How to Start a (good) Podcast

Equipment! Editing! What to say! What not to say!

This is an updated version of a post I originally made in 2021. I’ve recently had a few messages asking for advice about starting a podcast, so I decided to blow the dust off this baby and add some new material.

I’ve seen a lot of snarky comments online about how people should not start podcasts. They all have this weird tone, as if someone creating a podcast behooves everyone else to listen to it. I don’t like this sort of thing. But then again, I never understood those jokes about people who crack out an acoustic guitar at parties. At a certain point in a party, talking is boring, and it’s nice to have a little singalong? Am I insane for thinking that? Can’t we all just try a little thing?

Anyway. Podcasts. As long as you’re not going to sit your friends down and make them listen to an mp3 of you recapping episodes of The Good Wife, you are absolutely within your right to start a podcast. Having a podcast is really great, and the skills it teaches you are valuable and transferable. You learn how to record, produce and edit audio. You meet new people. You have a new way of hanging out with the old people, the people you’ve known for years. Sometimes you get money. It’s a great hobby.

Equipment

If you listen to Sentimental Garbage, you’ll know that half the episodes are recorded in studio (thank you Soho Radio!) and half of them are recorded sitting on someone’s couch, or someone’s bed, or in the basement of an Austrian ski hotel. For the remote podcasts, I use Rode Wireless Go II. I wish I could say that these are “easy” to use, because frankly they can be a bit buggy and I’ve had to watch far too many Youtube tutorials in order to use them. But. They are the easiest. The most important thing to remember is to keep them charged, and to always have them on “split” mode so that they record each mic separately.

i can feel you glazing over,

because I mentioned a Youtube tutorial, and the possibility that you might have to watch one. It is time for some Vulnerability.

I suffer from a disease that I made up called Behind The TV Stress Disorder. The lore is this: in the old days, if you wanted to plug in the DVD player or the Playstation, you had to go Behind The TV. You had to plug out one Big Cable and scramble your hand around to find another Big Cable, and the whole time your face was hot and your chest was cramped from squeezing into so small a space, you could feel a scary sense of electricity back there, and someone would be sitting on the couch saying “Nope. Nope. Still not working.”

The long-term effects of BTTSD is that being confronted with any technology more complicated than say, an iPhone, gives me the physical sensation of being trapped behind a very large Samsung television. I tell you all of this because I think many people are unknowing sufferers of BTTSD and as a result do not pursue anything with a technology aspect.

This is me telling you: if I learned how to do it, you can learn how to do it.

Editing

This same sentiment extends to editing. Editing is not hard. It’s actually kind of enjoyable, once you get the hang of it. There are one million tutorials on this subject, but let me boil all of them down to six simple steps.

1. open Garageband

2. Drag the two tracks (your recorded track, and your guest’s) into the file so that they are stacked on top of one another.

3. Listen

4. when you hear something that sounds wrong or boring, press the space bar to pause it. Drag the cursor back to where it started to sound wrong or boring.

5. Hit cmd + t. This will make a cut. Listen to the whole wrong/boring bit. Once the wrong/boring bit ends, make another cut.

6. Erase the rogue segment using the backspace key.

And that, my friends, is editing.

Podcast Jewellery

We were repainting our front door recently and were told that we needed “new door jewellery”. Door jewellery refers to the knocker, the brass numbers, the letterbox flap, basically anything that isn’t the wood. Podcast Jewellery therefore refers to anything on the podcast that isn’t two people talking. The theme music. The graphic. The stuff.

This is where knowing gifted people really comes in handy. My friend Harry Harris did the music for Sentimental, and Gavin did the artwork. My friend Hannah does the final mix once I’ve edited everything. I pay all these people, except Gavin, who is my husband and legally would get half my money in a divorce anyway. If you don’t have a Gavin or a Harry or a Hannah, I guess you could get some kind of Temu version of them on Fiverr. It’s important that you clearly communicate to Temu Gavin and Temu Harry what you want, though. When I briefed Harry back in 2018, I had noticed that a huge amount of culture podcasts had folksy, often ukulele-led theme tunes. This is not a diss. I understand why these podcasts sounded like that. It was meant to signal approachability and friendliness, but the trend had swelled to just feeling inane and silly. It felt like a good time to zag. I asked him for a shimmering, glossy, Fleetwood Mac-y vibe. I referenced Silver Linings by Rilo Kiley, and I think we actually ended up with something that feels a lot like that song!

Ok but what do I say on my podcast

My favourite thing about having a podcast is that you learn how to listen to people. Like actually listen, rather than just wait for gaps to say your pre-scripted bit that you were so certain would make you sound smart. You will realise just how many of your conversations outside of podcasting are merely pre-scripted little bits to make you sound smart. You will learn how to be more present and focused in your conversations, and you will notice the difference in how it makes people feel. People bloom when they know they’re being listened to.

And yet, with all this spontaneity and intimacy, you will still find yourself saying stock phrases. Memorised little lines of awkward chatter that you have picked up from listening to other podcasts. Everyone has a few awkward bits of chatter that they say anyway, and that’s no bad thing, but on a podcast it can sometimes halt the flow of conversation or act as a blocker for what can be really interesting, uncharted territory. These are the things you say because you’re not sure of what else to say, and sometimes you’re better off just letting that uncertainty breath than you are swooping in with a stock sentence. FYI, I’m guilty of almost all of these, and actively cringe when I hear myself saying them. That shows you how annoyingly powerful they are.

“Well, that’s something for a whole other podcast.”

What other podcast? We’re on this podcast, nerd! Everyone who’s ever hosted a podcast has rolled this one out, because it’s an easy way of steering your guest back on topic if a tangent has taken you elsewhere. It is always accompanied by an awkward little giggle, a sort of gut-based reverse-laugh that is never about humour and always about nerves.

If your tangent is interesting, let it flow on, and edit it out later if it doesn’t fit. If it’s not relevant at all, wait for a gap in conversation and say “this is really interesting, but I’m conscious of the time limit, and I’d really like to talk about X”. Edit this out later. Your guest will not have hurt feelings about this. This is producing, and good podcasts need to be produced. When I guest on a podcast, I get extremely nervous when a host is just hitting record and hoping for the best. Their lack of structure makes me think they’re not going to edit the audio later, and that I will end up sounding like an idiot because of it. It’s like ordering a gin and tonic and not getting any ice in it: you’re like, ok, this is fine, but if they’re getting this wrong, what must the bathrooms look like?

“Can you edit this out?” / “Don’t worry, we’ll edit that out.”

Well, you haven’t, have you. Because I’m listening to it. I should never be listening to unedited material, and I shouldn’t be hearing you talk about The Edit.

I understand why it’s tempting. Podcasting feels informal, and you want to keep a fun, loose, naturalistic atmosphere. Let’s keep stuff in that we said we’d edit, because it just flows better, y’knaw??

Keeping stuff in that you said you’d edit is disrespectful to the guest, for one thing. But even if the podcast is just between you and your best friend, it’s jarring for the listener to be constantly reminded of the medium they’re listening to. It’s the podcasting uncanny valley. When the hosts are constantly talking about hosting the podcast, editing the podcast, the experience of having to put out a podcast, you start getting the sense that they’re too excited, have no clue what they’re doing, and your trust that they’re going to entertain you starts to dwindle.

It’s Monty Burns losing his job, riding the bus, and then saying “I am riding on a bus.” Everyone knows it’s wrong. You saying it makes it wrong.

“You can’t see this, but…”

No shit we can’t see it! It’s an audio medium, fucker!

I understand that lots of people are recording video with their podcasts now. I hate this. It’s really tricky because you want to promote the thing on social media, and the easiest way to do that is to have a video of the words coming out of your mouth. But when a podcast starts assuming that it is a visual medium first, it totally loses me. It has stopped being an intimate chat between two clever people; it is now just a badly funded morning show.

“I’m so getting cancelled for this!”

Cancel culture has become this strange boogie man for creators that spend a lot of time online. It is everywhere and nowhere; it happens to friends of friends, but never friends. We are increasingly unsure of what it actually means, and scales anywhere from “attracting mild criticism” to “losing work for appearing to have an unpopular opinion”. We think that by talking about theoretical “cancellation” a lot, by showing we are with it enough to understand what cancel culture is, we will avoid any serious critiques of what we have to say. We want to head criticism off at the pass by telling our audience that any criticism they might have would fall under cancel culture, which would be very uncool of them.

I completely understand and empathise with the urge to do this, but it’s is a weirdly castrating thing to do to your audience, as well as jarringly egotistic. “My takes are so hot that people are dying to cancel me!” Girl, sit down, you’re hosting a Good Wife podcast.

“Uh, so, I don’t want to generalise…. and, y’know, obviously, I don’t know that much about this subject, and I’m not the person to comment, but, I think that, maybe…”

Ah, the conversational cladding that takes an interesting point and wraps it in so much bubble wrap that no one can tell what it is, and it takes seven extra minutes to unwrap.

This comes from the same place of insecurity as the above point about cancel culture. I.e., you’re so afraid that people are going to take umbrage with what you have to say that you couch it in a word salad of phrases taken from Twitter. You constantly “check your privilege” long after it’s relevant or interesting. You talk vaguely about “optics”. You refer to yourself as living in a bubble, you qualify that your evidence is “only anecdotal”. Unsurprisingly, you get a lot of female podcasters doing this. They constantly second-guess themselves, using their uncertainty as a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for any criticism that might come later. It’s like they’re already mounting their own defence: “As you can hear on the podcast, I clearly said this was not my area of expertise, and that I was only offering my opinion as an idiot.”

Lemme tell you what I’ve learned in eight years of hosting podcasts: people have a level of forgiveness and empathy for podcast conversations that they don’t have with written material. Whereas someone might screengrab a bit of your article and share it around as evidence of you being an arsehole, nobody is transcribing your Good Wife podcast. Podcasts are like a walled garden of online conversation, and it’s where people go to hear people sort out weird and thorny issues. Let go a little bit. Take down some of that cladding and see what’s underneath.