The Voice In My HED

After 10,000 - 12,000 interviews over the course of a career, I'll share with you one of the most important things I learned about how to immediately improve the quality of your interviews.

Everybody is "niching down", and it's a sound strategy for everything from your podcast to your audio repair shop.

Nope, we're not going to teach you how to do that twirly thing with the mic on the end of the cord. And we're not going to make you a fretboard wizard. But Van Halen did leave a teachable moment in their decades of success that many of us failed to pick up on.

There's a valuable lesson to be learned in some Hollywood drama. Let's spend a few minutes chewing the fat on this one.

I unwittingly participated in a little experiment today, and I felt I had no choice but to share it with you and get a couple of things off my chest.

They knew what they were doing all along. We fell for it. And now, it might be too late to stop it. Even now, they tell us that “the AI revolution is coming”. No, the AI revolution started a long, long time ago. And like a science fiction movie where the bad guys have infiltrated and permeated every aspect of our lives until there’s no way to fully remove them from the system, we’re trapped. 

Humans love bonuses. We love to feel special. So what's the biscotti in the project you're working on right now?

It's human nature to give credit where no credit is due. (Accidentally, of course.) Don't let the gorilla in the room steal your thunder.

Doing things on purpose is the difference between the pros and the cons. (And by "pros and cons" I don't mean "positives and negatives".)

But keeping that in mind, you have to choose which hills to die on.

We might be seeing a momentum shift in the podcast industry. But as yet more evidence that podcasting isn't as unique as the gurus would have you believe, we've been here a hundred times before.

It's been four months since the last episode of this show.Certainly it has podfaded and will never recover, right?

Not everything has to be a passion project. But going through the motions is a conscious choice. A quick story might help you get back on track.

A/B Testing isn't new. It wasn't invented by the tech community. And that might be why many people are just plain using it wrong.

Advertising fails, as far as I'm concerned, for one reason more than any other. Maybe this perspective shift can change your results.

Content creation is supposed to be fun... isn't it?

We use the specific phrase, "PAY attention" for a reason, but seldom stop to think about the value of what's being paid for. Let's explore attention as currency.

There comes a time when you get to stop selling, and instead focus on helping. Sadly, most marketers have forgotten what that looks like.

Enhancement Marketing represents what I think could be a seismic shift in the way we connect with people.Details on the program, the discount, the perks - everything you might want to know. (Except I forgot to mention the part about the money-back guarantee.)

"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." goes the quote. Funny advertising is even harder. Gurus might be talking you out of it for reasons other than you were expecting.

For people who never stopped writing for other people, Google's latest SEO guidance wasn't the horrific death knell it spelled for others.

When famous people say things that get repurposed as business mantras, the potential for misinterpretation abounds.

SPOILER ALERT: The entire episode builds to the mic drop moment with the last two sentences. If you're offended by this piece, I challenge you to get that far.

As we try to do with every episode, the lessons here apply to SO much more than what the title suggests. Podcasters, sure. But culinary wannabes and budding carpenters, too.

Your position is different from your niche, but equally critical to your success. And if you're not careful, someone will assign a position to you.

I hope that disagreeing with Jim from "Ask The Podcast Coach" goes better than disagreeing with Chef Gordon Ramsay.

Just because you can do a thing, doesn't always mean you should.

For most media, we're told that connection is key. But it's possible that you're subconsciously torpedoing that connection with some of the first words out of your mouth. The good news? It's very easy to correct. It might just involve breaking some habits that aren't serving you.

While it's admirable to have the attitude that you're not competing with your peers, does it also insulate you from having to admit that your skill set might be inferior?

You can make the argument - and I will here - that connection might be the single most important aspect of human life. But maybe we should look at the quality of those connections.

It used to be that the only thing you needed to claim "professional" status was to collect a paycheck. Now, I think it's something more.

Knowing who your intended audience is - and thinking of them as an actual person - not only helps you avoid creating things that don't interest them; it also prevents you from insulting them. Or worse.

Let's have this conversation now, one time, and then we never have to cover it again.

Joe Rogan doesn't care that I don't like his podcast. And he shouldn't, either.

Toddlers should attend more board meetings. We'd wind up with much smarter content.

Or, how being the smartest kid in the room might be hurting you.

A media giant told my friend to let them know anytime she published new content, so the media giant could amplify it. As you'd expect, my friend immediately stopped writing. Wait, what?

In the two or three hundred shows I did with my old friend Norm MacDonald, there was one bit that marketers would do well to pay attention to.

Audio producers have long been obsessed with how to recreate naturally-occurring sounds in a studio environment. Technology has made it easier than ever... to be lazy.

We'll probably catch considerable heat for this. But somebody's got to say it.Why do you really think host-read ads supposedly work better than traditional "commercials"? The truth might hurt some. But here it comes.

Hyperbole is literally the worst thing in the history of the Universe.Wait, what?