Binge Factor Media

Are you taking on big, important topics on your podcast but don’t want to intimidate your audience? Do you want to be informative but still entertaining? If you answer in the affirmative, then you will find today’s episode with Dr. Robert Heath Meeks a treat! Doc Heath is the host of TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB, a show that talks about the psychology of everyday life while serving up some baseball-related metaphors and farm animal projective assessments. They bring fun into a psychology podcast, a show that is bound to be complex. Joining Tracy Hazzard, Doc Heath shares the psychology of podcasting for success by diving deep into how he brings his creative vision and play to the show. He talks about the various ways they use to engage more people—from bite-sized lengths to adding humor—and how he sees the importance of motivation to create a show that serves the human experience. Full of great wisdom and fun conversations, this show with Doc Heath is one you won’t want to miss. So unleash that inner motivation and master the psychology of podcasting for success today!

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Unleash Your Inner Motivation: Mastering The Psychology Of Podcasting For Success With Dr. Robert Heath Meeks Of TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB

I had the pleasure of being on the other side with this podcaster a couple of weeks before I have done this episode. I had to invite him back here because he has some of the most original formatting I’ve ever seen. He also has the most fabulous outro. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve shared it with. You are going to want to read some of the unique things that he’s doing. I have TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB, Dr. Robert Heath Meeks. Doc Heath is amazing. He’s got many years of behavioral health with a dual PhD in Neuropsychology and Forensics Psychology.

In TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB, they talk about the psychology of everyday life while serving up some baseball-related metaphors and farm animal projective assessments. They’ve got these interesting and fun bits, puppets, and all kinds of things that you’re going to want to check out. I was analyzed by one of their Sigmund Freud Not. It’s interesting and fun the way that they play with the show. He’s fabulous and amazing here talking about how he built this show with his team, what they think about it, and how they go through it. You’re going to get a sense of the creative vision that he’s got going on here and how you might want to play more with your show. Let’s talk to the host of TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB.

I am glad to have you, not me not being grilled and having some fun and enjoying talking about TherapyBites A.R.T. LAB. It’s an interesting name because your show sounds like it’s going to be short, therapy bites, but it’s not. That’s such an interesting contrast.

No one’s ever brought that up before. Of all the people that have reviewed the podcast, no one’s ever picked that out. It’s meant to be a bit ironic, but the operative term is bites because we’re challenging our own field of psychology because we think that we have gone off the rails as a profession. We’ve gotten more complex and who wants that? I guess some folks are into that. I’m at a nerdy complex stuff, but it may not be helpful to people. I had a patient and I was sharing with them that the definition we’ve come used for psychology is telling you things that you already know in words you do not understand.

I’m going to have to share that with my psychology friends. My daughter says this to me all the time. Every time I ask Alexa to define something, she gives me a word that I need to define again. She’s like, “This is not helpful.”

Our big motivation got to be when we started paying more attention to social media. I have a friend. His name is Richard. He is in the concrete business. Richard said, “Doc Heath said, in the summertime, everybody with a brother-in-law wheelbarrow and a shovel thinks they’re a concrete guy.” It’s the same way in psychology. Everybody with a mic who’s been through a difficult situation thinks that they can do psychology and/or life coaching.

I have a very dear friend. He is a life coach. He has lots of training, but it’s no joke that he graduated from the same place I graduated from that I don’t know if he created or produces it, but Roseanne, which is now known as the Conners. Jackie, who runs a diner, is a former life coach. Chris Farley from Saturday Night Live was a life coach that lived in a rundown trailer beside the river.

The thing is I also have banker buddies that call me Heath and say, “It amazes us that somebody will be out cooking a burger,” and the family will say, “You cook great burgers. You should open a burger joint.” My banker buddy says, “That’s always a mistake because there’s got to be more to it.” You need to dig into the science of the burger or of concrete, or in my field, if you’re going to put yourself out there, don’t get your education from social media memes because that’s low-hanging clickbait.

We have lots of folks that come into the clinic, and I’m going to step on some toes here, but these are our high-value targets. I’ll be a bit more serious. We’re whimsical in the A.R.T. LAB, which stands for Accurate Realistic Thoughts, Life-Affirming Beliefs. We study accurate, realistic thoughts and life-affirming beliefs. We have a little character named Artie, and then we have another little demon-like character named IUT, which stands for Inaccurate Unrealistic Thoughts. We see many people come in and say, “My relationship is toxic.” “Is it? You need a radiation suit.”

Our terminology is a little interesting.

The terminology that you see on social media gets in the way of what’s going on in the brain. The purpose of the A.R.T LAB is to tackle that. We’re taking a bite out of psychology, but sometimes it’s an elephant-sized bite. We’re doing some things to break it down and doing some shorts. We do a thing now called QIQ, the Question In Question, the psychologically nutritious YouTube game show. We take a brief concept that someone has asked a question about and we give the answer, “Here’s the answer.” The audience comes up with the question. It sounds a lot like Jeopardy because we copy Jeopardy. We do that every Tuesday and Thursday. It’s an educational lead magnet.

We’ve had folks that will say, “That was very much needed because the longer form sometimes is too long for my attention span. Doing the short stuff is helpful.” I think if there’s a weak point in what we do, and we have lots of them. We try to tackle them one at a time. We don’t mind having weak points. We look at weak points as opportunities for improving our stuff. That was a weak point that even us, we tossed at some things and people think, “What’s Artie and what’s IUT?” We had this whole zoo of critters with emotional reasoning, catastrophizing, and underthinking ants. We have all these creatures to explain these concepts, and we’re going to use those to write a children’s book. We have someone ask this for a children’s book of all our creatures. We’re going to do that.

You have somebody else write it.

Maybe ChatGPT can help.

It’s not like you don’t have your voice and you don’t have your content. You’ve now got all those videos. Putting them in is going to be an even better solution because at least it’s not going to be some generic answer. It’s going to be your answer. You can force to at least use that. As we were talking about, it’s not a bite-size show in terms of a small bite. It’s like an elephant size bite. You have a lot of character segments and complexity to the show, but it’s not overly confusing to watch or listen to.

We were hoping it wasn’t.

It just flows. It’s an entertainment mode. Sometimes we don’t disrupt enough to get the thought process in. That’s what your show does well in psychoanalyzing and looking for the binge factor of it. That’s what I think it is. You’ve allowed me to buy this disruptive segmenting model of interrupting me with occasional characters or bits or other things that you do allow the concept to sink in. Now, I’m getting something out of each episode that I might not otherwise. I then want to come back and listen to more because I gained something from that. I gained knowledge or perspective.

We’re hoping to make it like a buffet that we don’t come into it with the expectation that every person is going to be a super fan and say, “I love everything,” because what are the chances? Maybe if you love everything, you do need therapy, but there are going to be things that you’re not going to like it. That’s okay. We’re okay with that because we don’t start it trying to appeal to everybody. We know we won’t appeal to everybody. What are the chances that there are now literally a lot of people on the planet? Eight billion people is a lot of freaking people. We can safely maybe slow down on making people. We have lots of people.

Not according to China or Elon Musk.

I like to talk to him about that.

We need to have a chat about that.

That’s something else going on there with Elon that he believes he needs to spread his jeans around.

Maybe he needs to redeploy.

With eight billion people out of the chance, one of my favorite stories is from a minister. The minister said that he was going to preach a sermon. It was a wintry day, and only one person showed up and it was a farmer. The minister said to the farmer, “No one showed up. I guess I should cancel the service. You’re the only one here.” The farmer said, “Preacher, let me tell you something. I got a lot of cattle, but if I go up to feed my hay to my cattle and only one cow shows up, I go ahead and feed that cow.”

It’s a sign.

We look at it that way with our podcasting that there is one person out there that is going to benefit from our message, “My question for you, my team, is that enough? If that’s not enough for you, then we should go ahead and quit, but if changing the life of one person is enough, then let’s do that.” We decided that one person can find value in some things and then we’ll engineer some other things more like a buffet that maybe other people can chime in with. It’s called PMS Analysis. It’s Psycho Malarkey Scale. I’m making fun of your own stuff.

What Doc Heath is referring to is because I was on his show and they sent me my analysis, which is one of the features of this show. They sent it to me so I can hear it because that episode hasn’t quite aired yet. That way I got the full effect of what the episode was going to be like. It was entertaining. It made me smile. A gift that you have is that even if my takeaway of something wasn’t like it didn’t totally hit home, you still make me smile. There’s still a lot of humor in everything that’s done. The characters make you laugh, the little puppets. It makes you smile and laugh. Even if it wasn’t complete that landed for me, there still is an impression that you’re leaving. That’s important.

We’re not trying to hit a home run. We’re trying to get a base hit. That’s it. That sounds weird as I say to you, “We’re trying to get on base with Tracy.”

It’s a good thing we’re friends now.

My wife and your husband might take offense at that. With our readers, we’re trying to get on base. We don’t expect to hit a home run. Your comment about our outro is interesting. Thank you so much. That’s very kind, and we are glad you guys enjoy it. I had a listener tell me because they called me. They said, “I like what you’re doing, but I got to that Dr. I am a-Freud not thing. I couldn’t hardly listen to it. It drove me nuts,” because it’s a friend of mine that does it. We have two guys, both friends of mine and one does Dr. I am-Freud not, “Is this your diagnosis?” “I’m a-Freud not.” We have another guy, and he does Dr. Joong A. Tart.

We think it’s fun and funny. We’re poking fun because our field puts too much stock in psychological assessments. We put too much stock in the WISC-V Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and the WISC Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children in all these pieces of paper instead of putting stock in our patients and seeing our patients as having individual experiences in being unique humans. This is my patient or my client having their own uniquely human experience where we think everybody’s got to be at the very center of the bell curve.

That is the problem a lot in podcasting. I lurk on Reddit. It seems like people think to be successful, you have to be like everybody else. That’s a huge mistake because if you are like everybody else, then either you or everyone else is redundant and unnecessary. If two people or podcasts are alike, then 1 of the 2 is redundant. Find your own thing. Do your own thing.

Bring your own personality to it, which is what you’re doing here, even though those happen to be two other people doing those personalities. It’s still your humor and direction that’s guiding that. What I love about the outro and what I share with people is that too often, there’s this coaching advice out there. These life coaches pop up and everyone and their brother thinks they’re a podcast coach.

The problem with that is they have anecdotal experience. They have their own experience, and that’s about it. They don’t have the data and the years of experience. They don’t have the touching of multiple personalities and different types of people to understand what was working. Their advice becomes cookie-cutter. That’s what you’re saying here. It’s this podcast that looks like everybody else’s that looks like mine.

That’s not the right answer for your show perhaps. Maybe some parts are. One of the podcast coaches’ advice is this long outro where you sell them stuff. It’s like you’ve delivered during the episode and now you get a long outro. You take two minutes or longer to sell them on your stuff. We fly in the face of that and our advice at our company. What we’ve seen is that that encourages someone to not play through your episode. We see a different play-through when you have a long outro.

However, yours is humorous and I keep listening to it because of the humor drawn into it that I didn’t want to shut it off. If you’re going to do something like that, you have to do it right. If you’re going to deviate from conventional wisdom, do it right and be humorous. Make people laugh, then they will buy and listen. That’s the rule set.

You have to get over yourself. I won’t call names because I respect these people, but I do watch podcasts, Instagram posts, and other social media posts from other people in the field. People may not like what we do, but at least I hope they go to sleep because what we did is we took a relatively famous podcast teacher person’s advice, googled and looked at what everybody else was doing, and then did the opposite.

It is brilliant for what you’re trying to do. Why it’s working well is because it is unconventional but unconventional in an effective way, not unconventional just to be different. That’s the problem. It’s unconventionally you. That’s why it’s working. It’s sustainable.

I hope so. We do this whole thing on motivation. There are guys out there and, I respect these guys. These guys are great. David Goggins and Jocko Willink have a big following. Jocko, if you read this, I love you, but you’re wrong on motivation. That is psychological. Motivation simply does not stop teaching that because that’s not how motivation works. Jocko teaches, “Forget about motivation. Get into this one.” I got news for you. Motivation is built on the back of cognition. Discipline is built on the back of motivation. You organize your thinking. How do you do that? By what you decide to find purpose in. It doesn’t matter if anybody else finds purpose in it. Don’t google it to find out how many people find purpose in this.

You find purpose in it, and because you found purpose in it, that gets you out of bed as it does me. I don’t mean to sound Pollyannish, but I get out of bed because I want to help at least one person. If one person gets it, that’s great. That’s fantastic. That motivation then becomes a habit. Habit is discipline because you can look at discipline as ruts and the gravel road of your brain.

It’s an interesting way to think about it.

If you drive on those ruts enough, that’s discipline because why would you drive anywhere else? The thing is also I wanted to add is I tell my team, “If you think something we’re doing is not working, critique it. Let me know because although I love being creative, we creatives can also get into the mindset that our ideas are wonderful and shouldn’t be questioned, and that is a mistake.”

Continual learning is a part of everything that we need to do. I want to touch on something you said before we head into this creative side of it because it is important. The motivation issue is the number one thing. I tell my clients, “I can’t record for you. If you’re not going to be motivated to record, this is not something I can physically do for you. It’s not going to happen. We got to figure out what that is for you.” The conventional wisdom that we hear from the coaches out there is, “You have to schedule a time and do it.” You and I both know that is a recipe for disaster. It’s never going to work that way. Everyone has their own internal motivations and if we can tap into that and figure out what is going to work for you.

My motivation is I’d love to have these conversations. It is way harder for me to do a topic lesson episode where I’m going to teach you something than it is for me to have a conversation with someone. I learn something from every single person I talk to. That’s getting used. It’s also getting filtered. It’s getting turned into something. That’s the creative part for me. That’s what energizes me, taking other ideas and putting them together into something workable. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, as you put it. That works for me. I had to come up with a motivation that would be similar for me to be able to do the educational coaching pieces that are required in my company. You got to figure out how you can do that.

For me, I will show up for one person. If one person’s depending on me, I’m going to show up. We had to force our topic episodes into a livestream situation so that I show up on time. I show up for whoever’s going to be there. I don’t know if they’ll show up. The more people that show up, the more energized I am and the easier it is to keep going and make sure that you do the next week, but I had to come up with that. What is it for you, that motivation piece, besides helping one person?

I like to be a good example to my team. I like to practice what I preach. I don’t want to be selfish. I struggle with selfishness because I want to have my way because I think, “Why not? The world would work much easier if all of you guys just give me my way.”

That flies in the face of having a team. You invited the team in, which pushes you out of that totally selfish view.

The other selfish thing is this, and I’ve told my team this. We’ve had this discussion a few times. I’m not like people on social media that say, “I love all of you, guys.” How could you do that? There are eight billion you guys in the world. You’ve not met them all. You might not love them at all if you met them. I will tell my team and select people. I tell my team, “I love you guys, but to do what we’re doing, you have to get over yourself,” because they were and still are, to some extent, camera shy. What is camera shyness? Send me letters, dirty letters, or whatever. Camera shyness is selfishness because here’s what’s going on.

You are deciding, “I am not going to serve my public because it is uncomfortable for me. I am not going to serve you guys because it’s uncomfortable for me.” That is selfish. I tell my team, “Nobody cares if you’re uncomfortable. They just need help. Nobody cares if you don’t think you’re pretty on camera. They just need help. Nobody cares if you sound like a country bump from Arkansas because they need help.” I had a guest of mine tell me, “We thought it was amazing that some dude from Arkansas is doing this.” I thought, “I’m not sure how to take that.”

I think it was a compliment. I’m going to take it that way.

I remember doing clinical work all over the US on the East Coast. I was in a facility in Boston. Somebody looked at my feet and said, “You’re wearing shoes. I thought you were from Arkansas.” I said, “We wear them when we leave the state. Come to Arkansas. No one has shoes.”

You’re right because I say this to people all the time, “The world deserves your message. It’s on you to get it out there.”

It’s not about building it and they’ll come. It’s not about finding your audience and then doing it. It is finding a gap in human experience that needs to be served. I saw a thing on Reddit that some kid talking about starting a podcast called The Fuzzy Tuba Podcast.

It’s a fun name.

Maybe it’s not about tubas, I don’t know. There’s somebody out there that needs to hear that and then the market takes care of the rest. I heard somebody say, “If you put out a podcast, and the audience for that podcast is 1,000 people and you get 30% of that audience, that is a huge number.” We’re not talking about 30% of 8 billion. Nobody has that, even Dwayne Johnson, but 30%, 25%, or 20% of an audience on a certain niche topic is a huge number.

That’s way more than open rates on emails. We get some people to come in and say, “If I don’t have 100,000 downloads a month, it’s not worth doing for me.” I said, “How many times do you speak to 100,000 people on a stage? Are you happy if there are 50 people in your audience? What if you can do that from the comfort of your home every single week and talk to 50 people?”

I got a trophy behind me. I was in amateur bodybuilding. There’s a guru in amateur bodybuilding that trained bodybuilders who would be particular about what they ate before the show that they did not brush their teeth because they were afraid that the toothpaste had calories. I’m not even making this up. Dan, the trainer, is now passed away. He was a cool guy. He said, “That is not a physiological problem. That is a psychological problem.” He’s right.

It’s the same as what you said. Somebody that says, “I’ve got to get 100,000 downloads,” that’s not a podcasting problem. That is a psychological or, at the very least, a mindset problem because you asked what gets me out of bed. If my definition of success in recording a podcast episode is quite simple, it has nothing to do with downloads, reviews, or ratings. It has to do with making and keeping a commitment to myself. That’s it. If I planned to record a podcast episode and I indeed recorded a podcast episode, then that is a success. Some of that I get from The Green Mile, the Stephen King movie.

Psychology Of Podcasting: Success in recording a podcast episode has nothing to do with downloads, reviews, or ratings. It has to do with making and keeping a commitment to yourself.

I know that movie. It’s great.

They horribly executed the guy. Tom Hanks, using Stephen King’s voice, said, “Eduard Delacroix is dead. The execution was a success.” If I execute a podcast episode, that is my success. I’m not looking for downloads. As a matter of fact, I’m not a podcast trainer, but I don’t even look. People say, “What are your downloads?” “I don’t know.” “You should look.” “Why should I look? Isn’t that something?” People ask Johnny Depp, which I love him as everybody did in Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s not watched every one of them. Never.

We hear a lot of creatives, actors, and people who write and do other things. Once it’s published or aired, they never see it because it was the act of doing it that was more critically important to them. They don’t want the end result to ruin or adjust that view for themselves because they want to keep what that felt like. That’s an interesting model. My team will say, “Don’t you want to listen to it?” I was like, “No. I trust that you edited it. You didn’t make a mistake. I trust that’s there,” but I lived it. I was here. I was in the moment. That is way more important to me than how it sounds on the other side technically.

Even if you do listen to it, you’re not listening to it with the ears of your audience. You’re listening to it with all the jungle of thoughts in your own brain. As an example, I would use one used by famous psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom. There are lots of great books out there by Irvin Yalom. He did an experiment where he did a psychotherapy session. He wrote down his perception of how well it went. He asked his patient to write down how well they thought it went. Here are the results of his little anecdotal study. In the sessions where he thought he was psychotherapy Superman, the patient thought they sucked. The sessions that he thought sucked, the patients thought were the best sessions ever.

That is in perception. I always say this is that brand. We put our brand or message out there, but it means nothing because it only means what it’s perceived us. We don’t get that enough.

I use this with patients sometimes when in relationship therapy, “You do not know what ice cream tastes like in the mouth of your spouse even if you do the whole French kissing thing. You can never know their experience. Their experience is their experience.” We are engineered that way. The creator of the universe made it so that we are unable to know the experience of another person without communicating about it, which is why I look forward to developing a community.

Psychology Of Podcasting: The creative universe made it so that we are unable to know the experience of another person without communicating about it.

We’re already hearing from people that are saying, “I’ve tried everything. I’ve done all the psycho-babble stuff. I’ve gone to woo-woo clinicians and none of that works. I’d like you to share with me what episode I can start on.” I’ll never see them for therapy. This episode, which is free, might change their life depending on what they choose to make of it.

You have an interesting show. It’s very complex and different in the way that it’s structured. You have a team. Tell us about the preparation process and how a show comes together.

I don’t have Hypergraphia, which is a disorder where someone keeps grease pencils in their shower and then writes down ideas in the shower, but I’m close. I have Apple Notes on my phone. I also have an expansive Zeigarnik radar. The Zeigarnik effect, in case you guys haven’t known, is I left the house and the toaster ovens on, “Did I leave the toaster oven on? Did I lock the doors?” Ideas will add weight to my brain until I write them down, which I will do it.

I didn’t know that that had out-turned, but that’s me too. In my company here, we’re addicted to Dropbox Paper, which is our collaboration tool, which is like Apple Notes, but we use it as a company here. It’s like a brainstorming document. You type into it and you can assign things. The team is loving it. It works for the creatives and the to-do list people. It’s covering both at the same time, which is important.

I have a weird thought about this that I’ve shared with my team very hesitantly because I do not want to be fitted for a straitjacket, but I shared it with them and they seem to be okay with it. I don’t believe that these ideas belong to me. I believe that these ideas, for whatever reason, I get them and I’m doing a disservice by not writing them down. I don’t self-censor.

I’m glad you said that because I’ve said those places before. I honestly thought someone was going to say, “That’s a little crazy.”

If they tell me I’m crazy, I’ll say, “You may be right. I may be the lunatic you’re looking for. I’m channeling Billy Joel.”

It’s one of my favorite songs.

That’s my response to, “You’re crazy.” “You may be right. I may be crazy. It might be the lunatic you’re looking for.” One of the biggest enemies of creativity is self-centering. It’s not a bad thing because some ideas will drive a car down a cliff, and that’s never a good idea. You have to be open to any ideas. It’s kind of brainstorming. I tell my team, “You cannot write and edit simultaneously.” You got to pick one. You write first and then you can edit later. I’m not a writing coach. Some of you writer coaches can disagree with me, and that’s okay. You write first because you’re doing that through a different mental network than editing, then you can engage your editor and cut out all the good stuff.

Psychology Of Podcasting: You cannot write and edit simultaneously. You have to pick one. You write first, and then you can edit later.

I would say that 98.6% of the stuff I come up with is crap, but then I watch Jack Nicholson, who is @SunglassJack on Instagram. If you’re not on @SunglassJack, just follow him. It’s amazing. One of his early things, he said, “I write things, and then I read them, wad them up, and throw them in the trash. I go in the trash and I pull them back out because it’s good stuff.”

It’s such an interesting idea the way that we do it and have always done it because I’m a designer first. We always called it a card discard pile. You would be putting ideas in your hand, like playing cards and sometimes you have to discard them, but that doesn’t mean you don’t reshuffle the deck and bring them back. You’re not trashing the idea. You’re just discarding it for now. It might come up to a better time.

I want to take the cream of the crop. I have a whole vessel of milk or whatever your metaphor wants to be. We try to skim the cream off. I did have a writing coach for a while, a very wonderful lady, Martha Alderson. I asked Martha one time. I said, “I had this great idea, but I think I might want to save it for later.” Martha said, “Never do that. Use your best ideas. Save nothing. Put your best ideas out there because then that leaves room for new best ideas.” It gets back to self-censoring.

The other thing as we were talking about ideas and perception, is when you are collaborating with your team and putting your ideas out there for them to view, when they come back, they read it to you. I never edit mine. We edit it as a team so that their perception of what I wrote down might be, “I hadn’t thought of talking about that topic in that way, but now that I hear that, you think that’s a need. I’m glad my idea triggered that.” It morphs into something new sometimes when you leave it there and let that team perception help you refine it because I’m not the audience or the listener as you pointed out.

We have a couple of different types of shows. We’re about to do a bit of a psychological thriller show in a serialized fashion from our own quirky, whimsical, psychological side of things. For now, we do an interview show, which is what Tracy was on. I encourage them to look at the person’s bio and come up with questions they think will be interesting, then I make a list of questions.

If I get to them, I get to them. If I don’t get to them, I don’t get to them. They’re almost back up. If they’re all there, which we all have full clinical schedules, we always can be there. They can all be there. Do round robin. Since they’re camera shy, I’m sitting there under the camera of, “You take number 4, 5, or 6,” when I’m not on camera, then they make it their own and ask the question. If it’s just an A.R.T. LAB team show or just us, we’re going to start doing more of those.

I’m glad because they’re fun.

That’s because people ask for them. I had people complain, and I love complaining because it’s information. You podcasters out there that are sensitive that you don’t think you can suffer complaints, get over it. Here’s a new word for complainers. It’s a $4 word. My dad would say it’s a four-syllable board, information. That’s all it is.

Somebody complains about this information. It’s information you didn’t have. Ignorance is not bliss. You’re better off just knowing. If somebody didn’t like it, what’s wrong with knowing? We had a complaint that, “I thought we were going to hear you and we heard some person from Timbuktu. We have no idea who they are. We’d rather hear you.” We’re going to do one week of interviews and one week a team show, in which we take a topic.

Psychology Of Podcasting: Ignorance is not bliss. You’re better off just knowing.

They prepare on their own about their take on it. I encourage them to challenge me and to be devil’s advocate because if I think I know what I think I know, I ought to be able to put my money where my mouth is. If I can’t do that, then agree to think my thinking, but that’s our two different types of shows. We create individually on our own, then we get together and have a conversation.

This is something that is critical. I’m hearing this again and again from a lot of podcasters. They’re doing more what we call topic-based shows or shows that are themselves speaking. It’s resonating more with their audience. They’re finding a play-through is almost complete and that those episodes have a higher listener rate. They’re binged on more often. That’s interesting that you want to bring both in, and it’s going to be good for you.

I hope so. We’re going to leave the interviews in a longer format about an hour. If it gets over an hour, we tend to split it into two episodes. We had a couple of shows that they had the time. I had the time. It wound up being an hour and a half. We’re not Joe Rogan and not trying to be Joe Rogan. It chopped it in half and made it a two-parter mainly as an experiment, but it is mostly an hour, then the A.R.T. LAB shows with the team are going to be more like 20 to 25 minutes or something.

That’s ideal for you. We touched on this before. You were saying that there is much social media and this stuff that’s out there leaving oppression. If we’re not brave enough to put our actual thoughts out there, ideas, analysis of things, and perspectives, if we’re not confident enough to do that, and then the ChatGPTs of the world are only going to have one-sided information.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about that. ChatGPT has human brains behind it. It’s only as good as its input. The term that I heard way back when in the ‘80s when I was going to be a systems analyst for computer systems was GIGO, Garbage In and Garbage Out. That’s ChatGPT. It’s only as good as what you program into it. We will probably use that, but we will also make it our own. I don’t know as much about it as I should, but it may be a starting point for those who have trouble generating ideas. I could start podcasting now with two episodes a week if everything is in Apple Notes and not get it done if I live to be 300 years old.

That’s my list too. I totally get you there. I don’t need it to make ideas for me. I’m good.

It sounds crazy, but I sometimes want the ideas to stop so I can go to sleep because if I have an idea and it’s 2:30 in the morning, I think, “I might as well write it down because I’m not going to go to sleep until I write it down.” If you guys are wondering about how to stimulate creativity, a couple of quick ways. One is cardiovascular exercise. I get more ideas when I’m doing my Thrive Weekly 5K, which by the way, I can now do in 20 minutes and 29 seconds. I’ve been working at that for a long time because it stimulates such blood flow to the brain. I’m not trying to do a few different things at once. I’m making my feet move and I’m focusing on my breathing because if I don’t breathe, I pass out. No one wants that. Do cardio.

The other thing is to learn some mindfulness meditation. The other thing is to stop self-censoring. There is another thing that sounds crazy, and if it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing. That’s okay. There’s some research out there that science fiction can stimulate creativity in your own segment, field, or sci-fi. I’m a big Treky and Star Wars fan, then also have quirky quotes.

You’ll sign it for a quirky quote or whatever quirky quotes you’ll find are the kindling of continuous creativity. They may mean nothing to you in the beginning, but they can stimulate creativity. You’ll never run out of ideas. Once you start self-censoring, your brain listens to the self-censoring and it feeds you less data. You’re literally telling your brain, “Don’t give me more stuff because you keep telling me it’s not good stuff. I’m open to everything.”

Self-censoring is something that we do too often. I have learned that there’s editing. I don’t need to self-censor now. Let me ask that question. If it turns out to be a dud, we’ll fix it on post. Not going there is one of the worst choices you can make because your audience will be sitting there going like, “Why didn’t she ask that question as a follow-up?” They’re yelling at you. That’s not a good thing when you stop yourself.

The important thing is to have a vision and be genuine to that vision. When finding your audience, they’re looking for the same thing. You’re putting a vision out there as a bit of a vision magnet for others that may see things the way that you do, or think, “Why would somebody look at it that way?” They want to try to see things the way that you do and you’re becoming a vision magnet. There’s a shock jock host who’s passed away now. Maybe not everybody’s favorites. He was my favorite. I thought he had a cool voice. He is Rush Limbaugh from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, of all places, his hometown.

I’m surprised by that. I thought he was from the South. I don’t know why.

Cape is kind of the South. That’s not too far from here. I used to do clinical work up there, but Rush would say, “Don’t be a milk toast. Don’t straddle the fence. No one wants that. Either be all this way or be all this way.” People are looking for that extreme opinion these days. Having done that, what I believe for myself is that I need to welcome disagreement.

I’ll get on social media to stir stuff up. I called it Social Media SmackDown. I will take head on some of this low-hanging clickbait psychological mumbo jumbo that’s put out there. People come on there and tell me I’m nuts, crazy, I should read some books and get updated in psychology. I’ll say, “Fantastic, come on the podcast. We’ll put a camera in your face and a mic at your mouth and we’ll have a live debate. I won’t edit anything you say. I promise I won’t.” No one’s ever taken me up on that.

I’ve only had one in all the time where I disagreed with him wholeheartedly. I said, “I will have you on my show. I will not edit it. I will keep you on.” Only one person took me up on that.

How did it go?

It was one of my better episodes, to be honest with you. I still think his viewpoint is off, but it was the contrast of seeing the two of us talking about it from those perspectives that highlighted why I think he’s off in what it is.

It amazes me. I’m not going to get political, but in our country that we have devolved into such a vanilla type of conversation that if I say something that doesn’t agree with your beliefs, I’m toxic, or if I say something that challenges what you’re saying, I’m gaslighting. That is the death of free speech. That is the opposite of the Bill of Rights. I believe in being courteous. I was raised that way. If I don’t have the right to speak my opinion, eventually, you won’t have the right to speak your opinion. I want you to speak your opinion because you’re doing it is protective of me having that freedom.

One of my favorite quotes comes from World War II. I can’t quote it exactly, but it said, “They came for the Jews, and since I wasn’t Jewish, I kept my silence. I didn’t speak up. When they came for this group, since I was not part of that group, I did not speak up. Finally, when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.”

Even if I have a show and I have my own opinions and things like that, I am fully welcoming of other people coming on the show and even doing stuff, which is some of the weirdest stuff I’ve seen. Bless their heart. I’m sitting there being courteous, but I find value in that because that is their human experience. The highest calling as a human is to be a human and to be a fully present, genuine human in your space of humanity. That’s the great thing about podcasting. It gives many people an economical way to experience their humanity.

Psychology Of Podcasting: The highest calling as a human is to be a fully present, genuine human in your space of humanity. That’s the great thing about podcasting; it gives so many people an economical way to experience their humanity.

I’m going to leave it right there because that is exactly what your show is providing and exactly what you’re bringing to the world. Doc Heath, thank you for bringing Therapy Bites to the world and for airing your voice every single week and the voices of others.

Thank you for all the work you do. It’s been a pleasure.

—

I almost felt a little weird psychoanalyzing a psychoanalyst, but it was a lot of fun to talk about the show from different perspectives, from how you’re building it to how you’re creating it, vision for it, to how it’s feeling and being received by people, the psychology of that as well. I am pleased that the direction that this episode took was mostly about motivation because, at the end of the day, that’s the one thing I can’t make you do. I can get you all excited about the world of podcasting. I can give you all these fabulous podcasters who you want to model and build your shows like or learn from at a tactic that they’ve given you. I can give you every tip under the sun in my other podcast, Feed Your Brand.

I can even do production services and all kinds of things in my company, Podetize, for you, but I can’t make you record. I can’t make you sit down to this microphone and give us your message. I can’t make you interview great people and bring us your connections if you’re not willing to reach out there and ask them to be on your show. That motivation has to come from you.

Doc Heath found motivation for himself. He is passionate about this. You can see it lights him up. He loves it. That makes all the difference in the fun and effectiveness of this show. Don’t forget to listen to the show. Check it out. Go all the way through and listen to that full outro because you are going to laugh out loud and have a lot of fun. Be sure to link back to TheBingeFactor.com.

Check it out. We had an episode where I was on his show and he was on mine. You can see what it looks like when you do a podcast swap and how effective and interesting the two pieces can be because I knew more about him as I’m interviewing him here. It makes for an effective interview between the two of us. Be thinking about that as one of your strategies for doing one of these podcast swaps and check out how effective that was. Thank you all for being here on the show and reading the interview with my great guests, for checking out, being curious, and intrigued by the podcasting industry. Thanks, everyone. I’ll be back next episode.

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