Today's special episode of Radical Personal Finance is sponsored by HelloFresh. Visit HelloFresh.com and use the coupon code RPF30 to save $30 off your first week of deliveries. HelloFresh.com, coupon code RPF30. Today on the show, I'm going to share with you some philosophy and some insight into the world of podcasting.

I've got 50 specific tips and pieces of advice that I hope will serve you to take your message out to the world and do it in a very effective way. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua and I am your host, special edition of the show today, not specific to personal finance content, no tax analysis here. Today we're going to talk podcasting and it's my hope that even if you're not currently a podcaster, give me a chance on today's show. One of my personal secret plans that I'm now sharing with you is that I want to encourage many more people to get involved in the world of production, of useful information, useful inspiration, useful teaching, etc.

One of the most incredibly positive trends for liberty and freedom today, liberty, freedom and prosperity is the democratization of information. The fact that any individual today with the equipment and things that you already own can take your knowledge and skill and experience and share that publicly with the world.

This is powerful. And in general, it's my conviction that it is a powerful force for good. At times this seems to be a powerful force for evil, but in the end, good wins and I am very confident that we will see more and more of that. I love to see the cartels that have controlled much of the historical shaping of public opinion broken by individuals like you and me stepping up and creating our own useful contribution.

I believe that podcasting is a very powerful way for you to do that. And so I've continually sought to encourage many of you to begin podcasts. I've gotten feedback from many of you that you've begun podcasting and I want to continue that because we're just getting started. The trends are strong and we're just getting started.

There's been some – we're just getting started. So today's episode I've got about 50 and I say about 50 because I lost count. I don't know whether it's 43 or 47 or 63, but I've got about 50 specific suggestions that I want to walk through. And give me a chance because you're not going to hear any discussion of microphone selection here.

You're not going to hear any discussion of technical anything. I'm going to do what I do best, which is talk about philosophy and tactic, that the things that are changing and the things that will change. And I encourage you to know that I'm recording this in December of 2017, which means that some of these things will change.

But most of them I think the principles that I have to share, the philosophy and the principles and the tactics will continue. So let's start with number one. I am more convinced than ever and I wish to convince you that podcasting is a powerful, powerful medium. Podcasting provides a tremendous platform for many reasons.

Audio alone is a powerful form of communication because there's an ability to express personality and context in the form of audio that is more difficult to do in other ways. World writers are very good at conveying personality. But that develops – that requires a level of writing skill and a level of experience.

Amateur and unsophisticated writers often struggle with this. How do you convey a proper tone? Tone in words is very difficult. Just think to the last crucial conversation that you tried to have via text message and you realize that so much of the tone is missing in the written word.

Much of our communication – I've heard estimates that 93% of our communication is nonverbal, meaning that when you're speaking to somebody, only about 7% of the actual communication involved is the words that are a part of it. So of course the very best platform and medium for communication is going to be in person one-on-one.

That's the way that you'll be able to have the greatest clarity of communication, the most powerful transfer of thoughts because you can really understand what somebody is saying and what they're thinking. But sometimes there are disadvantages to having that interpersonal one-on-one communication, especially when you're dealing with difficult subjects.

For example, many people are intimidated by having intense communication with somebody on a subject where they're not sure they agree. So there's benefit in having a one-to-many conversation that's not simultaneous. But how do you maintain that same quality of interaction? It can happen at times with a room full of people come as students and a teacher standing in front.

That has its place. But that's a very expensive way to do things. It's very expensive to put an in-person teacher in front of a room full of people. And it also requires a simultaneous presence. Whereas if you move to a non-simultaneous communication methodology by recording it, you open up many more things and you lower the cost.

That allows communication to go more broadly. And so now we move into the world of video being probably the very best way for somebody to communicate one-to-many and have the full context. Because in video you can hear the words that are spoken and understand what's actually denoted by those words.

You can see the body language of the person involved. You can hear the tone of their voice. But video has other problems. It requires that full attention between a listener and a speaker. Also video is often unengaging. We're so used to being engaged with our video that to put on a 60-minute lecture and try to give that full attention is very difficult for many of us.

Video also has a problem of it being very expensive. It's expensive to create. It's hard work to create good and compelling and engaging video. It's expensive to listen to in terms of the time that's required because it requires full attention to see and to hear. And it's somewhat expensive to share, whether it's with how do you host it online, how do you share it, requires a lot of bandwidth, et cetera.

Now moving down the scale, audio fills that next platform where it's much less expensive than video. It's less expensive for the publisher of the content. You don't have to come up with an elaborate physical set that's going to look great. You don't have to dress up. You don't have to look great on camera and put on makeup.

You just have to simply record the voice. It's much less costly for the hearer to consume because it doesn't require full attention and is much less costly to share. But audio still has some superiority over text in the sense of context of the communication. Audio has the ability to convey emotion in a way that written text often lacks.

You can hear somebody's voice and that helps you to understand more their phraseology and what they're actually saying. I want you to listen to a classic example from the world of speaking and understand how important this is in your ability to communicate with your listener. The classic example is this.

Use this sentence. I didn't tell her you were stupid. Now when written, I didn't tell her you were stupid, it's very hard to understand exactly what's being implied. But now consider these different approaches to emphasis and the different meaning that's behind these words. I didn't tell her you were stupid.

Obviously meaning that somebody else may have told her. I didn't tell her you were stupid. Meaning that most definitely I emphatically did not do this. I didn't tell her you were stupid. I may have implied it however. I didn't tell her you were stupid. But of course I may have told someone else.

I didn't tell her you were stupid. I told her that someone else was stupid though. I didn't tell her you were stupid. I told her you're still stupid. Or I didn't tell her you were stupid. But I of course may have told her something else about you. As you can see from this classic example, context and tone matters.

And there's a power that we have in verbal speech to convey meaning that doesn't exist in the written word, especially not from an unskilled writer. Text has significant advantages over podcasting. For example, in today's world, the written word is scannable, which is really valuable. It's scannable by individual people who can quickly look over and grasp the content of the idea.

That means that your ideas will probably have a much broader impact. It's also scannable by bots that will archive it and inventory it for a search engine. And this in today's world is very important. Text speech is shareable in a way that verbal communication is not. If you write an essay that takes maybe 10 minutes to read, it can be a powerful and effective essay.

And that essay may go viral. You may take the same content and pack it into a 30-minute podcast presentation with spoken word, and it may be way more powerful, but it's very hard for that 30 minutes of audio to go viral in today's world. Talk about virality in a little bit.

But text does have some benefits, but podcasting has very powerful benefits. And so I think it's valuable for us to focus on this fact and recognize that podcasting is powerful and tremendous. I'm convinced one of the powers of podcasting is the ability for small audiences of people for ideas or for content to connect with creators.

In the past, when mass media was all about the masses, you would automatically build a fairly generic, vanilla piece of content that had to have broad general appeal and not be broadly offensive. That was the world of mass media. But that world is now destroyed. And this is the fundamental thing that is blossoming.

It's the world of an individual creator being able to discuss ideas that are only appealing to a very small market of people. When somebody with a niche interest is able to connect with others who share that interest, it can create a much tighter bond between that person and between those two people than is created from the creators and the consumers in the world of mass media.

This is really, really powerful. Podcasting does this really well. And there's a tremendous future in podcasting. Next, podcasting as a marketplace has changed significantly in the last two years. I want to give you some examples of that in just a moment. Before I do, sponsor of today's show is HelloFresh.

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Again, go to HelloFresh.com, use the coupon code RPF30. Please make sure to use that code. Number one, it'll save you $30, so that's our bribe to you. Number two, it lets them know that their advertising campaign here on Radical Personal Finance is working. And thank you for that. Now, back to the changes in the podcast marketplace.

A few months ago, I was with some friends of mine who have similar experience as I do in the world of podcasting, been doing it about three or four years now. And we were talking about the fact that we feel like dinosaurs, which is weird in a way, because there are people who've been podcasting for much longer.

But we also all shared the same thought, and that's we're not sure that if we were going to start again today, that what we did and have done would work. I'm not sure, and I've recommended to people, and I've taken consulting calls with people, I've recommended to people that they not copy what I've done, because what I did in the beginning of Radical Personal Finance would not work, I don't think, in today's marketplace, or at least it would not work as quickly as it worked for me.

When I closed my financial planning practice in order to start Radical Personal Finance, it was a very expensive decision. I closed a profitable and effective business. But I did it for essentially one major reason in terms of the timing. The major reason was I saw an opportunity to take advantage of an early mover advantage.

And I felt like it would be worth it to take advantage of that. In hindsight, I was right. I did get to take advantage of that early mover advantage. Now hear me clearly. The world of podcasting is very young. Even today, I think there is still an opportunity for early mover advantage.

But compared to three or four years ago, it's very different. Don't let that put anxiety in your heart if you didn't get to take advantage of the same early mover advantage that I did. Early mover advantage is only one of many types of advantages that you can build. And today, I'm not even sure it's the most powerful.

The problem with being an early mover is sometimes you don't have as big of a marketplace as possible. And sometimes you come in and you prove the idea, but then somebody else comes in with way more resources, with way better ability to capitalize on the concept, and they eat your lunch.

You're the old dinosaur that proved the concept, but you're stuck to the side. That's happened to radical personal finance a little bit. I've been amazed as I've watched other brands come in and capitalize on something that, in my mind, I and others proved out, but they do it better.

So don't let that hurt you. But the marketplace has changed and it will continue to change. You must know this. It is no longer enough in today's world of podcasting for you to sit down and to say, "Hey, I'm going to sit down with a microphone and I'm going to interview somebody for an hour and I'm going to publish that to the internet, and all of a sudden people are going to listen." Not enough.

The only exception to that would be is if you're in a very small market that has nobody doing that and there's a group of people who are desperate for your interviews on some weird esoteric subject. But in today's world, that is simply not enough. It's especially not enough for you to do it if you have bad audio quality, if you have bad interview skills, and if you're just boring as an interviewer.

Just not enough. That ship has sailed and any show, even like mine, that use that as their foundational approach has found, is finding, and will find that that is not enough. There has to be change. So recognize that some of the advice that worked three years ago does not work today.

But there's a whole new market that's waiting for your innovative idea. Next point, it is possible to build a business on podcasting alone. It is possible to build a business on podcasting alone. You can build a business that is a podcast and make a living. You will, however, need to have a very effective and successful podcast, but it is possible for you to do.

Possible. Very hard, but possible. The reason I say that is because that was the question that I had a number of years ago. I remember at the time I had actually sent an email to Cliff Ravenscraft, who has a brand called the Podcast Answer Man, and I asked him that question.

I said, "Is it possible for somebody to build a business on a podcast alone?" He responded, I can't remember how he responded. Yes, no, I had to go read the email. But it is possible. However, my next point, podcasting is a terrible business. I repeat that point. Podcasting is a terrible business.

Podcasting, however, no matter the size, no matter the scale, is a great support. It's a great marketing support, and it's a great communications medium for a business if your interest is financial and profit related, and/or it's great support for your promulgation of an idea or an ideology if that's your area of interest.

So it is possible to build a business on podcasting alone, but podcasting is a terrible business. The numbers don't work. It doesn't scale for you just to say, "Oh, I'm going to create a podcast and maybe I'll sell some ads." Very, very difficult. It will only work if you are in the top few percent of success for all podcasts.

Now that is where Radical Personal Finance is, and so therefore it has worked for me. But hear me clearly. I don't look at my podcast as a business. I look at Radical Personal Finance as a business, which is led by a podcast that may be the biggest product that I currently have, but it's not necessarily going to be the biggest product in the future.

So think carefully through your business model and recognize that podcasting is a terrible business. Podcast serves very well, however, as a leading product, as something for you to think, to lead with, and/or a supporting product, a way for you to have deeper communication with some segment of your customers or your fans or people who are interested in your message.

Don't think podcast only. That's a real mistake, and that's one that I have made. Don't think podcast only. Think podcast and written word and video clips and images and email blasts. Don't think podcast only. The best way for a podcast to fit in today's world is as a component of an overall communication strategy for your company or for your ideology or for your political movement or for whatever it is that you're trying to do.

Don't think podcast only. If you do, I think the results will be less than what they could otherwise be. Most people will not sit down and just listen to every single one of your podcasts. Some will, especially if your content's good. I've had dozens and dozens of people who've told me they've done that with Radical Personal Finance, and I deeply appreciate their doing that and their support.

But in total, Radical Personal Finance has been hurt by my exclusive focus on a podcast. Much wiser to see a podcast as a component of your communication strategy. You want your ideas to infect the marketplace, and if you're going to do that, you need to present them in inappropriate ways for other people.

There is a small subset of the marketplace for the ideas that I have to share of people who enjoy listening to audio, who have the capacity to sit and to follow a discussion or an argument for an extended period of time, who have the time to listen to a podcast.

There's a small subset of people who are able to do that. But there's a much bigger population that would be interested in my ideas if they were packaged in various formats. So one of those ways of packaging is the podcast, but those ideas also need to be packaged in small little articles, in pithy little sayings, in longer pamphlets and books, in short presentations accompanied by visual aids, in long presentations accompanied by visual aids.

And this way, if you're thinking about this broad-based strategy, you're presenting your ideas to the marketplace in a way that's palatable to somebody at their different times. And somebody can stay connected to your ideas in a way that fits their lifestyle. And that allows the individual to choose based upon where they are.

There's a much bigger opportunity for ideas or communications when they're packaged in various formats than when they're only in the form of a podcast. Now if you need to start with a podcast, that's fine. If a podcast helps you to get to those other places, that's fine. In many ways, that's what radical personal finance has been for me.

The most helpful thing about it has been a way for me to clarify my ideas, test ideas, etc. And it's a format that works for me. But it's a mistake to think podcast only. Think podcast and. Next, fit your chosen format to your goals and to your content. Don't copy someone else's stuff.

Fit your format to your content and to your goals. Oftentimes people will copy somebody's format without understanding what it actually is that makes a format successful. I've seen this again and again in the world of podcasting. They'll say, well, Joshua does his shows as hour-long monologues, so therefore I should do a show as an hour-long monologue.

That's a big mistake. Some hour-long monologues need to be delivered as two-minute live Facebook videos. And they're going to be much more effective. But then there's a place for hour-long monologues. So think through what you're trying to do and what you're trying to convey, and then fit your format to that content.

Don't just copy somebody else's format. Take inspiration from somebody's format, but don't copy it. Think a little bit more critically about what would be helpful for you. In a moment I'll talk about editing, but let me give you just a quick preview. Some ideas would be so much better served if you spent four weeks creating and crafting and carefully editing something and releasing that carefully edited result than if you spent four weeks releasing the rough cut.

And personally I always struggle with this. I always struggle to understand how impactful is the idea in its rough format versus in the careful, finally edited format. You'll have to figure that out for yourself. Sometimes it's better to spend four weeks doing just rough cuts. Sometimes it's better to spend four weeks doing preparation and releasing that polished, final version.

Home movies are cool. They have their place. And not all home movies should be edited into a tightly crafted masterpiece. But at the end of the day, when you go to a Hollywood movie that may move your soul, you don't want to see a home movie. You want to see a tightly crafted masterpiece with every detail in place.

So think through what your content is and think through what your goal is and fit your format to that. If you are trying to create masterful presentations on a specific subject that is probably going to stay static, then it would be best to create something that's more in the world of carefully and tightly edited.

On the flip side, if you're trying to create fast content on something that's up to date, maybe a political commentary on an hour by hour or day by day basis, in that situation, maybe it's better for you to be less careful with your editing and quicker and your competition is first to publication, something like that.

Here are my thoughts on length, people's obsess over length. I am convinced this question is simple. Make your length the appropriate length for your listener and for your content. Think through what's the most powerful way for me to convey this idea and make your length fit that. Don't obsess over something else.

I find it very frustrating when people live in a world of 60 minutes. When television had to be 48 minutes, they could sell 12 minutes of commercials and so therefore you've got 48 minutes and you try to fit that format. If you're not on radio and if you're not on TV, don't worry about the 48 minutes.

Make your content fit your length. Adjust your length to fit your content. One of my biggest, two of my biggest annoyances is number one, when there's something that is dealt with that could go on and it's valuable and it's cut short due to lack of time. I'm sorry, if it's valuable, it's valuable.

But on the flip side, it's really frustrating when the content goes on too long. I have been guilty of this many times. It's an art. It's a studied, it's something that you have to study. But here's my thoughts on length. Make sure that your most important stuff is up front.

And this is where I think the podcasting marketplace needs to make tremendous improvement. I studied a lot in the world of radio because when I just said I want to be a better broadcaster, I couldn't find much help in the podcasting world. The podcasting world was filled with technical gurus and people who would talk about how to hook up cables and RSS feeds and the right kind of microphone to choose.

And that stuff bored me to tears. But I couldn't find anybody who would talk about content. And so in the first couple of years of learning how to be a broadcaster, I went and I studied and I did everything I could to try to find who are the people who have advised the radio industry.

And one of the things that the radio industry has gotten right is they've shown how important it is to be quick and straight to the punch. Now, this is easier said than done. It's easier for me to teach you what you should do than it is for me to model on a daily basis how it's actually done.

I try. I've got a lot of room to grow. But you need to think in terms of 30, 60, and 90 seconds. You've got about a minute to two minutes to capture your listeners' attention, which means you need to be interesting. You also need to be relevant, which is where I think the best way we serve our audience is to help our audience to filter by telling them, "Here's what I'm going to share with you in today's show," so you can choose whether you listen or not.

Put your most important ideas up front so that those who only listen to the first 10% of your show can grasp those ideas. You want your ideas to be held. It's not that you want someone to listen to your entire show. You want your ideas to be held. So put your most important ideas up front.

And then go ahead and expand on them. There's a time and a place for you to add all this different, all this expansion where you're giving them additional ideas, you're giving them clarification, you're delivering analogies, you're delivering additional meaning. That's great. But put that in the middle. And then put your other stuff towards the end.

For example, you may have supporting materials. My intention, we'll see how long this show goes, but my intention is to read an essay to you, but I'm not going to lead with that essay here up front. I would lead with that essay either in a separate show as a support material or at the end of today's show.

So you lead with the most important things. And this applies to every part of your content. An example would be banter. One of the biggest things that harms so many podcasts is there's so much banter, so much conversation up front that doesn't need to be there. When I'm listening to a new show, I will over time become interested in the host.

I'll over time become interested in what's happening with the host, what are they doing, what's going on in their life, how are they, did they have children, how was their week, how's the weather? But I don't want to hear that up front. Put that at the back end so that those who are interested in that can listen to it.

But make your length fit the content and think carefully about it. However, you should pay attention to the fact that increasingly people have very short attention spans and it's best to be as short as possible. If the subject involves more interaction, go deep. But it is always best to be as short as is possible or as is practical.

The average commute in the United States of America is, what, they say 25 minutes, so let's call it 20 to 30 minutes. If you can be consistently at that 20 minutes and under, then I think that is a sweet spot. Now, that's hard for certain types of content. That's hard for me.

I've gotten better, but it's hard. But that should be something that should be shooting for. But don't, if your ideas are worthy of a three-hour podcast, make the three-hour podcast. Next, thoughts on frequency. The other big question is how frequently should I publish an episode? In short, make your frequency fit the type of content and also your capacity.

If your content is very timely, you're talking about politics or something that's changing on a day-to-day basis, then I think there your frequency is going to be set out for you. In the past, I did a show called Why I Do a Daily Podcast and Why You Should Model but not necessarily imitate me, and I explained what the value that I saw was of creating a daily show.

And by daily, I mean five days a week. I pursued a Monday through Friday show. I still, at the time, my reasoning was valid, but the podcast marketplace has changed. And I think that this is a harder question than it was before. Of course, many shows are weekly, and weekly is wonderful.

To do a show on a daily basis, I think you've got to really question that. There are shows that have that value, and still, on a daily basis, you're going to be very connected with your audience. That's the big power of daily. But I think you lose people on a daily basis.

I know you lose people on a daily basis. There are many people who get this sense of anxiety at not being able to listen to everything that you produce. And this is where it goes back to the variety of content that you create. If you have content in various forms that allows you to have that consistent contact with your audience, but not to have everything focused on the podcast.

And so in hindsight, this is the direction I'm moving with, need to move with Radical Personal Finance, and am moving, is to have a lot of content in a variety of forms, but the podcast shouldn't be daily. It's too much for most listeners, and you'll lose, I think, a lot of impact from it that you would otherwise have.

I think I'll have more comments on this topic in about a year, because what's harmed us on this up till now is we haven't had good data on how much people actually listen to longer shows. For example, on Radical Personal Finance, up till now, I've never had really good data on how many of my listeners who would start a one or a one and a half or two hour show would get from the beginning all the way to the end.

Of course, we could draw comparisons from other types of content, and we would say, "Well, it's probably not 100%," but we didn't have very good data. That is changing as podcast statistics services are updating, and so we'll have much better data. I do think that if you're going to be more frequent, that it's best if your length be shorter, especially if you want to reach a larger audience.

I have in the past, and my own personal experience has colored this, I have a high tolerance for lengthy content if I'm interested in it, and I have a high tolerance for lots of content in the past. There was a time in my life at which I was a heavy audio listener, and I spent, I would guess on average, about 50 hours a week listening to audio.

Even to this day, I almost never listen to music, and I was single, and I drove a lot. When I was driving, I was generally listening to audio, and/or when I was doing something that didn't engage my brain, I was listening to audio. When I was listening to audio, I would listen at basically 2x or 2.5x speed, and so I would probably consume an average week for a period of several years, I could consume 50 to 100 hours of audio.

That gave me a very high tolerance for shows that produce a lot of content, but most people, their lives don't fit those parameters. Most people don't have the ability to listen to that much content that frequently. And so, even today, my life, I don't listen to very much audio at all now.

It's not that I don't want to, it's circumstantial. I no longer have a commute, I drive very little, and when I drive, I'm probably going to be with my wife or with my children. And I love being listened to when people are with their families, with their spouses and with their children, but I personally have a rule that basically, not a rule, I have a practice that I try to adhere to as much as possible, where when I'm with my wife and with my children, I don't listen to outside influence.

That time to me is so valuable that I want to spend it in conversation. I find that an empty car, a car that is void of music and void of podcasting, void of voices, inspires conversation. And to me, the most important things I want to nurture are those conversations with my wife and with my children.

And so I don't listen to audio when I'm with my wife and with my children. That means that in an average week, I probably at this point have about maybe three to four hours available to listen to audio. Also because my work is generally engaging my brain, I don't listen when I'm working.

So that's different. And so here I think you should consider your content. If you look at the shows that focus heavily on long shows very frequently, they tend to be the kind of shows where you can hit or miss. It doesn't really matter. Maybe the comedians or people like that that you can, where you can just dip in and out and whether you miss any particular day doesn't really matter.

That's not my interest. I have no interest in that type of content. If you're creating that type of content, then you should consider. But if you're not creating that content, if you're creating content related to ideas that you think are important or teaching that you think is important, then consider it and consider how is my ideal customer, how is my ideal consumer going to interact with this content?

Let's take an analogy from the world of reading. You've got to consider when you're writing a book, am I going to write on a scholarly level or on a popular level? Well, first, what kind of book am I going to write? Am I trying to write a novel? Is my novel supposed to be fun and fluffy and make me money?

Is my novel supposed to just make people feel good or is my novel supposed to be hard hitting and make people change their world? Then what language am I going to write in? Am I going to write on a popular level from writing nonfiction? Am I going to write on a popular level?

Am I going to write on a scholarly level? And in general, you're going to want to adjust your content to meet different audiences. Best to have a short book that's on a popular level. Then you write articles and magazines that will convey the substance of what you're doing. You may have the very long scholarly book to help your intense students go into that.

That's the best way to think about content, especially if you're dealing in the world of ideas. Virality. One of the biggest challenges with audio is there's very little ability to go viral. There has never once been a viral growth in radical personal finance. I think it's best if you acknowledge and recognize this because it'll make a difference in your marketing mix.

Podcast episodes don't go viral. Now can a podcast go viral? Maybe. The only example that we generally ever can point to in this world is – what was that podcast with the story that – Serial. The Serial podcast. The Serial podcast in a way went viral. The challenge is that it wasn't viral in the – it was viral in the way that sometimes TV shows are viral, where the body of the show, whether it's a – what do they call it?

The House of Games or Game of Thrones or some other of these types of – House of Cards and Game of Thrones, how these types of TV shows go viral and everybody talks about them. That's the way that podcasts can go viral. But individual episodes of podcasts don't really go viral and that has to do in my opinion because of the amount of investment of time on the listener for them to actually think and consider.

Articles on the other hand or short video clips can go viral so quickly. An article that can get shared because as everyone is flipping through Facebook and Twitter and they – oh, great. Let me retweet that. Let me share that. It happens in their in-between time. So podcast episodes don't really fit into in-between time and even if they do, they're still not going to go viral because let's say you had a brilliant six-minute podcast episode.

Very few people are going to sit on their mobile device and just listen to six minutes of audio without accompanying visuals supporting the point. So I think it's best to plan on the fact that your podcast will never go viral. Don't plan on virality. But maybe you can create some kind of useful ideas and content and package your content in a way that will help the show to gain public exposure.

So this would be where and why it's important to not focus all of your energy on just podcasting but to focus some of your energy on other methods of communication that do have the possibility of going viral. I've never found a podcast that's gone viral. Now it may happen more in the future other than what I've said.

It may happen more in the future because the base of podcast listeners is growing and as bigger names get into podcasting, then podcasts can grow more quickly. I'm reminded here of watching Ben Shapiro's podcast. Ben Shapiro was a well-known young conservative commentator and then he recently started a podcast and his podcast just rocketed up in terms of listenership.

And so I think in the future it will be more possible but that's because of the nature of his content. Political junkies are going to be interested in it. His age and the people to whom he appeals and the fact that there's a growing and increasingly broad and growing base for podcasts.

Another one I watched was Jocko Willmick. Just he was everywhere. But his virality didn't come from the podcast. It came from his being everywhere and having a unique idea at a certain point in time. So in terms of virality, I don't know of any way you can make your podcast go viral.

But if you have a podcast and then you come along at a fortunate time where you create something that fits the cultural moment and you can build the PR machine behind it like some of these big names do where it's a very skillful approach to public relations and you appear everywhere, then the show can grow very quickly.

There's no reason today whatsoever for you to not have great audio quality from day one. I didn't used to be an audio snob. To this day I still care more about the quality of the information than the quality of the presentation in general. But it has become so easy today to have fantastic audio.

There's no reason whatsoever for you not to have great audio quality. Intros, themes, music, all that stuff in my opinion is overrated. I go back and forth. Sometimes I use intro music, sometimes I didn't. When I was first building the show, I thought, "Okay, I just bought some intro music." And then I thought, "Well, I need to make sure that I figure out how to make this intro music fantastic and I'm going to make it better and I'm going to get some professional voiceover." Think carefully through your particular ideas, your particular podcast.

But I think that in many ways, the faster you get to the point, the better. It pains me when podcasts have lengthy 60-second intros that don't help and keep another 60 seconds between the listener and the content. In many ways, there's no reason not to just get straight into it.

When somebody's listening to a podcast, they've made an intentional choice to consume your podcast. That means they've probably subscribed to your show. They have information available to them in your episode title. And so they have opportunities right there for them to grasp what it's about. And then you can bring them in as quickly as possible, bring them right into the story.

And in that case, much of the time, intro, music, et cetera, I think it hurts. Where it doesn't hurt is if your show, if you do just a minute to tell people what the show is about, a sentence, a couple sentences. I've struggled with this over time to figure out what my show is about.

And I'm probably 65% happy with my current intro. My current intro is, "Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less." Still a little bit wordy, but honesty is really important to me.

And I want to make sure that people know my show is about a rich and meaningful life now and financial freedom. So I could shorten it up, and maybe I should, but you want to have that clear communication. And so if you can craft a very clear statement that tells what your show is about and what your unique selling proposition is, what's different, then that should be what you should lead with.

But it should be short. It's fine if it's a voiceover, but make it short. If you have qualifications in your area of expertise, I think it's best if we start to figure out how to bring those qualifications in. This one is new for me. Share with you a story that has brought this deeply to my attention.

Someone in my personal circle of influence recently got involved with a lady that was in significant need. And my friend became aware of her situation. She was sleeping on the streets. She had been evicted from her apartment, was in a really tough space. And this lady was in her, I would say, late 60s, mid to late 60s, in a very difficult situation.

And so my friend wanted to help her, and he didn't have, however, much capacity to be able to offer her. He didn't have any extra bedrooms, didn't have any extra space in his house, literally. And so the best that he could offer to her was to allow her to sleep on his back porch, a small screened-in back porch.

And this was of help for her. It was the best he had, but it was of help for her because it allowed her to enjoy a little bit of physical safety. She was unsafe on the streets. She had been accosted, and there was potential for her to be physically accosted by other homeless people that were around.

She was concerned for her safety. And so this was a great blessing to her to be able to be off of the physical street, even though she was simply sleeping on a back porch, a small screened-in back porch. That was a blessing to her. She was able to make that small screened-in back porch a little bit more homey by setting up a bed, hanging some curtains, et cetera, furnishing it with some furnishings she found on the side of the street.

And I interacted with her in a few different ways through this process. And along the way, in inquiring into her situation, I found out that she is a podcaster and that she hosts a podcast on how to be successful in life. Now hear me clearly. I want to honor each and every person's individual story.

I like the saying, although I don't remember who to attribute it to, that every man I meet is in some way my master. Every person with whom I interact has experiences that I can learn from and that I can gain from. And for me, I try to find those experiences.

It's valuable to seek those out. And I want to be very slow to denigrate or somehow try to cut down anybody who is seeking to work hard and to live honestly and uprightly and to improve their circumstances. I also believe that it's possible for people who are not experts in a subject to help other people as long as they're being honest about their lack of expertise.

I could learn my way through, I could create media as I learn my way through a subject and create that in a useful way. But I would be very careful to disavow any claims of expertise in that situation. I became aware that this lady was podcasting on success and she has a regular show on blog talk radio about how to be successful.

And I want to be, hear me, I don't want to cut her down, but I also want to be honest that she was homeless, literally living on the street, financially destitute, has very poor relationships with anybody in her family, is estranged from her husband, is estranged from some of her children, and relationships are so difficult to the point that even though the children know that their mom is living on the street, that they wouldn't support her, wouldn't take her in.

Wasn't able to find a job for a very long time and that's enough. So the point is that she's podcasting on success and trying to teach people how to be successful. I found that difficult to take because what was the basis of her qualifications? Believe qualifications matter. They're not mandatory.

We can learn from people who are failures, we can learn from people who are learning, but at the end of the day qualifications do matter. If you have qualifications, I think it's best if you can figure out how to share those qualifications in a useful way that people will know what your expertise is.

Because the marketplace is getting crowded. If you're creating a success podcast and you are up against in competition with my friend who is homeless and also creating a success podcast, then you need to figure out how to set yourself apart. Carefully consider the time that you put into a podcast.

There's a balance of too much versus too little and I have fought and struggled with this balance. You are always capable of better. No matter how good your podcast is, you can always create something that is better. But should you? On the other hand, if you have something that's not very good, should you really take it to the market?

For me, this has been a real balance in terms of the quality of my own presentation. And I've tried a variety of approaches. I have found that I can create a phenomenal show if I sit down and I carefully script and plan everything I'm going to say. I plan every analogy, I plan every story, I plan every point, I number and outline everything very, very carefully.

I can do that. But it takes a tremendous amount of time to do that effectively. If I do that, I'll be able to stay very carefully on track with my entire presentation. I won't ramble. I won't follow rabbit trails. I'll be on target. And that's really good. It creates a good result.

Now I can take that show and I can make it even better by sitting down in the editing studio and carefully cutting, scrapping much of my ideas and just keeping the most powerful points. I could make it even better if I used one draft and then went and did a second recording and a second editing and maybe voiced over some parts that weren't so good and removed something that wasn't perfect.

And I can make an absolute masterpiece of a show, which I then publish to the internet and 50 people listen to. That's probably not a good use of time. And you need to be aware of the fact that when you're taking your time to publish something to the internet for free for people to listen to, you should be careful about investing too much time and energy into that work.

On the flip side, you can do too little. You can have a thought and you can sit down and you can wander in your presentation, not know where you're going, not know what you want to talk about. And you hear this frequently in the world of podcasting. So Joe, what do you want to talk about today?

Well, I'm not sure, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you essentially waste time. And your show is never good enough for the audience to actually grow to make it worth your while to do more work. I don't know how to advise you on the right solution. I do advise you to pay attention to it.

And what I have had to learn and to be comfortable with is the fact that every individual podcast episode is not the best that I could do with unlimited time and resources, but it is the best that I can do with the time and the resources that I'm able to devote to my work.

None of my listeners can expect me to sit down and pour 50 hours into creating a beautiful 25 or 30 minute show that I present to them for free with no good advertising model, with no good platform behind it. There are some people who have the platform to be able to do that.

If I worked with one of the NPR or NPR outbranched podcasts and you had a staff of three to five to six people that are all had years of broadcast experience, we could pour 70 hour weeks, all of us into creating this 30 minute masterpiece and it would be huge.

And there's a place for that. If you have those resources, you should seriously consider devoting those resources to it because the shows are wonderful. But that may not be your show and that may not be worth it for you. My record of preparation was about 16 or 18 hours, about 16 or 18 hours that I did on preparing for one podcast episode at one time.

That show was very low listenership, was not particularly well embraced and made not much of a dent or a splash. One of my most popular shows in the last year I did zero preparation for. I had no prepared, let me adjust that. It would be unfair to say zero preparation.

I have years of preparation of work and I've worked hard to get better as a broadcaster. I did no specific outline or plan. I just sat down with a general concept in my head and I hit record and I went. That was one of the most popular episodes of any of my shows for the last year.

To the extent that a podcast can go viral, it went viral. So what do you do? Consider carefully your input and do what you can do. You want to create something that's good but don't fall prey to the trap of thinking that you're going to create the best that you possibly can.

You can't. You can do what you can do. Podcasting can be very humbling. It can be very, very humbling. Even in what I just said, almost every single episode that I produce, I know I could do better. This episode right now, I'm racked with, I'm looking at the time and I'm saying, "Okay, it's 57 minutes into the show and I'm not even probably a third of the way into my outline and what am I going to do?

Am I going to create a three-hour monstrosity?" And my brain, as I'm recording, is filled with doubt and question about, "Am I doing the right thing? Should I hit stop, scrap the last 57 minutes, rework my outline? Should I turn this into a three-part series? I don't know the right solutions but I'm live on the microphone and I got to figure out what to do." That's the scenario.

As I'm listening to myself, I'm editing and I'm hearing the sentence that, "Oh, that was an unnecessary sentence," or, "That was an unnecessary pause that you've used a filler word because you weren't sure the next thing to say." I hear all those things. And yet I know that at the end of this episode, I'm going to hit stop and then I'm going to hit publish.

And that's very humbling because I know I could do better with more time. But you can't afford to. It's a podcast. It's not a speech to the United Nations. It's a podcast. Now the other impact and reason why podcasting is humbling is that you can't edit your ideas and present them in the smoothest, most polished way possible as you can with written text.

You can't present an idea that's going to be presented as smoothly as you would love, as effectively with a podcast as you can with a written essay. A written essay has the ability for you to sit there, consider your ideas, polish them, and then publish your final considered project to the world.

Podcast is much more extemporaneous. You may have an idea of what you want to say, but then you're not so sure how it can be received and you better be ready to be humbled because all of a sudden your words will come back against you. You may express things clumsily and then there's that sense of regret, but you can't go back and undo it.

And then you're faced with the question of, was that bad enough that I should go back and edit what I said and rework the whole thing and scrap it? Well, maybe some people can do that, but I think in general, you and I shouldn't do that. Let me give you one example of how hard this was for me.

I have a mental list of a handful of times on Radical Personal Finance where I've said something that I legitimately regretted. And if it was serious, if I felt like I could apologize in good faith for something, then there have been a couple of times where I've apologized, whether I got something wrong, I shared erroneous information, or I just said something that was out of character.

Sometimes my emotions get the best of me. I become very enthusiastic about a subject and my mouth outruns my brain. But one example of this that was hard, or just as a practical example of what I'm saying about how humbling it is, one time, and I forget what show it was, I was talking about Dr.

Martin Luther King and I was talking about character. And I talked about Dr. Martin Luther King and I had recently read an accounting of his life. I was reading a biographical essay of his life. And in that context, one of the things that I learned that I had not previously known was about his personal moral failings.

The man was an adulterer, extensively without any sense of sorrow or humility. And that for me was very disappointing because I really honor, personally, I really honored and respect Dr. Martin Luther King and his work that he did of seeking to preach righteousness and justice to a nation infused with unrighteousness and injustice.

He stood in the face of tremendous attack. Some of his written content and his speeches to this day need to be studied and considered because they're incredibly powerful. You know, you go and you read his essay letter from a Birmingham jail and it's a powerful, powerful thing. And so I have this great respect and admiration for Dr.

Martin Luther King and I believe he's a man who's worthy of study. But I had not previously been aware of the extent of his personal moral depravity. And I had just learned about this and I was disappointed. I was legitimately just disappointed in learning something about somebody that I honored and then having to reconcile with the fact that he was a flawed man.

But in the context of the show, I said it without all of those positive things about him. And I said it without saying anything positive about him. I just said Dr. Martin Luther King was a morally depraved man and that really – and I was just saying it was hurtful to me and I learned this and how disappointing.

But I wasn't able to wrap it with that polite context in which it came across in the way that I conveyed it. It came across in a way that was at the very least insensitive and perhaps clumsy with a kind expression, all the way to the point where an uncharitable hearing would – someone would accuse me of falling – of aligning with the various people who sought to destroy Dr.

Martin Luther King because of their racism and their inherent desire to destroy him. I couldn't take it back. I can't remember if I apologized for that one or not. I felt like it's not my job to apologize for somebody else's uncharitable hearing of the words that I said. I have to trust that my heart is evident.

I can't remember if I apologized for that one or not, but it was very humbling because I – in the clumsiness of words spoken extemporaneously, I wasn't able to communicate as precisely as I would have liked, as inoffensively as I would have liked. And that is very painful when you bring shame to a subject or an idea that you think is important and yet you express it clumsily and then that causes your message to be hurt.

It's humbling. Guess what? Podcasting can be very humbling because you can't create that perfectly crafted written essay as effectively as you can. I have become much more charitable in my analysis of recorded comments or recorded remarks of popular personalities, people in the public eye, where it's recorded that so-and-so said such-and-such and it's this scandalous statement.

I personally have become much more charitable to say, "Well, wait a moment. Let's view the context of that statement. What were they saying before that? What were the afterwards? If at all possible, rather than just reading the written words, let me go ahead and bring in some additional context.

Can I see them say it? Can I try to listen for the inflection in their voice? And how does this fit in line with their other comments?" My hope is that a charitable listener would have heard my comments about Dr. Martin Luther King and somehow at least sense the heart of my disappointment in finding out the level of moral depravity in one of my heroes, not immediately jump to saying, "Well, Joshua is this terrible person who is a racist through and through, etc., blah, blah, blah." So it's very humbling.

Get used to it if you're going to compete in the world of ideas. Next, the method and means of your production of your podcast doesn't matter. You should pursue whatever production methodology is going to get production out of the way so that creativity can follow. You have to learn what a microphone is, and it's good to learn the difference between a dynamic microphone and a, what do they call the other one?

Condenser microphone. You need to learn the difference between a dynamic microphone and a condenser microphone. Hint, you want a dynamic microphone that lowers less room noise. Done. That's all you need to know. You need to figure out how to plug it in and turn it on and somehow capture a recording.

But beyond that, none of the rest of the stuff matters. And it all gets in the way when people are messing around with stupid programs. Last year I spoke at a podcasting conference in Orlando called Podfest. I was there as an expert in Podfest. And one of the things that was so fascinating, I wasn't a featured speaker, I was there as a supporting expert.

And it was fascinating to me because we did this exercise where we had a room of people who had never podcasted. And we divided everyone into six or eight teams, each team being led by somebody like me who was an experienced podcaster. And then we said, create a podcast, create a three-minute podcast on something using the equipment that you have.

Now some of us had, one person had a microphone going into their iPhone, somebody had a computer, somebody had a voice recorder. But what was fascinating to me was none of us, none of it cared about the podcast. I recorded mine with a phone and I wanted to teach my group that it doesn't matter, all this stuff about gear doesn't matter.

So we used my iPhone without any external microphone, which I have plenty of external microphones I could have plugged into it, didn't even use that. Just held the microphone in front of their face and we recorded right into the voice memo app on the microphone. And then I did use an editing program, which I use from time to time on the phone that I use called Multitrack DAW, if you'd like to know, D-A-W is Digital Audio Workstation or something like that.

It's a frequently used acronym in the audio editing space. So I use this program called Multitrack DAW. So I edited the clips together real quick. But at the end, I expected, frankly, that I said, well, ours is going to be pretty good as I had this idea of a podcast.

And I figured maybe there would be another one or two good ones and then three, four, five, not very good presentations. It was a competition. What we found was the exact opposite. Every single one of the six or eight recorded podcasts that had been created with groups of eight to 10 people in 30 minutes or less of work was unique and creative.

And every one of them was good. I was blown away. Every one of them was good and every one of them was creative in its own way. Some people followed traditional formats. Some people had other formats that they pursued. My group, we tried to create this NPR style podcast and they were all really good, really, really good.

And what we learned, what I learned and what all the other experts learned is when you get the gear out of the way, then you can have creativity with the message and with the content. And that's what matters. Next point, rankings don't really matter. Sometimes your show will rank, sometimes it won't.

Rankings do not really matter. They matter for you if they give you a little bit of pride. But if you don't get rankings, it doesn't matter. I haven't checked my iTunes rankings in six months. It doesn't matter. Number one, whether or not you rank on iTunes shouldn't be your indicator of success.

It might matter if you've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into this new giant company, blah, blah, blah. But you can't control how you rank compared to other people. And that's the thing that angers me when people compare things on rankings. Rankings involve other people. All you can do is do the best that you can do.

And you compare yourself to other people who may have more resources than you, who may have more skill than you, who may have more experience than you. You get a flawed sense of your own ability. If I were to compare myself as a broadcaster against Alex Bloomberg of Gimlet Media, I would be angry at myself all the time.

It would be a totally unfair consideration though, because Alex Bloomberg has a tremendous career history that he has learned. He's worked in the world of public radio and of spoken word. He worked on This American Life, widely known as one of the best storytelling presentations ever. He's worked under the masters for years.

He had a decades-long head start on me. And so if I – and in terms of building his company, he built a tremendous podcast company with millions of dollars of venture capital. If I were to try to compare myself to him, I would be miserable and I would quit.

And that's what happens when people compare themselves on rankings. Don't compare yourself on rankings. Compare yourself based upon what you're able to do. And take pride in what you're able to do and the progress that you've made. I am deeply proud of my growth as a broadcaster. Very proud of it, because I've worked really hard to get better.

That doesn't mean that I don't see the flaws, but it does mean that I'm not going to compare myself to Alex Bloomberg. I'm going to compare myself to my past, and I'm going to be happy with my progress, not my perfection. The other reason rankings don't matter is that they're incredibly fickle.

Rankings will change all the time. And when I was a new broadcaster, a new podcaster, I would take some screenshots, and I thought, "Well, I should take these in case I ever need to make some kind of marketing thing." I've never used them. But there have been times when I'm ranked higher than Dave Ramsey, when I'm ranked higher than other big brands.

Does that mean that I have a bigger show than Dave Ramsey? Nonsense. Nonsense. Rankings are a distraction. You may need them for a time to give yourself a little bit of encouragement. But if you do well, recognize this. You're not always going to do well, because sometimes somebody else who has more experience or more money or a better concept or a better execution of an idea is going to come along and beat you.

Don't take too much stock in rankings. And if you're not doing well in rankings, recognize that your content might not rank, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. Some of the most important ideas will never be publicly popular, or at least they won't be publicly popular during your lifetime.

Still doesn't mean you shouldn't devote yourself to the promulgation of those ideas. Let's talk about reviews. The number of reviews on your show matters, but the content of those reviews or even the number of stars that people give you is much less relevant than almost any other other factor.

Don't worry too much about the reviews. In my mind, most podcasts do and should be getting lots of five star reviews, and you should be getting a good number of one star reviews. Now don't ignore either, but don't run from your one star reviews. I love the fact that any individual listener of any show can make their voice known.

It's such a tremendous, powerful thing that anybody who hears my voice can, without any influence of me or without any control of me or any ability of me to stop them, can pull up iTunes and can put their rating on Joshua's show and advise someone else. It even goes beyond that.

Any person who listens to my show can go on Twitter and talk about it, can go on Reddit can talk about it, can go on a personal finance forum and talk about it. Anybody who listens to me can do that, and that's a powerful trend. You should applaud that because in the arc of liberty over human history, it has not always been that way.

We live in an exciting time where no longer are the rich elite in charge of everything, but rather systematically common men and women can have their voice heard. That's powerful. This is happening every single day. Communications is one of the most visible places for it to happen, but there are many others as well.

This is an exciting time to be alive. And so you've got to build a little bit of a thick skin to help you deal with it. Don't worry about your one-star reviews, but do listen to them. Listen to them and try to figure out what's the reason behind somebody saying something.

If I go through and I read my one-star reviews, there is a lot of criticism in my one-star reviews that is absolutely accurate, that I fully agree with, and that's useful because it gives you a chance to get better. On the other hand, many times people will leave one-star reviews and it's their way of expressing themselves over something that I say and believe that they find to be objectionable.

And so they'll say, I've had people say, one of my reviews, I can't remember the exact text, but it basically said something like this. Joshua goes really deep on financial subjects and he never talks about the same thing again and again. Well, my original outline for my show was I'm going to go deep on subjects that warrant it, and my intent is never to repeat the same subject.

That means there's an archive of 500 individual unique episodes. But those will change over time. And so I'm not going to change my show plan because somebody left their one-star review because that's not how they want it. Well, they can go find a different show. I'm not changing my plan unless I felt like I wanted to change my plan.

That's different than someone saying, Joshua gets off topic a lot. Joshua getting off topic is inexcusable, and that's the type of review that needs to be paid attention to. So don't worry too much about the content of the reviews. Don't let it bring you down. And recognize this, no one reads the reviews.

No one sees it. In today's world of podcasting, the only thing that matters is the number of reviews because that's an indication of the size of the show and how established it is. Once you get past 20 reviews, almost nobody is going to be able to read your reviews.

Nobody can go through. There's no currently, in the current technology, there's no real way for someone to go and look through all the reviews, and no one's going to do that. Your listeners are going to just simply click and listen, and if they like it, great. If they don't, they're going to move on.

Don't worry about it. Which by the way, we talk about how to get reviews. Reviews are not as important as they once were, but they were important. I think it's a mistake for you to beg on your show for reviews. I think out of 500 episodes, I've probably said it five, maybe, no, in the early years it was more.

A couple dozen times. It is important, and one of the way for you who are listening, who have not left your favorite podcast host's review, I would ask you to do that. Just do it right on your phone. It takes just a minute. Pull out your phone and please leave my show a review.

It's fine to ask every now and then, but don't spend all your show talking about needing reviews. It's not as important as it once was. Just create good stuff and people will naturally do it. The most effective way that I have found to solicit reviews from my audience is when I answer email.

When a listener writes to me and I respond to them, then I'll often put in a PS and say, "Please will you leave me a review?" That would be very helpful. I want to build reviews. I want to have thousands of reviews, but in terms of the value of your listener's time, it's not worth your wasting their time for a couple minutes just so you can build more reviews.

Figure out another way to do it. Think carefully about the feedback that you get and recognize that some is actionable and some is not. People will give you all kinds of feedback and you've got to build a little maturity to filter through it. Some things are actionable now. For example, you may have an annoying verbal tick, an annoying habit that you weren't aware of.

When you see that in a review, consider it and change it. But you also may be criticized for something that is harder to change. For me, the example is rambling. Huge number of my reviews say Joshua rambles. Well, I acknowledge that, but acknowledgement of a problem doesn't mean you know how to solve it immediately.

It takes time. It's took me a couple of years to really work that out. I'm sure I still have room to grow. You've got to build that. That's actionable, whereas those are actionable things. But then you'll receive reviews where people just don't like you. They don't think that you ...

You don't believe the right thing. You're too much of a whatever. Ignore that stuff and move on. Also, think carefully about who you're receiving feedback from. This to me is very important. We need to develop a whole new skill set in this year and going on about how to filter feedback.

Who are we receiving feedback from? One of my biggest fears that comes along with the value of the democratization of information, so there's a compelling trend. Anybody can contribute something. But the problem is many people don't seem to exhibit the ability to discern the quality of the information that they're receiving.

They don't seem to have the ability of critical thinking to ask questions. I'm so glad that anybody can publish a blog article or a Facebook post on anything and have it read by millions of people. That said, the editorial integrity of a random blog post published by your favorite writer, who sits at home and puts words into their computer and makes claims and allegations, is nowhere near the editorial integrity of a carefully researched extensive article in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

We're facing crisis in our modern world where people who are unable to distinguish the two. It doesn't mean that a blogger, an individual blogger, may not have incredible insight and inside connection. They need to be considered. But also the editorial integrity of a Wall Street Journal article needs to be considered.

In the same way, you need to also consider who you're receiving feedback from. It's one thing if a fellow expert podcast host gives you suggested critique and criticism of your show. You should pay careful attention to what they have to say. You may still ignore it, but you should pay careful attention.

It's another thing if an unknown person writes something hurtful about you on the internet or something that hurts you. You gotta ignore that and press forward. And we need to teach people to carefully consider the information that they're getting and where they're getting it from. I have my story about the broke homeless person living on my friend's back porch, creating a podcast telling people how to be successful.

Unfortunately, I see this working out more and more and it's very concerning to me that in the world of the internet where communication is veiled, people put as much stock into a comment they receive in a Facebook group or in a forum as they do with somebody who knows them and who cares about them and who knows their life coming alongside in a quiet conversation saying, "Would you consider these things?" I've watched, especially young people, I'm very concerned, I've watched a few young lives be really disrupted because the primary source of information and encouragement seems to come from the internet.

And on the internet, an insecure, let me think about what adjectives to use here, an insecure, immature 13-year-old who doesn't know how life works has the same voice as a successful, experienced, mature, upright 70-year-old. They're both words on a screen. But my goodness, we can't let the 13-year-olds, you can't let the 13-year-olds instruct your 13-year-old.

That's insane. That's like sending your child into the monkey pen and saying, "You need to go in and learn etiquette." Well, they're going to come out acting like a monkey. And yet that's one of the challenges of the internet. Serve your audience first and always. Your loyalty has to be to your audience.

In the world of podcasting, you can't produce a lot of podcasts and hide who you actually are. So make sure that your loyalty is genuine. If you keep that first and foremost, that will come through and people will look for you and they'll listen to you because they trust you.

They may not agree with you and that shouldn't be your goal, to get agreement. In many ways, you can't control that. You may be wrong in something that you believe, but what you can do is seek to get a hearing. That's going to come from your genuine devotion to service, to the service of your audience.

However, figuring out who your audience is can be really hard. And in a way, you're going to play this very weird game of self-selection because you're not going to know who your audience is, but you're going to create your audience based upon what you're actually talking about. And people are going to automatically self-select themselves in and out, which means that you're going to wind up with the audience that you created, that you don't know who they are, that you created them.

It's very, very weird and very challenging. You create something for a purpose and then people find it. And the thing that you create will turn certain people off and it will turn certain people on and you're going to have a hard time. You're just going to have to go with your concept and you're not going to know for a long time if it works out.

It's much harder for you to figure out who your audience is and about the only way that you can solve this problem is to say, "What audience do I want to serve and how do I want to serve them?" And then do your best to create something that you think will be effective and then wait and see because it can be really hard to figure out who your audience actually is.

You will likely receive very little communication from your audience in the beginning, even telling you who they are. And this is not because your audience is filled with people who don't like to communicate. It's due to the problems of podcasting. When people listen to a podcast, they're generally engaged in another activity.

Frequently it's something like driving or exercise or doing the dishes. They're not usually in front of a computer screen. Most of the audio communication is consumed on a mobile device. And usually, frequently, the person is actually not physically holding their mobile device. Their hands are on the steering wheel and the mobile device is piping through the speakers or their hands are in the dish bucket and their mobile device is piping on the counter next to them or the mobile device is in their armband and they're running down the road or pump an iron at the gym.

So it's very hard for somebody in that situation to stop and to communicate with you. And so communication from an audience in the world of podcasting is in many ways much smaller and less frequent than it is from other media. On a blog article, somebody who's reading the blog article is frequently on a computer screen, although there is tremendous mobile device consumption.

And they're probably, because they're reading it, they're probably also capable of either writing a quick comment or writing you a quick email. So there's going to be more communication from a reader than from an audience member. Also, medium matters. If somebody's watching a video of yours on YouTube, then right there underneath the video is a comment section that they can play your video and they can comment while they're still playing your video without stopping the video, which means that there's going to be much more engagement with commenting.

Podcasting doesn't have that. When someone's listening to a podcast in a podcast application on their phone, they're not going to be also simultaneously posting a comment on your article. They're not there. There's no commenting function in the podcasting application. And so they'd have to go to a separate application, either the mail app or an internet app.

They'd have to find that podcast, which may be very difficult, and let you know the feedback. And so it's just much less frequent that you're going to have communication. So don't sweat it. Just recognize that's the nature of the game. Now on the flip side, when your show grows, you may have more communication than you can handle.

This has been a real challenge for me. I can't handle the communication and it's caused significant stress to me. I'm happy to hear from my audience, but it's caused stress for me to learn new skills, to figure out how do I gain the positive things of really listening to the individual people that listen to me without letting it run my life.

So just don't worry about it. Just get used to it. Also get used to the idea of developing some filters for your feedback. For some reason, the anonymity, supposedly, of the internet causes people to lose their inhibitions. You see this every day and you experience this every day. But as you create public content, you're going to experience a lot more of this.

People are just somehow, I don't know if, people somehow think that you're not a real person and they think that because your name is on a screen or because your name is attached to something that personal insults are now okay, that you're a public figure and they're now okay.

In a way, they are in the sense that when you put yourself out there, you got to deal with it. But it takes a little bit of time to recognize that people think that you're fake. They would never sell you to your face some of the things that people write to you on the internet.

The funniest one, last week, somebody tweeted to me, and I'll read you the tweet. Here was it. It was a man named Kevin Gates. He tweets to me and he says, "I'm a former subscriber who just checked in to see if you had any commentary on Bitcoin, only to see you've gone full MRA, men's rights activist.

Glad you're no longer getting my $5. By the way, I always thought you looked like an inbred, an intelligent inbred, but an inbred nonetheless!" I burst out laughing. I have never in my life been called an inbred. I don't know what an inbred looks like. I don't know what an inbred is.

I think it's usually reserved as an insult for Southern people who have a reputation if you live in the deep South and up in the mountains of marrying your cousin. But I had no idea what an MRA was or men's right activism. All this stuff is over me. I just had to laugh out loud.

But if you think about that as an example, this was not private. This was not somebody privately writing me an email. This was not somebody commenting anonymously. This is somebody on the internet who calls me an inbred. It was remarkable to—it was just a good example of this. This happens again and again and again.

One of the biggest challenges is that frequently when you—depending on your content. For me, ideas are important and the power of ideas are important. I don't shy from those ideas. That's very important to me. I'm sure I experience more of this than people who are more, I don't know, not so focused on ideas and more focused on entertainment.

If I had a podcast about camping and how great camping was, I wouldn't expect such vitriolic ideas as what I do. But still, even so, you're going to get weird random insults. It takes time to develop some thick skin. All I can tell you, I don't know how to tell you to do it other than to recognize that you don't know who is talking to you and you often don't know who is hurting.

Many times the people who are the most violent in their rhetoric are the people who are either personally hurting, they're in a tough spot, or they're also very personally insecure. And I'm not, it sounds arrogant to even say it, but the thing that I have learned the most is frequently the people who object the loudest are the ones who are the most insecure.

And I've been there. When I think back to some of my ideas and the things that I've vigorously fought people over, the expression of my fighting them, and by fighting I mean debate, my debating them the most vigorously was because I didn't have a good answer. And frequently what will happen is when somebody, when you have a powerful idea or a powerful ideology or a powerful platform and you present it carefully, someone may interact with you over the ideas for a time.

But then when they can't answer your argument, they answer with an insult. They call you an inbred or they say you look like an inbred, whatever that look is. And so I think it's important to recognize that that may happen. You don't want to be too arrogant and say, well, I'm getting lots of abuse because my ideas are so great.

No, you might be getting abuse because your ideas are abhorrent, but only you are going to know that. And I will say this, it gets better with time. I don't know, I didn't expect this. This was one when I started a podcast, maybe I was naive. I didn't expect it.

And I'm a very sensitive, emotionally sensitive person. I think I do a pretty good job of connecting with people's emotions, understanding where they are. And I'm a pretty nice guy. I've never been in a fight with anybody in my life, just as an expression of that. But then I wound up on the internet and it was not only people fighting with me, it was people fighting about me.

And it was the weirdest thing ever. And there have been times when my email was filled with angry people and my comments were filled with nasty people who came to my website to tell me how bad I was. There were times when it really hurt me and it really caused me emotional pain.

But I think if you push past that, I'll tell you, as you push past that and recognize, number one, that can be valuable because you can stop and think, is this something I really believe in? Is this idea that somebody is a part of something I really believe in?

It's the hardest when you recognize that somebody is turned off to your message because of your own incompetence, because you express something clumsily. That's really painful because you bear the blame for that, or you bear at least some of the responsibility for that. But then on the other hand, sometimes you look and say, no, that idea is something that's worth it.

And I never wish to have relationships severed, but if that's the idea that you walk away from, I'm okay with that. And in time, you can develop some thick skin. And that's really helpful, is to develop thick skin. And it does come with time. Today, I laughed when the person said it because it's so stupid.

Now, it's not to say that it's always easy, but recognize in time, you will develop some thick skin. It's the internet. And a lot of times, some of the people who are the most hurting or the people that you are impacting the most are often the ones who react the most violently.

Now, in that light, however, one thing I recommend to you is you're going to have to learn some new skills to interact with the world. And here's some examples of some new skills. Number one, I think it's important that you learn and put things in place to learn how to shut things off.

If you're a new podcaster, it may not happen right away. It may not happen immediately, but you've got to learn how to get away. In the early years, in the early months, you're frequently going to be, "Oh, I'm going to check my statistic. Let me see who comments," et cetera.

But this can be very unhealthy if you don't learn how to turn it off. What I have learned to do is to completely segment my life and to not have any possibility or to try as much as possible to minimize any possibility of my online life invading my offline life.

So that involves things like removing your social media applications from my phone or your phone. That's what I have found to be very helpful is removing all social media from my phone because it's so tempting to sit there and say, "Oh, let's see what's going on on Twitter. Let's see what happens." Or, "Hey, guess what?

My little email just popped up and there was my Google alert for my name. And oh, they're arguing about me on Reddit or they're arguing about me in such and such a personal finance forum. Maybe I should go and look and see what they're saying." And then you go on there and see people ripping you apart one way and people defending you.

And it's like, "Wait a second. I'm hanging out here at the park with my children and now all of a sudden, instead of me pushing my kids on the swing, I'm now dealing with somebody on the internet who doesn't know me, who's upset about something I said?" And it's like, get a lot – and who thinks that their job is to talk about how I should quit what I'm doing when I give them a free podcast to listen to that may or may not help them and all they have to do is just click delete and move on with their life.

It's so weird, but you've got to learn how to do that. And thankfully, I have a couple of friends that I have also learned that with who have learned to do the same thing. And if you're in the world of a public personality in any way, I think you need to learn new skills.

And so I've learned new skills. Just simply, number one, get rid of any ability for anybody related to your stuff to find you when you're not in that mode. Meaning no social media – for me, it's been no social media, no email. I'm only going to go and deal with that stuff when I can.

And I don't want it to find me and invade my life and wreck my weekend. As a friend of mine said, a friend of mine who was a writer, a well-known, popular, nationally prominent writer, and he said he was with his wife and his mother-in-law one weekend in Washington, D.C.

and they were out beautiful afternoon, Mother's Day, I think, watching the cherry blossoms and his wife had walked away and he glanced at his phone and all of a sudden saw some crazy email from somebody who was mad and triggered over something he said and it wrecked his whole day.

And I spoke to him recently and we were talking about this and it just really hit me in the same – I've learned the same way. And it can happen right when you don't expect it. And what happens is for me, I immediately – when somebody says something, I immediately start thinking about it and I immediately start arguing with them in my head and I say, "Well, here is my argument.

I sketch out my argument. Here are the five main points, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they'll say this and then here's my rebuttal." And all of a sudden, I'm 45 minutes into this thought process and I was allowing myself to be controlled by some random person that doesn't care about me.

Well, I ignore the people who are nearby. So you're going to have to develop new skills. I don't know exactly all the right way to handle it but think carefully about your situation. Make sure that you focus on the people that actually know you and that actually love you.

Focus on those things first. In that light, if you have not yet started publishing anything online, I think you should seriously consider using a pen name or a pseudonym for your internet work. In hindsight, if you were going to ask me, my number one regret is using my name associated with radical personal finance.

My number one regret at this point is using my name because it's very painful when your worlds interact and it's very annoying when all of a sudden you lose your personal privacy. Number one, it can cause you to diminish your ideas to a point. So in real life, working with an individual, I don't mind sharing my ideas.

But when all of a sudden my name has to be associated with something in the world of the internet where an idea is going to be dealt with in whatever bazillion ways, then that's a little bit harder to deal with, especially when you see things done unfairly. Now if you're confident in your ideas, that's fine.

But there are other expressions of it because the people that get hurt are often not just you, but people around you. And that can be very hard. In hindsight, if I were going to go back and do it over again, I would never associate my name with my online work.

Now when I did it, I did it because I said, "Well, I'm a certified financial planner and I really stuff and of course I want people to know that I'm real and legitimate." Well, bad decision. If I were going to go and do it over again, I would never use – I would always use a pseudonym.

I would always use a pen name. And there have been times where I have seriously considered shattering the whole thing, scrapping the whole brand so I could get away from the invasiveness of your life being all out there and everyone being able to find you. That's really tough, really tough to deal with, especially when it exposes people.

And I've got thick enough skin to deal with – I can deal with or I can learn to develop thick enough skin to deal with the stuff that you got to deal with when you have ideas that you believe are important. But I'm not putting my wife and children through that.

And unfortunately, that's the challenge is that you got to figure out how to protect the people that are the most important to you. And the challenge here of course is that if you want to do something fully privately, it's really tough. And to not have your name tied to it at all, it's really tough.

So most people, you could pretty quickly pierce the veil of so-called anonymity with a little bit of work. I'm good enough on the internet. I could pierce most people's veils. But anyway, consider just using a pseudonym or a pen name. People have asked me about how I actually produce the show quite a bit.

So I'll just make it very, very simple and walk you through what I actually – the gear that I use and what I actually do now. Recognize that this is built and grown over time. I record in my home office. My home office is just a third bedroom in my house.

And in terms of the office, it's not particularly a great podcasting studio. My personal podcasting studio is not a soundproof room. Frequently, unfortunately, though I've done my best, you'll hear one of my young children crying in the background. I've tried to screen that out. What I did is there's a very non-sound dense wall between me and my family and I hung up some sound blankets on the wall to try to give a little bit more sound isolation for my young children.

It's just pretty hard for me to stomach paying money for an out-of-the-house office when I'm paying a lot of money just to never have my children or my dogs interact with my audio. So I hung up a bunch of sound blankets on the wall. Sound blankets do a pretty good job.

I have a triple layer of them and that blocks out enough of the noise that I am happy with it. Beyond that, my office has no particular sound treatment. I record using a dynamic microphone. A dynamic microphone is one that is not so sensitive to all of the room noise.

I use a microphone that is called a Heil PR40, which is one of the popular podcasting microphones. Totally unnecessary if I were going to do it again, knowing what I now know, I wouldn't bother. I don't think it matters that much. I would use an Audio Technica ATR2100, which is a $70 microphone instead of a $350 microphone.

It would be every bit as much as I ever care about. But I do use a Heil PR40. When I originally started, I just had it on a cheap stand and then over time, as I felt it was worth it, I went ahead and I bought the expensive shock mount.

So in early episodes, there would be shocks to the microphone sometimes. There are fewer of those now. Now I can move the microphone and I can tap it and it won't convey the sound through. So I use the Heil shock mount. And I also do finally now use a Heil boom arm, which is very helpful because having your microphone on a good boom allows you to sit back and to speak much more comfortably versus hunching over a microphone for years, how I had it sitting on a desk.

I record through a mixer. I use a Mackie mixer, which I have a 14 channel mixer because that was cheap. I bought the used one and I got it cheap. I don't need that at all. But the mixer is set up onto and that allows me to do things live.

So if I'm going to go and play audio from the computer, if I'm going to play a video or something like that, then it allows me to do it live, which is valuable. When I originally set out to commit to my production schedule, I knew that I could never produce as much content as I wanted to if I was going to be doing editing after the fact.

And so from the beginning, I focused on editing or producing live so I can do everything right at once, play voicemail, play sound clips, whatever. It all goes done and in one take. Coming also into that computer is I use, sorry, into the mixer is I have a channel for my computer and I use, what's this thing called?

A sound blaster, a little USB adapter that adapts into my computer and that allows me to send my computer audio into my mixer. It also allows me to do what the podcasting world calls a mix minus, which allows me to use an online application to record my high quality microphone into an audio recorder while also recording the audio coming back from somebody else's audio to do my online interviews.

And I can do that using frequently used Skype, but at this point I'm moving away from Skype and doing other communications options with my guests. Of course, Skype is the most well known, so that works fine. So that's effective. I have an output from that which goes into an external audio recorder.

I use a Roland, I don't remember what this is called, but basically it's a Roland audio recorder which works fine. It records onto an SD card and that allows me to have a reliable, consistent recording of my show. So when I'm done, I hit stop and then I stick it in the computer.

I used to do just a little bit of editing to trim the beginning and the end, and then even that was annoying to me and I couldn't do it. So finally, I use an audio processing program called Auphonic which levels the audio out and it gives it a good, nice, consistent level, which for my type of content is the most important thing.

So I process my audio file with Auphonic and then I publish it. I upload it into my Libsyn account. Libsyn is my audio host. It uses a coupon code "radical" for, was it a first month free? Libsyn is my audio host that I use to host my files and then from Libsyn, everything gets distributed out to my website to the various feeds as well.

So that's my tech setup. I've done different things. I sometimes record into my phone. I use Sean Smith's, the Mobile Pro setups when I've done mobile interviews. I've done a few different things like that. But at this point, all the tech stuff is my least interested, I'm completely disinterested in it.

That's not what makes the difference. Probably the biggest tip I could give you is what I do use extensively is an application called Workflowy. And Workflowy is essentially an outlining program, but it's an outlining program with unlimited levels of outlining and unlimited movability, which it's hard for me to explain in audio form how important this is.

But in practice, Workflowy is probably my most important tool. It costs five bucks a month. And of course, me being cheap, I've tried at times to say, "I'm going to do without it." But every time I come back to it, and I have about 900, almost a thousand pages of content in Workflowy over the years of all of my podcasts and all of the outlines that I have built.

Workflowy is for me probably one of my most important tools because it allows me to do a good job of sketching out my notes in advance of the show, which is really, really good. So that's how I do it. And wrap up, I've got eight more points. An internet business is really wonderful, and it can change your view of the world substantially.

It really can. It's also work, just like anything else. I always tried really hard to have an accurate understanding of the world. And I'm not scared of work. I don't think that work is something to be run from. But you should know that just podcasting, if your dream is podcasting, recognize that everything you do in the world is going to be meaningful.

There's going to be parts of it that are great and parts of it that are not. But it is very valuable to be able to feel the contentment of impacting other people, impacting other lives, is really, really helpful. And podcasting is wonderful from that. Having your income untethered from your geographic location is powerful.

And I really like it. It's very powerful. Working from home is great. Working from home has allowed me to achieve many of the goals that I have wanted to achieve. And yet, working from home has many challenges. I was naive when I started Radical Personal Finance. And I thought everything about working from home would be great.

And there are many things that are much better about working from an office. So just recognize that it's a give and take. And it may take your family time. It took my wife quite a while, a number of months, probably six months, to figure out for us how to figure out our working relationship when I was at home during the day, about when I'm at work versus when I'm not at work, and how those lines are blurred or present.

And so that took us a while to figure out some new skills to deal with that. Work is work no matter what. And I think you should be aware of that, that podcasting is great work. It's work, just like anything else. One of my big concerns today that I didn't have a few years ago, and I wouldn't recommend this to you to worry about this today.

If you're a new podcaster, but I think that everybody who is creating something and publishing it needs to pay careful attention to this. Number one, you've got to make sure that your connection with your audience is sufficient because your work is good enough that they're going to find you wherever you wind up on the internet.

One of the most devastating days of my business career was that after, right before my hundredth episode I deleted all my podcast listening audience. And I'd worked on it for months, six months. And I just deleted everything. And many of you have had your, just the show stopped updating and you had to go and find me again and figure out how to resubscribe.

But this can happen today more easily than you might think. And you've got to figure out in today's world how to own your own brand and how to own your own list. One of the new dangers that we face today that we didn't face a number of years ago was being shuttered by the big corporations that own access.

I have tremendous concerns right now about what YouTube is doing. I have thought about pursuing more video production and getting involved in the world of YouTube. I have ideas that I believe would be valuable there, but their actions of silencing voices that they don't want to have on their platform have been so, in my opinion, onerous and egregious that I don't much want to get involved with them.

But unfortunately it's hard not to be involved with them all at some point. One of the biggest concerns that I have right now is the infringement on free speech and on people's ability to speak about the things that are valuable to them without being shut down by the content people that want to interact with them.

So whether this is a hosting service, I had tremendous concerns when GoDaddy came out publicly and started to stop supporting the website registration and the domain service for people on their platform who they considered to be hate speech, the white supremacist and white nationalist movements a few months ago.

I had tremendous concerns when Google did the same thing. One of my biggest concerns is that many of the payment processors right now are systematically delisting people. And this is significant in the world of Christian ministries right now where there are a number of Christian nonprofit organizations that are just systematically delisting people who want to use them as a donation service.

I've looked at some where they've been dropped by PayPal, they were dropped by Stripe, they were dropped by all this. And it's very problematic when these companies own what you're doing and they decide, "Well, we don't like what you have to say and so we're going to drop you." This is a huge concern of mine.

And so it's caused me to say, "Okay, well, how do I figure out how to own my own brand?" And I think that in the future, we'll more and more need to consider this. But I'm not willing to deal with these people who have betrayed my trust and allow them to have access to my stuff and to have them be the ones who control access.

So that means we've got to go back and I've got to build more technical skills than I ever did before. So I think that if you're an established podcaster or if you're somebody who has a message that is controversial for whatever reason, that you should pay a tremendous amount of attention to the current infringements on free speech.

Things are good. It's easier today to get a message out than it's been in the past. But just because things are good doesn't mean that there aren't substantial dangers. And just because there's a macro trend doesn't mean that you can't be steamrolled in your micro brand. It can be very devastating for your brand to be shut off.

So think carefully about it and make sure that you own your list and make sure that you have a connection with your audience that will hopefully allow you to make it through those hard times. Interviews. The biggest challenge that I have had with Radical Personal Finance in terms of content is trying to figure out how to do great interviews.

And I'm happy with my progress, but it's not easy. And I'll just tell you what I have learned. There are different approaches to interviews, approaches of people. Some people say, "Here are all my questions in advance. Here are all the questions that I want to ask you about. And here's everything that I want to talk about." Some people script an interview out in advance.

That seems to work sometimes. When I'm interviewed, I often like to get the questions so I can prepare some ideas about the subject. But what I have also struggled with as an interviewer is trying to get someone to answer the questions the way that I want them to if I'm all prepared in advance.

What I've learned, some of the people that are the hardest for me to interview are people that I know their stuff, whether I've read their books or I've read their blogs. And for me as an interviewer, my practice has frequently been to read everything that somebody's produced. And then I know all the things because I've consumed their 2,000 pages of content.

I know the 12 key ideas that I want them to get to. And so there have been many interviews where I've really struggled, where I bring somebody on and I say, "Here, this is the topic that I want to interview you on." And I wind up asking leading questions because I'm trying to drive them in a certain direction, but then they don't want to be driven.

That causes frustration because now I'm not really just asking them questions. I'm driving them in a certain direction, and yet they don't do it as well as I would like them to. And so I've often found that instead of me interviewing somebody that I like their stuff, I should probably just do the summary.

Because if I've consumed their 2,000 pages and I know their 12 points that I think are the most powerful and the rest of it is all same old, same old, then I should just probably say, "Here are the 12 things that I most appreciate about Joe Smith and what Joe has to say." So I've struggled sometimes with interviewing authors.

I've struggled with interviewing people that I really know a lot about. I've also struggled with having things kind of prepared in advance. And what I have found to be the best practice for me is trying to embrace my curiosity and asking somebody certain questions. So for me, that's been effective, is that I'm curious enough and I have a wide enough background and enough subjects that I think what has been effective for me is just showing up and asking somebody an interesting person interesting questions.

Doesn't always work. And one of the things I had to learn how to do is in the early days, I basically would play every interview. But now sometimes I get to an interview and I try to ask the person interesting questions and they're just not an interesting person. And I look and look and look and I try to figure out, because my conviction that everybody's interesting in some way, and I just can't figure out how to get them to talk about anything interesting and sometimes I just scrap it and say, "I'm sorry, this isn't going to work out." But your allegiance is to your audience, not to your interviewee.

It's a privilege for them to be being interviewed on your show. You owe it to your audience. And so I have many interviews that I've just scrapped that just simply because I said, "I'm sorry, but you didn't do a good enough job of presenting something that would be a value to my audience." Not arrogance, but I've got to serve my audience.

I'm not going to waste their time with a boring interview. So what I've learned is just to follow my interest and actually listen to the interviewer. Now one of the challenges, one of the things that I like as an interview listener is I like to hear the host that I like and that I enjoy interact with somebody on a topic from their point of view.

When I'm listening to a host, I want to hear them interview with their perspective. After all, Radical Personal Fineness is Joshua's show. And so in general, I assume that you want to hear Joshua's opinion on something. Otherwise why are you listening to Joshua's show? Many times someone who's been on a specific show is interviewed everywhere and you can go and pick whatever flavor of interviewer you want to find.

But if they're on Joshua's show, I figure they should interact with Joshua. This is a bit of a double-edged sword though, because in the modern journalistic culture, we're basically trained that an interviewer should just ask a question and shut up. And I actually personally, I don't like that. I think it's appropriate for a journalist to ask a question and shut up.

That's what a journalist should do. But an opinion commentator, I don't necessarily want them to ask a question and shut up. I want them to ask a question, listen to the answer, and then engage on it and draw at that deeper level. But I frequently receive feedback from audience members that don't, or from listeners who've listened to an interview that don't like my approach to it.

They don't want to hear as much from Joshua on a subject as they do from the interviewee. That's kind of a delicate balance because I believe there is a rightness to that instinct. When I'm having somebody on my show, I'm having them to learn from them. But I also believe that I want to, if I were listening to the show, I'd want to hear the host interact with something.

But interviews are really tough to do well. And so what I have learned is just to kind of follow my curiosity and to think. So today, these days, as far as how I do interviews, I try to understand a little bit about somebody. But I will usually show up with a pen and a notebook, and I'll just listen carefully to what they say and then try to interact with them on the subject.

And then I think of the questions usually while I'm doing the interview. Don't think it'll work for everybody, but that's what I have done so far. Finally, embrace the vulnerability as a podcaster. It's hard, but you will learn more than anybody else. I am the one who's gained the most from Radical Personal Finance because I've learned a lot, I've been forced to articulate things that I couldn't articulate before, and I have grown a lot.

And so I think as a podcaster, you're going to gain the most from your show. So embrace that and embrace the fact that you're going to learn. I do think it's important that you protect your family, and I think it's important that you put some safeguards in place to cut the outside world off to protect your family and protect the intimacy of that safe place.

The internet is not a safe place. And two final comments is this. I want you to podcast. I want you to write. Because my hope is that podcasting can advance our public conversation in a useful way. Podcasting has a unique benefit of not being 280 characters of sniping at one another.

And unfortunately, in the US American culture, our culture is systematically we're tearing each other apart. And it's getting worse and worse. And very few people are listening. And unfortunately, I don't know of a way that that can be done other than through conversation. And the best format for that is usually podcasting, for people to interact with one another and to present ideas in a format that allows somebody to engage and to listen.

It's not going to happen on TV. TV is much more about the short soundbite and the opposing views tearing each other off and the fight. It's not going to happen on YouTube because it's got to be about three minutes long of people sniping at one another. Can it happen in text?

Some places. But podcasting is a really unique forum for us to have useful conversations about things that matter. And so my hope is that podcasting can advance our public conversation and our public dialogue in a really valuable way and allows people to listen to ideas in a non-threatening environment where they're not going to be if they go and want to listen to a political figure, they're not going to be pelted with paint or yelled at by some protester outside.

If they want to go and listen to some controversial opinion, they don't have to worry that it's going to show up in their Facebook likes. So podcasting has the ability to do that. But in order for that to happen, we need more and more people producing useful, impactful content.

And so my hope is that podcasting can be one of the ways that we can build and resurrect to a degree, but I try not to look too much to the past, so that we can build an ability to have a conversation. I fear that it won't, but I hope that it can.

And I want to invite you to join that conversation. It's going to require growth on your part and it will be hard, but I want to invite you to join that conversation. My final point is this. If you've been podcasting and you're not experiencing success, don't be scared to scrap what you're doing and start over.

Don't be scared to dump what you've done and rebrand. Because there is a point at which many people are really struggling and perhaps you've had a little bit of light in something I've said today and you realize, "Oh, here's the problem. Here's what's not going well." Don't be scared to dump it and start again.

In today's world, especially in today's world of podcasting, you can go from zero to significant pretty quickly. There's value to having an established brand, but if you're not experiencing the success that you have, just quit, retool, and start over. Hope these thoughts and ideas have been useful to you.

I'm not turning Radical Personal Finance into the podcast advice hour, but as a fellow frontline innovator in this space, these are some lessons that I have learned from 500 episodes of Radical Personal Finance. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at radicallifemedia.com.

See you next time.