Socrates, Philosophy in Podcasting and Challenging the Status Quo (Foundation Episode 03)

[00:04] Many podcasters sharing their experiences talk about podfade, otherwise known as podcaster burnout, as something to avoid at all costs for fear of failure, whatever failure could

[00:19] mean in podcasting anyway. Burnout could also hit the podcast professionals as well. In a world where competing with AI means we have to keep adding more and more to our offering, what can we do? This is the fourth foundational episode of this podcast as an introduction to me, Matthew Bliss, the host of Rethinking Podcasting,

[00:40] through sharing with you my career, a bit of my life, and how my thinking has changed on my podcasting journey so far. In this episode, I talk about the nature of podcasting today from my perspective as an editor and producer, how much value is in the podcasting process,

[00:58] and what I've learned from working in the red zone of burnout. Also, a quick note, the previous iteration of this podcast was called Coffee with a Podcaster before it was Rethinking Podcasting. So you'll hear me reference

[01:21] that for the first time in this episode as well. The most common problem that I hear about as a freelance producer and editor is I tried to edit my podcast with one of these online platforms. Descript is the most common one.

[01:38] And it's the most common that I hear because it's the most difficult to penetrate in terms of learning how to use it. They change all the words that you commonly think mean one thing, but actually mean another thing,

[01:51] like a timeline called a sequence. The only common words really are multicam, but most of that wording and verbiage they use for advertising. But most people will get a Descript account. They'll record an episode on there.

[02:04] They'll have a crack at the edit. They'll realize it's going to take them 12 hours to get used to the platform to be able to edit their episodes in an hour and a half. Unfortunately, they went through the rote process of planning their podcast where they recorded before they practiced an edit.

[02:21] So they're trying to edit a week out from launch. They presume because of the marketing from those products, that it will be very easy to edit the podcast. Done, done for you, AI, et cetera. But no, you have to learn how to do stuff. You have to

[02:35] get used to the platform. You have to practice with it. Layer on top of that, the psychological bias of hating what you sound like and what you look like and your need to self-critique and change every single little thing about the podcast you get to, you can't do that in a week for your first episode. And then you infer it takes that long

[02:55] with every episode afterwards as well. So they'll come to me usually by referral. Someone they know will say, Descript sucks. Can you help me? And they're like, I know the guy for you. Don't worry. Here's Matt. We have a chat. I turn around their first episode in a week. We plan the rest of the

[03:12] content. We plan the workflow and it makes sense. So the editing logistical perspective is the one that I hear most often, but there are some times where I'm fortunate enough to be able to help someone launch a podcast, in which case I get to ask all those questions that we've talked

[03:29] about so far. Who's the audience? What's the profile? What are your goals? What is the milestone you're looking to hit? And admittedly, it takes time. Like any client who is listening to this

[03:41] right now won't have been asked those questions if they've been with me for long enough, because enough because it takes time to learn what you should be asking a client to help them achieve a great podcast that realizes their vision and ticks all the boxes. But the other component of

[03:55] that is that with the things that I do, it can get quite expensive. So I offer a bespoke service for the most part where I can do top to tail and all you have to do is turn up for the recordings and

[04:07] that's it. But you know, my time unfortunately isn't free. So some people pick and choose the bits that they want. Some people are motivated to do the bits around it, except usually the editing.

[04:19] And that's the only bit that I do. You can get a whole scope of problems or issues that people have that you hear about. And that's what I'd like to change with my business too. Like I'm doing a lot of editing at the moment because that's the biggest problem. It's also the easiest lift for people.

[04:33] I'll do it well. I'll say what takes me two hours takes you 10. give it to me and a bit of money and I'll get it done for you. But just like the podcast, I want to move my expertise to the next level,

[04:46] not to teach people how to edit, but to teach people to think about podcasting differently. And I think podcasting professionals need to do that too. People who say, I want to edit podcasts for a living, they get onto the conveyor belt of industrial management of episode editing.

[05:05] You know, they have their own blueprint that doesn't adapt to what the client could want. They clean, they remove silence, they remove ums and ahs, stitch it together, give it back,

[05:17] and that's it. Whereas there's a lot of different things that you could do and that you have to do with the emergence of technologies like Descript, AI generated or automated functions, as they get

[05:30] better, the low level podcast editor, their job is going to become less and less available and will start to, and it's already happening. The market will push down that price because someone

[05:41] can pay Descript $10 a month to press a button and do what they want to. It might only be 70% as good as you do it, but it's also 10% of the prices you'd pay someone else.

[05:55] And that's the thing that I have to bring up as a thing that I think gets ignored quite a lot because the work has to be visible, but a great podcast editor is essentially invisible. The way

[06:07] that they do their work, they get in and they get out. It's like that cleaner that you hire, you give her a key to your house and a year later, you've had your house cleaned while you've been at work and you don't encounter her. You don't see her or him. The house is just clean when you get

[06:22] home. That's what podcast editing is like when it's done well. The audience doesn't know. The host doesn't need to know. The job just gets done and it gets done really well. That means that the podcast professional being as invisible as they are means that the industry doesn't recognize them

[06:39] as well. The podcasting industry internally does, but outside that, someone who listens to Dire OVCEO doesn't need to know that 72 people put their fingerprints on this episode. They just watch it and enjoy it. And as editors in that cleaning analogy, the cleaning person comes,

[06:55] they rock in with their gear, their manual gear and a loggy deck, the broom and mop and stuff and bucket. And then they see a little cleaning bot rolling across the floor and just kick it out the way and get to and what they need to do.

[07:09] And then very gently put it back before they leave. That's, that's what I feel like podcast editing is like. It is very rare that there's a case that I will do an editing job for someone in the platform that they intend to use, which doesn't make sense from a learning

[07:25] perspective, but it also means that instead of them spending the 12 hours learning to script, it means I have to. And I'm not there yet. My broom is much better than that robot vacuum at this stage, and I don't have to relearn how to do it every client I get. The thing that takes

[07:41] you five minutes now took you an hour like a month ago, but those are the nice revelations. The ones that you have in my context, being someone who moved from Australia to Ireland, leaving his job in Australia and needing to find one here, meant that I was doing the podcasting

[07:57] as a bit of a stopgap for myself. So I could earn a bit of money to do my side of the life domestic stuff and not be a man of leisure. I'm not just vacuuming the house and then

[08:10] having a glass of wine at two o'clock waiting for my wife to come home. I wanted to contribute. So the podcast editing business came about because of that. I was hunting for jobs all the way through that time. Never got one except for a single one, which was a four and a half hour drive across

[08:27] the country, largely remote. But yeah, you can imagine why the circumstances there didn't quite work out for me. So what that meant at the end of 2023 and for most of last year, 2024, I was

[08:42] worried about money. I wasn't confident enough to charge enough money for my services, which meant I had to get more clients, which meant I had more work. And that's the secret. Editing work doesn't scale. Your two minutes might come from your

[08:59] previous hour, but you still got to dedicate the same amount of time. And the next level of that is thinking about hiring people into your business to edit for you. That's not a place that I want to go if I can help it. And I wasn't able to do something like that at the time. So, uh, I've been in the burnout zone for a very long time with regards to the

[09:19] amount of work that I need to do, because it's all editing, it's all taking people's content, it's planning it well, it's doing it as fast as possible, but retaining the quality over time.

[09:33] And yeah, I've, I've started now, uh, not getting rid of clients, but not taking on new ones, doing the work in short stints, but trying to take work that pays what

[09:46] my value is. Like that advice that you hear as a freelancer, price out the market so that you get paid the same for having less clients. It definitely makes sense. But as a business mistake,

[09:58] I mean, it wasn't, it got me in front of more people. I became familiar with more people. It connected me with more opportunities than I could have imagined, expanded my network to the point where I can create coffee with a podcaster doing interviews now.

[10:11] But my mental health, my physical health, all of that takes a dive. When, when burnout begins, people take on too much too early. They presume the extrinsic value is the value.

[10:26] Like you haven't got a podcast until someone's listened to it, but there's a lot of value you can get from the building, the planning, the recording, the getting better at it, the talking to people, collaborating with your community, all that stuff. Don't plan two

[10:40] kilometers ahead or two miles ahead if you're freedom units. Look a couple of hundred meters ahead, learn that road, understand where the potholes are, pave them up, and then start thinking further and further and further ahead. The analogy that arrives to my brain is how Top Gear described driving a Bugatti when it first came out, a Bugatti Veyron.

[11:01] I think it was in Dubai they were driving it, actually. It's so fast that you have to think a mile ahead to not crash into anybody if you're driving at full speed. So be careful, I guess. Burnout in the podcast industry, huge. I'm almost reticent to call it podfade at this stage because

[11:19] I think that's a term that isn't constructive. I think it's a term that's been created to give people an excuse to talk about people failing at podcasts. And then people bring up weird data like the 1% or 2% of top podcasts.

[11:34] Yay. Okay. How do you avoid that? Why are you in the podcast? Why are you doing it? Go through that journey. And that's how you stick around for the long run. I hope you enjoyed that insight into my background, my career, and how podcasting has changed my life.

[11:54] If you'd like to find out more about this podcast, check the show notes or head to rethinkingpodcasting.com. You'll also find the ways that you can support the show, including affiliate links to any products I use in my daily podcast

[12:09] production. If you've got a podcast revelation to share or would like to respond to anything I've mentioned on the podcast, send an email to business at mbpod.com or head to speakpipe.com forward slash RTP and record a voice message.

[12:26] Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. You might be wondering what compelled me to create this series of introductory episodes. Truth is, I couldn't do it on my own. Activate Your Podcast is a service I offer with Peter Daly-Dixon and Rob Drummond,

[12:50] where we help you launch your podcast with a marketable set of five introductory episodes built from a 90-minute conversation with a conversation partner. These five activation episodes will help you get started on your podcast, give you a foundation

[13:03] to build your marketing from, and the provided transcripts will give you a strong base to kickstart your introductory email automation sequences. We'll even host and distribute the podcast for you. Not only that, but as the head of podcast engineering,

[13:18] I'll be editing your episodes together with the highest production value on offer. And if you love our process, you can choose to continue with the service ongoing for your podcast. It's basically done-for-you marketing with everything included.

[13:32] All you need to do is have a conversation. If you're interested, head to activateyourpodcast.com to schedule an introductory call and make sure to mention Rethinking Podcasting when you get there.