Podcasting, says Jey Jeyendran, has “a really super low barrier to entry but a super high barrier to continuation.” At the time of this conversation, Jeyendran was a coach in a podcasting course and had made several shows. Of the second barrier, Jeyendran says:

“People don’t get that when they first start. So what happens is they dive in, and then you get that pod fade at episode 7 […] that’s where the doubts start. Is anybody listening? Am I making a fool of myself?”

Or, as Jeyendran puts it, “you just stop and you can’t get the momentum to get back on track, which is where I am at the minute.” What makes continuing hard, in Jeyendran’s account, is “the lack of feedback, or lack of meaningful feedback, because there is no metric.” Download numbers do not say whether anyone actually listened, or for how long, so a maker has no way to know: “Am I wasting my time? Is it any good?” Jeyendran remembers a psychologist who studied very high performers and found them all “hungry for feedback.” And “we’re in a medium where we just don’t get that.”

Craig Constantine, who hosts this show, agrees that this sets podcasters up to fail, and then answers from the other side. Right now, he says, he does not care what anyone thinks of this episode, or whether anyone will listen to it. He describes being “lost in the moment,” when the conversation becomes “a playful interchange.” “That’s when I know I’m doing the right thing,” he says.

Every time he has gotten feedback, he says, it has been about some piece of an episode, and going back to it he finds the same thing: “It was a part where I was having fun and the guest was having fun.”

So the play answer is not as independent of feedback as it sounds. Constantine’s evidence that play is right is the feedback that does arrive, and it keeps pointing there.

Jeyendran takes the point: “I think you’ve actually hit it on the head there with the play thing,” because it comes down to “what’s the payoff.” The trap is making the payoff a great episode: “if your goal is to create a good show, then you only get one opportunity to do that in the process, and every other day is a fail until you’ve done that.” Better to love at least some part of the making itself. Feedback keeps a smaller job, the part where “at least you know you’re on the right track.” But “really the key, like you say, is making it playful.”

Asked about the greatest joy of coaching, Jeyendran describes the course’s sixty-second exercise, a recording about anything at all, and the students who fall in love with it and keep going, “publishing, publishing, publishing, publishing these tiny little jewels.” What frees them is that “it’s no pressure because it can be about anything. No one else is going to hear it.”

The barrier, then, is less the missing feedback than the hunger for it. When the payoff is a verdict, every day without one is what Jeyendran calls “a fail.”

“Is anybody listening?” is a question the medium can take a long time to answer, if it ever does. “Was that fun to make?” gets its answer before you press stop.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Magic with Jey Jeyendran,” published November 19, 2021.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.