The Talk Show Timeline

I really enjoy John Gruber’s podcast The Talk Show. However, I’ve noticed that it’s been a while since it was in my feed. I decided to chart previous episode dates to check some of my assumptions about release frequency.

Cutting to the chase, here’s a link to The Talk Show Timeline. You can click/tap on days to get a pinned tooltip, which lets you link out to a particular day’s episode. I’ve tried to make this work well on mobile devices, but you’ll likely find it works best on desktop.

A note about this: Gruber has mentioned in the past that there has been a personal situation that he’s been working through. He’s also mentioned something to this effect on the podcast at points, but hasn’t gone into detail. I don’t need to know more than has been said, and I just hope things are alright.

I’ve read Gruber’s site since 2002 and listened to his podcasts since 2007. In that time, I’ve learned that he operates on his own timeline… and has a penchant for procrastination. No shade here! He’s set himself up with a work situation that I envy. I also don’t want to seem grumpy about the lack of podcast episodes; I’m just trying to understand how this current break compares to those in the past.

Because it was easiest, and because it would answer my immediate questions, I only looked at the current iteration of The Talk Show. Happily, there’s a single page which lists all the episodes. It had a tiny bit of data weirdness, but I was able to turn this into a JSON file with the details I cared about. With that, I used the calendar heatmap chart in Apache ECharts to display the episodes over time.

Some things I noticed:

• While it’s been a while (29 days) since the last episode (on August 10), this isn’t unheard of. The average is about 12 days between episodes, but there have been 6 other times when the episode gap has been at least this long.
• The longest gap was 62 days between December 24, 2024 and February 24, 2025.
• There’s exactly one day with two episodes: July 19, 2014. It was “Cat Pictures” with Marco Arment, which got split into two “sides”. Here’s a link to side 1, and here’s side 2.
• I mentioned procrastination: 73% of episodes take place on the 16th of a month or later. 28% of episodes take place on either the last or second-last day of the month. Again, no shade! It’s something I chuckle about whenever I notice it.
• At the current rate, this year is about in line with output going back to 2023. While it has been a while since a new episode dropped, it’s not out of whack statistically.

Anyway, this was a Labour Day project that was mostly for my own amusement. I expect there will likely be a new episode of The Talk Show some time fairly soon after tomorrow’s Apple event.

I also don’t know if I’ll keep this chart up to date… though it’s not terribly onerous to do now, so who knows.

1. I found Daring Fireball because I was researching the purchase of my first Mac around this time. It wasn’t until October of 2002, but I ended up buying one of the machines he wrote about in his first post that August.
2. The following dates don’t match the main format:
   • Sunday 30 November, 2025
   • Mon, 24 Feb 2020 16:05:34 EDT
   • Tuesday 31 December 2019
   • Tuesday, June 25 2019
   • Sat, 16 Mar 2019 19:43:49 EDT
   • Wednesday 31 December 2014
   • Monday, 30 Jun 2014