4 Cents a Podcast: The Origin Story

Everyone's managed to find their ways to cope with the restrictions that came with the height of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. We aren't out of dodge from it just yet, but things are starting to loosen up a little. Things managed to loosen up just in time for yet another racially charged episode to occur, but let's not get into that here right now.

They way I've cope with all this is simply by doing what I always do: with the time I have to myself, I make stuff. The most recently thing I made, mainly as a hobby to amuse my friends who I haven't seen in a long time, was a Podcast. 

About five weeks ago, I started scripting and delivering a weekly show I call 4 Cents a Podcast. How did it happen? Why did I choose to do something totally new, when I already had one creative outlet (my writing), to pour my energy into? Well, that's a bit of a long story. As a would-be novelist and fiction writer in general though, long stories are not anathema to me. 

So this week, I thought I'd share with you the (more or less) true story as to how 4 Cents a Podcast came to be. Here it is.

The long-and-short of it is that 4 Cents a Podcast started as a joke, and like most of my jokes, it grew out of a bad pun. (Actually, I don’t know why I used the word bad before pun. That’s redundant. Let me rephrase that: it grew out of a pun. Much better.)

The original premise of the show was that 4 Cents was supposed to be two guys giving their two cents about anything and everything that interested them, despite their opinions…not being worth much. And then the tag was: it’s a podcast so good, it’s not even worth a nickel. (I’ve kept that.) The title then morphed into 4 Cents a Podcast simply because I liked the sound of it. It sounded like the price of something you buy in a grocery store.  

“Say, how much are those podcasts in that barrel over there?”

“What? Oh. Those things? They’re 4 cents apiece."

That’s where it started. 

I just randomly threw this joke out on Twitter several years ago in the hopes that someone else would do it. The thing was, I thought the idea was so good and feared that someone would beat me to it that I got a jump on everyone. I opened a new email account and a SoundCloud account, just to make sure no one else got there first. After that, I sort of let it lie for a long time. My reasons for doing that were fourfold. 

One, I knew nothing about podcasting. I listened to them occasionally, but I didn’t know how podcasters made them. My base assumption was they required a lot of expense sound and recording equipment, in which I was too cheap to invest. (Ancient Wisdom: Know Thy Self.) But boy was I wrong about that, or what? Turns out, all you need to make a podcast is a laptop, a kindle, and a phone. 

There was also the fact that, believe it or not, I don’t actually like talking. With my friends, I’m chatty—you know, because I like them. And it would be rude not to be. Around my family though, the only thing quieter than me is a pet rock. Ask my siblings, my parents, my aunts, my uncles, or cousins, and they’ll probably have difficulty thinking of a time I said more than five words in a given sitting. I blame that—naturally—on my motor-mouth family. They talk so much and so fast, I can’t get a word in edgewise. When I do speak, I get off a one-liner that echoes something someone else said earlier. So at least I get a good laugh out of it. 

Compounding that is the fact that I don’t like the sound of my voice. I had one of those awful experiences years back when my mother played one of my voicemails to me. Goddamn. The person on the other end of the phone sounded like a winy punk-ass, with a dorky, nasally tone. For years, I’d lived with the pleasant delusion that I had a nice deep voice, like Nat King Cole. Hell no. Put a broad New York accent on me, and I sound like Woody Allen. 

“Hi, I’m Woody Allen. This is my wife and my daughter. And it’s just the one woman standing there.”

Finally, there was the fact that the whole joke at the root of this stupid idea required two people. Two People. No second person, no joke. 

So, I let it lie. For the longest time I let it lie. I let it lie so long, in fact, I damn hear forgot the passwords to the account and the email.

Then two things happened in quick succession. 

First—and it’s the elephant in the room we all know and loath—came COVID.

Now, I’ll admit here, even before COVID, I wasn’t the most gregarious, sociable “man-about-town.” I had my haunts, but I also had the option to go or not go to them. When COVID hit, that option went bye-bye. Suddenly, this invisible enemy had me trapped. Boxed in at home. Home…where my family knew where I was. *Audible Shiver*. I needed something to do with my time. Co-host or no co-host, I figured I had to put all my frustration and creative energy somewhere, so why not put it into doing something new that might epically blow up in my face? Hey, at the very least, it would keep me from going stir-crazy and murdering the mail-carrier. (Let’s face it: the U.S. Postal Service has enough of its own problems right now.)

The second thing was a…new friend. (I won’t mention their name because I don’t want them to knife me in my sleep. They know who they are. They’re probably listening now.) For whatever reason, they were interested in hearing me talk. They liked hearing me tell stories about my life, they understood and got my wry, off-beat sense of humor, and when I did both those things in podcast-form, they enjoyed it. So really, this whole thing that started as a joke only exists because of them.

What I’m saying is…if this thing does turn into a total crap show…you’ll know whose fault it really is.  

Even if it does though, until my friends—and that one in particular—stop enjoying it, I’ll keep doing it. There really is no creative experience quite like making something for someone in particular. So, listen in or don’t. I’ll still be here, talking to myself like a looney-tune in a padded room. Don’t feel too bad. At least I’ll never be lacking in good conversation.  

In the five weeks since I've started this thing, I've since made the jump from using SoundCloud as my main platform (which is really better for music, although plenty of interview and conversational podcasts still post there), to Anchor. And every Saturday, including yesterday, I've posted a new episode. As I said, I'll keep doing it now, until I stop having fun and my friends stop being entertained by it. It's definitely a new medium for me, the world of audio, yet at the same time, it's still writing. Just of a different kind. 

I gotta admit, even though I'm not the adventurous type, trying new things every so often can be fun and rewarding. Even if the only reason you do it is to pass the time during a pandemic. 

If you're at all interested in hearing this weird thing, considering checking it out on Anchor.