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Podcasters, Please Do Your Homework
I listen to a lot of podcasts, typically the equivalent of 30–50 hours each week. It’s a habit I started a few years ago when I had a job that put me behind the wheel of a service van for about 300 miles a day. I listen to podcasts at anywhere from 1.2X to 2.7X normal speed so I get through them pretty quickly. The podcasts I listen to cover a wide variety of topics.
One of my pet peeves is when podcasters have not done their homework on a topic. I get it, they’re under time pressure to record an episode, edit it, and release it. Most podcasts are small operations, with only one or two people doing all the work of trying to make it sound professional in a highly competitive environment. I would argue, however, that paying attention to the small details will make a podcast all that more professional and less likely to raise the ire of people who are tuned into a particular fandom or who have professional knowledge of a subject.
In one recent podcast, the hosts were talking about the appearance of (spoiler ahead) a dragon from the HBO series Game of Thrones in an episode of the HBO series Westworld. They didn’t know why the dragon would be there and went on and on talking about how it makes no sense to have a GoT dragon there. Had they done a little homework, they would have known George R. R. Martin had seeded the idea of Westeros being one of the parks on…
