There is a class of thing about your show that nobody will ever mention to you. Not your co-host, not the people who listen every week.
Jason Tieri, who edits podcasts for clients, arrives at it sideways, talking about mouth noises. Some hosts never notice they make them, Tieri says, because they probably never listen to their own finished episodes. Then the same admission in the first person: Tieri edits the file and does not play the finished copy.
“I already recorded it, I listened live, and then I edited it. Why would I want to listen to it a third time? But it probably is good to do, because you may find things that you’re doing that maybe your host isn’t gonna tell you, or your fans aren’t gonna tell you, because they love you.”
Affection is the explanation Tieri reaches for, and it is the one most of us would reach for. Tieri has an instance ready: a word used wrongly, caught later in the edit, and nobody had called it out because they knew what was meant. On that account, understanding what someone meant is what people who like you do, and it is also what leaves the mistake in the file.
If these field notes spark your thinking, you'd like the Podtalk Community — a small forum where indie podcasters talk craft, not hype.
https://podcaster.community/
Craig Constantine, who hosts this show, supplies the reason a third pass is not a repeat of the first two. Listening back, he says, he finds he did not hear the conversation the first time. He was inside it, thinking, doing the work of being in it. There is a freedom, he says, in listening without having to think. The person who made the episode is the one person who could not hear it while it was happening.
None of which makes either man do it. Tieri says the third listen probably is good to do, and stops short of claiming to do it. Constantine does listen, mostly by falling over old episodes at random, and reports both things at once: surprise at how good they turn out to be, and a cringe at every one of his own contributions. “Shut up Craig.” So the third listen is not a cure for the thing that keeps people away from it. Tieri’s own answer to disliking the sound of a recorded voice is to have learned to ignore it. Clients arrive unable to start a first episode at all, by that account, for the same reason.
What the third listen would catch, in Tieri’s own example, is a habit of saying “yeah” a lot in an interview. That is the size of the thing. Too small for a co-host to interrupt for, too small for a listener to write in about, and small enough to be in every episode you have ever made. The faults that survive are not the ones anybody is protecting you from. They are the ones nobody could be bothered to mention.
This field note references the Podtalk episode “Production with Jason Tieri,” published May 24, 2023.
This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://podtalk.show/what-nobody-is-going-to-tell-you/