As promised, I’ve released the final episode of The Informed Life podcast. Billed as an “epilogue,” it was an opportunity to share what I learned from producing the show. There are two categories of lessons:
- About producing a podcast
- About the show’s subject
I’ll summarize them here.
First, about producing a podcast. I got into this thinking it’d be easy. The first interview I edited disabused me of that idea. Fortunately, by the second episode I’d discovered Descript. It’s not an exaggeration to say this tool made it possible for me to produce the show.
And that’s because I mostly did the editing myself. If I’d had a budget (or even a business plan) for the show, I might have outsourced this. But I didn’t. Except for a stretch of the show’s run where I got editing help from the excellent Sarah Clarkson, I did most of it myself. (Note to self: DELEGATE!)
When I launched the show, I chose Libsyn as the hosting provider. My mind never really gelled with this system, and when Descript launched one-click publishing to other platforms, I migrated to Buzzsprout, which I found much easier to use.
There’s more to producing the show than this, and I cover some of it in the podcast. But now, let me share some insights into the show’s subject.
The main lesson here is that – absent a “personality” (e.g., Joe Rogan) — a podcast needs a focused topic. The topic must be clear enough to foster recommendations. Someone must be able to say “I know exactly who this is for – and I’m gonna tell them about it.”
TIL started as a way for me to do research for a book about personal knowledge management. (What became Duly Noted.) But I soon reverted to discussing information architecture and UX design more broadly. This was a mistake.
While in my mind IA and PKM are clearly related, both topics have different audiences. I expect there’s some overlap between them, but not large enough to be an “audience.” People who come to the show expecting PKM and hear IA will likely be disappointed - and vice versa.
To summarize what the show was about, I built a Graph RAG instance on transcripts from the entire run. I asked an LLM to summarize what the show was about, and it responded with seven topics. Some (e.g., UX design) were expectable, but others surprised me. Check out the epilogue for more.
As I mentioned in my last interview with Peter Morville, I enjoyed producing the show. I especially liked having the opportunity to catch up with (and learn from) people I admire. But after Duly Noted came out, TIL had served its mission. It was time to move on.
Thank you for listening all these years. I hope the show was of value to you – and that you stay tuned for what’s coming next.