All right, let's do a, Oh, here's another podcasting question. Okay. Got a podcasting question here. I'm going to pontificate a little bit. So caveat emptier before we do a couple more sponsors. Okay. This question comes from Paula. Paula says, I really enjoy your episodes on the business of podcasting and its trends.

When I was looking for information on starting my own podcast, it seemed like a lot of the materials out there were focused on podcast as marketing tools. Ways to do quick, easy production with lots of episodes as a content rich way to show off your expertise. I'm more interested in podcasting as the audio equivalent of long form, nonfiction narrative writing like a planet money or Freakonomics.

Paula notes in parentheses that she is an economist herself. So that's why she was using Freakonomics as an example. Paula goes on to say, I see the value in all these formats, but if the low barrier to start promotional style podcast, fill the directories, does that turn off the potential audience to other styles?

Do they step into the podcast world, get overwhelmed, see a lot of styles they don't like and that feel very amateur and leave for amateurs interested in other styles? Does their entryway become working with an established production company like in traditional publishing thoughts? All right, Paula, I love pontificating on podcasting as a business.

I have a few thoughts here. Number one, I think it's important to have a good number one. No, I don't think the proliferation of the sort of low quality checklist productivity style marketing podcast is going to hurt other more serious attempts at podcasting by checklist productivity, by the way, that's my that's my reference to the genre of productivity that says if you just have the right insider information.

The right steps. And just go through and execute these steps, you can accomplish these big, really interesting things like you want to just work, you want to triple your income and work a fraction of your time, just have the right checklist to go through. And at the other end of that, you'll you'll accomplish that goal.

You want a podcast that's going to be a great marketing tool for your company. The key is going through these checklists. That's checklist productivity for anything that is. Desirable for any type of outcome that a lot of people would want. Checklist are never enough. They're really appealing because it's tractable.

I put in a little bit of effort, I make my way through the list, you feel like you're making progress, but things that are hard are hard and checklist aren't enough. Anyways, there's a lot of checklist productivity out there for marketing podcasts, you get a bunch of these podcasts that no one ever listens to.

Because it's people just talking about whatever their industry is in a way that no one would care about. I don't think that hurts other people making a more serious run. podcasting is developed enough, there's enough podcast out there, people aren't just perusing directories to see what they want to listen to.

It's more like radio shows or TV shows on streamers. Now people hear about things through trusted sources, a friend recommends it, they hear someone on another show, a show is spotlighted on one of these top charts or spotlights that let's say like an apple or Spotify does, that's how people find podcasts now.

So the fact that a lot of crap is out there, I don't think it's a problem. All right, number two, you ask, should you work with a production company, that's not really going to be that's not an entryway. So there's not, there's not production companies out there that will say, you know, Paula, like you seem like you're smart and interesting, we'll build this podcast around you.

And like, you'll find a big audience. There are production companies, but who they tend to work with is either established podcasts or established figures. So like an established, well known writer, and they will say you have a big audience, we will, will help you build the podcast around it.

But often what they're really offering there is technical expertise. So there's not, there's not an entryway in the podcasting like you would have in publishing, where if you have the right idea, the right publisher might get behind it, and you can just focus on the writing and it could take off.

podcasting requires a lot more from the, you know, the actual podcaster has to build a show that builds an audience. All right, so that's my second. Third, I don't quite know how to develop this theory. But see, I see a direct line, I think blogging and podcasting are connected.

Social media, which emerged between blogging and podcasting is a very different beast. And it warped. It's my pontification, everyone should be aware, it warped our understanding of democratized digital content production. Here's what I mean about that. When blogging came along and blogging as at the as the, the rear guard action of the web in general web 2.0, the ability for the average person to be able to publish text that's accessible around the world without having to have access to a magazine or to a newspaper or to a book press, this revolution, this democratizing of text in the digital, in the digital setting that sort of reached its apotheosis with the blog.

This was an important revolution. But most blogs did terribly. Because it turns out, here's what happens when you use digital tools to democratize different media channels. It allows many more people to get in and take a swing. But what it doesn't do is lower the bar of quality of originality for success.

So it's a good thing for the culture writ large, because there's lots of diverse voices or interesting voices or, or styles or ideas that, that never really would have got a shot to get above that bar if they had to write for life magazine and try to get in there blogging minute was possible that you, you could take your shot.

No, one's going to hold you back. So it's good for the culture writ large, because you get a more interesting, more innovation, more interesting set of writers, but for the individual, it can seem frustrating because 99.9% of individuals aren't producing stuff at the bar that it matters. So when you, this is the, the, a key mistake of the democratization of digital media that people often make democratizing access to the media does not reduce the quality bar relate required to succeed.

So we get this standard pushback around blogging when that happens. Like, well, most blogs are bad. So this isn't changing publishing, but it did. Yes, of course, most blogs are bad, but there was a lot of good ones. And it brought a lot of people into the, into the industry that might've otherwise not.

And it innovated the form. And, and, you know, you have the whole, like just even in politics, even the whole wonk approach to understanding politics and wonk blog, and you had Ezra Klein and Nate silver, and all of this came out of blogging these voices that, you know, would have otherwise had to have worked their way up through newsrooms and the traditional political reporting.

Podcasting is very similar. It's democratizing digital audio. Now, almost anyone like me can put together a show and have it out there and it can leap across the uncanny Valley between the internet and terrestrial radio that we're used to. And, and you can be in the same ecosystem and almost anyone can do this now.

And this is all great for the whole culture because you have a lot of innovation happening, but for the individual is still hard because the quality bar is still really high to produce an audio program that a lot of people want to listen to is really hard. It's like why most radio shows failed.

It's why the people who were great at it, the Howard Stearns of the world, the Dave Ramsey of the world make a lot of money. It's really hard to do. Now, why I talked about social media being a divergence is because social media warped our understanding of this democratization of digital media because it didn't just democratize access to various media.

They played these weird algorithmic games with attention. And I talk about this some in deep work, a little bit in digital minimalism as well, but it had more of a, for lack of a better word, collectivist model of attention, where it not just gave everyone access to publish. We had that before, but it gave everyone access to some attention.

Now it used to be in the early days of social media back when it was really based on the social graph, the way this unfolded was you would post things and your friends would look at what you posted and they would give you comments on it and you would do the same for them.

And now you could kind of post stuff and have, and you could have attention. Hey, look, here's a picture. I went to the farm or here's what I was up to today, or here's a little quip and people give you attention. Hey, good work. That looks beautiful or whatever.

And if you had tried to post any of that on a blog, like no one would have come. There wasn't a collectivization of attention there that wasn't going to attract an audience. And if God forbid you had a newspaper column where you were just posting these observations, you know, the paper would have fired you on day two, but social media added this new artificial attention redistribution, which is really what people want is the attention.

So it used to just be this implicit contract between friends. I'll post stuff. Let's be honest, garbage. You'll post kind of garbage, but we'll all talk about each other's garbage and we'll all feel like we have an audience. Then things got more sophisticated. And by the time you get to something like TikTok, now you have just direct manipulation of attention redistribution where they will take something you post occasionally and show it to a lot of people.

So that from your perspective, you were getting these intermittent, hard to predict, giant burst of reinforcement that make you feel like, my God, like that really took off. Maybe I'm really close to breaking out. When I was writing at Bevco yesterday at the coffee shop near where I record this podcast, there was a two gen Z-ers on, I might've been a date.

I don't know. It sounded like a date, like a first date. And they were just going back and forth about TikTok and like, well, I had this one video and you don't have these views and that's just pure manipulation of attention. So now it used to be an implicit contract between friends on sharing a network.

And now just the algorithms do it itself. I think that warped people's understanding of success in media and made it feel like more just your personal expression and observations of the world are always just, you know, one Mr. Beast breakthrough away from you suddenly having a big audience that everyone has the potential, potentially having a big audience.

And you get just enough reinforcement, you this trickle of online reinforcement that you're used to it. And then you go back to the non-manipulated pitiless media world of podcasting, just like blogs were before it. And just like traditional media was before that and it's crickets. So Paul, I've wandered way off your original question.

I just think this is interesting that, that we have these two points going on here. If we're going to just pontificate again about media, democratization of digital media, democratized access to publishing your voice. It did not lower the bar of quality required to succeed with an audience, but social media collectivized or redistributed attention in a manipulative manner to keep people using it.

And retrain people to expect and think, you know, if you're just out there and you're interesting, you never know. So that all goes to say, Paul, back to your plan to start a podcast. It's just hard. You know, it's just a, it's a very competitive pitiless landscape. You have to have something that's going to have a large audience say this.

I have to listen to it. It is a hard world out there. This show does pretty well. It's not a super successful show. It does pretty well. And it is really hard work to get there. We put a lot of effort into this and look, I have a large audience.

I've been writing books for a long time. I'm published all around the world. I I've been around, I've been known, I've been thinking and talking professionally about these things for well over a decade. And we work really hard, Jesse and I, to try to make the show tighter and tighter.

We have a good audience, but it's not massive. I'm just saying it's hard work. It's hard work. You got to think about it like a large FM radio station or cable news channel hired you to put together a show and how hard you would have to work to try to make that show a success.

That's the way to think about it. Don't let the artificial redistribution of attention that's been leveraged by social media, warp your understanding of what actually goes into success. Here.