Why Start a Podcast Outside Your Brand
My brother in life, if not in blood, recently came to me with an idea out of left field: Let’s start a podcast. Great! I thought, I have a ton to say about disability law and productivity software (my two areas of professional expertise), but he is an expert in enterprise IT and tech. So, what would we talk about?
Video Games, TV, Movies, consumer tech and a touch of life and politics.
Oh.
Well, *I LIKE ALL OF THOSE THINGS* but why would anyone listen to us talk about it? We’re a couple of middle-aged guys with no specific training. I’ve never coded a game (well, I wrote one in javascript for the Palm Pre and did the music for another, but if you still remember what the Palm Pre is then you share my pain and see my point). We’ve never produced a movie, designed a product, or even run a popular tech blog.
We’re just two guys with opinions. So what gives, and why should you do something similar?
The “Perfect” vs. the “Good”
The first reason we decided to do it, was just to do it. We probably could have focused the show on productivity and enterprise tech, which we know a lot about, but in a way, the pressure to live up to our expertise would have stopped us before we started.
This isn’t self criticism, but it is self awareness. Both of us are focused on putting out our best, no matter what we’re doing. If we jumped into a podcast, knowing nothing about podcasting, and decided to podcast about our big boy professional issues, we’d get buried in the research and preparation. We’d probably write out our first dozen episodes, fact check, call in our professional networks for interviews, and spend weeks or months in rehearsal before we ever dropped a pod.
With pop culture, gaming, home tech, it’s just stuff we love to talk about. We can still research, but the expectation that our audience is coming to us as “thought leaders” (blech at that term), isn’t there, and so we can focus on the fundamental task of building a podcast in the open. Learning as we go. If along the way, we share some of the things we’re actually experts on with our audience, it’ll be a happy accident. (We want to chat about home-servers, NAS devices, and home organization apps in the future, and those all brush up against the things we know about).
We are all Storytellers
The title of our second episode. My co-host Tim was talking about the new movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and we got into a discussion about our love of gaming and media, and how media like this really is about telling stories. It’s always been how our species communicates, from the earliest cave paintings and stories told around ancient fires to the lates Immersive VR experiences. When information is delivered as a story, we learn robustly and we grow closer to our tribe. Technology can be a tool to supercharge our storytelling, but often, it becomes a substitute.
As aptly stated:
Although our fast-paced electronic society doesn’t always nurture the art of storytelling, telling our stories can be an empowering remedy for healing alienation. Instead of humanizing technologies while we dehumanize ourselves, storytelling embraces the ver essence of person-to-person communication, weaving a sense of personal and collective welfare with the community and the universe as a whole.
Nanton, Carmela. Tectonic Boundaries: Negotiating Convergent Forces in Adult Education. 2016, p. 64.
For us, Interscription is an opportunity to tell our stories, and to highlight the stories that are being told all around us. Our initial episodes may be unfocused, jumping between games, technology, media, and other questions on our mind. But, the core of our goal is the glue that connects it. We are all storytellers, and, waiting for someone to ask for ours is never as good as simply stepping up to the fire.
Deliberate Practice — Building a Habit
I am a productivity nerd. I’ve helped design online productivity apps in the business and personal organization space, including kanban boards, whiteboards, and family checklists.
I don’t do this because I’m incredibly organized and deserve to be a “thought leader” (strike two) on the subject. I’ve done it because, frankly, I suck at staying organized. At some point, we’ll dive deep on neurodivergence, the spectrum of diagnoses between ADHD, OCD, Anxiety, and a lack of grit. For now, I’m going to simply say, it’s been a lifetime struggle to focus on the things, even those things I desperately want to do. I’ve written hundreds of songs, and recorded and produced none in about 20 years. It’s easy for me to start, but challenging to continue. It’s an area where I’m pretty self aware.
So, when Tim and I made the decision to start podcasting, I saw it as an opportunity to attack this through deliberate practice. Doing a weekly episode was just the right amount of commitment without crushing our other projects and responsibilities. It also meant that when we started getting listeners outside our immediate circle, as we have, that there was this additional level of built in responsibility, an accountability to those people who decided to come on this run with us.
It has a wonderful exponential effect: First it was just Tim and I, recording beta episodes to get into the swing, then we launched our first beta, then our first episode, and then our second. Each one is a bit better. Our equipment improves, our planning improves, our ability to speak with fewer “umms” and other fillers improves, and now we’re honing our ability to stick to our show map and keep the timing tight. Soon we’ll test our chops on interviews.
None of these steps are taken before we’re ready, and none of our missteps stops us from recording the episode and putting it out. If it has warts our listeners will let us know where to improve and we’ll do so. Come for the storytelling, stay for the improvements.
So here we are, the Interscription Podcast. A work in progress, just like us, and just as it will always be.
