I’ve talked about writing articles for years (eg, Continuing to push the LLMs…) , and I’ve even made a few attempts before now.
I’ve been working on this again and I thought I’d share a current example. This is raw work from a Claude instance—it’s NOT QUITE ready for publication; I need to give it its final review and I need to at least link to @ItsVinceQuinn’s episode.
But, this is really close.
The Question Nobody Asks
Most podcasters treat hosting as the activity you perform while making a podcast. What if hosting is what podcasting actually is?
That reframe changes everything. But it’s not how indie podcasters think about their work. The evidence is in what they obsess over: microphone comparisons, analytics dashboards, download numbers. The entire discourse treats podcasting as a production and distribution problem.
Nobody’s asking “how can I be a better host?”
Vince Quinn caught this gap immediately. People talk constantly about their podcasts but almost never about hosting as a craft worth developing. Not just rarely—almost never. And that absence reveals something fundamental about how podcasters conceptualize what they’re doing.
The Gear and Metrics Trap
There’s a reason equipment and analytics dominate the conversation. They offer the comfort of tangible problems. Microphones have spec sheets. You can research, compare, purchase, check the box. Downloads either went up or didn’t. These are concrete questions with definite answers.
Hosting offers no such comfort. You can’t Amazon Prime your way to better conversational instincts. There’s no five-star rating for “knows when silence creates tension” or “prepared enough to skip biographical filler.”
So podcasters solve the problems they can measure. The audio chain gets optimized. The RSS feed gets tweaked. Meanwhile the actual hosting—the presence, the preparation, the skill of noticing when something surprising just happened and following that thread—gets treated as either innate talent or incidental detail.
That’s the reveal: most people see themselves as having something to say, not as developing the craft of guiding conversations worth hearing. The microphone is the tool for getting their voice out there. Hosting is just what happens while they use it.
What’s Actually Missing
Podcasting atomized what used to be institutional knowledge. Radio had apprenticeships where craft got transmitted through proximity. Podcasting has independent operators learning by imitation, copying formats without understanding why they work.
But the deeper issue isn’t the missing training system. It’s the missing conceptual framework. Without seeing hosting as learnable craft requiring deliberate development, the question “how can I be a better host?” doesn’t naturally emerge. You’re just making a podcast. Hosting is incidental.
This explains why people optimize the wrong constraints. Better audio quality, wider distribution—these solve production problems while the actual bottleneck is whether anyone wants to listen past thirty seconds. That’s determined entirely by hosting quality, and it’s invisible to the gear-and-metrics mindset.
The Uncomfortable Shift
Asking “how can I be a better host?” requires seeing podcasting differently. Not as a production project needing technical optimization, but as conversational craft that improves through practice. That’s uncomfortable in a way researching compression settings isn’t. It means admitting you might not be great at this yet.
More than that, it means treating yourself as someone developing a skill rather than just someone with something to say. Vince pointed out that everyone understands quarterbacks require continuous development—the position’s too important to coast on natural talent. But most podcasters don’t see themselves that way.
And maybe that’s the real gap. Not just what podcasters don’t ask, but what they think they’re building when they hit record. Are you making a podcast, or are you developing the craft of creating conversations worth listening to? Those sound similar but they’re completely different projects.
One optimizes for production and distribution. The other optimizes for the quality of your presence and preparation. One asks “how do I get more downloads?” The other asks “how do I earn the attention I’m asking for?”
What Would Change?
What would actually shift if indie podcasters treated hosting like learnable craft instead of just the thing you do while podcasting? If “how can I be a better host?” showed up as often as equipment questions?
I don’t know. But the question feels worth sitting with.
Because right now, most podcasters are solving problems that don’t actually constrain their success. The gear is fine. The RSS feed works. But the hosting—the actual work of podcasting—remains undeveloped because it’s not even visible as the work. And that conceptual blindness might explain more about why most podcasts never find an audience than any amount of technical optimization ever could.