It was just a couple of years ago that pundits who follow the way we get our media were saying that the culture was already at Peak Podcast, that the online — on-phone, mostly — storytelling, politics, journalism and entertainment-biz format was running out of mojo and had topped out in listeners.

When you read, as I did yesterday, that the 30-year-old L.A. woman who runs a podcast I had never heard of, “Call Her Daddy,” who interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris this week for her pod has recently signed a multi-year deal with SiriusXM for $125 million, you begin to think that perhaps the peak has not arrived.

But apparently a lot of people listen to Alex Cooper’s show, because that’s not the kind of salary being tossed around in, let’s say, newspaper newsrooms these days.

If you haven’t plunged in, you ought not let whatever novelty there still is in the format scare you away. A podcast is nothing more than a radio show unencumbered by any time issues. They can go five minutes, and they can and do go five hours. And they are often micro-focused on something you’re interested in. On morning runs and while doing chores in the garden, I listen to “No Laying Up,” for golf geeks only, and “Bandsplain,” for rock music fans, whenever Altadenan Yasi Salek gets back to hosting her show, that is.

While searching for something else in the podcast section of my Spotify app recently, I ran across a pod I’d never heard of and never expected to see: “Hidden Pasadena,” it was called. And that same week I got a note from old friend Katie Dunham, who turns out to be a media consultant for its production team. “Hidden,” she wrote, is actually the fourth season of pod “Western Edition” from another old friend, USC history professor Bill Deverell, and his Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

In other years, the show has covered the calamity of wildfire in the Western U.S.; the past, present and future of L.A.’s Chinatown; and sites of memorialization and commemoration across the American West.

Why, I asked Bill on the phone the other day, considering that he’s already really busy teaching, writing books and co-directing an academic institute, become a podcast host as well?

“Well, I went into it kicking and screaming a few years ago,” Bill admitted, “because I thought the challenges would be severe.” But now, as the ICW approaches 20 years, he sees that the pod is broadening a formerly select audience. “We’ve had over 20,000 downloads” during the four seasons, he says. “Yes, academics in general have been uncertain” about the medium. “But now there’s a certain currency to extending the audience through nonprint formulas. And we’re never going to be charging anyone a nickel.” When an academic publishes a book, he noted, sometimes on the order of only 500 copies are sold. “And that’s if my mom buys a lot for her friends.”

And why Pasadena for a subject this season?

“Pasadena seems to be really popular!” Bill says. I actually don’t even have to ask “why?” Bill, who lives here, and who formerly taught at Caltech, is almost as big of a Pasadena homer as your correspondent. He really knows, and loves, the city. And the topics he and his team chose for the season are so wonderfully various, like the town itself — and neighboring Altadena and San Marino, home to some of this season’s stories. The first, I knew nothing of, other than the Simons-branded old brick walkway in my front yard: “Now an upscale, residential neighborhood in the heart of Pasadena, Madison Heights used to be home to Simons Brickyard, once the largest brickyard in the world.” The second is one of the great, and poignant, tales of a nominally liberal city and its legacy of segregation: “The story of two churches: St. Barnabas, the historically all-black Episcopal Church still standing on Fair Oaks Avenue in Northwest Pasadena, and the mainly-white All Saints Church, located less than two miles south of St. Barnabas,” with its famously wealthy parishioners. The third: “Thriving in Pasadena in the 1960s and 1970s, members of the John Birch Society identified as anti-communists, opposed the civil rights movement and racial desegregation, deeply disagreed with the feminist movement, and disseminated lies and conspiracy theories.” Then there are looks at the history of Vroman’s, at the Shoya House, the Japanese structure recently brought from Japan to the Huntington, and the local legacy of the children of John Brown the Liberator.

Check it all out where you find podcasts: your phone!

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com