My show isn’t very good yet, but my goal is to be a professional

By David McElroy · February 14, 2020

If I tell you a secret, will you keep it just between the two of us?

OK. Here it comes. My new podcast isn’t very good yet. If you’ve already heard some of the episodes, you might be relieved to hear me say that. You might be thinking, “Well, duh. Everybody else knows this, but I’m surprised you admit it.”

I’m not just being self-denigrating when I say this. I mean it with all sincerity. But there’s something I have to add — which I think is the more important part of the story.

Roughly 98 percent of the podcasts out there — out of about 750,000 active podcasts right now — are dreadfully bad. And when I admit that my podcast isn’t very good, I’m saying that with the knowledge that my “not very good” podcast might already be in the top 25 percent in terms of quality — only because most podcasts are so incredibly awful.

This leaves me baffled at what most people are producing — and it also leaves me encouraged about my future prospects. Let me tell you what prompts this thought.

I’ve been incredibly conservative in approaching how to make a podcast and I’ve taken an extremely incremental approach. I’ve spent the last few years researching how to make a podcast, buying the right equipment and trying to get comfortable with recording and editing myself.

This just seems like the approach that any serious person would take.

But I was researching a hosting platform Thursday night and I sampled about 20 podcasts that this company hosts, and it seems as though almost all of them took just the opposite approach.

These shows most often sound like some semi-drunken idiots who’ve never used microphones before just got together and started ad libbing. Everything I heard was absolutely dreadful. I was embarrassed for these people — and I was mortified that they were putting themselves in front of the world in this way.

I know this sounds horribly arrogant of me to be judging others when I admit that my show isn’t very good. My show is very flawed, but I think mine sounds as though it’s from someone who’s trying to learn the right way to do a broadcast show.

I’m trying to learn the right ways to emulate a professional format. I’m trying to figure out how to write well for audio. (That’s very different from the writing here.) I’m trying to learn how to perform for the microphone. And I still have technical issues to work out with my recording and editing.

But I’m trying to emulate a professional style, even if I know it’s not good enough. My quality at this point probably isn’t much different from that of a broadcasting student who’s working on air for the first time at his college radio station. It’s awkward and unpolished — but I’m learning.

Most of these other shows which I sample sound more like random people chatting in their living room. They don’t seem to understand the formats that they need to be emulating. They don’t seem to understand what makes certain professional shows entertaining. And when I sample shows across several seasons of these podcasts, they don’t seem to get any better.

I don’t see why anybody would bother to publish most of what I heard — and I can’t imagine that they’re working to become more professional. If that’s your approach, what exactly is the point?

I’m sure we all have different goals, but my goal is to eventually get good enough — with an eventual concept that has wide appeal — that building a professional audience would at least be an option for me. I‘m a beginner, but I get the impression that most of the people I’ve been sampling lately think they’re making entertaining shows — and I can’t imagine why anybody would listen to most of them.

I don’t yet have a concept that will appeal to a bigger audience — and I keep reminding you that was intentional since I want to figure out what I’m doing before I try to build a real audience — but this sampling of other shows makes me think that most people who make these small shows have no long-range professional hopes or plans.

That confuses me.

It hurts my pride that I know my show isn’t good enough yet. It’s very difficult for me to allow myself to publish something that I know isn’t professional, but I’ve pushed myself to do this because I know it’s the only way I can get better.

I realize that the concept and content of my current show won’t attract a broad audience, and I’m OK with that. This is practice for me. But it’s practice with a purpose.

You see, I don’t want to be a dilettante. I don’t want to make podcasts or movies or any other form of media on a lark. I want to become good at what I’m doing — and the only way to do good work is to do enough mediocre work to get better.

I don’t know why most people make podcasts. We all have our goals. But my only goal is to become a professional at this. For me, that means letting my ego grapple with not being very good — and working hard to figure out how to make something that can earn money for me.

So please forgive me for being mediocre through my first seven episodes — and probably through my entire season of this show. I’m working to get better, because I really want to be the best one day, even though I realize that’s a long way off.

But please don’t tell anyone that I admitted any of this.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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