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Re-Humanize Your Podcast Before It's Too Late

Has the pendulum swung too far away from “podcasting is an intimate medium”? In our haste to resist the cliche, we might be editing out the humanity from our podcasts.

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Plastic. It felt like I was listening to a piece of plastic talk to me on a podcast recently. A piece of plastic had gained just enough sentience to push some knowledge down their podcast, and I was on the other end. And I wasn’t enjoying the experience. 

Strangely, I was reminded of an event I attended years ago that featured several speakers rotating out on the stage, each giving short talks on a variety of topics throughout the evening. Some were sharing their passions. Some their expertise. And for one guy, a book he read a month ago.

Yeah, not kidding.

Within 2 minutes of his talk, we knew something was off. Specifically, we in the audience knew that this guy was just parroting what he’d read in the book. Sure, we got some of his passion, but the passion was a breathless gushing over shallow concepts he’d read about, but clearly hadn’t put into practice, let alone mastered.

And here I was again, this time in a car, listening to someone recite concepts they likely had mastered, but with all the personality of a plastic patio chair.

The connection between those two was a lack of themselves. The presenter didn’t have any personal “here’s what this book did for me” stories to share. The podcaster didn’t add in their point of view to the knowledge they’d chosen to share. Both felt artificial to me.

Are We Not Entertained?

While I’m grateful for the army of un-paid curators who work tirelessly to keep Wikipedia a valuable resource for everyone, reading a Wikipedia entry is oftentimes incredibly boring. And that’s by design. As a repository of knowledge, it’s important to Wikipedia that they maintain a neutral point of view.

But few people read Wikipedia for entertainment purposes. 

The phrase “podcasting is an intimate medium” is considered a bit gauche these days, though I’ve probably uttered it or immortalized it in print many times over the last 16 years. But as stated in the opening, it’s possible that some podcasters have gone too far in the other direction, sucking out all the humanity from their episodes.

And that’s not very entertaining.

Blending Humanity With Information

Humanity has a huge impact on the podcast listening experience. Though it’s a bit of an oversimplification, shows that convey their humanity to their audience tend to be better. The converse is also true: remove the humanity from a show, and the listener experience is worsened.

Yes, even short-form, fact-based news programs need humanity. Podnews is an excellent illustration. James’ focus is getting you the news about podcasting in an efficient manner every day. He’s ruthlessly committed to keeping each episode very short, which doesn’t allow him a lot of time to wax poetically on any given topic like some people. (Hi, me!) Yet somehow, James finds a way to inject his own humanity in the narration, rather than just regurgitating headlines. It sounds human, just not long-winded.

Journalists like podcasting not only because they can go deeper, but because they can use themselves as part of the story. That’s historically been a bad thing in traditional journalism. Thankfully, we don’t hear as many reporters talking about themselves in the 3rd person any longer (“This reporter was on the scene to…” 🤮). Journalists who podcast find their podcast listeners want to hear how the reporter was affected by covering the story they’re conveying on their podcast. Because stories change humans, even those (or especially those) who cover them.

Narrative-driven stories -- even those where the voice of the narrator has been purposely removed from the final edit -- still need to show the humanity of the person/people behind them. Yes, the stories gathered from interviews or conversations are filled with humanity. And even if they are all covering the same topic, they’ll just sound jammed together if the personality of the producer(s) isn’t woven throughout and is easy to identify. Evidence of an architect should be subtle, yet obvious. Yeah, that’s a bit of an oxymoron.

Your Listener No Longer Needs You To Read To Them

We're already seeing new apps and services that encroach on our podcasting territory. We’ve done a good job of selling the narrative that podcasting is a found-time activity. So much so that companies are finding ways to use the technical architecture of podcasting - audio files delivered to a player - with very little human interaction. And tons of scale.

Right now, you can use one of these apps to make a podcast episode out of any text found on the web. And not in a dead-sounding robotic voice. If you can get that, do you need to subscribe to a podcast where someone only reads headlines to you, where they choose what is and what isn’t worthy? Or do you, as a listener, want to have more control over that experience?

As a podcaster, do you need to expend the energy to narrate your show after you script it out? Or should you leave that to software so you can get back to digging up new content for your audience and scale, scale, scale?

As a human, will technology like this change how you interact with text-based content? Instead of doomscrolling through social feeds when we have nothing to do (or are procrastinating things we should be doing), will we instead “doom listen” while we’re doing the dishes?

This new “aural web” (which cannot be what we call it, please?) where the information we want is comfortably consumed via audio is going to see loads of innovation and disruption in the coming months. And it’s going to make things very difficult for podcasters who have sucked all the humanity out of their shows.

The Time To Re-Humanize Your Podcast Is Now

I’m bullish on tech’s ability to make a passable human voice, making it quite nice to listen to just about anything. But I’m bearish on that tech’s ability to out-humanize human creativity, passion, and sincerity. 

Human podcasters should embrace their humanity. Yes, even the messy parts. We need not be afraid of being vulnerable on our shows. We need to be willing to express our opinion. And we need to be willing to see our opinion proven wrong.

Your audience wants you to be human. Your audience listens to your show because of you. Get in there and put more “you” in your podcast. Because in the battle of which side can convey more neutral point of view facts, humanity will lose every time. And that’s a good thing.


One fact I can’t get away from is how much a genuine, one-to-one recommendation from you to another podcaster helps my little show grow. Maybe you know someone struggling being too human on their show? Or not human enough? Send them a link to this episode, would you?

And if you'd like to support me and the humanity I bring with this program every day, please go to BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra.

I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications. 

Cheers!


Published On:
August 18, 2020
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PPS3E24 Re-Humanize Your Podcast Before It's Too Late - Transcript

Has the pendulum swung too far away from podcasting as an intimate medium in our haste to resist that cliche, we might be editing out the humanity from our podcasts.

[00:00:17] Hello, and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo, Tara plastics. That's exactly how I felt. It felt like I was listening to a piece of plastic. Talk on the phone podcasts recently, the conversation we're going to have today, we want to oftentimes push some knowledge down our podcast, feed to our listeners, some sort of information.

[00:00:48] And we want to make sure that information is received by our, the people that are listening to us. And sometimes when we find some information, we want to share it. We're not really experts, but oftentimes we are, but let's let's address the non-expert thing. I remember a few years ago, I was at an event and this event featured several speakers throughout the evening.

[00:01:13] Each giving short talks, variety of topics, very fun, entertaining. Uh, typically tip entertaining evenings when we, when we do these things, but one of the presenters got up there and began giving his talk about a concept, which I've already forgotten what it was. And it was just a minute, maybe two minutes into the talk.

[00:01:33] And it was very clear that this person didn't really know what they were talking about. I mean, they had some knowledge and they probably pulled some knowledge out of. Well, as we'd later figured out a single book that they had read like a month before and said, this is such great stuff. I want to give information.

[00:01:52] And so they got up there and just dumped out the information from the book. They were so excited to share the information in the book. I'm fine doing them. And that's how knowledge gets passed around is we share the knowledge that we have with, with other people. The problem was there was no. Humanity in it.

[00:02:11] I mean, sure. We got his excitement from learning this new information, but he wasn't able to really communicate the value of having the information. It was really only his excitement of having the information rather than other than it came down. And that fought back to that presentation. When I felt like I was having a piece of plastic, talk to me about a topic on a podcast recently, because in both cases, The humanity was missing in the, in the presenter on stage.

[00:02:41] I got his humanity of being excited, but he was unable to convey the information to me when I was listening to the podcaster, pretend like they were a piece of plastic talking back to me. They too were just regurgitating information without any real humanity that they lack. The excitement and enthusiasm was more like a reading, a standard Wikipedia article.

[00:03:06] To me, that is not what people want to listen to them. At least not on podcasts. I think we've got this wave of people out there right now that are trying to, as I said, in the introduction to the show goes so far away from podcasting is an intimate medium, because that's a bit of an overused cliche that we're going too far on the other side.

[00:03:29] You know, every show I think every podcast I think can be made better. And with, and a lot worse without humanity. Take a fact based news program, short format news program. And we'll we'll use pod pod news as an example of what about that is short couple of minutes long, just reading out the facts, right?

[00:03:51] What is a human being, reading at the facts? There's not a lot of room for commentary. Yeah, there's a way. And James does a good job of that. There's a way of bringing there. The person who's curating that list, their personality to Ru small things here and there subtle, not a lot of room for large expo, but you can certainly insert yourself into the reading of the news.

[00:04:14] If in fact that's what your show is doing, reading off the news, or just providing some sort of a, a fact based thing. Be funny, be interesting. Do something with it. More journalistic styles. The more journalistic story, not necessarily storytelling, but actually truly reporting on a story. A story itself, definitely plenty of room in the podcasting space for journalists to insert themselves to the story, which has been a bad thing in regular journalism.

[00:04:43] We don't hear often any longer, thankfully. The reporter on the street saying this reporter visited here, talking about themselves in a third person, says it's a dumb, right? And we're not doing it on podcasting podcasting. We are encouraging the journalist to explore them selves, but themselves, if not necessarily in the story, talk to us about how they were affected by covering the story they want to.

[00:05:05] We want them to make it personal for us more in narrative driven show. Clearly need some humanity, but even, even non that narrator narrative stories, where you go interview a bunch of people and cut out yourself as the interviewer, I've talked about that on the program previously, you can still keep the humanity in there of yourself.

[00:05:26] It's you? You're the humanity where you want, not just your guests, not just the people you're interviewing on the street, but that really comes through and how you select the people to be on the program. And then maybe even how you possibly wrap it up at the end with putting in your voice. Lots of ideas of how you can do that.

[00:05:43] And then that no narrator style of doing a narrative program is a little, it's a lot, it's a challenge, right? But I think there's still a way to do it subtly with you as the architect in control that shall be able to come through. Now, the worst thing for me is when the person is really a human, but they've really taken out the humanity like that piece of plastic talking to me.

[00:06:10] I am. I began this with, so yeah, that's just, you know, if you're a PR, you're a person be a person, a little you in your podcast goes a long way, put more you in the podcast of it all. Cause that'll let, give him go a longer way. And the reason I bring all this up, the reason this is so important right now is we're already seeing some new applications and services.

[00:06:35] It being introduced into our podcasting industry. That will do a lot of what we do specifically. It will narrate articles for you. Do I need someone reading me, the headlines, someone sitting down behind their microphone and reading the headlines and making that as a podcast. When I now have a new service, which allows me to pick and choose my own news sources, and it will automatically narrate in a much better voice than we've ever heard of before.

[00:07:06] Right. We have these new, highly, well, they sound great. These new voices that are reading and that news article that I can tweak that algorithm to me the way I want it to be. And if it's going to make a podcast for me, do I need someone just sitting and reading? We headlines. I'm just going to be reading the tweets.

[00:07:24] It's going to be reading articles. Anything that I want we're on the edge of this. I don't know what we call it. An oral web, maybe. We're not just consuming things, textually, weeding with our eyes. We can not read with our ears and even in such a way to where it's compelling and interesting, it's going to be very difficult for those podcasters who have sucked all the humanity out of their show to compete.

[00:07:48] When I've got a robot reading to me in a human voice. Well, I'm probably going to pick the robot because I can tweak what I want it to be. So my message. If I have one today is podcasters. Don't forget about your humanity, right? Be vulnerable. Be willing to have an opinion and be willing for that opinion to be proven wrong.

[00:08:11] Maybe you just a few episodes later of your program. So you have to be, be willing also to change your mind through all of this. These are the things that your audience wants your audiences listening to your show, largely because of you. So definitely get in there and put more you in your program before somebody can just, you know, use a program to have words similar to yours, read out to them.

[00:08:36] You'll lose in that battle. I asked you before, but I'll ask you again, find one person who's a podcast or in your life that needs to hear about podcast pontifications and share either this episode or another of your favorite episodes with them. That really helps me grow the show. And if you'd like to support me and the efforts that I do every day, when I bring you this program, go to buy me a coffee.com/evo, Tara.

[00:09:02] That's it enjoy the rest of your day. I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast. Pontifications cheers. .

‍

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Podcast Pontifications is produced by Evo Terra. Follow him on Twitter for more podcasting insight as it happens.
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