I’m writing because I could use a hand.

Would you mind going on our hosting service, importing your podcast, and downloading it from a player? It’ll give you a chance to see the actual software we’ve been talking about, and it won’t impact your current hosting or listeners in any way.

How to help

Here are the instructions if you’ve got a few minutes:

1. Go to https://app.timber.fm and create a new account.

2. Import your podcast.

   • This part requires you to verify your ownership of the podcast via mail. Important: if you use ACast or Anchor, your email is not in your RSS feed, and you won’t get an email from the import tool.

   • Here are instructions for how to add your email in Anchor.

   • Here are instructions for how to add your email in ACast.

3. Once your show is imported, click around and have a look at it. You can try listening to episodes right in the web.

4. (optional) Grab your RSS feed and import it into a player like Goodpods or Pocket Casts.

   

5. Listen to an ep from the player to cause it to be downloaded from Timber’s service.

6. (optional) Wait an hour and verify that you can see the download appear in Timber analytics.

Again, doing all this will really help us and will not interfere in any way with the ongoing distribution of your show on your current hosting provider. They will not even know you did it.

If you would like to try this but would like my personal help walking you through it, I’m more than happy to jump in and give you a hand. You can reach me by replying to this email or by joining our Discord server with this link: https://discord.gg/q9szR35m (link expires in 7 days).

Thanks so much! I hope you’re enjoying the beginning of your year!

Runners high

Personal side note.. Are you into new year’s resolutions? I usually do them kind of secretly. I don’t like the accountability of having the whole world know I didn’t succeed at something I set out to do. But here I am doing a startup.

Anyway, last year I did one that was so darn good, that I’m doing it again this year. I call it “10 for 10.” For the first 10 weeks of the year, I exercise 10 hours a week. It’s a TON of exercise, and it’s really hard to make it all the way through, but when I did it last year it set the year up as the most physically fit year of my life somewhere in the middle of my 40s.

The nice thing about the 10 week duration is that you end up really fit in the middle of March just as other people are starting to realize they need to shed their winter layer before spring gets too far underway.

The other nice thing for me is that I enjoy exercise induced euphoria (runner’s high), and I find that I get it really consistently, and even during post-workout life if I exercise 2 or more hours in a day, and generally a lot less if I’m more in the 30 to 90 minute range. I think it has something to do with getting into that fat burning metabolism that brings it out.

Totally non-podcasty thoughts, but hey! Part of this newsletter is sharing my life in hopes that we’ll connect and you’ll want to join in our mission of making Timber a great company for podcasters.

I’d love replies with your resolutions if you’re doing them.

Thanks,

—Jon Christensen

What you’re here for, the prediction

Nothing—not competition, capitalism, preferences for video, journalistic objectivity, unfair power imbalances, global pandemic, celebrity, technology, or Joe Rogan will change our human desire to listen to great stories that entertain us, move us, educate us and challenge us.

That’s it! That’s the prediction. Keep making audio and distribute it however you can. Even if your distribution is limited to friends within earshot, your story could be better than those on any top 10 list ever curated.

Thank you

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve helped Timber survive the year in better shape than we started it.

Thank you so much for reading and sharing our stories.

Thank you for getting your podcast reviewed by our editors.

Thank you for beta testing our hosting software.

Here’s looking to happiness, kindness, and love, and to meeting every challenge of 2022 to the best of our abilities.

—Jon Christensen

ps. Last Chance! Right now, today, please support your fellow BIPOC, Queer and Trans podcasters who are making great audio. Here’s the link: https://www.podcastingseriously.com/fund. Just donate, and follow Juleyka Lantigua Williams on Twitter to stay up to date with the fund.

Some background:

LWC Studios launched the The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to support independent BIPOC, Queer and Trans audio producers in submitting their work to media/journalism awards.

Basically they pay the submission fees (which, before I started Timber, I didn’t even imagine that you would have to pay to win an award, but that’s another story) for these indie podcasters.

I was feeling the weight of existence on my chest as I lied there. How can I breath when the Beatles broke up, then started dying, and I haven’t even tried to make something as lasting as their music? And, as humans, how can we even stand it that only 4 in a million people make something as creatively important as they did?

What’s the use?

It’s heavy. And certainly these thoughts were all the heavier because I lost a friend this year to an avalanche. A musician who played better than I ever will whose music will never be heard by most people.

So how do we create? How do we breathe?

I’m a good sleeper, so I fell asleep easily and these thoughts were replaced by a focus on the day ahead when I woke up the next morning.

By evening time, I felt a compulsion. I needed to go to the piano and play a Beatles song. It’s cliché. Even in the comfort of my own house with my own family I felt embarrassed being the guy that plays the Beatles on the piano after watching Get Back.

Cautiously at first, I fumbled through the song Get Back, then Strawberry Fields, and then I decided to play Let It Be. For that last one, the caution slipped away and I started belting it out. It felt SO GOOD.

I finished, and my daughter, who blessedly is not yet a teenager, said, “Dad, you sounded like a professional musician.”

And I felt the world get lighter. And this short story popped into my head. It doesn’t matter that I’ll never write a song as popular as the least popular Beatles song. It only matters that I feel what they felt when I play their music.

Flip that around. We can see while they wrote their music that they didn’t feel any sort of 10X or 1000X more powerful feeling of creative mastery than you do when you work on your novel, write your song, or edit your pod. It’s documented right there in Get Back. They felt the same human joy at creation that we all do.

And when we want to be inspired to enter that world of the mind and make something, we can listen to our favorite artists or watch their movies and be inspired. And if we’re lucky enough to make something that reaches the entirety of humanity, we can be perplexed at why, and get back to doing what we love.

—Jon Christensen

Those guys were TERRIBLE. Parts of the story nearly made me gag they’re so gross. Casually racist, misogynistic, and crude, sometimes they make you laugh, and sometimes they make you angry. The story isn’t an apology, but it’s not not an apology. They’re grownup punks recollecting their lives with a mixture of pride and regret.

I’m not a NOFX fan, but I did have a few punk-adjacent years in the mid 90’s where I moshed to Fugazi, shouted the lyrics to Green Day, and drunkenly ignored the bands on stage—probably NOFX—at Warped Tour.

Should you listen? No. Not unless you’ve actually strutted in a mosh pit. This isn’t an audiobook for poseurs.

So why talk about it here to an audience of podcasters? Because while the bad behavior is the headline, the story is about NOFX making something with love. Doing it with no audience for seven years, and never giving up.

We’ve been doing Timber for less than two years, and I’ve already wanted to give up more than once. I’ve never been booed or had glass bottles thrown at me over what I said in a newsletter.

But I can still relate. The band would hop in their shitty van and drive from venue to venue around the United States and play for 40 people, and, if they were lukcy, get $100 at the end of the night. They were once paid $13 a piece to not play.

We’ve marched up and down the internet shouting about our great podcast feedback and hosting services to equally small audiences.

But NOFX kept playing. They wrote songs, they supported each other, and yes, they partied like no one you have ever ever known.

In the various groups of podcasters that I spend time with these days, there is a lot of hopelessness. Indie podcasters are getting the shaft. The industry only cares about big budget shows. Spotify is ruining everything.

They’re not wrong. Rose Eveleth this week decided to take a break from her show and in a message to her fans she said, “Making it work as an indie podcaster has only gotten harder since I started Flash Forward." Later adding, “I didn’t get into podcasting to get rich, but I know that the show could be so much better if we had either a little bit more time, or a little bit more money to play with.”

And podcasters that have been in the game since before the audio industry was a frothy sea of investment and Hollywood deals are sometimes bitter. Some of their peers like Roman Mars and Hrishikesh Hirway have vaulted into the new monied realm of podcasting while they’ve been overlooked.

Conveniently for the theme of this newsletter, NOFX and the punk scene had a similar reckoning. Green Day’s 1994 release, Dookie, set the world on fire and made kids in Kansas want to listen to PUNK MUSIC. Suddenly A&R people from Warner, EMI, Sony, and BMG, were dining punk bands in swank LA restaurants and offering fat stacks.

NOFX was courted by the big label Hollywood Music and amazingly didn’t board the money train. They already had loyal fans, and they feared that a sudden jump in profile could be followed by an unrecoverable fall. “You can’t play a stadium and then play a 500 seater the next year. It’s humiliating. But if you play a 1000 seater and then go down to a 500 seater, no one really notices, and going downhill has always been part of my plan,” says NOFX lead singer, Fat Mike.

So, indie podcaster, we’re currently in the post Green Day punk scene of podcasting. The lesson is, in today’s podcasting froth, there will be venture money wasted on bad pods and people that crash and burn. You won’t be one of them.

If you’re in it for the love of making stories, and not because you thought podcasting would be a quick way to market yourself or make some dosh, then hang in there and keep working.

Side note: What I love about this analogy to punk and NOFX in particular is that it’s not about talent! NOFX sucked. They eventually became professional musicians, but they’ll be the first to admit they weren’t super talented even when their audience started growing. They *were* authentic and their music was a true reflection of their point of view.

If you’re patient, if you bring heart to your craft, and you are your authentic self in what you create, you will build an audience. As the waves of the industry break around you, you may have to experiment with different ways to ask for support from your audience (subscriptions, kickstarters, ads, merch, books, threats), but here’s the thing:

I cannot imagine a world where people with taste, talent, and heart have no way to survive and create. Collectively we will fight such an outcome and keep creating. People will keep listening, and we will find a way to support the storytellers we love.

I’ve bet the future of Timber—my future—on this belief, and we’re in the same struggle as you. We don’t succeed if we don’t get people reading our articles, subscribing to our newsletter, being moved to try our hosting solution, and joining our community. We need 1000 true fans. You need 1000 true fans.

I hope we both can do it with less suckage and in fewer years that NOFX, but I’m beyond inspired that they stuck with it and built a life of wealth and happiness out of sheer will. Punk as fuck.

Free podcast hosting for beta users

Thanks for reading. 🖤🤘🏻

—Jon Christensen

ps. It’s getting to the end of the year. We’re deep into awards season. You need to support your fellow BIPOC, Queer and Trans podcasters who are making great audio. Here’s the link: https://www.podcastingseriously.com/fund. Just donate, and follow Juleyka Lantigua Williams on Twitter to stay up to date with the fund.

Some background:

LWC Studios launched the The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to support independent BIPOC, Queer and Trans audio producers in submitting their work to media/journalism awards.

Basically they pay the submission fees (which, before I started Timber, I didn’t even imagine that you would have to pay to win an award, but that’s another story) for these indie podcasters.

During this time of, thankfully light, illness, I’ve created an incredible automated marketing system for Timber called Firenado that already has you in its vortex, finished building a new custom computer, and written this newsletter.

So, out of sympathy, do me a solid and tell me you’ll join The Edit, or host a podcast FOR FREE on our craft podcast hosting platform.

Now, please enjoy the rest of this newsletter without interruption.

I want great podcast hosting free, Jon!

Talking Story

I’ve been surfing for 20 years. Too much has been written about how the surfing community is insular, so I won’t get into that. But within this closed community there is a tradition of storytelling that goes back forever and people with some connection to Hawaii affectionately call “talking story.”

We surfers never stop talking story. Back in October, I spent the weekend in San Clamente. My friends and I were eating on the rooftop at Pizza Port, and sitting next to us was Australian three time surfing world champion, Mick Fanning. Next to him was world tour finals contender, Morgan Cibilic, and across from them a couple industry guys. These guys have been in the water every day minus a month of covid lockdown since they were old enough to walk. They must be bored of surfing stories by now. We were close enough to overhear their conversation…

What were they talking about?

Surfing and surfboards. So were we.

With all this practice at storytelling, it stands to reason that surfing must have spawned some great storytellers.

It has.

My first contact with them was via surf competitions. I started working from home long before I started listening to podcasts. Around 2008 I discovered all surf competitions were broadcast online, and that they lasted for days at a time. Surf competitions consist almost entirely of a couple of surfers floating out in the water for hours between waves.

I used to turn on the surf comp just to listen to the commentators—sometimes washed out pros, and sometimes former champions, but never slick media professionals—talk while I worked. Good commentators could fill twelve hours with stories about waves, surf trips, airline disasters, hospital visits, drug problems, party gossip—anything and everything. They were essentially doing hours-long podcasts seasoned with occasional live-action wave commentary.

I miss those days before surf competitions were professionalized and media-trained, slick commentary became the norm because those early web commentators were my companions through years of working from home. Certainly, though, even here in no-attention-span 2021, the great surfing storytellers are still out there.

Surfers telling stories on video

Unsurprisingly, some have found their way to social video, like the creators of these two clips.

This first one features Paul Fisher who got his start as a mid level pro surfer willing to do anything in front of the camera. He turned his camera antics and surf industry connections into a friendship with Brody Jenner, and ultimately became one of the top booking EDM musicians on the planet: Fisher. Here he is telling a classic fishing tale:

Watch it for the irreverent Australian dialect, but stay for the line “Are we gonna make it?” … “We’re fucked!”

The next one is from Ivy Miller. She also didn’t quite climb to the top of surfing’s competitive heap but has managed to kick up an online following with her own brand of viral videos consisting largely of skits where she plays multiple characters.

The other day she decided to “go live” on Instagram and share her solo rotisserie chicken meal with the world. It takes her a couple of minutes to warm up, but by the time you get to the mint ice cream, you’ll wish you could invite Ivy on your next road trip. (sadly Substack doesn’t unfurl instagram videos so you have to hit that link up above). Seven minutes in, she starts talking about doing a podcast and isn’t sure whether she can shoot the shit for that long before proceeding to entertain 300 people for half an hour.

Surfers telling stories in podcasts

I haven’t really gotten into the world of surfing podcasts, yet. I know they exist, and there might even be good ones. So I asked Reddit and Twitter. The only worthwhile response I got was from a surf friend on Twitter who wrote:

So I decided to listen.

Holy shit what have I been waiting for! The linked episode is a fun story about poor drug choices taken by young a surf journalist on endless series of overseas junkets. The show’s hosts are clearly comfortable behind the mic, the storytelling is first rate, and the added music and editing means they take the show seriously.

Most of the episodes have incredible storytelling, but they don’t take time to explain surf jargon or humor, so they aren’t a good fit for a wider audience. Hang on a sec, if I’m not going to make recommendations you’ll actually like, who is this newsletter even for? Me or you? Score one for Jon.

Surfers telling stories in books

Finally how about books? You know I love a good book especially when I can listen to it. Would you ever read a book about surfing? If you’re the slightest bit curious, do it. They have the important elements of storytelling—good characters, great settings, high stakes.

1) Barbarian Days. It’s the best-told story ever of a surfing life. It transcends the genre. You might even have read it since it won a somethingerother prize—Pulitzer.

2) In Search of Captain Zero. It’s a non-fiction, Hunter S. Thompson style tail of drug smuggling and lost friendship with surfing along the way. The movie based on the book was a C- but the book is a solid A.

3) Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell. Chas Smith has always been my favorite surf journalist. He brings the perfect blend of who-invited-you and should’ve-been-here-yesterday cynicism to his writing. He makes me laugh every time. This book tells the story of the big business of North Shore surfing (billion dollar lifestyle companies) and the violence and mafia-like practices that go with it. Reading it helped me understand what our sport appropriates when it arrives upon distant shores.

That’s it! Do any of you surf? Tell me at least one of you surfs. We can be surfing, podcast buddies.

—Jon Christensen

ps. Oh you thought I wasn’t going to shout out LWC this week? You thought wrong. Get your wallet out and donate right now. Here’s the link: https://www.podcastingseriously.com/fund

I’ve already explained it four times, but I’m patient. I’m just sitting in bed anyway:

LWC Studios launched the The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to support independent BIPOC, Queer and Trans audio producers in submitting their work to media/journalism awards.

Basically they pay the submission fees (which, before I started Timber, I didn’t even imagine that you would have to pay to win an award, but that’s another story) for these indie podcasters.

How’s The Edit?

A couple months ago, I got some nice feedback from writing a vulnerable email that our feedback service wasn’t working. In the spirit of that note here’s what’s happening now.

Marketing The Edit is still not really working even though I’ve systematized it by first promoting tools for growing your audience and improving your podcast so that people can get to know us a little bit before they commit to hanging out with us on Discord.

We’ve grown to 16 participants, and they all love it. So we still have no plans of giving up.

We’ve also started to forge partnerships with companies we love like LWC and AIRMedia, and hopefully a few others soon. I think if potential members hear about us from companies they already trust, it will help.

How’s the hosting service?

All along, Timber has been building a hosting service, and I’ve been publicly saying we’re almost done since December 2020. I learned that move from Elon Musk. Internally we had set a deadline of October 6th (my birthday) to start our beta, and we missed it (but just barely).

It’s now looking like October 18th will be the new date. I’m going to go to San Diego next week to try to store up some sunlight for the fast-approaching Colorado winter, and when I come back, I’ll open the doors up.

We need 50 real podcasts on the platform that are being sent to Spotify in order to get access to their private API for collecting analytics. Without this access we will be at a severe disadvantage to other podcast hosts in terms of the analytics we show. So, the first 50 people on the platform that submit their shows to Spotify will get free podcast hosting for a year. That is a good deal for a feature gap that we should be able to close within a couple months if people join quickly.

Here’s what will be great about Timber hosting from day 1:

• Lighting fast podcast importing. We created the Ferrari of pulling in your episodes. You should try it sometime even if you don’t plan to host with Timber. All your episodes get vacuumed in at once.

• Super intuitive episode management. Episodes can be drafts, scheduled, unscheduled, rescheduled, published, updated, unpublished, deleted. That’s a lot to get right. We spent the time on it.

• Extremely nice analytics. In our blended view of episodes and analytics, you won’t have to jump from page to page to see how episodes are performing.

Here’s who should join the beta:

• Experienced podcasters that take the craft seriously

• People who will report any issues and feedback to us

• Podcasters that are ready to grow with us

Here’s who we’re not ready to serve:

• Brand new podcasters

• Shows with over 100 episodes (there’s just a bit of pagination and search work that we still need to do)

• Shows that need to publish straight from their host to Youtube

• Shows that need dynamic ad insertion (we’ll get there)

• Shows that use their host’s website creator. We don’t believe podcasts hosting platforms should be making your website.

It’s right around the corner from being real!

If you want to be one of the first 50 beta users, please sign up here.

What about the publication?

The publication is cruising along. I still love commissioning and editing pieces for it. We’re running at a rate of about 2 per month. It’s expensive for us to do much more than that because we pay fifty cents to a dollar per word. I’m planning on sending out a new pitch call just after we get the hosting beta kicked off.

Let’s talk about friends

Last year, we published a wonderful profile of Juleyka Lantigua-Williams by Joshua Dudley. And since then, she’s gone nowhere but up. Her company LWC is consistently mentioned in top podcast lists, and her quotes grace the best of podcast media.

When we recently asked her if we could partner to help get the word out about The Edit, she said, in return, she just wanted us to help publicize The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund.

Consider it done, Juleyka! We also made a small donation to the fund.

LWC Studios launched the The Podcasting, Seriously Awards Fund to support independent BIPOC, Queer and Trans audio producers in submitting their work to media/journalism awards.

Basically they pay the submission fees (which, before I started Timber, I didn’t even imagine that you would have to pay to win an award, but that’s another story) for these indie podcasters.

Here’s the site with details https://www.podcastingseriously.com/fund. If you’ve got some extra money, and especially if you’re in a position of privilege, get on it. I’m certain the donation we made will not be our last.

Thanks for taking the time to read!

—Jon Christensen

Congrats to founder Wade Roush and all the shows in the collective!

Timber recently published this story about the collective as a way to point out that making a more-or-less formal group of podcasts that help each other out doesn’t mean you need to put on your Patagonia VC vest and start the next Gimlet.

Indie podcasters can continue to own their IP, work to promote each other’s shows, and make an entity that can accept gifts, donations, and sponsorship.

I love this, and I hope, as Wade mentioned to Amanda in the story, that he’s successful at making a template, no matter how informal, for other podcasters to follow.

Wade’s approach isn’t new. Ashley Carman pointed out that he followed a track laid out by Radiotopia and PRX. But he did it at an extremely small scale which is interesting and hopeful. Here is an off the top of my head list of ways podcasters make money:

1. Ads

2. Subscriptions

3. Merch

4. Using the podcast to drive the sales of some high-touch service like consulting

5. Individual donations (Patreon, buy me a coffee)

6. Grants and philanthropy

I think number 6 used to be limited to people that had a public media pedigree— people who understood the ins and outs of public media board rooms and could speak the language of large donors like the MacArher Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

But now we live in a world where basically no independent media can survive and yet there are an increasing number of incredibly wealthy people and companies that don’t even have enough ways to spend all their money.

One way of looking at Wade’s trailblazing is that he has invited small to mid-sized donors that want to be patrons of the arts to the podcasting party in a more visible and centralized role than they would have by donating in the traditional public media world. Maybe collectively, these smaller donors can begin to understand that independent podcasts are exactly the type of art that needs them.

If this catches on, it could be very good for independent creators. I’d love for there to be peer pressure on newly minted tech billionaires to fund a podcast collective. “It’s what everyone is doing! It shows you have taste! Everyone knows that buying a professional basketball team is so 2000.” I’m for it! How about you?

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

—Jon Christensen

The Edit - Podcasters Workshop

A couple weeks ago I was at a Phish concert in Denver which I would totally keep a secret from the world except that it helps explain my thought process. My mind was wandering as it does when the band goes into an outer space jam. I was thinking about rhythm.

When the band snapped back together, the entire crowd of thousands started moving as one, connected to the band’s rhythm. Another less hippy musician, Paul Fisher, demonstrates this audience connection beautifully in a minute of buildup before a beat drop in the video below:

This skill with rhythm and audience connection set both Phish and Fisher apart in their respective genres.

Then the real question hit me: is rhythm the single most important thing that separates the good from the great in all human pursuits? What it if is?

We already have some science that informs us that rhythm is innate. This study demonstrates that people with no musical training create the same rhythmic structures as trained musicians. But what if rhythm is the thing that makes certain skiers, runners, chefs, writers, and podcasters elite? I think it is.

Rhythm is obviously the thing that sets apart great musicians. Playing music requires making muscle movements—fingers, feet, vocal chords, tongue—to a beat. Human ears can hear a half millisecond delay in sound, but a professional drummer typically only plays within 20 milliseconds of the perfect beat. That leaves a ton of room for variance, with the best of the best being noticeably better than the very very good. It’s worth listening (audio clip link) to Phish frontman Trey Anastasio describe drummer Russ Lawton.

I liked that tour a lot. The ‘99 tour. I remember getting into a couple of grooves with the trio that were like—those guys had an ability to get so locked in. The groove was locked, and then I'd be playing the guitar, and I could hear hear the dinging of the symbol—just like dead tight with the guitar, and [Russ would] just be, he wouldn't really vary what he was doing. It was much more like… oh man.

The best athletes, the best cooks

What about rhythm elsewhere? For whatever reason, growing up, my coaches never emphasized the importance of rhythm in sports, so I had to discover it. I first noticed it watching a video of myself skiing. I saw that the shape of my turns was fine, but my skiing looked awful because I was picking and choosing when to turn instead of turning on a beat. It’s so satisfying to see a professional skier with real rhythm.

Likewise, this year I discovered rhythm in running. Studies have shown that elite runners keep a cadence of about 180 steps per minute. I downloaded this playlist from Timber contributor Brent Rose, and aches and pains disappeared, time sped up, and I got faster just by keeping my steps on the beat. Elite runners hold their perfect 180 beat cadence for miles without music.

Ok so rhythm in running is important, what about swimming? Same thing. During the Olympics I used a beats-per-minute calculator to determine the stroke rate of swimmers at various distances. They swam at 80 or more strokes per minute on sprints and about 70 strokes per minute at longer distances. Their rhythm was faster and more perfect than mine. I made some adjustments to my own swimming and felt immediate gains.

I’m sure we could find examples of amazing rhythm in elite stars in more popular team sports like soccer, football, and basketball, but instead let’s turn away from sports and jump over to cooking.

Do the best cooks have good rhythm? You know it. Anthony Bourdain’s description of Le Bernardin’s fish butcher, Justo Thomas, as he removes tiny, difficult, pin bones from a piece of salmon, revels in his rhythm:

Ordinary mortals have to feel for each slim bone lurking just beneath the surface, careful not to gouge the delicate flesh. Justo moves his hand up the filet in a literal flurry of movement; with each bone that comes out, he taps the pliers on the cutting board to release it, then, never stopping, in one continuous motion, repeats repeats repeats. It sounds like a quick, double-time snare drum beat, a staccato tap tap tap tap tap tap tap, and then . . . done. A pause of a few seconds as he begins on another side of fish. I can barely see his hand move.

I have never seen anything like it in nearly three decades in the restaurant business.

The best writers

I had never read about rhythm in prose before deciding it was important, so I decided to google around. Turns out we’ve been talking about the importance of rhythm in prose since Aristotle who said, “Prose should contain rhythm, but not meter, else it will be verse.” The video below has a more modern take on rhythm in writing with useful examples. I got a kick out of watching the guy describe it.

Writing rhythm is super important, so I’ll offer up one more example worth reading if you’re trying to improve yours. This one is from the New York Book Editors site and in addition to giving useful advice on creating and varying rhythm in writing, it even offers some linguistic evidence that the different feel we get from using multisyllabic versus short words is rooted in racism and subjugation! Pretty wild stuff, check it out.

I was recently listening to two of Anthony Bourdain’s memoirs (Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw), and as a prose writer he has an infectious rhythm. You can hear the rhythm a little better if you speed the playback up to 1.4X.

I love how Bourdain’s sentences and reading performance come in volleys like a saxophonist belting out a jazz solo. Here’s a little audiogram I made from a relatively random sample played at 1.4X that shows how he modulates his rhythm between righteous anger and false repentance.

If you want to do this for your own writing, take my advice from a previous edition of the newsletter and read your own work aloud to yourself. If you don’t intuitively hear opportunities to improve the rhythm, you might need to work on your innate sense of rhythm by doing other things:

• Listen to your favorite writers but only focus on their rhythms. Get a feel for them. Speeding up playback can help you hear it.

• Listen to some rap and hip hop from the past 20 years—earlier hip hop doesn’t have enough variation in verse structure. The playlist I mentioned earlier is a great place to start.

• Move your body to a rhythm. Dance, jog, play an instrument, chop vegetables to a beat.

The best storytellers

We’ve climbed the tree all the way to writing where the argument that rhythm separates the good from the great is a little thin, but let’s keep going. What about storytelling itself? How important is rhythm in storytelling? I mean is there even rhythm in storytelling?

Absolutely there is. If you think of rhythm as a regular interval that makes it possible to predict the next beat, then rhythm in storytelling makes sense. Does the next major event of the story happen when you expect? And is it emphasized or deemphasized in the way you expect? Rhythm is something we can all feel, and we can feel if it’s right or wrong. Does the rhythm of the story feel right?

And to use movies as examples (because unfortunately we maybe don’t have enough podcasts in common to use them as examples), there are those that are very predictable and and hit every beat exactly when and how we expect. Think of some Disney classics like The Lion King or The Little Mermaid. There are also those that surprise us a little but still feel just right. I think of them as having syncopated beats or emphasizing the back beat. Movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Donnie Darko or recently, Pig. (Watch it it’s so good).

Of course I’m not the first person to see great storytelling as having rhythm. This article by marketer David Intrator discusses storytelling rhythm,and has a great little how-to section. I love the first question in the how-to: “Is there an overall groove? Is this a story that, broadly speaking, moves quickly or at a more leisurely pace?”

And here’s another piece from Psychology Today looking at the way movies are edited with evidence of different scene cut lengths at different places in the films. The faster the scene cuts, the more intense the action of the plot.

My suggestion for you as you write your podcast and create your story arc is to let the listener be able to predict the next beat most of the time. You don’t want a surprise at every turn, you want listeners to have the pleasure of feeling like they can anticipate your moves. Then if you do have a couple of surprises, they will be so much more shocking.

A good storyteller will even do this in everyday conversation. They’ll hit the notes people expect, get them nodding, get them laughing at the predictability of it all, then BAM surprise!

I wrote this whole damn article in my head as Phish was in the middle of some jam. I was even noodling over little details like this: Recently, listening to the podcast Whistleblower, there was a scene where the host wasn’t sure if a key source was going to make it to a meeting. The source FBI agent had been notoriously tight-lipped about the podcasts’ topic, an NBA referee scandal from 2007. If the FBI agent showed up, the podcaster would get a scoop. If not, the whole podcast could amount to nothing. A guy walked into the diner where they were supposed to meet. He was wearing a suit. He turned around. There was a pause in the audio. It was the FBI agent! That pause was just the right length. What should that length be? One second? Two? NO! It should be exactly the right length, and you can only know by listening and feeling the rhythm.

Phish was still playing the jam. I turned to my friend Erik. What song is this?

See you next week!

--Jon

Today our van will park right here at my house. I’m going to tell you about an adventure I had last week. This is a personal story that has very little to do with audio, but I’ll at least try to tie it back to something like “preparing for the worst.”

When you live in a mountainous area, you spend a lot of time looking at the mountains. Your eyes get drawn to certain prominent peaks, and they usually have names and you learn what they are. There’s one near my house that I’ve always been interested in it because it appeared to have a huge grassy expanse on the top. I imagined it could be beautiful and green up there on that grass with a magnificent view of the whole valley. I wanted to go to the top.

One day last winter, I saw a beacon of light coming from the top.

Researching on Google Earth, I saw the light probably came from a reflection on a window of some unnamed building up there. And I learned the name of the mountain itself which I’ll happily share with you when we meet in person. Most importantly, I learned that there’s a road to the top.

Another thing that draws my eyes in mountains are the scars of roads and trails on steep terrain. When I look up and see switchbacks zigzagging up a steep face I want to be on them. I had been eyeing just such a road near the Colorado River for years, and from Google Maps I learned that the road I had been eyeing was on the far side of the same mountain. A plan started taking shape in my mind.

Last Friday I decided to execute the plan. I would ride my bike up to the top of the mountain on the clearly established roads, and I would ride down the far side on the zig-zag steep ones that had no names or numbers but were visible from the ground and in Google Earth.

The ride up to the top was about 10 miles long gaining 2,500 feet of elevation. The ride down the back looked shorter and steeper, so I figured the making a loop out of the ride could be done before lunch. I’m going to tell you right now that I looked very closely at the part where the back side trail dropped down to the Colorado River and I noticed that the trail kind of disappeared. We’ll come back to that.

The morning of my ride I got off to a late start. The sun was already fairly high in the sky and noticeably warm on my skin when I started pedaling toward the mountain top. There’s a mine near the bottom of the road and I passed huge tractor trailers hauling the stuff used to make drywall down to the processing plant. I don’t think those drivers see too many mountain bikers because they all waved super enthusiastically.

Once I got past the heavy traffic section, I put in my AirPods and turned on my

audiobook. I’m on my second ever book about cooking. The first, two weeks ago, was Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and the second is Bill Buford’s Heat. They’re both behind-the-scenes stories about the kitchens in upscale restaurants in New York, and they both have an entertaining tension between unapologetic male peacocking and tearful sensitivity over food. I’ve loved them both despite their obvious macho flaws. (Quick aside, if you know of a cooking podcast that is on the level of these two books, please email me.)

So I’m listening to Heat, and it’s fucking hot out. Buford is saying Mario Batali’s kitchen at Babbo is so hot that it cooks him alive. I’m just sweating and pushing on my pedals. Since the last truck driver, I haven’t seen anyone. The miles are ticking by quickly.

Over my left shoulder the view starts to open up. When I arrive to the grassy area at the top of the mountain, Buford has an epiphany about pasta with shellfish (it’s the seawater in the sauce), and I’m getting hungry.

It’s not unusual for the final climb on a mountain to be the steepest, and my pace to make it to the top in an hour and a half slipped back to two hours, then more than two hours. I just kept pedaling and listening, and I got there. I learned the shining winter building is an airport radio tower. The view from it was incredible. The smoke from distant wildfires diminished visibility but amplified the feeling of aloneness. There were no sounds, and nothing moved. There was only heat.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing this ride already, but up until now, this isn’t a newsletter-worthy ride. Sure I had a certain pride in arriving at the top of a mountain I’ve looked at 1000 times, but it’s the kind of pride that other people tend not to share. “Sounds like a fun ride, was it hot?” is about the best I could expect from a story.

Now it was time to go down. The downhill is the fun part. Those switchbacks were gonna be …. tight! I took out my AirPods, and started down, realized I made a wrong turn, rode back up a few hundred yards, and then started down for real.

This road was different. It hadn’t seen truck traffic like the road to the radio tower. There were downed trees and loose rocks everywhere. I wanted to go fast, but the loose rocks got me thinking about what would happen if I crashed. If I broke my bike or myself, I would be alone over 10 miles from the nearest human with no phone service.

My brakes started to overheat and whine at me. A tiny stirring of anxiety started to take root.

I came to a fence with an opening in it. What is this fence for? Who built it? Maybe the opening is for paragliders?

Just on the other side of the opening was an incredible drop into a giant gouge in the side of the mountain. These cliffs were what drew me here. This is the view I had hoped for. The fence couldn’t be more than 30 years old, so I’m not the only one that has seen this view, but I still felt special. I was a kid with a secret.

From the fence gap, I resumed inching my way down the switchbacks across the faces of cliffs and along ridgetops. The descent was giant, and took at least an hour. Then, just before arriving to the bottom at the Colorado River, the trail ended. I had seen this on the map, but I didn’t expect it to end at the top of a long, steep drop off. The final slope was too steep to walk down with my bike.

I was able to ride my bike along the edge of the steep slope southward for a few minutes until I found a place where I could safely hike my bike down to the river.

Before reaching the river, I crossed some railroad tracks, and then had to drag my bike through a thick ravine.

I arrived at the river’s edge expecting to see some shallow rapids that I could wade across. The river was running deep, and smooth and brown. There was no way I could wade across it here. Worse, I couldn’t see a place to wade across upstream or downstream.

My Google Earth studies had prepared me for this. There were train tracks along the side of the river I was on, and upstream there was a bridge.

I pushed my bike up towards the train tracks through the brush. My Apple Watch told me that my heart rate from the effort was almost 170. That’s my threshold heart rate—I can’t sustain that effort for long, and any higher than that, my body says, “Jon we’re slowing down right now.”

I also noticed that I was getting a bit of a dehydration headache. I had less than half my water left because I had planned on needing it mostly for the climb. I brought two and a half liters which should have been enough for a three and a half hour ride in the heat.

Pushing my bike along the railroad tracks, I kept imagining a train tearing around the corner behind me.

Then I arrived at the next obstacle—a train tunnel.

When I had seen the tunnel on Google Earth, I thought it looked pretty short and I could probably dash through it real quick.

The tunnel wasn’t as short IRL as it was on my screen. I couldn’t see a light at the end of it. There was not enough room in the tunnel to safely stand aside if a train came through. No fucking way was I going in that thing.

It’s at this point of the story that my personality begins to reveal itself. The safest thing to do from here would have been to ditch my bike, walk on the river bank to the bridge, wait for a raft or car to come by and ask for help. But I was determined (a misspelling of “not about to be embarrassed”) to get myself and my bike across that river.

I honestly didn’t know if I would be able to get around this bend in the river. The whole reason for the tunnel is that the river bend was too steep to hold a train track. I started out, thought, “Hey this isn’t too bad.” Then I got to the steep section. It was full of small cliffs and rocks, and it had a few narrow ledges.

I walked along one of the ledges. The ledge got narrow. The drop off to my left got big. I would be injured if I fell.

I decided to put my bike down and scout ahead—pulse back to 170. Could I walk along the ledge without slipping, and did the ledge continue around the bend?

I was able to walk on the ledge, but it didn’t continue. I walked along it until it disappeared, and then found a place where I could zig zag straight down to the river’s edge.

Next to the river there was a small rock cave that looked exactly like the mountain lion habitat at the Denver Zoo. It also looked like there had been some animal traffic in and out of this rock cave. My mind reached the level of anxiety where I was convinced I was standing next to a sleeping mountain lion, but I had left my bike up on the ledge and needed to go back for it.

Back up I went, got my bike, and inched that thing along. Every step required picking my bike up and putting it back down while trying to find a root or rock to brace it against, and then taking a careful step with my feet. I crossed the dangerous ledge one step at a time in about 10 minutes. I zig-zagged my bike down the step section to the river, and then just before I got to the rock cave, I switched sides so that my bike would be between me and the sleeping mountain lion.

Now I was right next to the swollen, brown river, surrounded by tall brush. The brush was tall enough that I couldn’t see up or down stream.

I tried pushing my bike through the brush, and got my wheels tangled in branches and became instantly exhausted. I slumped over my handlebars and said, “Come on!” to no one.

It was around this time that I decided I would hail the next boat to come down the river and ask them to ferry me across.

I also decided to actually walk in the water instead of through the brush. I push my bike out of the brush to the rivers edge and stepped in.

I was so grateful for the cold water. My rising core temperature in the 95 degree heat had been working against me. Now I was at least cool if still exhausted and moderately dehydrated. That reminds me, have you heard the latest joke about dehydration? No? That’s because there isn’t one. Dehydration is not a joke. (My favorite dad joke.)

Walking up the river should have been easy, but it wasn’t. There was quicksand. Quicksand! It wasn’t really bad but over and over I’d step in sand and be swallowed to my shins, sometimes my knees, even my thighs, and at one ridiculous moment, to my waste. Again I yelled out, “Come on!” The quicksand wasn’t really scary, but it wasn’t not scary.

No boats came.

A train came. I would have been in the tunnel, so I guess I made one good choice.

After walking in the river for twenty minutes, I got to the other side of the tunnel. The bridge I was walking to was still not in sight. Again, I collapsed over my bike and said, “Come on!”

I had to get back up to the tracks to make faster progress to the bridge. In a last insult, I climbed three quarters of the way up a scree field leading to the tracks with my bike on my shoulder. I took my bike off my shoulder to catch my breath from exhaustion, and then I felt my foot slip, then my bike slip, then my whole body slip and I slid all the way back to the bottom.

Adrenaline and anger helped me make it up on my second attempt.

And that was it! Once I was up to that railroad track I was home free. I was even able to get on my bike and pedal along it until I reached the bridge. The whole ordeal of arriving at the river and trying to get across had taken over an hour.

Now all I had to do was ride 16 miles around the perimeter of the mountain I had just climbed.

There was traffic on the road, so if I really needed help I could flag someone down. I was super dehydrated, but stopping at a house or flagging down a car was unthinkable. Even exhausted, I was too proud to admit to being underprepared for the adventure I had just had. So I put my head down and pedaled.

The whole ride took five and a half hours. I got so hot that I got a few chills down my back. When I finished, I bought a Mountain Dew for the first time in 10 years.

Even though this post seems to be mostly about me confusing adventure with pride, I told you I’d tie it to the broader concept of preparation. I was obviously unprepared. I didn’t bring enough water and food. I didn’t have a good plan for what would happen if I was unable to cross the river. In retrospect it would have been easier to bike back up the switchback road than it was to cross the river. I should have been open to that possibility.

But maybe I wasn’t completely unprepared. During the Olympics, my wife Kelly told me that she had heard Michael Phelps talk about his preparations on a podcast about happiness.

He specifically talked about how his coaches emphasized visualizing swimming a perfect race. Phelps also secretly visualized some worst case scenarios. And in the actual event, when his goggles fell off, he was prepared to swim without them because he had put in that additional work.

In my case, I have spent so much time this year putting my body through extreme exercise, that I was also prepared for the worst. The ride I had planned wasn’t at the absolute limit of my fitness, so when it ballooned into something twice as difficult it was still doable.

Here we go with the lesson: I think the same holds true in podcasting—especially on the journalism end of the medium. Earned experience and preparation can do things like help you save an interview that’s going pear shaped.

Maybe that’s too much of a stretch, but we all have our best plans ruined all the time, and flexible thinking, experience, and stamina to go the long way around are our best defenses.

Thanks for reading! I don’t even know if I want you to share this. It’s kind of embarrassing. See you next week!

—Jon Christensen

Just kidding. Normal Jon here, and I do not write like that, but it sure would be easy. I could do it in just five…. sorry.

Smash this SUBSCRIBE button!!

Buuut, social media is important for podcasters to get sorted. In fact, I tend to agree with Jack Rhysider that you should probably build a social media following before you put too much effort into promoting your podcast.

Do not fall in the trap of thinking your social media audience will grow after you make a podcast. It's the opposite! Your podcast will grow after you build your social media audience.

So today I have a piece about one way to build your following that definitely works. It requires some effort, but it produces results.

I put it up on our main publication behind the Timber for Podcasters email-walled area because it’s valuable.

If you don’t already have access to Timber for Podcasters, all you have to do is put in your email address and verify it. Basically what’s going on is that we treat that part of our website as the premium subscription area (even though it’s free) and we manage it with our own code instead of letting Substack handle it.

Here’s the link. Please read and share! Let me know if it’s useful—if you learned something.

Read on Timber

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week.

—Jon Christensen

Welcome to the #vanlife of podcast publications, where the writing is casual and the sense of adventure is high. Usually we park the van somewhere interesting, but this week we’ll just stay on the road so we can keep listening to pods. For both listeners and creators, podcasts worm their way into the highlight reels of your life so deeply, I thought it’d be fun to spend time thinking about how.

A place marker

In a time before #vanlife was a thing. I was driving on this Western Colorado stretch of road in my black 2004 BMW 3-series.

Looking out at the canyons and listening to music, my mind started to conjure up images of another canyon in Southern California. I got an uneasy feeling like there was someone, a latino man, hurt. Why? Where were these vague visions coming from?

They were images and emotions my mind manufactured while I listened to The Tortilla Curtain a few years before on the same stretch of highway.

That was the first time I noticed these audio place marker memories. Since then I have worked to develop these connections so that I associate certain podcasts or books with stretches of road or trails. Going back to those places is the surest way to remember the story.

I-70 in Eastern Utah will always surface thoughts of Broken: Jeffrey Epstein. I got so swept up in the story that I forgot to look at the gas gauge. Now I know that after my gas gauge counts down to zero remaining miles, there are still two secret gallons and 50 miles of heart attack panic highway driving in the tank.

An unscripted record of your life

If you make a podcast on a regular cadence for awhile—maybe a year, and if you talk about things that are important to you during that podcast, especially if some part of what you say is unscripted, you are creating a trove of memories.

I’ve listened back to a few episodes of Mobycast, and there’s a not-recommended section at the beginning of many of them where we told each other what we had been up to that week. Whether our listeners appreciated the vanilla banter is doubtful, but listening back brings the days I recorded the episodes into full color. I can remember the things I was thinking about, what I had eaten, conversations I had with my wife and kids, and the feelings I was having about life, my company, and my family all as if they were much more recent.

If you’re a podcaster, and you have these records, you should treat yourself to them sometime. For some reason, they are more effective at letting me relive a moment of my life than either photos or the short videos that pepper my iPhoto.

A friend that you only know for awhile

Who were your pandemic friends? What percentage of them were podcast hosts? Mine were Alex and PJ from Reply All. I listened to every episode as those early days got weirder and scarier.

You probably have other shows that have come and gone and you’ll forever associate them with a time in your life. The hosts got their own drawer in your thoughts and your memories.

The older we get, the more this will happen. Someday I’ll look back at early 2021 as my Climbing Gold phase.

A reference point for personal growth

Finally, one more for podcasters. You know how podcasting has changed you. You can hear the difference in your voice, you can feel your confidence to be able to ad lib and bring energy to a conversation. Now there’s the part of your life before podcasting and the part of your life since podcasting. It doesn’t happen after episode one, and maybe not even by episode 10, but somewhere in your first few dozen episodes you change, and forever after you can connect every memory in your life to whether it was before or after that change.

Two more things:

1) Don’t you want your show to be better? Better shows get more listeners. One hundred percent of members have said we’ve helped them make their show better.

Help me make my show better

2) We have a new episode of Timber—Stories for Podcasters. This is the tale of Paul MM Cooper’s highly crafted history podcast Fall of Civilizations.

Here’s the Apple link. And the Spotify one is below.

Thanks for being in the van with me this week! Talk to you next week.

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—Jon Christensen

Today, a story about creative and athletic pacing.

Going all-out

On a cold morning in January of 1993, the angry tone of the alarm matched my mood. I dragged myself out of bed before the sun was up and took six gulps of orange juice straight from the carton to try and ease my sleep-deprived stomach. Hopping in my gray, ice-coated, hatchback ‘87 Toyota, I sped off into the blizzard to go to high school swim practice. In the dark, listening to “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails, pouting, I drove toward the dingiest, oldest high school pool in Colorado Springs.

When I arrived, Mark Friedberg was already in the pool finishing his warm up—already going faster than I possibly could. With a Cheshire grin, he asked if I was going to go “all-out” today. “I don’t even want to get in let alone go fast,” I said. He coached me with some condescension that practice would only get easier if I went all-out all the time. “All-out,” I thought. He must know since he’s so much faster. And I have held that single thought about exercising ever since. Over twenty years of believing that if it’s not all-out, it’s not helping.

So, as we watch the Olympics, are we watching a bunch of people that have dedicated their lives to going all-out every time they jump in the water or lace on shoes? I’ve always assumed that we are.

But this thought has been frustrating. So much of my non-Olympian life I’ve noticed that people much faster than me didn’t seem to be suffering like me. I would bury myself trying to keep up with them while they would remain chipper and talk about what a beautiful morning it is. FUuuuckkk youuuuuu!

Eventually my swim career ended in burnout. I was over the pain, the early mornings, and the endless blue of the pool. I quit after my freshman year of college swimming. Years later, in fitful attempts to stay in shape, I’d try running. It always felt terrible. I would immediately get out of breath. Even the slowest jog spiked my heart rate. My legs burned and I gasped for breath training for 10Ks and longer races. And, I never performed well. My favorite part of running season was the end of it.

More recently I’ve been doing the same thing on a mountain bike around Eagle, Colo. I use Strava, and I fell into a cycle of going for personal best times (PRs) on almost every ride. All-out every time—feeling the burn. Over the last couple of years, I started to hear murmurings from some of my athlete friends that some low heart rate training was important, so maybe one in 10 rides, when I felt like absolute dogshit at the start, I would slow down.

Then I saw a tweet from one of my favorite, always informative tweeters, Paul Kedrosky. He was going on about something that sounded fascinating. What is aerobic deficiency syndrome (ADS)?

Going all-out creatively

Before we get into ADS, let’s talk about podcasting. I’ve taken that the same all-out all the time mentality that I’ve had in fitness into my creative pursuits including podcasting. In February 2018, when Chris and I left the high tables of the Denver Central Market, overcaffeinated and excited for a new podcasting adventure, the main thing on my mind was not—as it should have been—how we were going to make a great show. I was focused on when we could get the first episode “out the door.” We were on a footrace to publication.

Charitably, we probably believed we were going to get something out there and then go through cycles of feedback and improvement.

But, guess what? After going all-out as fast as we could and slopping something out, and after making the common mistake of setting ourselves on a weekly schedule, we had no room in the process for feedback and improvement. It was all we could do to keep up with the frantic publication pace we made for ourselves. We didn’t have any real feedback from anyone because that’s not how podcasting works.

So now we were stuck with a bad show that we made hastily, on an unsustainable schedule with no planned breaks. Our creative muscles couldn’t keep up with the turnover and were starved for oxygen. We were doing the podcasting equivalent of going all-out in every workout. We had tried to take a shortcut to greatness and ended up topping out at upper-mediocre. This has got to resonate with a few people.

The importance of training your aerobic base

Remember, I was wondering what aerobic deficiency syndrome is. It’s what happens to people that only ever go all-out all the time. Apparently your muscles cells need specific training to be able to produce ATP (energy) from stored fat. If they get this training they can propel you extremely fast on nothing but the intramuscular fat in your body for hours on end and your muscles don’t produce any lactic acid (pain) so the whole experience is quite comfortable.

If they don’t get this training because you always go all-out, then your muscles only learn how to make ATP from stored glycogen (sugar) which results in the production of lactic acid (pain), requires higher heart rates, faster breathing, and feels bad—even when you’re going fairly slowly.

I learned all about ADS and how to overcome it from the book Training for the Uphill Athlete by Kílian Jornet Burgada, Scott Johnston, and Steve House. Its early pages were a revelation, and they spoke my language:

Don’t believe that there is a newly discovered shortcut to endurance fitness that only these overhyped fitness fads have discovered. If that were true, professional endurance athletes of all stripes would be beating down the doors of their local CrossFit.

To overcome ADS, you have to slow down. You have to be willing to run slowly, sometimes walk, for hours and hours until your cells learn how to make energy from fat, then slowly but surely you can start to move faster.

The bigger revelation for me is that athletes in endurance sports from running, to Nordic skiing, to swimming spend significantly more of their time (75-90% of total time) going relatively easy at low heart rates than they do going all-out. This is true for the entirety of their careers.

So we don’t need to feel bad for elite athletes out there suffering with burning legs day after day. They are spending almost all their time going at a pace that feels comfortable and pleasant—intoxicating even.

The only ones who hate long, slow aerobic capacity–building runs and skis are those who have never known what it feels like to sail up the mountain, nose to the wind, with ease. Relaxed, poised, moving fast and flying.

Training your creative base

Just as there isn’t a shortcut to endurance in fitness, there are no shortcuts to making a great show.

Great shows can only be made by people willing to put in the hard work. Feedback is the creative oxygen that your brain needs to rely on, and you need to seek it out and incorporate it into your creative products.

To keep with the analogy, you need to build your creative base before you go all-out. This means getting early feedback on your ideation, your show structure, your host plans, your season arc, and some episode outlines. Feedback at these early stages requires a willingness to go slow and be patient—not just get something out the door.

Have you noticed that when you listen to some of your favorite shows, the hosts talk about how certain episodes were months or even years in the making? They were going slow, doing all the research, letting the story reveal itself. They were working within their “aerobic capacity.”

What about those creative people that are super prolific and seem to generate more minutes of quality creative output than their peers? With our analogy, these are the people that have built up a high aerobic threshold.

High creative output people might be able to have several different projects moving along at a sustainable pace at the same time. Each of these projects is not being rushed, but these creators produce so much because they’re stewarding multiple things through the creative pipeline at once. And, like Mark Friedberg, they might Cheshire cat grin while they tell you, falsely, that they are always running at full-tilt.

This is not to say you should go start five podcasts, but you might notice that you have some downtime waiting for people as you’re working on one show, and eventually you might feel like you’ve caught your breath enough to start something new during that downtime.

I hope this analogy was as fun for you to read as it has been for me to think about for the past several weeks and months. There are very few books that I’ve read in my life that have initiated paradigm shifts that bleed into every facet of the way I operate and think about the world. This is one of them.

I lived this because I changed the way I exercise in January of this year, I saw my body transform into a fat burning exercise machine and melt away 25 pounds. I trained for a triathlon with a goal to break two hours, and I finished it in one hour and 47 minutes. While arriving to one of the transition zones in first place overall I heard someone who has known me for years say, “Christensen!? What?!”

As always, I’d like to invite you to join The Edit. We’ll provide you some creative oxygen. We had a few new people join this week. Some of the people we’re reviewing already have successful shows, and it’s an incredible honor that they’re interested to hear what we have to say.

Here’s the link to join: https://timber.fm/the-edit/

See you next week!

—Jon Christensen

(before you continue, please make sure you’re subscribed)

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This week I did a triathlon—my first one. The race took place at 9000 feet in the mountains of Beaver Creek, Colo, and I put in six months of training—sometimes 12-14 hours a week—culminating in that single day effort.

My sister texted me to ask how it went, and I told her that I got sixth place overall and first in my age group. She said, “Wow that’s awesome. I’m sure you’re addicted now.” And I had to stop a second and think, “Am I addicted?”

I wrote back, “Maybe a little addicted. It reminds me of a quote from the movie Drugstore Cowboy. “Most people don’t know how they’re gonna feel from one moment to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.”

For me, for the last six months, all I’ve had to do to know how I’m gonna feel is look at what my training plan prescribed for the next day. There’s comfort in this. There’s addiction in this.

Now’s where I connect this concept to creative work. In the aughts we all watched Grey’s Anatomy. Somewhere around three or four seasons deep, I was watching on the couch and noticed my heart was racing and I was keyed up—nearly grinding my teeth. I didn’t know how they did, it, but I said to Kelly (my wife) that that this stuff is made to be addictive. The emotional ride it sends us on is basically the equivalent of popping a pill.

I have no doubt that people in writing rooms for TV dramas talk about the emotional arc of a show. They know how people are going to feel while they watch, and they deliberately tune the emotional knobs within an episode and across a season to deliver the best high they can.

Everyone doing creative work should do the same. You don’t have to be creating Grey’s Anatomy for the emotional journey to be important. Ira Glass said that emotions and feeling are core to TAL in an interview with Slate in 2008:

If any story is going to be good, whichever one of us is working on it, we have to go through the feelings of the story ourselves. Nobody’s going to feel it if we don’t feel. It’s honestly not worth making a story if you’re not going to have strong feelings about it, if it’s not going to create empathy.

Even if you’re doing an interview show or your trying to teach concepts, the same rule applies. If listeners have to choose between two shows that teach them how to do tax preparation with the new child tax credit—a very boring topic—they’ll prefer the one that has an emotional arc to it. It might make a promise in the beginning that creates a feeling of anticipation. It works best if the promise is tied not just to the facts on offer but to some deeper human desire—like, “feeling confident that you know these new rules will grow your trust with your clients.” The show that takes us on this emotional journey will win out over the one that dryly addresses the new policies and rules.

Likewise with an interview show, first and foremost the host should get the interviewee to tell stories because well-told stories naturally evoke emotions. The host can even ask for stories in the context of emotions. Imagine interviewing Desus and Mero about their days of making the podcast Bodega Boys. We might ask them to describe a day where they were about to give up on it. What did they eat? Who did they call? What did they say? What was waiting for them if they quit? What was the thing that happened where they decided to keep going?

Even as I type those questions, I bet you want to know, right? In the example, we’re mining for some negative emotions that we want Desus and Mero to walk us through in the context of the events surrounding them. You might be able to imagine the emotions you want to hit in your show before the interview, ask for stories related to those emotions, and then edit them into the order you want them.

If we get good enough at evoking emotions, our listeners will know how they’re going to feel when they listen to our shows, and they will get addicted.

And hey, if you’re about to go into the pharmacy, would you mind grabbing me some Band-Aids? All this triathlon training was murder on my feet.

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See you next week!

—Jon Christensen

I’ve been torn about whether to write this because part of me wants to be an endlessly optimistic entrepreneur, but the other, maybe bigger part of me wants to be real with you. There’s something happening that’s is surprising and frustrating me, and I’m going to let you in on it.

We can’t get anyone to join The Edit. I’ve been selling various things to various people for most of my career and I have never had as much trouble selling anything as I am with this podcast feedback service. I swear I could sell body odor scented deodorant more easily than The Edit. WTAF?

Since we launched The Edit at the beginning of June, it has been featured everywhere from Facebook Groups to well-read newsletters. We’ve paid for advertising in podcasts, on Hot Pod, and in the trashfire of society that is Facebook and Google advertising.

All of that netted us a handful of brave souls (literally 7) that have been loving the help they’re getting. They are getting focused attention from some of the top tastemakers and producers in the business for lunch money.

There’s a guy out there that if you’ve spent time in podcasting Facebook groups, you’ve come across. His name is Dave Jackson, and he talked about The Edit in his podcast Ask the Podcast Coach. He said, “I’ll be interested to see if this goes, because I’m not 100% sold on the fact that people want feedback on their podcast.”

Dave, we weren’t even trying to make it go big! We just wanted a few dozen people to be the seed of something special. Wow, was I wrong. Dave was right. We can’t find anybody who wants feedback on their show.

People that work for big studios or NPR-type podcasts have feedback built into the creative process. They have these meetings called “edits” where everyone listens to a draft and gives notes. Supposedly it can be brutal. But it is very effective at making shows better. When producers learn what parts of a show are confusing or boring, they can make adjustments. Because of those adjustments, they make a better product. Those better products get more listeners and make more money.

But I get it. I did Mobycast with Chris for two years without getting any feedback. We just believed that we were smart and it was obviously coming through in the audio. This was incorrect. Listening back, we needed editing.

Later, I was working on a personal project, trying my hand at making a little documentary, and at that point I had made friends with some very good podcast producers. I asked one of them, Caroline Crampton, if I could pay her to listen to two episodes and give me notes. The fee she charged to listen and give notes on an hour of audio was way more than $20. And the result of the process was honestly about the same as what we’re doing in The Edit. She heard things I didn’t. She saw potential for improvement in places I didn’t. And perhaps most importantly, she inspired confidence in my work. She let me know that I was on the right track, and I loved hearing that.

I want to reproduce that feeling for other podcasters. It’s such a joy to see the small gaps between what you produce by yourself with your headphones on and what your show could be if you made a few adjustments.

Why won’t people join? Overconfident? Too nervous? Don’t like doing work? When I talk about our difficulties getting signups with Chris, he says, “You’re literally giving away free money!” He’s right. We are. We’re giving away free money.

I guess working on your show and collaborating with smart people isn’t the message that resonates. Maybe the only kind of marketing that works is:

Who’s ready to get famous? Join The Edit and you’re guaranteed Rogan money! *not guaranteed.

Eric Johnson ranted a little about this kind of marketing recently too, and I hate it. He hates it. Do you hate it!? F$ck hustle economy marketing and everyone that does it.

Feedback and vulnerability

Ironically, I wrote this and realized I should get feedback before publishing, but I sort of didn’t want to. It feels vulnerable. It would be easier to just close my eyes and hit send. But I asked a few people read it, and Chris asked what I hoped to get from it. Good question. I’m not sure. Maybe just to connect with people that have tried to grow things from nothing and had similar difficulties.

The other reason I might have written it is to lead by example. I’m putting something difficult out there, and it makes me feel vulnerable. You can do the same thing but on a much smaller scale by getting feedback on your pod.

Join The Edit or don’t. I’m not giving up on it, but I’m not holding my breath that we’re going have to make a waiting list.

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See you back in the van next week. I promise not to write another long read about The Edit. Thanks for being here with me for this.

—Jon Christensen

While we discuss the state of our software, how to get more of you to sign up for The Edit, and Podcasting writ large, I have a small request for you to help me find something.

Recently I wrote that most of us have a strong desire to hear familiar stories with new twists. There’s one type of story that is rarely told, and the few times I’ve encountered it, I’ve, perhaps strangely, really liked it. The type of story I’m talking about is the story of the actual apocalypse. We have tons of save-the-world stories and tons of post-apocalyptic visions but rarely do we get to witness the making of the apocalypse sausage.

I realize it’s a tad morose to like this kind of story. Telling it requires writing about the deaths of billions. There’s an episode of The Scaredy Cat Horror Show (from Reply All’s Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt) where they talk about the rules of the horror genre with their guest Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. She says that the rules of genre have to fit within a moral framework, and they must be observed as sort of a societal compact. And because we can all trust that the rules will be respected, we can enjoy a horror film knowing that we’ll come out ok on the other side.

In fact, this one paragraph from her is the best thing in an otherwise mediocre six episode pandemic project from of Alex and PJ banter, and it will always stick with me:

That- that the whole point of a story is like someone building an emotional experience for you, and if they're very good writers, and it's a very good story, everything you're feeling you're feeling safely, you just have to remind yourself of that, that none of this is real. And that you're, and that in some ways, it's about building up a tol-, not tolerance, but a strength around that feeling. So I think part of why people get addicted to horror films, or like people who get addicted to like skydiving, you know, it's like a thrill. It's like, you kind of have to like rush through those feelings again, and again, you feel in some ways, like you're taking ownership of them in some way. It ceases to be so potentially overwhelming or paralyzing, because you realize that feelings are just like a passing thing. You know, they're a sensation. 

This moral code in the genre must be true in the same way with movies about the apocalypse. No one wants to listen to a podcast or watch a movie that is like, “and that was the end of all life on earth forever. fin.” There has to be a seed of hope and life in the end. It’s a law.

That’s enough of my rationalizations of liking such a weird, dark genre. Now it’s time to tell you the entire list of movies and books that I’m aware of that go into detail on how the world ends. Please, please, please tell me if you know of more! Ultra bonus points if you know of a podcast that does this.

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The world ends in these three books and this one movie

The Stand by Stephen King

I just re-listened to The Stand and included it in the newsletter about listening to your writing in order to improve it. It tells the tale of a deadly pandemic and goes into amazing detail about how everyday people react, how the government reacts, and the stages of the collapse of society.

Since we’ve had our own little pandemic, I think one thing The Stand gets right is that the vast majority of people will comply with rapidly placed government restrictions on their freedom. This seemed to be especially true when our fear of the disease and the unknown was greatest. King recently told Terry Gross, “I keep having people say, ‘Gee, it's like we're living in a Stephen King story, and my only response to that is, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

I can’t tell you how the world ends in Seveneves without it being a major spoiler. It’s surprising and terrifying. The first half of this book is one of the most gripping pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. Stephenson’s ability to imagine how people would react at all levels of society to an imminent existential threat will keep you up late. It includes scenes with thoughtful details of everyday people’s lives as they’re confronted with a terrifying reality, and stressful scenes of meetings where leaders try to make decisions about what to do. All of it feels 100% real.

Greenland

There’s no better way to ingest fiction about the apocalypse than on a turbulent flight. Save this one for your next flight involving small aircraft or uncertain weather conditions. Greenland is overwrought and silly but it’s SO FUN! It makes shameless use of one of the most standard suspense tactics ever—will they make it on time??! While I watched it on my flight, the thin air of the cabin and the flashing seatbelt sign allowed me to put predictability aside and experience the end of all humanity.

The Lorax by Dr Seuss

I almost didn’t think of this one until I wrote the rule about there needing to be a ‘seed of life’ at the end. The Lorax goes into quite a bit of detail about how each of the animals in its fictional world’s ecosystem are sent off, but we’re left with hope because the Onceler leaves the message, “Unless.”

What else is there?

I’m so serious about this question. Please help! I want more stories of the end of the world and how it happens. I feel like I must be missing obvious ones.

Thanks for reading! Join us in The Edit!

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I’ll see you next week.

—Jon Christensen

Send a Friend to The Edit

Welcome! We’re here in the #vanlife of podcasting publications—always exploring somewhere new, and always exactly where we want to be with good podcasts along the way.

Today we will talk about the thing that every company is touting yet failing at: community. To start, herding people into an area is not building community. A Facebook group or subreddit with thousands of members that mostly don’t know each other and spend time trying to work around self-promotion rules is not a community.

We’ll use In The Heights as our guide. I’m sure you saw it within the last couple weeks? It is a moving, singing, joyous ode to community. It highlights the three key ingredients that make Washington Heights a wonderful community. We’ll go through each one.

There will be spoilers, so come back if you haven’t seen it.

Commitment and authenticity

We learn through Usnavi that community takes commitment. You stick by it and work for it. You don’t leave it for tropical beaches, or if you do leave it, like Nina, you find a way to give back to it.

But as we make new communities, we can’t immediately expect commitment. Instead, we can plant the seeds of commitment by fostering authenticity. If you’re in some online group making a real connection with @SourDoughBaker1995 what happens when they just disappear forever? Who were they really?

We’re more likely to stick by people we really know. When we learned that Sonny is a Dreamer in In the Heights, his character went from flat to round. We became committed to his future—to the community’s future.

Place

If you’re making the Washington Heights of online communities, it needs public gathering spots—the pool, the salons, the stoops. Small talk, random connections, and Place (with a capital P) are such important parts of communities. One of the reasons Twitter is a hollow community is because it lacks Place. Everyone follows different people around a non-neighborhood.

Slacks and Discord servers have created neighborhoods with places (channels) online. I love them. As someone with kids in a small town, I might feel locked down by my parenting schedule or lacking a large group of people that share my particular interests, but Rands Slack (for software leaders), Bello Collective (for thoughtful podcast people), and a few others always have someone up for a chat. Since I didn’t grow up in Washington Heights, my analogy for the Slacks and Discords I’ve joined is a college campus where you can wander from the campus center for general gossip to a science building to geek out.

Shared work

But even these wonderful online communities aren’t quite the real-deal without one more ingredient. The most overlooked ingredient in most companies’ rush to make communities: To really build a community, you need to work together. You need to have a stake with other people in creating something new. In the Heights hits this note with the bodega-slash-boutique that Usnavi builds with everyone he knows.

Now’s the part at the end of the newsletter where I tell you that this is what I’m trying to do at Timber. The Edit is the seed. The members there have literally worked on their podcasts with us. We’ve listened, we’ve taken notes, we’ve written helpful guidance.

Come join us. We’re hanging out online, and we’re around when you are. We like to talk about podcasts, and movies, and traveling, and kids, and food, and more.

We want to make your podcast with you.

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—Jon Christensen

PS. One thing I left out

Building strong communities isn’t all dancing under open fire hydrants and hanging out on stoops. We must also experience shared loss. In In the Heights, Usnavi and his friends and family mourn the loss of Abuela Claudia. Her death is the spark that draws the community together. Here in real-world Eagle, Colo., Adam Palmer’s death has done the same. I am not recommending that people building communities manufacture shared loss, but I wanted to mention it, and maybe the reality is that if the community is lasting, has a place, and creates things together, shared loss is eventually inevitable.

We’re here in Studio City, home of many film and TV (and maybe even podcast) productions, because I’ve been thinking about originality and the trap that creators fall into when they try too hard to be original. By the end of this post, you will probably have 10 new ideas for podcasts that aren’t original but are better than your most original ideas.

A couple weeks ago, I started watching Mythic Quest on Apple TV+. Feeling clever, I wrote this on Timber’s Discord server:

I'm watching Mythic Quest on Apple TV+ and it feels like someone walked into an executive's office at Apple and was like "Ok, here's the pitch. It's Silicon Valley, but about a game company," and the executive was like, "I love it. Let's fast track this." And then it really was fast tracked in every way, from writing, to filming, to editing. And what came out of that process is exactly what you imagine would come out.

And yet. I don't hate it?

The reason I didn’t hate it is that I love Silicon Valley. It was so relevant for me in my life as a startup person. It felt original, but I also want 100 more Silicon Valleys. Do that story again and again, creators! I’ll eat it up every time!

I would also binge 100 Breaking Bads, 100 Mad Men… Wait a minute, Mad Men feels like Silicon Valley but 60 years ago and in New York. For that matter, Ozark is literally Breaking Bad, but with Jason Bateman. I still love it!

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I use examples from movies and TV because they’re widely relatable, but the same is true of podcasts. There’s too much bad advice out there to be unique. This piece of content marketing from Castos that ranks high on Google for the search terms “good podcast ideas” says, “The top podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Google Play are popular because they’re unique.” Are they, though? Currently two of the top ten are The Daily and Up First, aren’t those both news-o-the-day shows with the same content? Another two are Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and SmartLess with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett. Aren’t those both upbeat, kinda-funny, celebrity-driven interview shows?

Basically this tells me that people want what they know. They are less likely to take a risk on something truly unique like a fictional series where the dust mites in our eyelashes are controlling humankind and leading us blindly into germ warfare than they are something familiar like a story of a loving, well-intentioned father who is forced to start doing crime to save his family in an impossible situation.

So when you come up with your next podcast idea, why not start from something that’s already a hit? You can take a show like 99% Invisible, You’re Wrong About, Floodlines, or Darknet Diaries, and use the ingredients that make people love it in a new way. You’ll be more likely to attract an audience than if you try to come up with the most unique idea ever.

Even this post is just my own perspective on something that’s been said forever. Here is not just one, but two more examples from writing blogs. They’re worth reading because they go into some of the ideas about how many plots there really are under the sun. We’re here for podcasts, though, so listen to this. Guy Raz covers the topic thoroughly and entertainingly on this episode of TED Radio Hour from 2014. I heard this one on the radio a few years ago and enjoyed listening to it again to write this post.

In the episode, Raz interviews several people with interesting things to say about originality from music producers to fashion designers. My favorite is a guy named Kirby Ferguson who’s central thesis is that everything is a remix and he gives examples from George Lucas’s Star Wars to Steve Jobs’ iPhone. I looked up Ferguson, and he’s still on the same trip. You should totally take two minutes to watch this short video he made with the “everything is a remix” theme, because I think it helps demonstrate my point.

Looking at all those Tik Tok clips and thinking about how Tik Tok is the fastest growing social media app ever, it makes it clear that what people want is theme and variation. Remixing. More of the same but slightly different. People want this so much more than they want true originality. Tik Tok realized this and made it the core feature of their social media platform.

I’ll leave you with a final idea. What is the most beloved thing to human beings? If you guessed children, you’d be right. And guess what children are? Remixes of parents. Someone out there should do a whole big doctoral thesis on how people’s love of theme and variation in all the arts is rooted in biology, genetics, and childrearing. Right?

Thanks for reading. Good luck with those podcast ideas! We are still hoping for some more people to come join us in The Edit. If you don’t already know about it, it’s podcast help and feedback from professionals for $20. Find out more and join us by hitting the button below.

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Enjoy your weekend! See you next time!

—Jon Christensen

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The ideal blend of art and technology

Today’s the day to get ahead of the weekend traffic and take our van somewhere new. Thank you for joining me in this #vanlife of a podcast publication where we’re always relaxed, comfortable, listening to good road trip music, and exactly where we want to be. Our destination today is the intersection of liberal arts and technology.

I’m going to make the case that what Jobs was trying to do across all of Apple’s products in the mid 2000s is exactly what podcasting should be trying to do today.

As Apple fumbles about and fails to make software that inspires awe or even tell-your-friends excitement, I miss those Steve Jobs days. His belief in combining the humanities with technology, and his description of computers as a “bicycle of the mind,” were foundational to my whole career. As Apple loses sight of this goal we all lose a vision for a better future, and if we more broadly as humans also lose sight of it, we are lost completely.

But many of us outside of Big Tech haven’t lost Job’s vision. Those of us who remember and believed in it can continue to espouse it, manifest it, and teach it. We can make software that makes us better.

Podcasting should occupy prime real estate at the corner of liberal arts and technology. Whether you’re an RSS purist or are more of “a show is a show” type person, you probably agree that podcasting requires internet distribution, and that means it requires technology. But it is also storytelling and gets written about unironically in the New Yorker which is the litmus test of being part of the Arts.

Instead, podcasting is in a raging sea storm. Investors, entrepreneurs, creators, and influential listeners are trying to push it in directions involving more art, more tech, more platforming, more subscriptions, more independence, better tooling, more diversity, better inclusion, better discovery, easier sharing, more equity, closer ties to Hollywood, more stickiness, more advertising money, better audience insights, better privacy, and more control.

Because of all these largely at-odds pressures, it can be difficult to decide what’s good. Is Descript good? Is Spotify inherently bad? Has Apple become bad?

One way of measuring this is to think about the intersection of technology and liberal arts and whether the companies that are forming and building new products share the core value of making us better. (Remember: “bicycle for the mind”).

Companies that enter from the tech side—often with large VC war chests—are frequently not even considering the humanities side. I saw a recent launch of a social podcast player by founders that demonstrated no awareness of the existing industry. They just floated their new podcast player into the scene claiming to be the social solution for podcasting despite a raft of similar companies that have come before them. They didn’t think to acknowledge the people that have spent 15 plus years working hard to make podcasting important.

A couple of other pure tech companies have been making waves with alumni from Google, Spotify, and Uber. And so far, they are using their former employers’ playbooks. They’ve spun up business models that “monetize” other people’s creative work or labor. Building software with the explicit intent to collect rents on other people’s efforts in exchange for the software being free is not making us better.

As these tech companies try to to “do a Facebook” or Google with podcasting, they are notably scooping up more customers than their counterparts from the liberal arts end of the market. I have all the love in the world for my fellow NPR nerds, but you need some tech background to make a tech company.

Two companies that were too deep in the liberal arts world were written about fairly critically by Nick Quah this year.

Radio Public was recently acquired by Acast, and Quah wrote, “Terms of the deal were not disclosed... though, frankly, it’s probably safe to assume that it’s somewhat modest.” Also, “it never felt like the app was able to gain much traction in its bid to provide an alternative point of podcast listening designed to be in sync with the potentialities of the open podcast ecosystem.”

Likewise, Pocket Casts never really raged. From the same Hot Pod Insider, as of January 2021, the consortium of public media organizations that owns it is trying to sell it off.

New companies and new products are, by definition, meant to change podcasting. They’re a wave in the raging sea. When I hear about a new company, I think about how it will help or hurt listeners, creators, indies, and people of diverse backgrounds, but I also think about technology and ask myself questions about whether it’s extensible, programable, secure, scalable, and beautiful. Also, importantly, how will it be different in the beginning than when a billion people are using it?

Companies and new products that score high in both the liberal arts and technology worlds are very rare birds in podcasting right now, so I’ll close with a question. What software do you think best blends technology and liberal arts in the podcasting space today?

The Edit

We got permission from Celine Teo-Blockey, who has been through the The Edit process to share her reaction to the feedback she received.

Wanted to quickly say [you’ve given me] so much to think about @Skye Pillsbury but all really good stuff. I need to listen to that portion that both you and @Jenna Spinelle pointed out. I listen to all my various cuts very closely to make sure I answer those sorts of questions usually. But I think it’s great that these blind spots come to my attention. Will be back! But just wanted to say thank you both for taking the time. Love this editing room.

Here’s a link to the episode she had reviewed:

If you value creative feedback given with good intentions and are trying to make your show stand out, please consider joining us.

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Thanks for reading, and happy mic talking and filler chopping!

—Jon Christensen

If you found your way here from a tweet, you’re in for a treat. In fact, you should subscribe.

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I’ve been wanting to tell a personal story, and I was looking for a way in. I have a story about a hard time in my life, but I don’t want to be ungrateful for my obvious privilege. I also want it to be relevant to podcast listeners and creators, so my lens has to be wide enough to encompass you.

This week I listened to an episode of Climbing Gold, and the the way to tell my story materialized for me. The episode helped me see my own story in contrast to someone it featured, and I wanted to write about that contrast. I’m going to write about the entrepreneurial leverage of privilege, and how three different people, Malik Martin, Anna Sorokin, and I have used it.

Unpacking this term I just made up, it’s is probably just a long way of saying “working that hustle.” It’s about using the privilege people grant you from the external clues they perceive to gain access or favor with them. It’s about getting just the right access or favor to be really meaningful (that’s the leverage part), and it’s about making something out of that access or favor to move yourself higher on the capitalist pyramid (that’s the entrepreneurial part).

What if you’re Black and born in a poor neighborhood in Memphis?

Your privilege is like a credit score that people can figure out with a first impression. If you’re Black like Malik Martin and grew up in Memphis, then your privilege score, historically, is at absolute rock bottom. Martin grew up in the mostly Black neighborhood where, in an unlikely twist of luck in 2018, former Hollywood producer Tom Shadyac (known for comedy blockbusters like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) decided to open a climbing gym as a community hub.

Martin describes his first impression of the gym as “Narnia” in a place where things like that, “They're not accessible for like the vast majority of the people who lived there.” What he was used to was, “poverty and hopelessness.” He says:

I'll try to paint this picture. I want you to understand if you wake up, your parents are absent (both of them) wherever it may be—like legal problems, or drug issues, or they're working all the time. And they're not very productive in their child's day-to-day life. You have no resources or food, and you’re overcoming that day-to-day. Like figuring out how you're going to maneuver—what you're gonna do. Sometimes a good day is just, ‘I want to eat today.’

From that place, Martin had no privilege to trade. He says, “Nothing's ever going to change, but you're still hungry.” But despite his lack of privilege, he learned how to make money. As a kid, he discovered he could trade labor for cash and started a business called Two Guys and a Rake.

When the new climbing gym was set to open, he was working as a freelance photojournalist. He went there to take some photos, and they offered to let him climb for free for a couple weeks before the opening. Director of Operations at Memphis Rox, John Hawk, noticed Martin returning to the gym several times during that pre-opening because, as Martin says, “being a freelancer means that you have a lot of time on your hands.” Hawk offered Martin a job at the gym.

With that small favor, Hawk extended his own privilege to Martin, and Martin leveraged the hell out of it. He is now an outspoken and loved influencer advocating for the gym and for representation for people of color in the climbing world. He was featured in the annual Reel Rock film series with the short film Black Ice that has been grabbing headlines.

Please listen to the episode. I laugh-sobbed the whole way way through. Martin is the most engaging and fun personality I’ve heard on a podcast in all of 2021. He’s a treasure. I’m so happy that Climbing Gold used its place of privilege to give him a spotlight.

What if you’re me, and 23, and broke as hell?

I’ve told this story a hundred times. I love telling it because it felt like a triumph during the lowest period of my life, and as I tell it, I feel that positive, successful, energy again. But recently I’ve reexamined it for what it really is, not a triumph over adversity, but a moment in time when I, a young, healthy, white guy learned how far I was able to stretch my privilege.

Shortly after 9/11 I was laid off from my software developer job in Downtown Denver. I was two years out of college and had every opportunity to save money but none of the maturity, so I skidded into unemployment with only my last paycheck’s wages in the bank.

It’s hard to imagine a time when someone with a computer science degree couldn’t get a high paying job within 24 hours, but the summer of 2002 was not good for young tech people. No one was hiring, and if they were, there were plenty of people with five or more years of experience ready to scoop up available jobs. My other entry-level friends left the software game altogether. Marco got a job at Home Depot, Jonathan became a teacher, but I was determined to stay in software and stretched my unemployment checks as far as they would go.

Those checks didn’t stretch far enough to continue the lease payments on my car, which eventually got so many parking tickets that it was booted then later impounded. They didn’t go far enough to pay off credit card debt or student loans, so they went into collections. And they didn’t even quite cover paying rent on time, but the property manager let me pay rent about 30 days late for several months. That wiggle room on rent was surely because my property manager thought I looked like the “type of person” that would eventually get it together.

Too broke to spend time in indoors, which always requires buying something, I just started walking around my Capital Hill neighborhood. I struck up conversations with whoever would talk to me. A few of us started meeting outside every morning and sitting on the steps to the three story apartment buildings we lived in. There was the former Marine, the lost soul sailing instructor who for some reason lived in Denver, a couple of homeless guys in their early 20s, and all the people that walked by and in and out of the buildings.

Usually by noon we had scrounged up enough loose change to afford a 12 pack and we made a run to the liquor store. We’d offer beers to passers by, and they would sit on the stoop and hang out with us. Before you knew it, they’d be back with more beer. After two months of doing this, we sometimes had a crowd of 20 people sitting on the stoop. We even started getting hassled by the police. We owned the stoop!

“What are you doing tomorrow, Paul?”

“You’re looking at it, Jon. Stoopin’ it.”

Sailor Paul was the energy behind all of it. He equal parts generosity and trouble—always drunk, always sunburned, and always listening to Jimmy Buffet. He left his apartment open for people to use the bathroom until it got hopelessly clogged and just stayed that way until he was evicted at the end of the summer.

One day I got an email. It contained an invitation for an interview with a software company in Houston. This would be my first interview in months, but it felt like an impossibility. How was I going to get to Houston?

I asked the company to buy my plane tickets because my credit cards were maxed out. That was the first risk. Some hiring managers would have hit me with a “no thanks” just for that, but they bought the round trip one-day ticket from Denver to Houston. Now all I had to do was get to the airport on the day.

I also needed to look employable which meant that I needed a haircut. Those relationships I’d forged on the stoop were worth something. I asked sailor Paul to lend me $20 for the haircut and he unquestioningly and magically produced a twenty dollar bill. He also gave me a nearly new pair of Sperry Topsiders he claimed his parents had sent him.

With my hair looking high and tight, and my boat shoes deployed, and one of my dress shirts from back when I was employed, all I needed for the day of the interview was to get to the airport.

A perk of working for my previous employer was the all-access bus passes they gave to every employee. Mine had expired, and I hadn’t gotten an updated one before I was laid off. This year’s passes had a red shiny sticker on them instead of a gold one.

Finally after a summer of boozing on the stoop I had an engineering challenge. I tore through my broke bachelor’s apartment looking for the solution, and I found it in the form of a red dry erase marker. I tried coloring the sticker. Passable!

The morning of my interview was hot, and the sweat pouring from my hands as I waited at the number 15 bus stop threatened the dry erase job on my buss pass. I was terrified of getting caught stealing a bus ride. I rehearsed in my mind, “Just flash the pass confidently and duck into the bus.”

When I stepped onto the bus, the driver never even thought that someone with a fresh haircut, white skin, and boat shoes was using a counterfeit bus pass. The drama of the event was 100 percent in my own head.

And throughout the day I continued to use my first impression privilege to grab small favors. I landed in Houston and hopped in a cab. When the cab arrived at my prospective employers office, I told him to wait there while I got money for him. I walked up to the office admin and told her that there was a cab waiting that needed paying. In my head I was panicked, but looking back on it, I probably seemed like a privileged, mildly annoying kid to both the cabby and the office admin.

Lunch that day went the same way. The CEO took me to lunch and I made no move to pay. But by that time I was warmed up. I had made it to Huston with nothing but my driver’s license and a counterfeit bus pass. Nothing could stop me.

I ended up getting the job, and I needed it so badly I would have moved to Houston for it. Fortunately, I got another offer in Denver during the time I was negotiating with the Houston company for relocation expenses. The dot-bomb didn’t last long.

The mindset I had during that time to use whatever I could find from the borrowed $20 to a red dry erase marker has stuck with me for the rest of my life. Over the years, when I’ve asked for shout-outs, introductions, and access for my business, I was taking the same advantage of my privilege that I was when I was flashing my fake bus pass.

What if you know that the non-skin and non-gender parts of privilege can be faked?

Just like first impressions and skin color can unfortunately determine privilege for everyday interactions, it looks like whatever mental formula people use for calculating privilege at society’s highest levels is equally bullshit. Your privilege becomes a cocktail of where you say you’re from, what your parents did, and how you talk. I love thinking about how it can all be faked.

My favorite story of faked privilege is the one of Anna Sorokin. She was a middle class Russian immigrant who spun a story that made her the “it girl” of New York society in the mid 2010s. She made a counterfeit life on Park Avenue for years before it collapsed around her. Take a dip into how this famous piece from The Cut describes her:

Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing”—Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa—“and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.”

Even knowing those clothing brands is part of projecting privilege.

“She forged financial statements and lied about her family and her name,” this New York Times article says. She nearly made the transition from fraudster to legitimate entrepreneur by almost landing a huge investment for a night club. If she had gotten that investment and started that night club, she might never have been caught for overextending her “line of privilege.”

What should we do?

After having looked at three different starting points, my hope is that what comes out is that all three of us used what we had in the same way. We leveraged our privilege (even the tiniest scrap of it in Malik’s case) to enlarge our window of opportunity.

But living in a world where the advantages of privilege are unavailable to some people and easily stolen by others, how should we play?

For me personally, the answer is to leave faking it to fraudsters, to create great stuff that people actually love, and talk about it with as much pride as I can muster. This might keep me permanently out of the billionaires club, but f!#$ those a-holes anyway. I’m most interested in a world where people are richly rewarded for creating actual value through hard work, creativity, ingenuity, and persistence. And if we have to bank on whatever privilege we happened to be born with to get started, then we sure as fuck had better offer that same privilege to others that don’t have it when we’ve succeeded.

Actual great stuff is happening right now

In cast you haven’t heard of The Edit, it’s Timber’s new service for podcasters where we offer genuine feedback on your show from actual professional reviewers.

The value that the people that have joined are getting right now is unreal. The people that got in there early are getting close listens by some of the most thoughtful listeners in the industry. Everything that happens in there is off the record, but so far we have only happy customers. You should join! Let us talk with you about your show.

Here are the details and a signup form.

Learn About The Edit

And there’s also a new Timber—Stories for Podcasters today

Here’s the link to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

True crime chat casts are the most popular flavor of the true crime genre. Among them, True Crime Obsessed is a hit. Sean Williams wrote a profile of the show that highlights how the two hosts played to their strengths to find their audience.

Listen to learn about a well made pillar of the true crime genre, or to get inspiration if you've ever felt like you're swimming against the current with your show.

And here’s a Spotify player:

Thanks for being with me on the bus today! Next week we’re back in the van.

Please share this story. It took a long time to write, and I’d love if lots of people read it!

Share

—Jon Christensen

Introducing “The Edit”

Getting meaningful, candid feedback on your podcast episodes is difficult, especially for indie podcasters working without professional teams behind them. In this new community from Timber, members and professionals will join to give each other feedback and support. We’re running this in a new subscriber-only area, called #the-edit, in the Timber Discord server. It’s here to help you improve your show with feedback that goes beyond “sounds great!”

How it works

After subscribing you’ll get access to a special area of the Timber Discord server. Once per month, you can drop up to one hour of unpublished or previously published audio into the channel. Then members and professionals leading each edit will dive in to comment and help.

We value participation that is encouraging, helpful, respectful, and 100 percent of the time coming from a place of loving podcasts and supporting creators.

Join for $20

Multidimensional feedback

We will listen with the following nine areas in mind and give you feedback on the ones most relevant to your work:

• Recording notes (any sound quality issues)

• Soundscape (notes on music, sound design, and aural feel)

• Personality (notes on host chemistry, humor, likability)

• Stickiness (what’s keeping listeners engaged and where listeners might lose you)

• Landmines (are there any no-nos like making blanket statements about a groups of people)

• Journalism notes (any journalistic concerns where fact checking or additional research might be suggested?)

• Story notes (how’s the storytelling? Is it immersive, shareable, can you follow it?)

• Format notes (intro/outro/sections sound good and make sense and fit?)

• Writing notes (if parts of the show are scripted, does the script need writing improvements?)

Monthly subscription

Join now, monthly, by clicking the Stripe payment button below. After signing up, you’ll be given instructions to access our member’s only channel.

Important: Once you pay, you’ll get an email from LaunchPass with instructions. If you get stuck in that process, just shoot us an email at support@timber.fm and we’ll help you in.

Join for $20

Meet the Timber Reviewers

Timber has gathered a group of professionals willing to offer their own time to help give your show a nudge in the right direction.

Shruti Ravindran—Writer and podcast producer. She’s written some of Timber’s most loved stories, and was a producer on Science Vs. at Gimlet.

Skye Pillsbury—Hot Pod contributor, former Inside Podcasting writer and podcast host.

Eric Johnson—Founder of podcast production house Bumblecast, host of Follow Friday, and award winning producer of Recode Decode.

Jenna Spinelle—Journalist, podcaster, and Penn State educator. Producer of Democracy Works, and writer of some of Timber’s most helpful podcasting guides.

PS.

If you haven’t heard of the concept of “the edit” before, listen to Jessica Abel describe it in this episode of Out on the Wire. Simply put, it’s a group meeting where everyone listens for ways to improve the first draft of a show and gives the show’s producer notes.

PPS.

We have a new episode of Timber—Stories for Podcasters today.

This is the origin story of the hit D&D actual-play podcast The Adventure Zone. It was written in summer 2020 by Shruti Ravindran, and much has happened with the McElroys and their juggernaut pod since then. But, if you haven't ever listened, this is a great intro, and if you already love it, you'll love reading Travis's thoughts on how the show went from a funny idea to a hit.

Here’s the apple podcasts link. And here’s a Spotify player:

Thanks for being here with me on this big announcement day! And thank you so much for your help, Shruti, Eric, Skye, and Jenna!

—Jon Christensen