One of the more fun things about getting your colleagues more famous is doing podcasts. I’ve been a podcast champion for years and have encouraged my PR partners to secure them.

So now I am looking to start one of my own, and recently connected via LinkedIn with someone who has been running them for about 8 years. Big shout out to Adam Merino at Influencerr TV https://www.linkedin.com/company/influencerrtv/.  He’s a pro. We were discussing how to launch a podcast today, and he said to visualize one of three people – someone you know that want to help, someone you visualize, and yourself from ten years ago.

Several people that I’d want to help, and each for different reasons, and those will be future topics. I’ve put together campaign playbooks that utilized a Mr. Potato Head approach (the headshot of one person on the bio of another on the demographics of still another) so visualizing the second person is easy. On that third person, my mind immediately went to the Yardbirds song “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” from way back in 1966. The Yardbirds were the breeding ground for Eric Clapton, then Jeff Beck, then Jimmy Page. Although their most memorable songs were written by outside writers, they had a few of their own. “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” was one of them. They were in their early twenties when they wrote it, and it is about looking back yet not sure if it was a dream. The surviving members are in their late seventies now, so looking back that long probably seems like a dream now. To commemorate his tenth year in the music business, one of Philadelphia’s greatest cultural icons, Todd Rundgren, devoted half of his 1976 album Faithful to incredible covers of that Yardbirds song and others popular in that year such as “Good Vibrations” and “If 6 Was 9.” Confession time – when I’ve played the Beatles’ deep cut “Rain” I am more familiar with Todd’s version than the original, so that is the one I play live.

Back to the podcast. So what would I say to myself of ten years ago (that would be 2013 for those of us not good at math)?

• Remind yourself to take the meeting. And don’t be afraid to take a day away.
• Turning sixty isn’t nearly as scary as turning forty. You will still have most of your own hair and it will be in the original color. Own it.
• ProTools is only half the Satan that Dave Grohl says it is. Sometime in the next ten years, you will purchase a licensed copy and will learn to not hate it.
• Embrace new technologies such as ChatGPT and NightCafe, just like you did with blogging a decade earlier. Play with them and see how you can work them into your toolkit.
• Cherish every conversation – in person, over the phone, or digital – with your parents. You never know when it will be the last one.

My two cents. Podcasts will not take the place of blog posts. There are many channels out there. Embrace all of them that work for you.