Commented on Twitter, and sharing here as well:

I used to run a pretty popular crypto podcast for 48 episodes and this is the reality:

1) PR agencies send you e-mails wanting to plug their clients, often many times per week,

2) These clients are ofc VC-funded startups who can afford PR agencies,

3) 90% of these projects don't have any product out, they just want to talk about their "vision",

4) Some of them aren't even pretending it's about merit, and they outright ask you "How much it costs to be a guest in the podcast?",

5) If you decide to optimize for clicks (I did not), you need to have big names that are being discussed on CT,

6) And the big names discussed on Twitter are ofc the VC funded ones because VCs shared they invested in them and they got attention,

7) This attention often gets fueled by paid and nonpaid KOLs as well as airdrop farmers who typically farm VC funded projects as they expect tokens,

8) You can ofc try to ignore this whole circus but then you'd make much less from ads. This is what I did btw, but I didn't do podcasting for a living, so it was easier to resist the bad incentives.

In other words, it just pays off to be a part of this circle.

Now that also explains how I could be a crypto podcast listeners a few years ago, and am now down very bad in that consumption habit.

The only podcasts I genuinely enjoy now that talk about crypto are BoysClub and the occasional Gwart podcast, mostly because - depending on guests, they go very deep into the tech, architecture, and assumptions behind certain choices.