This content was created by Peter Winick. This content was uploaded by Peter Winick. This is a YouTube podcast clip (Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast, Episode 235) recorded Feb 4, 2021 featuring Srinivas Rao. The excerpt is a conversational exchange between two speakers discussing the online-marketing “gold rush” around podcasting—criticizing the blanket advice that everyone should start a podcast, highlighting cognitive biases (authority bias), imperfect information, and the advantage of having an existing email list or platform. The speakers debate how platform size and leverage, rather than intrinsic podcast quality, often drive perceived success.
In the book space, I could Google and find 500, you know, be a bestseller author by Joe Lipschitz from Cleveland that's never read a book, let alone written one or something. And it's like, you know, why are people, you know, there's more money in selling the picks than, you know, to the gold diggers.
So exactly, it's the gold rush, right? So, And then, you know, particularly in online marketing space, what ended up happening was, you know, a few big personalities got, you know, on the microphones and then shouted from, you know, their megaphones of social media, hey, everybody should start a podcast. Now that is the stupidest statement that has ever been made by an online marketer. And I'm sure if one of them is hearing this, they're probably gonna hate my guts, but I'm willing to take that risk. That is the dumbest thing.
I would hope there's none of them hearing this because that's not my audience.
Well, no, it is, it is the stupidest thing that anybody could say because that's like literally saying that, you know what, you know, Nike now only makes size 10 shoes, we should all wear them. Yeah. Well, no, if your feet are not big, you're gonna look like a clown if you do that. And so what ended up happening is that everybody, of course, jumped on the bandwagon. And this is where all these cognitive biases come in. Yeah. There's the authority bias. It's like when some authority figure tells you that, oh, everybody should start a podcast, you go and look at this person's results. It's like, wow, they're making like $70,000 a month from their podcast. Of course everybody should start a podcast. Exactly. Let's not forget that there's numerous, you know, biases here. First off, you have imperfect information. Let's look at that. One, most of these people, what they have conveniently left out— I don't know how the hell everybody has overlooked this, and it really makes me angry because it's one of those things where I'm like, okay— and I'm not saying this because I don't think everybody should start a podcast. There are people who've done wonderful work in the last few years that I think have— I'm really glad they did. Sure. There are other people who honestly, you You know, they leverage their platforms, but their podcasts aren't that good. They just happen to have big audiences. So the thing that, you know, you have sort of an imperfect information problem where the thing that most of these huge, you know, people left out is, oh, by the way, I had 60,000 people on an email list I could tell about my podcast. Exactly. How is that? That's imperfect information.
