“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain
For nearly 15 years, I started almost every public presentation with the above quote. First and foremost, it was a reminder to myself. It still is.
Four score and 750+ episodes ago, I started a podcast.
In 2023, The Tim Ferriss Show crossed a billion downloads. This past April marked the 10th anniversary of the first episode. It seemed as good a time as any to pause and reflect.
Let’s kick it off with a weird graph and wild numbers:
listennotes.com/podcast-stats/
The dip in 2022 is simply the resumption of pre-COVID trends, as 2020–2021 was an at-home anomaly. That said, the pandemic period saw some of the largest deals in the space, and it helped propel deal comps and mass media attention to new heights, a lot of which stuck around or at least heavily rounded up. The celebrities, the ad dollars, the gazillion-dollar exclusives, the controversies… It’s all been outrageously exciting to watch.
statista.com/chart/10713/podcast-listeners-in-the-united-states/
When I started my podcast in April of 2014, there were fewer than 200,000 podcasts listed on iTunes (as Apple Podcasts was called back then). At the time of writing this post, there are more than 4,200,000.
That represents a 20x+ increase, but there are other interesting metrics to ponder. Here’s one: bigger shows.
If we define a “bigger” show as any show with at least 100,000 downloads per episode, I would guess the total number of such shows has at least 100x’d. This is a massive paradox of choice and discovery issue. Having a good show is no longer good enough. Having a great show is no longer good enough.
If you want to survive in the mindshare of listeners, you need differentiation.
I think this is reflected in how well special-interest podcasts with a focus (e.g., The Drive with Peter Attia, Founders, Huberman Lab, Acquired) have done recently relative to newer interview-format shows where nearly anything goes.
As is so often the case, if you stand for everything, you can end up standing for nothing.
So, how do you differentiate yourself if every person and their grandma is starting a podcast?
If you’re starting from scratch, I think choosing a niche you have a bizarre love for—and therefore endurance for—makes a lot of sense.
If, on the other hand, you have a broader, interview-based legacy show, it can be a little tricky. Perhaps the business is great, but you see the writing on the wall and want to be ahead of the curve. As I see it, there are at least a few options:
(1) Start a new podcast with a niche focus. Sadly, I suspect I would get bored within weeks or months, but it’s not off the table…
(2) Pack up your tent and walk off into the sunset in search of other adventures.
(3) Create new and better rules.
I landed on #3.
In the midst of a weekly ship cycle, it’s hard to escape the collective pull of algo chasing, thumbnail tweaking, and details long enough to zoom out. The waters have been churning at a fever pitch, ever changing and ever faster. When you’re inside the washing machine, it’s very hard to step out and get perspective.
So I decided to take a sabbatical of roughly four months. It ended a few weeks ago.
During the sabbatical, I stopped recording new episodes, republished some of the greatest hits (e.g., Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Margaret Atwood, Jerry Seinfeld, and more), and did a lot of thinking.
The full break allowed me and my team enough breathing room to think about the long game. What do we want to do, and furthermore, why are we doing this at all?
Since nearly all the rules are made up anyway, I asked myself a bunch of questions, including:
What might this look like if it were maximally fun?
What might this look like if it were easy?
If I get to do this for another decade, or had to do this for another decade, what new rules might I create to keep it interesting?
Of course, these are implicitly “for me.” It’s a highly personal thing.
In my experience, keeping it interesting for me generally keeps it interesting for my lovely listeners. At the very least, it’s the only way to ensure I have the enthusiasm required for endurance.
Sure, sometimes what-Tim-likes is too strange and misses the mark, but trying to cater to the tastes of an abstract “audience” or the YouTube gods, without paying attention to what you like, has sent a lot of podcasts to the elephant graveyard.
And even if you manage to “win” that game, winning might be the most dangerous.
Rather than getting Old Yeller’d behind the barn, you have just enough income or traction or validation or growth to make it seem crazy to stop. How could you shut it down? Then you adjust to the creeping boredom and incremental gains, and you convince yourself that it’s all a cost of doing business. You start by feeding the machine through the cage, only to wake up one day and realize that you’re the one inside the cage. For an extreme example, read this article on audience capture, but it can take many forms. Some are very subtle.
Media is a great tool and a merciless master.
Fortunately, this is NOT how things need to be.
Based on all of the above, here are some new rules that I’ll be implementing starting today:
No more book-launching episodes.
The podcasting circuit has largely become the same authors appearing on 15–30 podcasts in any given week or two for book launches. It’s the modern equivalent of a radio satellite tour. For authors, I totally get it, but I’m over it, and I know a lot of my podcast friends are over it. It’s boring for everyone.
So, I’m opting out. No more book-launch episodes for a while.
If I make an exception, it will likely require that both of the following conditions are true:
– You’re a truly close friend, meaning we’ve known each other for at least 10 years, we’ve stayed at each other’s homes, see each other multiple times a year, etc.
AND
– The episode will come out a minimum of three months before the book’s publication date. Early can be a great strategy for authors. This is exactly what I’ve done with past guests like Jocko Willink, who made his first-ever podcast appearance (in fact, first public interview) on The Tim Ferriss Show in September of 2015. I suggested we publish well before his pub date because this space would allow his publisher to gauge pre-order demand and substantially increase the initial print run. His first book, Extreme Ownership, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and the rest is history. Even one month is quite tight if overseas printing is involved, and sadly, a lot of podcasters don’t respect embargos (crabs in a bucket!), so… at least three months in advance it is.
90/10 barbell strategy for future guests.
The barbell strategy is an approach to investing popularized by past guest, author, and self-described flâneur Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The metaphor of the barbell is apt because weights are placed at the far ends. In the investing context and in simple terms, the majority of your assets might be in very conservative positions with the remaining assets in very high-risk, very high-reward bets. For instance, municipal bonds and angel investing. The middle is empty.
But how could you apply this to a podcast? It’s actually very easy. Just look for extremes. I apply the barbell approach all over my life and business.
In the case of The Tim Ferriss Show, I will aim to interview guests who are either:
Known by more than 90% of my audience (e.g., Jeff Bezos, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey)
Or
Known by less than 10% of my audience (e.g., some of my favorite past episodes, like Dr. BJ Miller, Boyd Varty, Dr. Sue Johnson, or Elan Lee)
I’m trying to avoid the messy middle, which is a Tokyo subway car of repeat guests on the circuit. It’s crowded, and I don’t like crowded. Cue The Blue Ocean Strategy.
Prioritizing living legends.
I love people who’ve mastered a craft and who seldom—or never—do podcasts.
I really enjoy interviewing masters who’ve produced excellence decade after decade. This often means such people have some gray hair, and I would love to celebrate them and immortalize their wisdom while they’re still sharp. The last person holding a tradition, the 10th generation of X, a reclusive genius… you get the idea.
Experimental hyperdrive.
I’ve experimented a lot on the show in the past, and I’m going to put that into hyperdrive. It’s simply more fun.
I have done podcasts in saunas (e.g., Rick Rubin’s first-ever podcast), live Q&As, walk-and-talk episodes in the mountains, drunk-dialing fans for shits and giggles, interviews in taxis in Uzbekistan, audiobook excerpts, and more. It’s easy to assume that slick, labor-intensive, polished episodes get the most downloads, but it’s simply not true. And much more important, the experimentation keeps things fun and fresh. After all, I still consider this the early days for podcasting. Less than one-third of terrestrial radio ad spend has landed in podcasting thus far, and there’s lots of room left to innovate and make strange things work.
If you only stick with what has worked, you might miss something that works a whole lot better.
So, if you want to listen to one podcast that delivers a variety of fun stuff in a variety of formats, that’s the next chapter. Maybe I should rebrand as The Tim Ferriss Variety Show… or make a mobile-only TimTim WalkWalk? That last one is for the oldies.
So, let’s get this party started.
I’ll continue to add to these policies and this blog post, but in the meantime, I would love your suggestions:
What would you like to see or hear on the podcast?
Are there any experiments that would tickle your fancy? Or podcasts or formats I should see for inspiration?
Any guests that fit the 90/10 barbell strategy? Living legends?
Other thoughts or suggestions?
Please let me know in the comments below! Comments here are far better than social media, as I’ll actually see them. And thanks for reading this far.
All the best to you and yours,
Tim
P.S. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to The Tim Ferriss Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio niblets.
Related
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for “Best of Apple Podcasts” three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it’s been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.