Is it still a podcast if no one listens to it?
The koan for the average podcast (which generally only lasts 9 episodes before people give up and are like WTF am I doing)
Social proof and podcasting are such a fascinating phenomenon.
The key habit of humans that we have been wrestling with in this world is detemerninstic thinking vs probablistic thinking
At the level of Newtonian physics determinism reigns victorious. The laws of physics determine the behavior of large objects
BUT (and its a big but) at the level of quantum mechanics probabilistic is the nature of the game. Not many people have caught on to this.
For thousands of years humans have tried to determine their reality by trying to make reality deterministic.
"Here just read this book, that will have all the answers"
"Here just listen to what my god tells me, then you will have the answer"
How does this relate to podcasting?
Well most people have all these determenistic ideas about what will happen to them once they start podcasting. Most of these ideas have to do with social status, i.e. "ill get a million followers and then finally make it"
So they don't last more than 9 episode
But what if you approached podcasting (or anything else) from the point of view of finding better questions rather than finding better answers (better answers are important but not as good as finding better questions).
That what I did with Crazy Wisdom and now have over 350 episodes. I don't focus on getting big names (although I have many of those). I focus on finding people who can lead to better questions and there have been all these amazing non-linear benefits from that (DM to hear some)