How to Make a Podcast, and Possibly a Reputation, as a Consultant: Three Models

School could be so much better. That's the initial sense, and then comes the chain reaction: the realization that it's not in schools that people are learning anymore, that that's not the point of school; that people want distillations, spoken not written, of some of these great books, to spare them the time and attention needed for reading; that whenever information is propagated, but especially in these new immediate media, it is changed, not least by contagion with the popularity (or lack thereof) of the speaker. So one question underlying all the brilliant ideas you might start to think about: is it sharing and communicating these ideas, or is it attention and aggrandizement you're really after? Respectability, in an older formulation, or nowadays we might say accolades, or simply a reputation? Another overarching question would be, will, over time, the best stuff rise to the top, or will it be lost in the whirlwind?

So for a long time now I've been writing this blog, and for a short time now making podcasts about some of this stuff. The ideal at first was to start a school, but lately it has been the more modest one of simply putting out interesting content. (Or is it vanity, not modesty at all? This blog which no one reads, content no one listens to--perhaps it's how I feel about that vacuum which should let me know whether I'm really humble or vain. Generally I feel all right about it, so humble after all?)

And so what's the next step? Recently a couple of friends, Brian and Alex, have been independently coming to the same conclusion and started telling me about it: what about consulting? Then we talk about it and get all jazzed and then go off and get distracted by something else (at least that's how it goes for me).

Our ideas converge around the areas of coaching teachers online, running tutorials and seminar training, perhaps curriculum restructuring services. I wrote some of this up recently in a post about ROOTS (as opposed to STEM, you see?). We think about drawing up business plans and seeking grants and investors, but none of us knows anything about that, so for my part at least, pretty soon I go back to reading books.

For anyone else out there cogitating on these matters, here we are! Have your people call my people.

Getting Started--

For me, substitute teaching is not a bad day job to allow time for thinking about this more ambitious work, but here are some better role models to look to: Corey Olsen and Jordan Peterson. Their routes to the leadership positions they now inhabit have been quite different. Both, though, started by establishing themselves in academia--getting their PhD, publishing research, being recognized as a top professor at a top school. Now, assuming we can sidestep that foray through the ivory tower and skip to the disillusionment that led to the Tolkien Professor taking off and launching Mythgard and Signum, or to the insight into the zeitgeist the that led Peterson to speak out about free speech and responsibility, which he's parlayed into a best-selling book, that's sort of the goal, perhaps a delusional one.

But I promised three models, and I don't seriously recommend myself as the third--preferring to stay aloof, to do this as a hobby and a fun way to write all those things I would otherwise never get around to, falling asleep reading Concluding Unscientific Postscript, holding the book up in front of my eyes in my sleep-- so here it is: Erasmus.

His colloquys, on courtship, for instance, along with Praise of Folly, have never been more apposite, though he's not quite the popular public intellectual he once was.

Looking more laterally, rather than up into the clouds, and thinking about how popularity works, another good place to look might be Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. More than one person recommended it to me, so somehow they got the word of mouth going. I've only listened to a few episodes, but I'd guess that the podcast's popularity is probably not so much due to their content as their production, their intricate format, the listeners' investment in the hosts' journeys. And again, you might think about how JK Rowling, like Tolkien in his day, has been panned as not actually being all that great a writer. Depending on your tastes, the criticism might be fair. But even if their writing is nothing special in itself, perhaps for that very reason it has spawned indefinite troops of imitators, for what it does show is that everyone has such a story, or the yearning for such a myth to live out, to tell. The nanowrimo instinct, the blog impulse--take and shape it, winnow it down to its basics, reframe this vague impulse into a concrete product and voila!

Voila--

For instance, students learning English as a second language, who know the story and want to read it and discuss it in the original; old folks who have time and can figure out the technology; people our age, wanting to make their own podcasts, their own living as teachers and leaders...

Other resources to start from:

Paideia

Touchstones

Michael Strong

Teach Like a Champion

Partially Examined Life

Great Discourses