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 teleprompter, and they will happily sit through twenty minutes of pure nonsense as long as the dopamine drip stays steady. The information could be pure crapola — they'll watch anyway. Because they are not there to learn. They are there to feel.
Now, there is a smaller crowd — and you know who you are — who, when life hits the fan and you find yourselves wedged between a rock and a hard place, suddenly want real answers. Those are the people I work with. Those are my clients. They become family. And when I say family, I mean it the old-fashioned way: I actually care about you.
WHAT NOBODY WILL TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE
Here is a truth no podcasting guru will ever sell you in a course.
Nobody gives a damn about you.
Read it again. Let it sink in. The general public, given a comment box, will use it the way a vandal uses a brick wall. Look at the Wall Street Journal comments. Look at any platform. People are mean, nasty, and bored.
So if you enjoy throwing red meat into a piranha tank and watching the water churn, podcasting will give you exactly what you want.
I have a simple rule. I only work with nice people. Dead serious. Less, in this case, is more. A small group of folks who actually engage with you, who use your products and services, who treat you like a human being — that's gold. Everyone else? Why, exactly, are you worrying about them?
Oh, I forgot. The algorithm. The algorithm will reward you if your viewer count goes up. Who cares? The algorithms are screwing your brain. They don't mean a thing.
A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE WORD "PODCAST"
I don't know how the word podcast got so universally adopted. They were audio casts. Leo Laporte — good man — tried to push "netcast." Didn't take. The word podcast comes from the iPod, and right now somebody listening to this is asking, "What's an iPod?" And there you go.
Today, YouTube says it has podcasts. YouTube is video. A podcast can be live, on-demand, behind a paywall, free, audio, video, an audiobook in disguise. The word means nothing and everything at the same time. It's a linguistic accordion.
Why isn't an audiobook called a podcast? It hits every technical definition. Nobody knows. Sometimes I wish George Carlin were still around. He had a gift for slicing through the hogwash, balderdash, and poppycock. We could use about ten more of him right now.
THE TRUTH ABOUT VIDEO
I've done video. I've done green screens. During COVID I had a whole production setup that would have made a local news station envious. Here's what I've learned: video is a lot more effort for not a lot more return.
Live video means technical glitches, sneezing fits, a stray nose hair that's plotting against you, a burp at exactly the wrong second, the moment your tongue ties itself into a sailor's knot. On-demand video means editing. And editing means clip, clip, clip, clip, clip — those little jump cuts that have become the visual vocabulary of modern YouTube. Every time I see a video edited like that, I think the same thing: this person can't hold a thought together for twelve consecutive seconds.
If I need to show you a diagram, I'll put it on the website and tell you where to find it. Open a new tab. We do still use that word, right? Tab? Browser? Some of you, I know, need to be told. So here it is: open a new tab. Look at the graph. Come back. That's the whole trick.
YOUTUBE DID ME A FAVOR
I am grateful — genuinely grateful — that YouTube and its discriminatory algorithm decided to bury me. Because it gave me back my time. I'm not playing the game anymore. I shouldn't have ever started. I got sucked in because it was cool to watch the view counter climb. It was bull. It really was.
My clients can think. They connect the dots. They understand there is no such thing as a free lunch. They pay me for my time, my effort, my aggravation, and my ability to make them money. That's a real relationship. That's worth protecting.
ON DERANGEMENT, OF BOTH FLAVORS
I am going to say something most podcasters won't.
You have Trump derangement syndrome on the left. You also have it on the right. You had Obama derangement syndrome on the right. And yes, you had it on the left too — the kind where the man could have walked outside and done something unspeakable on live television and a portion of his supporters would have found a way to applaud.
Derangement means I am deranged in my support, or I am deranged in my hatred. Both are diseases. Both rot the mind. And both apply equally to every political family in this country — the Clintons, the Bushes, the Kennedys, all of them.
The same applies to the country itself. There are times when America is on the wrong track and needs to correct. We're correcting some of that now. No more outsourcing everything to China. No more wage suppression by oceans of illegal labor. No more turning a single-family home into a twelve-bunk hostel where nobody has a license, nobody has insurance, and your lawnmower disappears on Tuesday, your rake on Wednesday, and your laptop by the weekend.
Not everyone here illegally is a bad person. But they are breaking the law. And a country that will not enforce its own laws isn't really a country. It's a suggestion.
THE DRUG QUESTION
Here is another one we never quite get around to answering honestly. Drugs. Either make them legal, or make them illegal. Pick one. If they are illegal, why are there treatment centers funded by taxpayers? If they are legal, why am I paying for the consequences?
I don't want to pay for the surviving Darwin Award winners. You shouldn't either. You drive drunk. You drive high. You hurt somebody. You have no insurance. I think you should sit in a cell until the key rusts.
Harsh? Tell it to the family at the funeral. Tell it to the spouse, the child, the parent. Until you've stood at a traffic fatality at two in the morning — and I have, more times than I want to remember — you don't quite get a vote on what counts as harsh.
A NOTE ON POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS
I went through a stretch of years where certain sounds and certain smells would unspool me without warning. I know what PTSD is. I lived in it for a long time. And I caught myself getting spooked again — by an algorithm, of all things. By a like count. By a number on a screen.
A like is not a vote. A view is not a relationship. A subscriber is not a friend. Don't let a software company convince you otherwise.
ON VOTING
While we're at it. If you vote, vote intelligently. If you don't know anything about the people on the ballot, do all of us a favor: skip that race. You are not canceling out a dumb vote. You are the dumb vote. Voting because somebody had pretty signs is not civic engagement. It's interior decorating.
WHY THIS PODCAST EXISTS
This is my second universal podcast. I'm putting it on YouTube. On Facebook. Across the platforms. One piece of content, many doors. No more chopping the same thought into seventeen formats for seventeen audiences.
I have probably annoyed somebody. Maybe many somebodies. As I've always said — I don't care.
With that, I'm out of here.
Click. Click.
What is The Paul Truesdell Podcast?
The Paul Truesdell Podcast
Welcome to the Paul Truesdell Podcast. So, what's the gig? Paul records frequently at the Truesdell Professional Building. He eplains a few things about how life works before time gets away. Paul connects the dots, the plot and knots, spots the ops with a heavy dose of knocks, mocks, pots, rocks, socks, and mops. Confused? Then welcome aboard! You see, Paul the Elder enjoys telling complex stories in a way that is easy to understand. While always based on business, economics, and forecasting, having fun, laughing, and being among like-minded men, women, and children from Earth, Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune is a requirement. Paul the Elder coupled with Team Truesdell, have been there and done it. If you enjoy front porch philosophers who take deep dives and connect the dots, while drinking coffee during the day and a whiskey after five, welcome.
It is a true pleasure to have you onboard.
This is, The Paul Truesdell Podcast.