This is a story about a professional podcaster whose seventy-one-year-old mother, in retirement, started a podcast that has, over the past two years, become significantly more popular than her daughter’s, what the daughter has done with this information, and what the mother, when asked, has said about it.

The daughter — I will call her Cass, because she chose the name, and because when I asked why, she said, “It felt like the name of a person who was going to have to be very honest with a stranger for the length of an article, which I now understand I have signed up for” — is forty-three. She is a professional podcaster in Los Angeles. She has produced, over the past nine years, four different podcast series, one of which was, at its peak in 2021, in the top fifty of its category on Apple Podcasts. She lives with her partner and a small dog. She has, by every professional measure she has been trained to care about, been a success.

Her mother — I will call her Peg, because that is what Cass has always called her, and because Peg herself agreed to be described this way — is seventy-one. She is a retired librarian. She lives in a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin. She has, until approximately two years ago, had no professional or amateur involvement with audio production of any kind.

Two years ago, Peg started a podcast.

Its most recent episode, at the time of this writing, has been downloaded three hundred and eighty thousand times.

Cass’s most recent episode has been downloaded twenty-two thousand times.

Cass has told me she has spent most of the past year trying to figure out how to feel about this.

How Peg started the podcast

Peg started the podcast, according to Cass, “in the way she does everything, which is quietly and without asking anyone.”

Peg had retired from her library job in the spring of 2023. She had, in the months after retirement, gone through what Cass has described to me as “the standard retirement package of anxieties” — the sudden empty time, the loss of daily structure, the strange grief of no longer being needed at 8:47 in the morning by a specific set of people. Cass, watching this from Los Angeles, had suggested that Peg take up a hobby.

Cass suggested pottery. She suggested a memoir class. She suggested a walking group. She suggested, half-jokingly, that Peg start a podcast — a suggestion Cass has since told me she made “because I was, in some way I do not want to look at too closely, trying to invite my mother into my professional world.”

Peg thanked her for the suggestions.

Peg did not, over the course of the summer of 2023, do any of them.

In August of 2023, Peg called Cass one Sunday evening and said, in what Cass has told me was her exact phrasing: “I am going to try recording a podcast. I do not know how to do it. But I have a microphone Frank left in the basement. Can you tell me what to do.”

(Frank was Peg’s husband. He passed away in 2018. The microphone, apparently, was from a barbershop-quartet phase of his early sixties that Peg had never entirely understood.)

Cass, who is a professional podcaster, gave her mother the fastest, most efficient version of an introduction to podcasting that she has ever given anyone. She sent Peg a link to Audacity. She walked her through how to record. She told her about hosting platforms. She recommended one. She sent Peg a document she had written, several years earlier, of tips for beginning podcasters.

She did not, she has told me, expect anything to happen.

The first episode

Peg’s first episode was published on September 4, 2023. It was called “Sitting in the Kitchen With the Radio On.” It was thirteen minutes long. It was, by Cass’s professional assessment, “technically terrible.”

The audio was uneven. There was a discernible hum. Peg had recorded it in her kitchen with the microphone approximately four feet from her mouth. She had not edited it. There was, at one point, the sound of a refrigerator turning on. There was no intro music, no outro music, no branded sting. There was, in what Cass has told me was Peg’s only concession to production values, a very short pause at the beginning of the recording that she had, apparently, been told about somewhere.

The episode consisted of Peg, sitting in her kitchen, describing what it felt like to sit in her kitchen with the radio on. It described the light in the room. It described the specific quality of the sound of the local NPR station coming out of the small radio her husband had bought in 1998. It described what she was drinking (coffee) and what she was looking at (a bird feeder outside the window) and what she had been thinking about (her sister, who lives in Arizona, and whom she had been meaning to call).

It did not have a point. It did not have a takeaway. It ended, at thirteen minutes, when Peg said, “That is what it feels like to sit in the kitchen with the radio on. Thank you for listening.”

Peg published the episode.

She sent Cass a text message that read: “It is done.”

The slow growth

For the first six months, the podcast had, by all conventional metrics, no audience.

Peg had, when Cass helped her set it up, added it to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. She had not, however, promoted it. She did not have social media. She did not, in Cass’s phrasing, “believe in emailing anyone about anything unless there was a specific administrative reason.”

She published one episode a week. Each episode was between eleven and seventeen minutes long. Each episode was about a small, specific thing — the light in her kitchen, the specific feeling of a walk to the mailbox in October, the way her sister’s voice sounded on the phone.

In the first six months, according to Cass, the podcast averaged perhaps ninety downloads per episode. Most of them, Cass suspected, were Peg’s friends in the neighborhood. Peg did not check the numbers.

Then, in April of 2024, something happened.

The exact mechanism has never been fully identified, but the best guess Cass has been able to arrive at is this: someone, somewhere, screenshotted a passage from an episode of Peg’s podcast and posted it on Bluesky. The passage was from an episode called “The Way the Grocery Store Smells at Six in the Morning.” The screenshot showed the transcript of a paragraph in which Peg described, in careful and gentle detail, why she had, three months earlier, cried in the frozen food section of her local grocery store.

The screenshot was reposted a number of times. Someone linked to the podcast. Someone else linked to the podcast. Within approximately two weeks, Peg’s podcast had, by Cass’s estimate, gone from ninety downloads per episode to about six thousand.

Peg did not notice.

Cass, who did notice, did not tell her.

Why Cass did not tell her

I asked Cass, in our second conversation, why she had not told her mother about the sudden growth.

She said: “Because I did not want her to change what she was doing.”

She said: “I know how audiences work. I know what happens when someone realizes they have one. They start writing for the audience. They start, in small ways, performing. I did not want that to happen to her podcast. I liked her podcast. I liked that it was, in some way I could not fully explain, real.”

She said: “And I did not tell her because I was, honestly, jealous.”

She said: “I want to be clear about the jealousy. I was proud of her. But I was also, in a way that has taken me a long time to look at directly, angry. I have been doing this for nine years. I have hired producers. I have paid for consultants. I have promoted my show at every stage. I have optimized. I have iterated. I have done everything you are supposed to do. My mother, in her kitchen, with a barbershop-quartet microphone from 1998, was in six months doing what I have spent a decade trying to do. And she did not care. She did not care about the numbers. She was not going to check them. That was the part that I could not, at first, forgive.”

The current state

In the two years since the Bluesky post, Peg’s podcast has continued to grow.

At the time of this writing:

Peg’s podcast averages 340,000 downloads per episode.

Cass’s most recent podcast series averages 22,000.

Peg has been contacted, at last count, by three publishing houses, four production companies, and a woman in Copenhagen who wants to translate the podcast into Danish.

Peg has responded to none of them.

She has told Cass, when Cass has finally, after much internal debate, brought some of this to her attention, that she is not interested. She has told her that the emails, when she reads them, “sound like they are written by people who do not know me and would like me to be different.”

She has told her that she is going to keep publishing one episode a week, from her kitchen, for as long as she feels like it, and then, at some point, she is going to stop.

She has told her that she does not, and has never, checked the numbers.

She has told her that she likes it better this way.

The thing Cass told her mother

In February of this year, Cass finally told her mother the numbers.

She had been meaning to tell her, she has told me, for approximately fourteen months. She had put it off. She had, in her own phrasing, “sat with the information the way a person sits with a difficult letter they know they will eventually have to open.”

She flew to Wisconsin. She went to her mother’s house. She sat with her mother at the kitchen table — the same kitchen the podcast is recorded in. She told her mother the numbers. She told her that her podcast had, in the past two years, become significantly more successful than her daughter’s professionally produced show. She told her that she had known this for eighteen months. She told her, in words she had rehearsed, that she was proud, and that she was also, she wanted to admit, jealous, and that she had needed to tell her both things at the same time because they were, in some way she was still figuring out, one thing.

Peg listened.

Peg said, when Cass was finished: “Okay.”

Cass said: “Okay?”

Peg said: “I am proud of you.”

Cass said: “That’s not what I said.”

Peg said: “I know.”

They sat, both of them, for a long time.

Then Peg said: “I would like to hear your podcast.”

Cass told me she had not, at that point, actually asked her mother to listen to her own show. She had, in a small way she had been trying not to think about, always assumed her mother would not be interested. She had been sending her mother links to specific episodes over the years, and her mother had, kindly, said “thank you, honey” — but Cass had not, actually, ever known whether her mother had listened.

Cass, in her mother’s kitchen, opened her phone. She pulled up her most recent episode. She played it, on the small kitchen speaker, for her mother.

They sat and listened to the entire thing. It was forty-seven minutes long.

At the end, Peg said: “That was very good.”

Cass said: “Thank you.”

Peg said: “It is very produced.”

Cass said: “Yes.”

Peg said: “I like yours too.”

They did not say anything else about it.

What this is

I have, in the months since I first heard this story, thought a great deal about the difference between doing something for an audience and doing something for the specific reason you started doing it. It is, I think, one of the most difficult distinctions in modern professional life.

Cass has been doing what she does for an audience for nine years. She has been good at it. She has, at times, been very successful. She has also, she has told me, spent significant portions of the past nine years feeling as though she were slowly, imperceptibly, becoming a person who was writing for the audience rather than for herself.

Peg has been doing what she does, from the beginning, for herself. She has been doing it in a kitchen. She has been doing it with a microphone she inherited from a husband who has been dead for eight years. She has been doing it without checking the numbers. She has been doing it, in the truest sense of the phrase, without paying attention to whether anyone was listening.

And she has, by every metric her daughter’s industry cares about, been more successful than her daughter.

This is, I think, one of the small painful jokes of our current moment. The people who succeed hardest are, increasingly, the people who are not, in any conventional sense, trying. (For a related earlier piece on writing that was not meant to be seen, see the Wattalife story about the woman whose out-of-office email became the best writing of her career.)

Cass has told me, in our last conversation, that she has been considering, in the past several months, changing how she makes her own show.

She has told me she has not, yet, done anything about this.

She has told me she is thinking of starting, on the side, a small second podcast. One she does not tell anyone about. One she records in her kitchen. One she does not promote. One she does not check the numbers on.

She has told me she has not yet decided whether she will do it.

She has told me that if she does, she is not going to name it.

She has told me that if she does, she is not going to tell her mother.

—

Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, briefly considered starting a podcast of her own. She has decided against it. She has decided that this newsletter, which she writes every weekday morning in the same small office, in the same small chair, in the same small silence, is probably enough of a project for a woman in her position. She may, however, revisit this decision.