were listening to or interact with playback. Now they can. This is the technical unlock for in-the-moment capture. (I wrote a long separate piece on why this matters.)

2. On-device transcription is real. Apple’s Speech framework on iPhone is good enough that you can talk into your phone and get usable text without sending audio anywhere. This means voice capture can be private by default, which is the only way intimate-friend-sharing of notes makes sense.

3. People are spending more on audio than ever. The average podcast listener now consumes ~7 hours a week. The active listener is at 10+. The cultural weight of audio inside thoughtful communities (founders, PMs, investors, writers, designers) has crossed a threshold where it’s the primary shared diet. The substrate is there.

The technical primitives, the social need, and the cultural weight all line up for the first time. The window is open.

What this would do to the medium

If podcast clubs become a real format, a few things change.

Podcasts get listened to more carefully. When you know your club is going to discuss an episode, you don’t half-listen at 1.8x while doing dishes. You pay attention. The medium rewards careful listening, and currently almost nobody listens carefully.

Specific episodes get treated as events. Right now, a new Dwarkesh episode is part of a stream. Once clubs form, a specific episode becomes a thing your group is doing this week. That changes the ritual.

Hosts get better feedback. Right now, podcast hosts get vague feedback (downloads, ratings, the occasional tweet). With clubs, the specific moments that landed and didn’t land are visible. A host could literally see “67% of clubs marked minute 34” of their episode. That’s a different relationship with your audience.

Discovery improves. The hardest problem in podcasting right now is discovery. If clubs are sharing episodes they’ve discussed, the recommendation surface gets dramatically better. The “what should we listen to next” decision is no longer a single person browsing Spotify’s homepage. It’s a group of people pooling taste.

Listening becomes less lonely. This is the smallest-sounding but maybe most important change. Right now, podcast listening is a solitary act. You walk by yourself with headphones. Even if 50,000 other people are listening to the same episode that morning, you don’t know who they are. Clubs fix that. The listening is still solo, but the thinking about the listening is shared.

Who would join one

Honestly, the same people who join book clubs and the same people who already screenshot podcast clips to share with one or two friends.

In rough audience order, the people most likely to join a podcast club are:

• Founders and operators who already share Acquired and Founders episodes in their group chats. They have the listening volume, the shared peer set, and the discussion appetite. The DMs are already happening, the club is just formalizing them.
• Knowledge management nerds who already take notes on everything. They’ve been waiting for a tool that lets them share their notes with their friends without making them public.
• Investors and VCs who use podcasts as a primary substitute for trade publications. The club is a research format for them.
• Designers and PMs who follow Lenny’s, Designed Tomorrow, and Dieter Rams interviews and have nobody to discuss them with at the office because the office doesn’t listen.
• Couples and close friends who already text each other “did you hear this.” This is the most underrated cohort. Two people is enough for a podcast club. The product doesn’t have to be six.

The market isn’t “everyone who listens to podcasts.” The market is “thoughtful listeners with three to seven peers who also listen carefully.” That’s a smaller but extremely real audience.

What’s stopping someone from building this

A few honest objections.

“People don’t want yet another app.” True. Which is why the right form factor is probably a layer on top of an existing podcast player (Spotify, mostly) rather than a player itself. You listen where you already listen. The club layer is what’s new.

“Voice notes are weird.” True, for some people. But also: voice notes are wildly popular on iMessage and WhatsApp for exactly this kind of in-the-moment, intimate-to-friends sharing. The friction is lower than typing one-handed at a crosswalk. People who object to voice will probably write text. Both should work.

“Why would the podcast hosts allow it?” They’d love it. The clubs would be the highest-engagement listeners, sharing episodes with their friends. Hosts win on every metric: deeper listens, better word-of-mouth, qualitative feedback they currently never see.

“The audience isn’t big enough.” I think this is wrong. The “thoughtful listener with three friends” audience is in the millions globally, easily. Goodreads has 125 million users. The podcast-club audience is at least a tenth of that, plausibly larger.

The real reason podcast clubs don’t exist yet is nobody has built the in-the-moment capture primitive well enough. Without it, you can’t have a club, you can only have a forum. The forum has been tried. It doesn’t work.

The Margin take

Full disclosure: I built Margin for exactly this thesis. The first version is a personal note-taking app, press and hold to capture a moment from any Spotify podcast, your voice transcribes on-device, the note saves with the timestamp.

But the v1 personal app was always the wedge. The v2 product is the social layer: invite 3-7 friends, share episodes, see what each other marked, discuss in the margin of the episode itself. The first version of that already ships. The full version is what I’m building now.

I think it’ll work because the thesis is right: there’s a missing format, the substrate is there, and the people who would join one are already half-doing it in their group chats. The product just needs to make it 10 seconds easier than the group chat, and 100x more shareable.

What you can do right now

If you want to start a podcast club today, before anyone builds the perfect tool, here’s the minimum viable version:

1. Pick 3 to 5 friends who already listen to similar podcasts. Don’t recruit strangers. Use the people you already share clips with. 2. Pick one episode per week. Agree on the cadence (Sunday night discussion is the book club default for a reason). 3. Each person marks 3-5 moments while listening, with whatever tool you have. Margin works. A Notes app with manual timestamps works. Voice memos with the show name in the title work. 4. On the discussion day, everyone posts their moments to a shared group chat or thread. People react. 5. Pick the next episode together.

That’s it. The format is robust. The tooling makes it easier but isn’t strictly required.

I’d bet 4 out of 5 clubs that start this way will still be running a year later. The friction is low. The reward is high. The conversation gets richer over time as the club develops its own taste.

The bigger pattern

The deeper observation underneath this whole post is that new media always lag in their social formats. Books had decades before book clubs were a cultural thing. Movies had decades before the modern movie club existed. Television required decades to develop the watch-party. Each medium needed time for the format to find itself.

Podcasts are about 20 years old as a popular medium. The first wave was the podcast itself. The second wave was the podcast app. The third wave is the social format on top of the listening. That third wave is what’s missing.

The fact that it’s missing isn’t a sign that it shouldn’t exist. It’s a sign that we’re early.

Selinay

If you want to try the personal-capture version today, Margin is free in TestFlight. If you want to start a club, grab 4 friends and send me a note. I’m building this in real time and would love to learn from how you’d use it.