Episode Details

Why most podcasting efforts are a waste of time. 

PODCAST NOTES — WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT PODCASTING
By Paul Truesdell

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Let me give you some background on what I've learned about this whole podcasting business. When I started, we had dialup. That's right — dialup. The internet sounded like a fax machine having a nervous breakdown, and I was running a program called Icecast. I-C-E-C-A-S-T. Phenomenal piece of software. Still around, by the way. We did everything live.

I shut it down. Why? My business partner had a peculiar habit — he was late, unprepared, and apparently allergic to a clock. I tried it again later with a few other folks. Same story, different cast. And I don't cotton to that. That's one of my phrases. I don't cotton to certain things, and chronic unreliability sits right at the top of the list.

Here in little old sleepy Ocala — and I mean truly sleepy, the kind of sleepy where the town rolls up the sidewalks at sundown — we had built that show up to fifteen hundred, two thousand listeners. In the early days of the internet, that wasn't small potatoes. That was a whole bushel.

I've always been one of the first ones on a platform. Not all of them — a lot of them came and went — but Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it, we were early. And along the way I figured out something important: there is no one format that works for everybody.

THE JOE ROGAN FANTASY

Let me address the elephant in every podcaster's studio. So many people sit down behind a microphone and genuinely believe they are going to be the next Joe Rogan. Let me explain how that actually works.

Joe Rogan spent decades — plural — building connections across the country. His early guests were comedians, because comedians were his friends. He did not roll out of bed one Tuesday and suddenly have heads of state on the line. He grinded. For years.

And he does not edit people the way 60 Minutes edited a certain presidential candidate. He just lets the tape roll. That's a feature, not a bug.

So before you order business cards that say "podcast host," ask yourself one honest question: Do you actually want to sit and interview people for hours, day after day? You might. But you had better have connections. You had better know how to interview. And — this is the kicker — the people sitting across from you had better have something worth saying.

Here is the dirty little secret nobody wants to print on a billboard: most podcast guests are boring. They don't know how to use their voice. They have no rhythm, no cadence, no sense of when to land a point and when to let it breathe. They mumble through a thought that should have taken thirty seconds and stretch it into a seven-minute meandering autobiography of their lunch order.

A RADIO VOICE IS A TRAINED VOICE

I have a radio voice. That isn't bragging — it's the result of a very long time spent learning how to raise the voice, lower it, color it, and end a thought with a little signature click that tells you we're done.

Most folks haven't done that work. They sit down expecting the microphone to do it for them. The microphone doesn't.

THE TWO-PALS-IN-A-POD PROBLEM

You can do the co-host thing — two people, three people, just riffing. I did it with my son. We called it Two Pals in a Pod. Loved every minute of it. Here's why it ended: he has his life, I have mine, and the moment you involve another human being, you adopt their schedule. I'm not doing that anymore. Life is too short and calendars are too full.

EDUCATIONAL CONTENT AND A LESSON IN HUMAN NATURE

Then I tried the educational route. Training videos. Real, useful, actionable material that could change your finances, your health, your life.

You know what I learned?

Most people don't actually want help. They want entertainment. They want a good-looking woman or a buff young fella reading a telepr