Cal Newport Pontificates On The Past And Future Of Podcasting

00:00:00.000 | All right, let's do a, Oh, here's another podcasting question. Okay.

00:00:04.160 | Got a podcasting question here. I'm going to pontificate a little bit. So caveat emptier

00:00:09.760 | before we do a couple more sponsors. Okay. This question comes from Paula.

00:00:13.520 | Paula says, I really enjoy your episodes on the business of podcasting and its trends.

00:00:21.520 | When I was looking for information on starting my own podcast,

00:00:24.320 | it seemed like a lot of the materials out there were focused on podcast as marketing tools.

00:00:29.040 | Ways to do quick, easy production with lots of episodes as a content rich way to show off your

00:00:32.640 | expertise. I'm more interested in podcasting as the audio equivalent of long form,

00:00:37.680 | nonfiction narrative writing like a planet money or Freakonomics.

00:00:40.720 | Paula notes in parentheses that she is an economist herself.

00:00:45.840 | So that's why she was using Freakonomics as an example.

00:00:49.200 | Paula goes on to say, I see the value in all these formats, but if the low barrier to start

00:00:54.640 | promotional style podcast, fill the directories, does that turn off the potential audience to

00:00:59.440 | other styles? Do they step into the podcast world, get overwhelmed, see a lot of styles

00:01:03.600 | they don't like and that feel very amateur and leave for amateurs interested in other styles?

00:01:08.560 | Does their entryway become working with an established production company like in traditional

00:01:12.720 | publishing thoughts? All right, Paula, I love pontificating on podcasting as a business.

00:01:19.920 | I have a few thoughts here. Number one, I think it's important to have a good

00:01:23.920 | number one. No, I don't think the proliferation of the sort of low quality checklist productivity

00:01:33.120 | style marketing podcast is going to hurt other more serious attempts at podcasting

00:01:38.400 | by checklist productivity, by the way, that's my that's my reference to the genre of productivity

00:01:44.400 | that says if you just have the right insider information.

00:01:50.800 | The right steps. And just go through and execute these steps, you can accomplish these big,

00:01:55.840 | really interesting things like you want to just work, you want to triple your income and work a

00:02:00.480 | fraction of your time, just have the right checklist to go through. And at the other end

00:02:04.080 | of that, you'll you'll accomplish that goal. You want a podcast that's going to be a great

00:02:07.440 | marketing tool for your company. The key is going through these checklists. That's checklist

00:02:10.800 | productivity for anything that is. Desirable for any type of outcome that a lot of people

00:02:17.200 | would want. Checklist are never enough. They're really appealing because it's tractable. I put

00:02:22.800 | in a little bit of effort, I make my way through the list, you feel like you're making progress,

00:02:25.600 | but things that are hard are hard and checklist aren't enough. Anyways, there's a lot of checklist

00:02:29.120 | productivity out there for marketing podcasts, you get a bunch of these podcasts that no one

00:02:34.240 | ever listens to. Because it's people just talking about whatever their industry is in a way that no

00:02:40.480 | one would care about. I don't think that hurts other people making a more serious run. podcasting

00:02:46.080 | is developed enough, there's enough podcast out there, people aren't just perusing directories

00:02:50.880 | to see what they want to listen to. It's more like radio shows or TV shows on streamers. Now

00:02:56.480 | people hear about things through trusted sources, a friend recommends it, they hear someone on

00:03:01.200 | another show, a show is spotlighted on one of these top charts or spotlights that let's say

00:03:08.000 | like an apple or Spotify does, that's how people find podcasts now. So the fact that a lot of crap

00:03:12.000 | is out there, I don't think it's a problem. All right, number two, you ask, should you work with

00:03:19.040 | a production company, that's not really going to be that's not an entryway. So there's not,

00:03:25.040 | there's not production companies out there that will say, you know, Paula, like you seem like

00:03:31.840 | you're smart and interesting, we'll build this podcast around you. And like, you'll find a big

00:03:35.760 | audience. There are production companies, but who they tend to work with is either established

00:03:41.120 | podcasts or established figures. So like an established, well known writer, and they will

00:03:47.680 | say you have a big audience, we will, will help you build the podcast around it. But often what

00:03:53.040 | they're really offering there is technical expertise. So there's not, there's not an entryway

00:03:57.280 | in the podcasting like you would have in publishing, where if you have the right idea, the

00:04:00.400 | right publisher might get behind it, and you can just focus on the writing and it could take off.

00:04:04.240 | podcasting requires a lot more from the, you know, the actual podcaster has to build a show

00:04:10.080 | that builds an audience. All right, so that's my second. Third,

00:04:15.840 | I don't quite know how to develop this theory. But see, I see a direct line,

00:04:22.720 | I think blogging and podcasting are connected. Social media, which emerged between blogging

00:04:29.360 | and podcasting is a very different beast. And it warped. It's my pontification, everyone should be

00:04:34.160 | aware, it warped our understanding of democratized digital content production. Here's what I mean

00:04:38.960 | about that. When blogging came along and blogging as at the as the, the rear guard action of the web

00:04:45.600 | in general web 2.0, the ability for the average person to be able to publish text that's accessible

00:04:50.880 | around the world without having to have access to a magazine or to a newspaper or to a book press,

00:04:55.600 | this revolution, this democratizing of text in the digital, in the digital setting that

00:05:00.320 | sort of reached its apotheosis with the blog. This was an important revolution.

00:05:07.600 | But most blogs did terribly. Because it turns out, here's what happens when you use digital

00:05:12.400 | tools to democratize different media channels. It allows many more people to get in and take a swing.

00:05:22.160 | But what it doesn't do is lower the bar of quality of originality for success.

00:05:29.200 | So it's a good thing for the culture writ large, because there's lots of diverse voices

00:05:36.880 | or interesting voices or, or styles or ideas that, that never really would have got a shot

00:05:41.360 | to get above that bar if they had to write for life magazine and try to get in there

00:05:45.760 | blogging minute was possible that you, you could take your shot. No, one's going to hold you back.

00:05:49.520 | So it's good for the culture writ large, because you get a more interesting,

00:05:53.760 | more innovation, more interesting set of writers, but for the individual, it can seem frustrating

00:05:57.840 | because 99.9% of individuals aren't producing stuff at the bar that it matters. So when you,

00:06:03.360 | this is the, the, a key mistake of the democratization of digital media that people

00:06:08.160 | often make democratizing access to the media does not reduce the quality bar relate required to

00:06:15.040 | succeed. So we get this standard pushback around blogging when that happens. Like, well, most blogs

00:06:20.080 | are bad. So this isn't changing publishing, but it did. Yes, of course, most blogs are bad,

00:06:24.240 | but there was a lot of good ones. And it brought a lot of people into the, into the industry that

00:06:29.120 | might've otherwise not. And it innovated the form. And, and, you know, you have the whole,

00:06:34.000 | like just even in politics, even the whole wonk approach to understanding politics and wonk blog,

00:06:39.600 | and you had Ezra Klein and Nate silver, and all of this came out of blogging these voices that,

00:06:44.240 | you know, would have otherwise had to have worked their way up through newsrooms and the

00:06:48.800 | traditional political reporting. Podcasting is very similar. It's democratizing digital audio.

00:06:55.760 | Now, almost anyone like me can put together a show and have it out there and it can leap across

00:07:01.360 | the uncanny Valley between the internet and terrestrial radio that we're used to. And,

00:07:05.280 | and you can be in the same ecosystem and almost anyone can do this now. And this is all great for

00:07:09.440 | the whole culture because you have a lot of innovation happening, but for the individual

00:07:12.320 | is still hard because the quality bar is still really high to produce an audio program that a

00:07:16.880 | lot of people want to listen to is really hard. It's like why most radio shows failed.

00:07:20.480 | It's why the people who were great at it, the Howard Stearns of the world, the Dave Ramsey of

00:07:24.880 | the world make a lot of money. It's really hard to do. Now, why I talked about social media being

00:07:30.800 | a divergence is because social media warped our understanding of this democratization of digital

00:07:36.320 | media because it didn't just democratize access to various media. They played these weird algorithmic

00:07:44.160 | games with attention. And I talk about this some in deep work, a little bit in digital minimalism

00:07:51.840 | as well, but it had more of a, for lack of a better word, collectivist model of attention,

00:07:56.880 | where it not just gave everyone access to publish. We had that before,

00:08:01.120 | but it gave everyone access to some attention. Now it used to be in the early days

00:08:06.560 | of social media back when it was really based on the social graph, the way this unfolded was

00:08:11.520 | you would post things and your friends would look at what you posted and they would give you

00:08:15.840 | comments on it and you would do the same for them. And now you could kind of post stuff and have,

00:08:20.560 | and you could have attention. Hey, look, here's a picture. I went to the farm or here's what I was

00:08:26.000 | up to today, or here's a little quip and people give you attention. Hey, good work. That looks

00:08:29.520 | beautiful or whatever. And if you had tried to post any of that on a blog, like no one would

00:08:34.320 | have come. There wasn't a collectivization of attention there that wasn't going to attract

00:08:37.440 | an audience. And if God forbid you had a newspaper column where you were just posting these

00:08:41.040 | observations, you know, the paper would have fired you on day two, but social media added this new

00:08:45.840 | artificial attention redistribution, which is really what people want is the attention.

00:08:50.960 | So it used to just be this implicit contract between friends. I'll post stuff. Let's be honest,

00:08:58.080 | garbage. You'll post kind of garbage, but we'll all talk about each other's garbage and we'll all

00:09:01.600 | feel like we have an audience. Then things got more sophisticated. And by the time you get to

00:09:08.080 | something like TikTok, now you have just direct manipulation of attention redistribution where

00:09:13.600 | they will take something you post occasionally and show it to a lot of people. So that from your

00:09:18.000 | perspective, you were getting these intermittent, hard to predict, giant burst of reinforcement

00:09:23.520 | that make you feel like, my God, like that really took off. Maybe I'm really close to breaking out.

00:09:28.880 | When I was writing at Bevco yesterday at the coffee shop near where I record this podcast,

00:09:35.520 | there was a two gen Z-ers on, I might've been a date. I don't know. It sounded like a date,

00:09:40.000 | like a first date. And they were just going back and forth about TikTok and like, well,

00:09:43.600 | I had this one video and you don't have these views and that's just pure manipulation of

00:09:48.880 | attention. So now it used to be an implicit contract between friends on sharing a network.

00:09:52.640 | And now just the algorithms do it itself. I think that warped people's understanding of

00:09:56.880 | success in media and made it feel like more just your personal expression and observations of the

00:10:03.040 | world are always just, you know, one Mr. Beast breakthrough away from you suddenly having a big

00:10:10.640 | audience that everyone has the potential, potentially having a big audience. And you

00:10:13.760 | get just enough reinforcement, you this trickle of online reinforcement that you're used to it.

00:10:17.680 | And then you go back to the non-manipulated pitiless media world of podcasting,

00:10:22.880 | just like blogs were before it. And just like traditional media was before that and it's

00:10:27.600 | crickets. So Paul, I've wandered way off your original question. I just think this is interesting

00:10:33.120 | that, that we have these two points going on here. If we're going to just pontificate again about

00:10:37.120 | media, democratization of digital media, democratized access to publishing your voice.

00:10:45.280 | It did not lower the bar of quality required to succeed with an audience, but social media

00:10:50.960 | collectivized or redistributed attention in a manipulative manner to keep people using it.

00:10:57.280 | And retrain people to expect and think, you know, if you're just out there and you're interesting,

00:11:02.480 | you never know. So that all goes to say, Paul, back to your plan to start a podcast.

00:11:08.080 | It's just hard. You know, it's just a, it's a very competitive pitiless landscape. You have

00:11:13.120 | to have something that's going to have a large audience say this. I have to listen to it. It

00:11:17.840 | is a hard world out there. This show does pretty well. It's not a super successful show. It does

00:11:21.840 | pretty well. And it is really hard work to get there. We put a lot of effort into this and look,

00:11:26.320 | I have a large audience. I've been writing books for a long time. I'm published all around the

00:11:31.120 | world. I I've been around, I've been known, I've been thinking and talking professionally about

00:11:36.320 | these things for well over a decade. And we work really hard, Jesse and I, to try to make the show

00:11:41.440 | tighter and tighter. We have a good audience, but it's not massive. I'm just saying it's hard work.

00:11:46.000 | It's hard work. You got to think about it like a large FM radio station or cable news channel

00:11:53.280 | hired you to put together a show and how hard you would have to work to try to make that show a

00:11:56.560 | success. That's the way to think about it. Don't let the artificial redistribution of attention

00:12:01.120 | that's been leveraged by social media, warp your understanding of what actually goes into success.

00:12:06.560 | Here.

Cal Newport Pontificates On The Past And Future Of Podcasting

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