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The Talk Show Timeline

September 8, 2026

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 1 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, 2 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

    ↩