I think that with podcasts, a lot of things are about fostering and having a direct connection with the community.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The power of podcasting is pretty remarkable. It is such an amazing way to mobilize fans. It's almost like they're part of your family. They probably listen to you more than they listen to their own families. I know that's true for me. So there is a real bond there.
What podcasts can do in order to liven up the talk show area of TV is bring new personalities and unique worldviews into the fray in a way that's not going to be filtered through the whole Q-rating thing. I think there's a whole new layer of doing things that TV is behind the Internet in figuring out.
I find podcasting an enticing space.
You don't need 30 million people to listen to your podcast. If 10,000 people listen to your podcast, which is not a hard number to achieve, then 10,000 people are listening, and you can build a community, and literally change the world just recording into a microphone.
Between podcasts and places like Funny or Die or CollegeHumor, there are so many venues to get the word out. It makes it difficult in that there's a never-ending desire for content, so you have to constantly be turning stuff out, but that makes you better and more prolific in general.
The only way to make podcasting a real big business would be if you could somehow get the top seven podcasters to team up and make a mega-network.
I pushed against doing a podcast for so long. I'm a very late comer to the podcast game. But you're responsibility as a comedian is to get your viewpoints out into the world, and we have a lot more avenues to do that. So it's a lot more opportunity, but really have to work all the time.
Podcasts themselves cannot exist without the Internet - in a way, they are a microcosm of the Internet.
I think the mistake a lot of people make with new media is they just focus on one thing. But any one thing - just doing podcasts or just having a website or just doing television - isn't enough anymore.
One of the beautiful things about podcasting is that I'm not beholding to some public entity.