Apparently, I'm just insane enough listen all the way to the end, down to nine minutes and 31 seconds.

And I'm crazy enough to ignore the social niceties, to step around all of the arcane furniture that we filled the rooms of our minds and our societies with, just put my hand on your shoulder, look into your eyes, and give a simple nod. That's all you need from me on the "being your friend" side, and anything else you can ask for.

So now I get to put on my "podcast engineer" hat and talk to you about what you've put together.

Your audio levels are good and solid. Way too many people record either far too quietly or way too loud. It's a huge problem and it never has to be. You're hitting a pretty sweet spot and that's nice.

I wouldn't worry too much about your use of salty language, considering that TalkShoe ended up instituting a custom "rating" for language and content called "rated SL for SquidLord" because of my tendency to be quite florid with my language. And by that, I really mean being able to use the word "fuck" as every single piece of a sentence.

The same sentence.

I'm not sure exactly what you want to do with your podcast, but it's worth thinking about whether or not you want a second voice to be involved. One of the things that I discovered that was really helpful for making content that people wanted to listen to was having more than one person in the conversation. There's a long history in sports commentary, for example, for one person to be the "stats guy," and the other to be "the color commentator," the guy that talks about the emotional issues, please to feelings more than thoughts, and generally is there to make the primary host look good by – behind-the-scenes – often being the one that works out the schedule for the broadcast, figures out what bits they're going to be doing, frequently does a good chunk of the scripted writing, etc. It's very hard to both perform a show and produce the show simultaneously; those are not necessarily overlapping skill trees.

But the main thing you need to figure out is how much planning you want to go into a show/podcast. Do you want it to be mostly scripted? Do you want it to just be driven off of a set of bullet points that you elaborate on and talk about a natural way, conversationally? Do you want it all to be free-form and off-the-cuff, but necessarily not regularly scheduled? Do you want it to be run it live as a call-in talkshow, because we have the technology to do that now?

(For many, many years I was doing that last one, which you can probably imagine is a lot different from recording something alone or with a couple of other people, editing it, and then posting it. "Fuck it, we'll do it live" is a very different kind of dancing monkey. I found it really exciting and a lot of fun, despite the crazy amount of work that made me quit doing it, but I can totally except that it's not everyone's cup of tea.)

Figure out what you want to do, figure out what you want it to look like and sound like, and then it should be relatively straightforward to just start putting that together.

You probably know a few people who are qualified to help out if you like.