As varied as the means to put out content in this day and age, podcasting attracts people you otherwise wouldn’t in other media outlets. That’s why for many businesses and individuals looking to expand their reach, creating a podcast has become a way to go. But how do you go about doing that, especially one that still speaks to who you are? In this episode, Tracy Hazzard interviews Mark Gober—speaker, author of An End to Upside Down Thinking, and host of the Where Is My Mind? podcast—to share with us how he has been strategizing his podcast series to match his big “why.” He takes us across his journey of turning his book into a bingeable podcast series and the process he follows to create a unique show format. Plus, Mark also shares how he is increasing listeners and monetizing his podcast.
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Strategizing A Podcast Series To Match Your Big Why With Mark Gober Of The Where Is My Mind? Podcast
I’ve got a person who’s been swirling around our consciousness since I interviewed Laura Powers of the Healing Powers Podcast, she mentioned a story about a listener who then wrote a book. I said, “I’ve heard that story before, I remember reading it.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mark Gober was the reader. He was the one who wrote that book, An End to Upside Down Thinking of which I interviewed him and wrote an article about him. We had a tie in and we didn’t even know it. That’s why I invited Mark to come back on because he has a podcast that he created from the book from interviews that he did with it.
It’s a very interesting podcast. It’s not our typical that we talk about here because it’s only an eight-episode series. Normally, even the ones that would do seasons that we interview here have had more shows and have done more, but he’s got an interesting model for it. It’s highly produced. It’s Freakonomics like. If you’ve ever heard the Freakonomics podcast or the Harvard Business Review, the HBR IdeaCast. Those are a similar feel to it. It’s highly scripted. It’s a different model for a show. You would find it interesting to know why, what he’s doing with it and how it has helped him as an author. Let me introduce Mark Gober to you. Mark is an international speaker and the author of An End to Upside Down Thinking, which was introduced in 2018.
It was awarded the IPI best science book of 2019. He is the author of An End to Upside Down Living. I am in the midst of reading. I have not quite finished it yet because it’s quite intense. He’s the host of the podcast, Where is My Mind?. Additionally, he serves on the Board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment. Mark’s background is in business as a partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and previously as an Investment Banking Analyst in New York. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Princeton University, where he wrote his award-winning thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel prize-winning Prospect Theory. He was elected captain of the Princeton division one tennis team. Mark is such an interesting person. He gets your brain thinking, but what he has is this business mind that turned to looking at consciousness.
We’re talking about a large pivot, which brings me to my other connection to Mark, which was actually how I met him. That was on Adam Markel’s The Conscious PIVOT Podcast. Adam and I ended up as a client and a friend. He said, “I’ve got this guy that you would enjoy talking with.” Mark Gober was the guy. We have lots of connections. That’s what this interesting look at consciousness that he’s taking. He’s taking it out of this business that world, but he’s applying business and science to it and flipping that so that we look at how we consider consciousness differently that we turn it upside down. The interesting part about how he’s approaching all that is this is in some way counter to who he is and who he’s known for in business.
He’s written that book, done that thing that is completely counter to what other people in his marketplace are doing. That’s put them into this interesting place where you have to build an audience, listeners, or go out there and sell books and do more publicity. This is an interesting choice that he’s made to develop the Where is My Mind? podcast. That’s what I wanted to talk with them about and know what’s going on in Mark’s mind.
Mark Gober is the author of the award-winning book An End to Upside Down Thinking (2018) and the sequel An End to Upside Down Living (2020).
He is also the host of Where Is My Mind? podcast (2019), featuring his interviews with world-leading consciousness researchers Eben Alexander, Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Russell Targ, Raymond Moody, Jim Tucker, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson, and many others. Mark serves on the Board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment (SoWE), and he is an international speaker.
Mark’s background is in business as a Partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and previously as an investment banking analyst in New York. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he wrote his award-winning thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning “Prospect Theory” and was elected a captain of Princeton’s Division I Tennis Team.
Mark, thanks so much for joining me. I’m excited to talk about Where’s My Mind?. This is a little bit unusual, you’ve got a short season and we’re talking to you because I want to know why you started a podcast?
My background is in business. I went into investment banking out of undergrad. I was in New York from 2008 to 2010. During the financial crisis doing investment banking and then joined a Silicon Valley strategy firm where I was a partner for many years. In 2016, I was listening to podcasts myself that exposed me to new information that ultimately led to my writing my first book called An End to Upside Down Thinking. I work in business and I wrote a book on consciousness, something that has nothing to do with my business life, the literary agent said, “It doesn’t matter how good your book is, in the world of publishing, you need to have a following. Whatever you can do to try to get your name out there in this consciousness space, that would help.”
My first thought when he said that was to focus on podcasts because I learned a lot from podcasts myself. I ended up texting a friend from high school because he’s the only person I know in media doing TV shows for Fox Sports. I said, “Do you know anything about podcasts?” This was 2017. He said, “You wouldn’t believe it. I’m leaving my sports show to join one of the biggest podcast production companies very soon.” He and I were talking about different podcast ideas. I initially wanted to interview many of the scientists that I wrote about and put the interviews out like a traditional podcast. My friend urged me to wait and try to make it more digestible. The way we ended up doing the podcast called Where’s My Mind?, which wasn’t released until 2019.
There was a lot of thinking that went into it. It’s eight episodes that feature clips from 50 interviews that I did. Those interviews are for 1 to 2 hours each. We took little bite-sized pieces from those interviews. In any of the eight episodes, you might hear from ten scientists, for example, and each of the episodes is structured such that I’m narrating the stuff that I want to be talking about. My producer, my friend who joined the podcast production company, is playing the devil’s advocate and asking the questions that the audience have. He’s the skeptic, but we wanted to have that because some of the ideas I talk about are against what we’re taught in school. He’s playing that role of saying, “Wait for a second, Mark, that doesn’t make sense. How do you reconcile this and that?” We thought that would be a more engaging way of doing it than a traditional podcast.
I hate to say this, but I am a huge reader. These are nothing in the background here compared to the library books I have out in my living room. Your book was hard to digest. It’s hard to read. You have to read it and reflect. It was one of the ones that took me the longest to read. Before I wrote an article about you, which is how we met when I wrote an article about your book An End to Upside Down Thinking the first time. The podcast was a little bit hard to digest still, even though you did do it attempt to that. I’m a little bit, much of a use to pod faster. I’m used to speeding and you can’t do that with yours. That’s interesting. It goes against certain ways people like to consume podcasts. It made me have to not do anything else, which we typically do other things while we’re listening to podcasts, but it made me sit down, sit isolated, and concentrate on it. It was a very different way to consume a podcast for me compared to what I’m used to. Did you realize that was happening as you were still doing it and you were still trying to make it more digestible?
We knew the subject matter itself is very dense. We’re asking people to take their worldview that they’ve been taught for their whole lives and to question some of the most basic assumptions about reality. The topics themselves are also abstract. These aren’t things we can touch. We wanted to create the most convincing argument possible. That’s why we use many voices. That’s why we didn’t want to gloss over things because it’s an area replete with skeptics who want to come in and tell you why something doesn’t make sense. We wanted to cover all the bases and the way we did it, we thought was the most efficient way to do that. It still takes a lot of time in many episodes and dense. We say one very big idea then on to the next thing like you said, it’s hard to speed up for that reason.
You also have premium content. For those of you don’t know that, it’s this idea of being able to throw out and say, “I’ve got more of this interview. I’ve got this in a membership area within my website, or I’ve got this somewhere else.” You’re sending people back to your website to hear the full interview that you may have done with a particular expert that you’ve excerpted on the show. How did that work for you? Are people doing that? Are they going back and forth?
I would say it’s a relatively low percentage of people that wanted to do that. It’s 50 interviews on my website. It’s an unlimited subscription. You can listen to it as much as you want. If we add new interviews, which we haven’t done yet, that would be included. It’s over 60 hours’ worth. You could spend a year doing your own PhD course on consciousness. It’s $33 for that full package. We found that the people who are interested in learning more, those are the ones that have done it, and they’ve given positive feedback because, in the podcast, you only hear a tiny bit from each of the experts. When I talk to someone, let’s say you had a near-death experience that changed your whole life, talking for an hour and a half. That is very different than hearing just a clip.
We wanted to make that available to people. Another thing that we did was to make 2 of the 50 interviews available for free on YouTube. People could get a sense of what it’s like and also to at least one of the two was one of the more life-changing interviews that I did. It was on this topic of a life review where a person has a near-death experience and relives events of his or her life. I interviewed someone who had four life reviews because he basically died and came back four different times. That’s available for free and we found that people have enjoyed those, too.
That’s an interesting approach. Have you thought about maybe put adding them as bonus episodes so people could get a taste of what they might get?
It doesn't matter how good your book is in the world of publishing; you need to have a following. Click To TweetWe have thought about that, at some point maybe we will. The eight episodes are highly curated. We had two production companies involved. One of the considerations would be whether we want to have a rougher interview that I was doing at home on Skype versus I was in a studio in LA working with top-notch editors for the other eight episodes.
You needed it because you had the challenge. When you’re trying to insert those kinds of quotes from all the different people from these interviews that you didn’t know you intended to air one day when you started doing them. You have different sound levels. You need a more heavy-handed producer who understands sound engineering and understands the experience of listening to be able to make it so that it’s not one of these things that go the sound goes up and down and people can’t consume it, which makes it even harder to handle a subject as heavy as yours.
I’m not an audio expert. This is not my expertise. Fortunately, we had some people that have done this before. The editing process on my end was something I didn’t expect. The number of times we listened to any given episode before it went out and my producers, we went through rounds and rounds of edits. It’s to the point of, we need an extra half-second after the sentence to give people more time. That level of detail where we should cut out this word from this quote. That was something where I was giving the commands, but someone had to go in and execute and make it sound good.
Was it editing your book, wasn’t it?
It was but it’s harder in a way because it’s multidimensional, whereas books are just words.
They were your words, to begin with. Let’s talk about the combination of the two. Has it done or is it still doing what you expected it to do and creating a more engaged audience?
The podcast has reached people that the book did not reach, which is something I was hoping for. Part of that is because some people like podcasts rather than books. Some people don’t like to read books anymore and podcasts are something you can text the whole season and someone clicks on it while they’re already on their phone and they can engage for free. For that reason, some people have been willing to engage, whereas maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise. We’re finding that people are still listening to it, lots of new downloads on a consistent basis. It’s getting around somehow. I’m always doing interviews for around the topics so that’s part of it. A lot of it is a word of mouth because people will reach out to me and they’ll say that a friend or someone referred it. That’s what nice about a podcast is that it’s technically out there forever. We don’t know when someone’s going to listen to it.
If you’ve done your job because you’re building a foundation here, it’s evergreen. It’ll still be valid tomorrow. Although, that’s one of the things that gives you the exciting reason for season two when something new happens in the world of consciousness.
We’ve been asked about that. We don’t have one in the works. We’d have to think about what that season is. I’d have to have the motivation to spend all the time that goes into that. It would have to be at least as good if not better. That’s a high bar. I’d rather do nothing than do something that’s not as good.
You’ve launched a new book, An End to Upside Down Living, which I’m only three-quarters of the way through that. I try to get through these books. Your books are more challenging. They make you sit back, think, and reflect. Has the podcast helped the second book launch?
Strategizing A Podcast Series: Interviews have varying levels of impact, and sometimes, the impact is high, but on a small number of people and other times, the impact is high, but over many people.
It has. The two books and the podcast have had a synergistic effect. I know I spoke with one person who read the second book first, then read the first book, and has listened to the podcast.
They’re binging on you and all different media types. Here on the show, we talk about binge-listening. When we talk about the binge factor that creates that, you were a podcast listener first. Did you create an aspect of binge-listening expecting that or were you not that type of listener?
The podcast we created was not the type of podcast that I listened to. I was used to listening to long-form casual conversations, whereas we did an eight-episode, highly curated, edited, and narration version. I was relying more on my producers who work in the space and they know what’s worked in other shows, what keeps people engaged, the type of music to do, cadence, and all that stuff.
You still have a season because it’s nice and short. Even though it’s still hefty in terms of getting through the eight episodes, but you need to finish them. You have them set up so that the next concept flows from the one before it. You’re creating that tie and that bingeability from one episode to the next.
We wanted the audio version to be almost like a Netflix series. We’ve gotten feedback that some people do binge the season. A friend texts it to them and then they’ll spend a Saturday afternoon because it’s 4 or 4.5 hours total. Each had eight episodes of 30 or 40 plus minutes. If people are into it, I find that they binge it and then they say, “Where’s season two?” Those that are into it, they’re enthusiastic. That’s what we find.
I handle the five questions here and some of that is going to be stuff that your producers did for you. I’d love to hear it from your perspective on the things that you had to work at and you had to do. You don’t have great guests because you’re not doing that casual interview style, but you did have to curate the clips from the interviews and what you did. How did you make those selections? How did you make those choices?
We transcribed the full-length interview. We had 50 very long transcripts. I wrote each episode out and then would say, “Slot in Dr. so and so,” who says something about this type of experiment and I go look for it or I’d remember that I spoke to someone about this. I would read one of the transcripts and say, “We need to include that into the script.” It was an iterative process.
It was interesting and time-consuming because you’re relistening to interviews or rereading them in this case.
I would write a script, my producers would look at it and say, “We need to change this.” I would look at it and say, “We need to change this.” We would read the script, listen to the episode and say, “We’ve got to redo this and this.” We had multiple iterations where I flew down to LA to redo things.
It’s quite the process. You have your co-host in with you who is acting as a skeptic. Did you plan those in or did he decide, “This is where I’m going to interject?”
The challenge of being a content creator is that we don't know who we're going to impact, and when we impact someone. Click To TweetWe tried to do it casually where we’re having a conversation and loosely working off of the script by the end because I was so nitpicky about what we said, especially when it came to the science. We ended up going with a script. There was a little bit of spontaneous stuff, but we kept it pretty tight.
There’s not a lot of ad-libbing here.
Not as much as I thought there would have been because I’m so picky.
Normally, I ask about increasing listeners. What did you do in that process? You said it’s been somewhat organic, but what did you do to announce your show and get it out there so you could get some listeners?
Most of the PR I did was around my first book and that came out in October of 2018. I worked with multiple publicists to help get me on shows. That was able to help me build a mailing list and social media following. I had a base of people were interested and I had been telling them months in advance that a podcast was coming. They didn’t know when for a while, because we didn’t know when. Finally, we had a launch date. I remember the first day it launched, we had a pretty good spike in listeners because of people that knew my other work.
You already had a little built-in list go in there. That always helps in that word of mouth, that organic reach helps from there. Have you seen growth in the website?
It’s spiky. It depends on the time. If there’s an interview that I do that has a large following, then I might see a big spike on my website, in the podcast, or in book sales. I do find that interviews have varying levels of impact. Sometimes the impact is high but on a small number of people. Other times the impact is high, but over many people because of the podcast or has a large audience. If I’m offered an interview, I like to do it because I never know who it’s going to hit. There are some where there’s a much bigger impact than others. We can see the numbers. My producer texts me and say, “What’s going on? There was a huge spike in downloads.” It’s because a new interview came out where it has a big audience.
We talked about producing in a professional way that you worked with two production companies and you took this approach. I would say that your show has a Freakonomics feel, which the Freakonomics podcast is one of my personal favorites as the IdeaCast and some of those other ones. There are highly curated shows. There’s lots of scripting in there, but there’s also a hefty topic to tackle. They’re breaking it down into understandable pieces for you. That’s the process that your show is taking. The production is more than that side of things. The production is also making sure that you have good sound and all of those things. What you tapped into is that you have a job to do as the host and as the curator on the production side of making sure that quality comes out. What was the most production picky thing that was important to you?
I’ve always been very concerned with the narrative and making sure that there are few holes for the skeptics to hit because the topic is controversial. That was always my first priority to make sure conceptually we were covered. We hit the appropriate science and we explained it in an accurate way. There can be ways of explaining something that’s not quite true. I wanted it to be as true and accurate as possible. That’s where I started. We also want it to be as entertaining as possible. We would redo lines. I would do a line and we’re like, “Mark, it doesn’t sound right,” or my co-host Matt, “Say that differently.” We would do a lot of that or we need different music over this because it’s a dramatic topic. Change the music, “The music’s too loud here, you can’t hear Mark’s voice.” All those little picky things usually came at the end. It started with the conceptual, making sure it was the right narrative we wanted. We wanted to be the most entertaining possible, given the heaviness of the topic.
They affect on the outside of that. Do you get engagement? Have you been encouraging engagement in the community that’s reaching out to you from the podcast listenership? Do you ask them more questions? What do you do to engage them with you further?
An End to Upside Down Thinking: Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life
That wasn’t part of what we were thinking. We thought that the topic itself would be thought-provoking enough where people would then want to explore further. Sometimes people reach out to me and ask questions or they give feedback. That’s been the extent of the engagement, but we thought that we would give people enough of a base that they could engage on their own. It was the research platform where they would hear a certain scientist and say, “I want to learn about that person.”
This could have been even more engaging that you could get controversial. People could say, “I questioned this.” You’d be able to say, “There’s this detail over here and there’s this interview over there.” It could’ve gotten into this heavy debate and discussion, which could have been an interesting group as well. It’s a different model but interesting, nonetheless.
The people that engage with the podcasts are open-minded. The ones that don’t like the topic or disagree with what I’m saying probably shut it off. They won’t listen.
Everyone always wants to know what some of the best ways to monetize their show. Sponsorship and book sales. What is your thought when you did this? You put a lot of time and money into the production value of it. What was your real thought or goal? You may not have achieved it, but what was that about the monetization side of this?
It was not as big a concern for me because I was in a unique situation at the time. I was still working and I wasn’t thinking that way. I was doing this because I thought it was important information to get out. At the same time, I have two production companies I’m working with who need financially. There has to be some profitability other for it to make sense because they had lots of projects going on. For that reason, the financial model was both advertising and also the $33 bonus, 60 hours of interviews on my website. It’s a multipronged monetization. There’s this subscription for one time, $33 payment. We do have two ads in some of the episodes and we have space for more. A bunch of times in the show, we’ll say, “We’ll be right back after this.” Sometimes there no this and sometimes there was an episode in the ad so it’s there. The way the ad market works. I haven’t been as close to this. It’s based on the number of downloads. If there’s a high concentration of downloads and there’s a higher likelihood of getting an advertiser to put something in.
That might be your miss because the production companies are used to that broadcasting model of it. In your particular case, your audience are highly active and interested in consuming more, or they wouldn’t go through it. As you put it, they give up after episode one if they even make it all the way through. They’re highly engaged and interested in learning more and getting more in going further into it. It might have needed to have a different sponsorship model. That’s where we look at these alternative ways to monetize a show. This is not that common in terms of the way that most of the broadcasting companies or the production companies look at it. It is the way it is. You don’t get advice to set your show up for success from doing that alternative model as easily. You still have your great throws to the premium content. As you get more and more listeners who are of that, they’re more likely to start to convert over time, especially as we start to understand who’s in that 50 interviews circle of that. That’s what you should do. What you should start doing is inserting commercials for those interviews.
It’s available to us because we left in that open-ended break. Part of the process for me was giving up control to the production companies. That’s what I knew I was signing up in exchange for having a highly curated and highly edited type of podcast. There are certain things that the producers have to do, including advertising models and monetization models. How they’ve typically worked is ads within the show.
Now that you went through all that effort and your business models shifting a little bit as you referred to, although I haven’t gotten to the end of the An End to Upside Down Living. I have a feeling that’s what it’s going to tell me at the end as to what you’re doing. Are you thinking that this was worth it and maybe you will do something again like this?
It was worth it. It summarizes a lot of the ideas that I’ve been researching for a long time, it’s in one place, and it has lots of different voices. We’ve got great production companies. I’m happy with that. In terms of the next steps and whether we would do things differently for something in the future, I’m open. We don’t have specific plans for another podcast or another book. For me, at least I left my firm right before COVID head. I didn’t know this was going to happen, but it coincided in an interesting way. I wanted to give myself space because I’ve been working nonstop. I was writing books and doing a podcast while working. I wanted to give myself the time to breathe a little bit and see what’s next. I’m still in that phase. I don’t know exactly what’s next and want to wait for what I feel passionately drawn towards.
Doing things like reaching out there and connecting, that all work in your favor. I want to touch on that because based on the topic of consciousness, we were meant to be connected here. This is the funny part about the story. I touched on it briefly that Laura Powers, who is one of the podcast interviews that I did about a month before yours here. Laura was on the show and she’s telling a story about a listener who listened to her and then wrote a book. I’m sitting back thinking to myself, “That sounds eerily similar to the start of Mark’s book that I read and that the story he talked about listening to a podcast who I know was in the consciousness space.” The whole connection in my brain went off that I knew who she was talking about. I said, “Laura would you tell us who that listener was?” She said your name. I was like, “I knew it.” That’s interesting how that comes together though. At this moment in time, you need to reconnect and reach out about a new book and here I am with an opportunity for you to be featured as well. Those types of connections, I don’t believe that they happen.
We can’t prove it, but I did agree with you that it’s amazing probabilistically that that would happen. Many of the episodes I listened to for a podcast in 2016 were interviews she did in 2011. That led to where we are now having this conversation. It inspired me through lots of other chains of events to do my own podcast, which who knows who’s going to hear. Anyone who’s thinking about doing a podcast, it could be an inspiration because you never know what impact it will have.
You're not necessarily going to know your content's impact, so it has to be about whether or not you feel good about what you did. Click To TweetThe thing is you can start to see the impact of podcasts, books, and media in general having on our consciousness. For me to be able to pull out the connection to that story when I’ve interviewed thousands of people over several years, there’s the chance that you left that big and the impact on her story and I went, “I’ve heard this before.” That says that there was an impact that was left by what the story you told and by the way she said it as well. You had an impact on her by reaching out back to her. That’s where I the true power of the podcast community. The dynamic between the listeners and the hosts where we’re getting into an interesting place of that relationship building and that higher conscious.
Interestingly, I was interviewed on Laura’s show and she was interviewed on my podcast, she’s featured as well.
What advice do you have for other authors out there? There are a lot of authors thinking about what you were advised at the very beginning that you touched on, which was you need a platform. You need an audience that you need to have had this in order to successfully launch a book. What is your advice to them about starting a podcast?
My advice would be for people to ask themselves a question, both for the podcast and for the book. Why am I doing this? What do I hope to achieve from this? For me in both cases is I thought there was important information that was out there in the world, but it was spread out and scattered. I wanted to bring it together in one place and create a context so that people could understand things that might seem to be disconnected and hopefully have a positive impact. After creating that, I wanted it to get to as many people as possible so that those who are interested can engage. Part of the challenge of being a content creator is that we don’t know who we’re going to impact. We also don’t know when we impact someone. The number of people that I’ve heard from relative to the number of people that have consumed my content is it’s a low percentage. It’s hard to know sometimes. For anyone who hasn’t done this before, to be ready for that, that you’re not necessarily going to know what the impact is. It has to be about whether or not you feel good about what you did. That’s the highest priority and that’s the best you can do.
That’s true. I was talking with Shane Snow, an author that I admire for his book, Smartcuts is one of my favorites and one of my all-time best list personally. When I interviewed him, he said that he had interesting phenomena start to happen when Kindle books came out and that he could see the passages that were highlighted. All of a sudden, he had some insight into what was resonating with people. Prior to that, even as an author, very few people still reached out to you and let you know they were touched by your work.
Few people leave reviews on a relative basis compared to the number of people that read a book or download the podcast. That’s hard because it’s like you put something out and then you want the immediate feedback and it doesn’t work like that.
Having some patients is required in both authorship and podcast hosting.
Patients, definitely but being sure that you’re happy with yourself. That’s the first step because if you do the best that you could do, that’s it. Whatever happens, is sometimes beyond the person’s control.
Mark, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us in podcasting. I’ll make sure that everybody knows how to reach you.
Thanks for having me.
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I’m sure you found that quite enlightening, interesting, and a different view of it. Not everyone is ready to put that amount of work into a show where you’re doing that heavy scripting, highly edited, and you’re spending hours and hours on the audio that you create. Some of us like to do this just off the cuff. Do the interview processes and build that in. Remember that this is all a part of why Mark talked about, why am I doing this? What fits that why? The format has to follow why you’re doing this. How the listeners are going to receive that. The strategy around that is critically important. The fact that he spent so much time thinking this through working with producers, figuring this out, and developing it into a format that is going to enhance that.
Strategizing A Podcast Series: Being sure that you are happy with yourself is the first step, because if you do the best that you could do, then that’s it. Whatever happens is sometimes beyond the person’s control.
That is why its listenership is way up. He’s being modest here and that he wasn’t telling you how many listeners. He has over 70,000 listeners on the eight episodes already. Considering how few episodes he has, that’s a great set of download numbers. He’s done well with the show. It’s only going to increase over time as more people search for this topic as this topic is becoming more and more mainstream. As other shows are being built around various aspects of the topic, whether it’s afterlife experiences and they’ll reference maybe his show. As those mentions, as those increases, and as that organic sharing grows, it’s going to create quite the network that is going to still continue to boost a show, even after you’ve recorded it, done it, and put it out there like a series.
It’s not always necessary to continue to create content unless that’s a part of your business plan. Mark’s in transition. He doesn’t know what that is until he does, I agree with him. He should sit back, wait, and then make a decision about whether or not podcasting’s or another book or what might be next for him and what might be that to meet that why of why he’s going to do that. I love that advice from Mark. I appreciate him being brave to come on the show because you’re talking about this and it’s an interesting subject. It’s not in your normal area of expertise. He is always scripted and researched. We asked him to come in and talk off the cuff. I appreciate Mark for that as well.
Mark Gober, Where’s My Mind? podcast. You want to check it out. It’s an interesting show and a thought-provoking topics as well. I have to tell you, this is not one that you cannot pod-fast. I tried, but you cannot do it. You will have to relisten. One of those shows, that’s different in our scope of how we look at different shows in different structures and different reasons why we’re out there podcasting. I’ll be here next time with another show for you.
Don’t forget to check out the Laura Powers episode, The Healing Powers podcasts so that you’re able to know that connection that I made when I made the connection to the fact that we both knew Mark Gober. It’s always an interesting trade-off to find these deep connections and networks in what we do. It’s one of the powers of this show. I love is the connection and networking. It is what I get the most out of on my show. It’s my number one reason for doing it. I thank Mark for making that connection for me, Laura and Adam as well. Don’t forget to check out all those shows.
Don’t miss Tracy Hazzard’s Authority Magazine article about Mark Gober too!
Important Links:
- Laura Powers – Previous episode
- Healing Powers Podcast
- An End to Upside Down Thinking
- Freakonomics
- HBR IdeaCast
- Mark Gober
- An End to Upside Down Living
- Where is My Mind?
- The Conscious PIVOT Podcast
- An End to Upside Down Thinking
- Shane Snow – Previous episode
- Smartcuts
- https://MarkGober.com/
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