Reflecting On The Pod

Listening to Chris Williamson’s 2.5 milly Q&A put me in a retrospective mood regarding my own show this weekend.

I don’t really remember why I started this podcast. It wasn’t to ‘have more conversations’, ‘ pursue a personal brand’, ‘make money’ or any of those motivations that might look like decent reasons. I had always consumed high, daily hours of podcasts. I was familiar with the big players and what, in my opinion made interviews bad, good and great, and so I think the answer to why I started is as simple as the barriers to entry being non-existent. All you needed was a microphone, editing software, an email and some interest, now all of a sudden you’re operating in the same domain as Tim Ferriss.

In competition with on the other hand… certainly not. I never had any misconceptions about that, but at least I could appear alongside the GOATs in Spotify search, and I thought that would be pretty cool. The podcasting medium is a dramatic winner take all domain. 99.9% of all downloads are likely attributable to 0.1% of the podcasts. The podcasting game is nothing for a long time until it’s suddenly everything, and as such, to get into it for any other reason than joy is misery.

Chris Williamson who himself is a modern doyen of podcasting (and former guest on the pod) has said just as much. He existed in the depths of podcast undiscovery until he wasn’t and now he will accrue my monthly download count within an hour of publishing a new episode (maybe minutes). Podcasting (and most creative mediums) are extremely fat tailed distributions. Book publishing, music, journalism, artists all the same. The statistics are blurry, but as many as 500,000 books are published in the English language per annum and the average sum of those will sell 200 copies year 1 with (maybe) 1000 in its lifetime. If you make it to a second print run you have now published statically one of the most popular books of all time, but if your Mark Manson, Jordan Peterson, J.K, Jack Weatherford or Thomas Erikson and you’ve sold millions of copies, you’re now responsible for the accumulated sales of the million others published before you. Your book represents 0.000001% of the books published that year, but 95% of all sales. It is extremely unequal. But It’s not just creative fields. 95% of startups die. They go to 0. But from the 5% that make it… how much are they worth? Billions, trillions? Totally unequal, dramatically skewed distributions dictate much of what we consume and interact. And while Taleb would insert a heavy does of randomness as explanation, quality obviously matters. How many fantasy stories are as rich, complex and wonderful as Harry Potter, LOTR or Dune but never experience even 0.1% of the success? Who is to say that ‘x’ fantasy tome who crawls lifeless into their third print run is as good as ‘y’ best seller that sprints past their 1000th? Here is where I think Taleb is so original and so devastating with his insight. The difference between 0% and 99% is quality, but the difference between 99% and 100% is luck. To quote one of his books (I think Fooled By Randomness), “mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance”. What tipped Harry Potter into J.K’s billions? What propelled Lex Fridman to the most liberated, all consuming interview platform on the planet? Life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards, there are things we can point to that will suffice in explaining why they got so big… but how accurate can that retrospective really be? And how dramatic was the hidden hand of variance that expelled them from the normal distribution? And most importantly… how can I exploit it?

This is all a part of me trying to make sense on reflecting the pod. Why is it not my full time job, why have I done it for years without any income, why do I love doing it and feel so lucky and grateful that I can?

I think the podcast ended up being a more achievable expression of my not so quiet ambition to produce journalism. For this, one needs far more than just a microphone and an editing software. The opportunity cost to research, write and sell to a publisher would mean forgoing any semblance of steady income... and, I live in Sweden, this is a pricey place. For me to do the whole writing thing well, fitting it in between work hours just wouldn’t suffice. It wouldn’t meet the quality the market demands. Plus, I have, even though I can barely explain why, career ambitions. I want to be involved in business that thrives. A life of pure artistry (in this case, writing and podcasting) just doesn’t seem enough. To have the chance to be doing what I’m doing with Quartr makes me feel charmed. But the podcast on the other hand, I can fit this in between everything else and still scratch that journalistic itch. Therefore, it might have been that simple trade off which culminated in the first few episodes years ago. These interests are genuine and research a joy. Podcasting is an opportunity to do that without it consuming your entire life. And once a few eps are locked and loaded, to continue at something you find joyful is no effort at all.

There are phenom’s out there who can just ‘write on the side’ of their otherwise busy lives but sadly I’m not one. Hitchens life was writing, it was his entire attention, and stories of legend left in his absence. This is from Salman Rushdie; At the end of a long night of drinking, smoking and conversing while everyone else was fighting sleep to stay upright in their chair, Hitchens would withdraw to his study to pump out a 10,000 worder worthy of Vanity Fair with little to no edit required. Whether it’s the ability to just carry around formed arguments fit to print or the honed craft of so much deadline publishing over years I’m not sure, but although I cannot do it now (I’ve tried and failed) perhaps one day I could get there.

So in reflecting on the pod, I think it’s the same instinct which informs my compulsion to write that mutates (in it’s absence) into my impulse to podcast. Again, that Soren Kierkegaard quote, ‘life can be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards’. How much explanation I offer here is actually the truth and not just my own dot connecting half a decade later? I don’t know. But I know my first two episodes were just a pure expression of interest in blokes I’d known here and there. Davis Cutter into Jono Tan into a serendipitous encounter with Stephen Hicks (the first real guest) and from there everything kicked everything into gear.

And 180 episodes and 4 years later I’ve got episodes I’m extremely proud of and episodes I’d rather forget. I’ve got a wonderful network of the most interesting, prolific, and adventurous authors on the planet. I am forced to read more, focus more and face up to how I communicate. I’ve got a media invite to Bill Browder’s Magnitzky Awards in November, and I’ll be profiling the most incredible human rights activists for an Australian publication. The serendipity is real, and while at times I lament that it doesn’t come fast and hard enough, the serendipity is real. So, upon reflection, here is to at least 4 more years, and here is to you, someone generous enough to take time out their day to read this :)