So you want to start a podcast

Some thoughts and advice

Jun 14, 2024

I started my own podcast in 2018. At the time I felt late to the game. The form had matured and the market seemed completely saturated. Many predicted that video would eviscerate traditional audio-only shows. Every original idea (and title) was taken. Podcasting was becoming the butt of too many jokes. And the whole exercise seemed like a fad.

By Brendan Loper, from *The New Yorker.*

The podcast bubble never burst, though. And any deflation might have been only temporary. Many were shocked in 2020 by Spotify’s deal to buy the exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience for US$250 million. But Spotify just renewed the deal, this time giving up the right to exclusive distribution. And they’re paying… $250 million. Inflation hasn’t changed the fact that a quarter billion dollars is an eye-popping amount of cash for a single podcast series.

Video may have killed the radio star, but the rest of the cast of radio voices survived and even thrived. We like to listen to music and conversation while driving, doing chores, and exercising. In fact, many gym-goers turn themselves away from the row of TVs facing the treadmills and ellipticals so they can pay attention to their ears. YouTube has known for years that a lot of its views are actually listens—people who play the video and then do something else on their screen.

I often advise clients to consider video if they have the capacity, as it can increase reach and open up to a whole new audience. But it’s not the critical component that it was predicted to be when I started. Just like the first podcasts made for the iPod in 2004, the basic requirements remain very simple. You could hit record on your smartphone right now, tell me about the Stanley Cup Playoffs for five minutes, upload it to a service like Libsyn or transistor.fm, cobble together a quick square graphic on Canva, and boom—you’ve got a podcast.

Obviously, you could do better. And since 2018, part of my consulting business has been to devoted to helping people do exactly that.

What on Earth is Going on?

What on Earth is Going on? started in a classroom at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, back in March 2018. CFRC, the local campus radio station, put on a workshop about how to start a podcast. My girlfriend (soon to be my fiancée) and I attended because… we could? It’s amazing to think of things we did, so casually and freely, before we had kids.

“Want to go to a podcasting workshop?” he asks.

She goes to check her calendar and realizes there’s no point.

“Sure, why not!” she says.

Here’s the conversation today:

“Want to watch 20 minutes of Outlander tonight after the kids fall asleep?” he asks.

She looks at the dishes, the piles of laundry, the dog who still needs to be walked, the kids who just ate watermelon and will clearly not be sleeping until 9pm, and a pile of magazines and books.

“Sure, why not,” she jokes.

The workshop was partly a way to get more content for the radio station. The notion that my stuff would play for real people listening to the radio, and not just imaginary social media followers pulled from the ether, made the prospect seem more concrete. I emailed the station with a pitch: a show about current events that would dig beneath the headlines and ask what was really going happening.

Things moved very quickly. I was given my first hour time slot to fill just a week later. I followed the steps in the workshop, learned to use the station equipment, and launched into developing a weekly program that would broadcast on CFRC (I later added five other radio stations across Canada) and be released simultaneously as my own digital podcast.

The first episode was about populism. Which meant, it was about Donald Trump, and everything that Trump meant to the modern world. I found a university professor, Keith Banting, who had made populism a key research area. We had a brief recorded chat in comparison to the conversations I would later have, and I filled the rest of the time with a spoken essay. I received a lot of good feedback on this monologue segment in this and later episodes, but it eventually got swallowed up by the conversations—not just because I found the latter more interesting, but also because I found the speeches time-consuming to write and record.

I soon drew on the large and distinguished faculty at Queen’s University for my material. I scoured the list of instructors for interesting researchers and voices, and then tried to find clips of them speaking. Sometimes I took a chance based only on what I could read, and these paid off well over half the time. The Conversation was an excellent means of finding exciting people, because its authors were almost always academics pontificating on a subject important to them.

I was amazed at how keen many people were to appear on a podcast. Academics were desperate to talk widely and incisively about their passions and projects, often surprised to be asked. But after years of teaching, they had (usually) honed their public speaking skills and were smooth after the first couple minutes of recording. Some public figures appreciated the open conversational form, and the fact that I came well-prepared. And some were hocking a book and would take any opportunity to spread the word a little further.

By around Episode 10, I acquired portable equipment: a Zoom recorder and headphones with a built-in mic. The set-up meant my guests could quickly forget about head placement or the fact of being recorded at all. This allowed me to go to people in places I happened to be traveling, such as Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John’s, and Barrie (CBC’s Bob McDonald sat down with me at a cafe there while passing through, Episode 52). I recorded conversations in hotel rooms, restaurants, offices, homes, and even a stairwell behind a downtown Calgary rehearsal hall (Andy Curtis, Episode 66).

I experimented here and there. Episode 21, about the movies, was my first foray into multiple guests at once. Episode 42, about live performance with three Queen’s theatre instructors, was broadcast live on the radio and recorded on video. Episode 51 brought together three people to discuss a profile in the New Yorker of the controversial satirical Chinese writer, Yan Lianke.

Some of my favourite episodes are ones where I discussed books with friends. The central theme of What on Earth is Going on? is guests who are experts in a field. That field is where we start and end, with some detours along the way. But with the book conversations, I treated the material as the expert, which allowed me to bring in someone else who had simply read it. Examples include Nineteen Eighty-Four (Episode 64), Thank You For Being Late (Episode 60), The Three-Body Problem (Episode 36), and Selfie (Episode 11).

Another guiding principle of the podcast was in-person conversation. I relished in the flow and feel of a discussion with a person right in front of you—to capture, in tone if not in words, the unspoken tension and excitement that comes in bringing two people together. I often told my guests to imagine meeting up in a cafe to talk about their favourite subjects, and to dispense with the small talk. I came to celebrate the notion of cutting small talk in favour of “big talk”. In fact, the show’s tagline became, “A no small-talk podcast for a world in flux.”

I did try a few remote episodes because it was the only way to get the guest. One of them, with Terry O’Reilly (Episode 45), went very well. But the others, mostly recorded later on, seemed to lack something. That’s why, when COVID-19 shut things down just after I moved to the Yukon, I decided to suspend the podcast for good after 101 episodes.

I’ve considered bringing it back. Not only do good conversations make me want to share them more broadly, but the very fact of having the podcast led to so many good conversations I never would have had otherwise. In a way, it was an excuse for me to be curious and to pick brains I otherwise would have no right to.

What on Earth is Going on? has continued to serve as a sort of online resume. Since my last episode in September 2020 I have advised, produced, and edited several other shows. I have probably given advice to more potential podcasters than people who actually followed through. Despite the relative technical and programmatic simplicity of the form, it scares people off.

Podcasting Tips

If you want to start a podcast, you really don’t need another list of tips and tricks. The internet is chock full of top-ten lists, equipment recommendations, do’s-and-don’ts, and countless examples (5 million shows with 70 million episodes between them). But perhaps because there is so much out there, my clients often come to me for more straightforward advice, which emerges not only from my own podcasting experience, but in my work of producing and editing other podcasts over the past four years.

Here are a few core principles.

Quality. Listeners don’t realize why they stop and don’t come back, but we know. It’s quality. Some listeners will plough through an episode just because they can relate to it. But most people need more. And it’s not just quality of content (people who are interesting to listen to, finding new things to discuss, or new ways to discuss old things). It’s the quality of the sound. A bad microphone, a distracting echo, a lot of background noise, inconsistent volume (you have to turn it up only to have it burst an eardrum a minute later). These can all be fixed. And it’s worth your time and, sometimes, your money, to get it right.
Eavesdropping. Don’t scream into the microphone like you’re giving a speech. The ear of your listener is the same distance from your mouth as the microphone you’re speaking into. If you really want to be loud, try putting the microphone a little further away and increasing the gain on your audio mixer or computer. But still, people prefer to feel like they are eavesdropping on a transfixing conversation, rather than sitting back and being blasted by what you think they should hear.
Dialogue is usually better than monologue. Banter will only take you so far, but it is still the heart and soul of so many successful podcasts, from WTF with Marc Maron to Armchair Expert. But it’s not just the witty back-and-forth that people want. Sometimes it’s the deep engagement that teases out fascinating subjects, such as the Ezra Klein Show. You can certainly go on your own, but you’ll need to find the same natural dynamism in your own voice. Sometimes, high production values (music, sound effects, other source material) can compensate for this. Sincerity and passion work too.
Don’t get caught up with originality. Someone already has your clever title, and they are already filling that unique niche. Are you a group of three guys who want to talk about your favourite movies? Yes, that’s being done a thousand times over. But that’s what is liberating—you don’t have to be original. You just have to be truly interested, constantly improving, and consistent.
Consistency. Sometimes I’m the one who scares people away from podcasting. I usually say, you need to do this for about year before you see any real following emerge, and in that time, you have to be consistent: whether it’s half an hour of content once a week, or an hour once a month, keep on track. Your growing audience will come to expect it on their devices every Friday, the first of every month, or whatever.
Avoid check-box podcasting. The flip-side of consistency is that you sometimes have to produce content when you aren’t inspired to write or speak, or don’t have a great guest lined up. Fortunately, it’s the same with every other form of art, from painting to music to writing. You have to show up and do the work. Let the deadline spark something you didn’t expect and follow that. There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people—so find your switch and do your best. If you find that you are doing it by rote, maybe you need to change things up, or maybe you need a break. Once you’ve got a solid catalogue of episodes (the “long tail”), you can take a sabbatical and not lose your following. But it’s incredible how many podcasts are produced because a business or public figure feels they need one to be relevant, just like people felt about websites 25 years ago, or social media 15 years ago. Unless these hosts find an exciting vein to tap or a niche to explore, these shows are, almost universally, crap.
Get ahead. I learned pretty quickly to get off the record-a-weekly-podcast-once-per-week train. Riding that, I constantly felt under the gun. If I got sick and lost my voice, or a guest cancelled, or I had to travel in an emergency, everything was thrown off. Three times, in fact, my recorded conversations just… sucked, and I had to scrap them. In one case, a renowned theoretical physicist actually fell asleep mid-chat! Yes, I have that on tape, and no, you won’t be hearing it. I started to record multiple conversations per week to get as far ahead as I could. At one point, I had almost three months of content scheduled for release—which meant I could take a vacation, adjust my schedule, or just relax a bit. Obviously, my episodes were meant to be evergreen, not topical. Not every podcaster has this luxury. But if you do, I suggest being 1-2 episodes ahead of the game.
Break the rules. Do something different. Do the opposite of what I say. Offer something original both in form and in content. Forget consistency and just make an episode when you feel like it. Some successful podcasts are a minute long (Heartbeat), and other go on for hours (Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History). If you really want to try something, go for it. Unless you’ve got a studio and a big budget to do whole narrative series with a team of paid researchers, podcasting works when it is as close to you and your voice as possible.

Interested in podcasting? What are your fears or reservations? What podcasts do you think work well? Which ones annoy you?

Writing

I have to carve out time each day to actually write. Also, news flash: water is going to be wet! And bears will continue to shit in the woods! This is such an intense, uncomfortable, monstrously stupid cliché (didn’t you know, a writer needs to write more?) that I am tempted to delete this section altogether. But it’s here for a reason. Hopefully next week I’ll come up with a more interesting way of telling you that I am not writing enough.

Reading and Listening

Really digging The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire by Stephen R. Bown, which is making me think a lot about a canoe trip on the Yukon River next month.
A page at a time of Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts by Matt Bell. I feel like I don’t want to squander reading this book at a time when I’m not really writing.