I’ve published 167 podcast episodes in a little over 3 years. My criteria for considering guests to invite on the show has remained relatively consistent since the beginning. The first and most important criteria is that I am genuinely interested in having a conversation with the person. If I am not genuinely interested, I do not believe it will make for a very interesting conversation. Moreover, it feels like a waste of both my time and theirs.
I have not compromised on this “interestedness” criteria at all but naturally I am more interested in some guests than others and I have found that, the more interested I am, the more interesting the conversation tends to be. That has been enough to support my hypothesis without having to actually run the experiment of having someone on as a guest who I am not genuinely interested in. That’s not an experiment that I am interested in running.
This may sound like an obvious criteria. Why would I invite a guest to come on the podcast if I am not genuinely interested in having a conversation with them? Well, there is at least one obvious reason which is that, even if I am not all that interested in them, other people are, and so it could be a conversation which many people might listen to. I imagine there are a ton of podcasters who don’t really consider their interest in a person as a criteria at all. They might start with a completely different question such as “Does this guest fit the niche that my podcast is about.” For me, if I am not interested, I am not interested. It’s a non-negotiable criteria, and it’s as simple as that.
For these first few years of podcasting, I have also had a second criteria on which I have seldom compromised. That is a prominence criteria. Once I’ve identified a guest I’m genuinely interested in, I secondarily consider whether they are above some subjective prominence threshold where a lot of people like me would be familiar with them. It is important to emphasize that this prominence threshold is subjective and specific to me and people interested in the kinds of things that I am interested in. If I show my podcast guest list to a stranger, they are likely to only recognize about one name — Mark Cuban, or maybe a handful. If I show it to someone who is into crypto, they might recognize several or even a few dozen. But if I show it to someone who really has a lot of overlapping interests with me, they may recognize more than half of the people I’ve had on my podcast to date. It is from their perspective that I think about this prominence threshold.
My logic was always that, in order to build a large audience over time, I needed to maintain a certain prominence threshold among my guests so that when the right types of people come across my podcast they will be inclined to listen and subscribe because they recognize a lot of people who they like, respect, and/or admire on my guest list. Additionally, if I did a good job I figured prominent guests would share our episode with their relatively large audiences and some percentage of that audience would listen and some percentage of those who listen would continue to listen to more episodes of my podcast and become a part of my audience.
I have always had a long-term goal to have less prominent people on the podcast so that I can do my small part to help them get discovered and become more prominent in their own right. I concluded that I could not effectively do that if I did not first build a sufficiently sized stage on which to spotlight them, metaphorically speaking. I figured I could start with a high prominence threshold and lower it gradually over time as the audience grew. Even from the beginning, I have had less prominent people on the podcast here and there because I feel like I have some amount of “budget” to spend (in a sense) on these lower prominence guests without materially compromising my ability to hold a high prominence average and continue to build the podcast audience as I’ve describe. But something somewhat expected has happened, or hasn’t happened I suppose is more accurate.
My podcast audience has not grown that much in its few years despite all of my above logic, as sound as it may seem. It’s not that no one is listening — I get between a few hundred and several thousand listeners on every episode, with the median listenership being closer to the bottom end of that range. But this size was achieved fairly early in my first year of podcasting and has not meaningfully grown much since then for whatever the reason may be. Fortunately, I have never sought to make my podcast a full-time thing nor felt the need to make it monetizable as quickly as possible or anything like that. I often tell people that if I was doing it for the audience size or the money I would have stopped a long time ago. But I haven’t. I’ve kept going, sometimes more consistently than others, but mostly releasing episodes every week or two for the better part of the last 3 years.
I still believe in everything I have written above, but I am writing this to draw a sort of line in the sand beyond which I intend to deprioritize my prominence threshold a bit. More accurately, I have already started doing this. I have realized that I do not really care about building a huge audience. It would be certainly be nice and preferable, all else equal, but it is not in the top few reasons why I do what I do, and it never has been. What I really care about is having interesting conversations with interesting people and sharing those conversations freely with the world, so that anyone with an internet connection can listen. That has been my real purpose for the podcast all along.
I will continue to have prominent guests because prominent people tend to be a bit more interesting. They are somewhat extraordinary by default, given their prominence, and I tend to be interested in extraordinary people. But I am going to continue leaning in on inviting more guests on the podcast who are not yet as prominent as perhaps my average guest has been to date, especially when I am most interested in having a conversation with that particular person.
In the long run, I would still love to be able to bring more attention to less prominent people whom I find interesting, and the bigger my audience is, the more effectively I will be able to do that. But I have realized that my audience is sufficiently large to bring some attention already. Moreover, the quality of my audience is extremely high, and many of my listeners are quite prominent in their own right. I am regularly shocked by the caliber of people who I learn are listening to my podcast. And I have come to believe that it might be just as (if not more) valuable for an under-discovered guest I have on the podcast to be discovered by one person, if that person is the right person, compared to one thousand people by whom the value of being discovered is not as great for one reason or another.
In lowering my prominence bar a bit, I expect to be able to raise my interestedness bar even further than it has already been, and I am excited to see what results from that change in my criterial philosophy. I am also aware that sometimes it is right around the point when you stop looking for something that you find it, so perhaps deprioritizing guest prominence as a means towards the end of attracting a large audience will be exactly the thing that ends up attracting a large audience. I’m not counting on it, but we’ll see.
I’ve already made many trade-offs at the expense of building a large audience (remaining pseudonymous, refusing to constrain myself to a particular niche, etc.), so this is nothing new in that sense. And you might not even notice a difference. I still expect to have many prominent guests because my weighting of that criteria will not go from second priority to not caring about it at all, and because I am very interested in a lot of very prominent people. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast to date, I am confident you will continue to enjoy the podcast in the future. And if new people are less inclined to listen as a result of a lower average prominence as it pertains to all the awesome people on my guest list, that’s ok with me.
