Jeff Revilla runs a small podcast theater in Pennsylvania, and he’s noticed a pattern: Podcasters who bring prepared material tend to bomb.
“I’ve seen people prepare monologues. I’ve seen people prepare like standup comedy routines that they haven’t even tried. They just thought I’m going to write some funny jokes. And time and time again, those things bomb. They fail because you’re not in that moment.”
This isn’t surprising advice for live performance. Don’t script it out. Stay present. But Revilla’s observation points to something deeper about why podcasts connect with people in the first place.
The audience in a live podcast recording isn’t just tolerant of spontaneity—they’re there for it. They’ve shown up specifically to watch something happen in real time. A prepared monologue, no matter how polished, puts the performer somewhere else: back at their desk, writing, planning, anticipating. The audience senses the mismatch. They’re present; the podcaster isn’t.
What makes this worth examining is how it reveals the contract that exists in podcasting more broadly. When someone puts on headphones and listens to a conversation during their commute, they’re essentially sitting in on a moment that happened. The intimacy of the medium depends on that sense of being present to something authentic—even if it’s edited, even if it’s been refined. The best podcast conversations feel like they’re unfolding, not performing.
Revilla’s advice to his podcasters—have bullet points, know your material, but “meander through” them and talk from the heart—sounds like basic conversational guidance. And it is. But it’s also a reminder that the safety of the home studio can obscure what podcasting actually requires. In that controlled environment, you can convince yourself that preparation and presence are the same thing. A live audience makes the distinction unavoidable.
But most of us will never perform in front of a live audience. So what keeps us honest?
Here’s where things get uncomfortable: possibly nothing. The home studio offers no feedback loop. You can record something that feels connected while you’re doing it, then listen back and realize it was performance all along—or worse, never realize it. The mic picks up everything except the truth of whether you were actually there.
Revilla describes his home recording setup as “simple” and “safe”—a controlled environment where he knows the routine. He can fire up the computer, fire up the microphone, and execute. There’s nothing inherently wrong with comfort and competence. But comfort can become a hiding place. When you’ve mastered the technical aspects, when you know exactly how your voice sounds in your treated room, when you’ve developed reliable patterns for moving through an episode, the danger isn’t that you’ll make mistakes. It’s that you’ll stop noticing when the conversation becomes a delivery system for content rather than an actual exchange.
A live audience forces that reckoning because they’re present to the same moment you’re supposed to be in. If you’re mentally somewhere else—at your desk last Tuesday, writing jokes that would have been funny in a different context—they feel it immediately. But the listener with earbuds on their morning commute is also present. They’re in a moment too. The mismatch is the same; it’s just harder to detect.
The failure mode isn’t that scripts are bad or that preparation is wrong. It’s that when you treat conversation as something to deliver rather than something to participate in, you’ve stepped out of the moment your audience is in. They notice—even if you’re not in front of them.
The mic doesn’t hide as much as we think. And maybe that’s the substitute for a live audience: trusting that the intimacy of the medium runs both ways. If listeners can feel like they’re in the room with you, they can also feel when you’ve left.
This field note references the PodTalk episode “Interactive with Jeff Revilla,” published May 16, 2025.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://podtalk.show/the-audience-is-already-in-the-moment/