Can you really call it a conversation if everyone’s reading their lines?
We don’t use boards. We don’t use run sheets. We don’t do call times, beat maps, or pre-roll briefs. You’d think that’s a bad idea for a podcast. Maybe it is for some. But it works for us.
This show runs on impulse. Someone has a topic. Someone else disagrees. One of us says something ridiculous, and the next thing you know it’s 47 minutes later and we’ve got a rough episode in the can. It’s a mess – but it’s our mess. And it sounds like people talking, not people reading out what they wrote the night before.
We’ve considered planning. We thought about setting up segments. We even threw around the idea of having recurring formats for different types of episodes. But you know what would happen. Everything would be flat. Conversation would be stiff. Someone would try to move things along while someone else was just getting going. You would hear the effort. The energy would be sucked out of the room.
There’s something about knowing you’re not being boxed in that lets people talk like they actually think. When someone brings up a tangent, we don’t shut it down. We follow it. Sometimes it goes nowhere. Sometimes it ends up being the best bit. That’s the deal. You get the good because we don’t filter it through an outline first.
We’ve all listened to those podcasts where it feels like the hosts are just waiting for their turn to speak. Everyone’s got their bit prepared. It’s not a conversation, it’s a rotation. And no one responds to anything, because they’re all too busy remembering the next line they want to say.
We can’t do that. It doesn’t fit what we’re building. This show works when it feels like you’ve dropped into the middle of an argument. Not a performance. Not a pitch. Just a group of people who know their stuff, trust each other enough to disagree, and aren’t afraid to let things get messy.
Some people think planning makes things sound more professional. Sometimes it does. But too much planning sounds like marketing. Too many rehearsed points. Too much structure. You forget to leave space for anything real to happen.
We record the way we talk. We trust each other to pull it together. And yes, it means someone will start a sentence they can’t finish. Someone else will say the same thing twice. That’s fine. That’s what editing is for. But the heart of the thing, the stuff that lands, that only happens when you give people room to go off script.
If we wrote it all out, you’d lose the pauses. You’d lose the jokes. You’d lose the bits where someone finally says what they really think instead of what they thought they were going to say. That’s the part people respond to.
The plan is simple. We hit record. We talk. We stop when it feels right. Sometimes it works better than others. But it always sounds like us. Not like some polished content unit trying to hit a quota.
We’ll take the chaos. It’s honest.
Would you rather hear a show with rough edges, or one where every word was written in advance?
