There’s no school like the old school

One of my favorite resources for learning interviewing skills is the old late-night talk shows, hosted by the likes of Johnny Carson, David Letterman (in the 80’s when he was funny), Dick Cavett and the like.

There’s just something about that era of television that makes the late night shows of today cringeworthy by comparison. Although there was a rough plan on what questions to ask, what movies or books to pitch, the conversations themselves seemed to be genuinely spontaneous, the guest and the host would feed off each other and between them create really funny material in the moment.

These days I can’t watch the likes of Conan, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel for longer than 5 minutes because everything is not only planned, but scripted. Every single guest has some sort of monologue prepared, and the host just feeds into it, they do their bit, hit the 7-minute mark and cut to commercial.

It’s like a neatly baked tray of cookies, no dough coming out of the little things used to shape the cookies. An OCD producer’s dream, maybe, but real entertainment it doth not allow, in my humble yet accurate opinion.

It seems to more or less mimic society as a whole. You have this 3×5 card of “allowable opinion” that you must not stray from, lest you be “that guy” who is ostracized from the herd because he shares a view that is borne out of genuine curiosity and/or conviction.

People fear for their jobs, even businesses that rely too heavily on a single social media platform. Lives are literally destroyed for voicing a single opinion on Twitter that strays too far from what’s deemed acceptable by “The Herd” and those who feign to lead it.

Things like that are why I made the decision during my last days in the Army in 2015 that I was going to be an entrepreneur, and I was going to use the podcasting medium to do so.

I didn’t know exactly what that was going to look like, nor exactly how it would happen.

There were a lot of uncertain moments, plenty of mistakes made, but eventually things began falling into place. To the point that nearly a decade  later, I make my living producing podcasts, audiobooks, websites and such for myself and others.

This craft has enabled something we all crave: location independence. Which means something different for just about everyone.

In my case, it allowed me to weather the Covid storm while living in the U.S. and Vietnam; and then recently to move from Virginia to Minnesota on very short notice.

For someone else, it could simply mean working from home or the nearby Starbucks, versus an office full of men who aren’t their husbands trying to steal a whiff of their perfume.

It’s different for everyone.

Ultimately it’s about living a life of intention, not according to The Plan foisted on us by the Big players of society.