Two best friends on an endless search for inspiration. It's not a podcast yet, but feel free to listen.

Nathan P. Woodard is a writer and comedian. Andrew "AJ" Estes is a locksmith with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. They both moved from small midwestern towns to Louisville, Kentucky in the early 2010's, and after meeting through AJ's former roommate (who was also Nathan's former bandmate) they became fast friends.

We Don't Have a Podcast Yet is a satirical take on the culture of straight white men in their 30's feeling like they ought to have a podcast. It's also an excuse for two straight white men in their 30's to have a podcast.

Statistically speaking we have a diverse audience from all parts of the globe. Who they are personally is a mystery; a small Venn diagram of people young enough to laugh at bathroom humor but also somehow old enough to laugh at jokes about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
 

Summer of 2019 we started bouncing ideas off each other. We had worked on creative projects together in the past and had a lot of fun, the podcast was just a way of formalizing that relationship; committing to hanging out and writing together every week. One of the biggest influences in creating We Don't Have a Podcast Yet was the Three Stooges; not the slapstick aspect but the social commentary of these mediocre buffoons living through the Great Depression, hoping to strike it rich by scheming and scamming their way into all sorts of jobs they clearly weren't qualified for. We both had some experience with podcasting prior to We Don't Have a Podcast Yet, and Nathan already owned a lot of recording equipment so once we had the idea, it was off to the races. We recorded the first six episodes in one weekend and had them ready to go before we started promoting the show on social media.
 

We release two episodes a week. Mondays is our "brainstorming" episode where we bring our own ideas, take listener submissions from our hotline, and consult with the Pod-Tron 4500; an artificial intelligence we trained to generate podcast names. We pick our favorite from that week's ideas and release a premium episode on Patreon where we try out whatever concept was that week's winner. Nathan has four children so we tend to record after they're in bed. Monday episodes take very little preparation, just a few minutes to pick ideas and maybe devise an opening bit. Our premium episodes on Friday vary wildly; sometimes the format is just a candid conversation or a review of a film, other times we're forced to write an hour's worth of haiku or a 90-page screenplay about a detective with a moon for a head. Since the start of the pandemic we've been recording remotely using Zencastr, usually the night before an episode is released. While it's always better to manually edit a podcast, Zencastr's automatic post-production features usually do a pretty good job of cleaning us up and making us sound professional, and has been totally worth the cost. We've been extremely lucky to have supporters on Patreon, their support covers the basic costs as well as unforeseen expenses like AJ having to drive to the mall and buy a new mic when his old one crapped out.
 

Our only financial support comes from listeners. If you get us drunk we might act all high and mighty and claim it's because we won't "sell out" or we might say we'd love to have a big corporate sponsor, it could go either way, honestly. The truth is: we make the podcast for us. We go into every recording session thinking "what's the funniest thing to me? What's going to make my best friend crack up?" The fact that anyone else enjoys the show is a bonus. We're incredibly grateful that people seem to enjoy it, but from the outset we acknowledged that 99.9% of podcasting is just yelling into a void and if that was going to be the case, we should at least have fun with it. Whatever success we've found I'd like to smugly think comes from people appreciating that unpolished authenticity.
 

Mondays are easy, we both come with two rudimentary podcast ideas, hopefully a listener has called our "Podcasp Hotline" (that's 702-PODCASP, we tried to get "PODCAST" but it wasn't available) and then we select a couple of podcast titles from a list that the Pod-Tron 4500 generated. Sometimes people think we're making up the Pod-Tron, and we can't stress this enough: it's a real Artificial Intelligence coming up with these stupid ideas. Currently we've been recording remotely using Zencastr due to Covid. It's not without its bugs but it's gotten drastically better in the last year and having isolated raw wav files of each person makes mixing and editing so convenient. Nathan has an Audio-Technica AT2020 running through a Zoom R24 as an interface with Loopback to map channels and some old Sennheiser headphones. AJ uses a Blue Yeti X microphone and headphones of unknown provenance. The majority of editing is done in Adobe Audition, with After Effects and Premiere to produce videos for social media.

We don't go out of our way to book guests but when we do it's usually serendipitous. Last October we happened to be doing an episode about cover bands, and our friends The Sheastie Boys (an all-female Beastie Boys tribute) were playing a Halloween show in Oakland with The Mummies and the inimitable John Waters.
 

We once bought an ad on Instagram and it told us the only people who clicked on it were 13 year old boys. Out of that cohort roughly half sent us "lightly racist" threats and harassment. We also once bought an ad on Overcast that said something like "Please help us we spent $1000 on an ad and we still don’t know what we’re doing" and now I think a little less than 20% of our listenership comes from Overcast now so I'd say if you got a little money to spend, that's where you should spend it.
 

- If you're the one editing a podcast, don't get too concerned with how dumb you sound. Deleting every time you misspeak or say "uh" won't make you sound like a pro.

- Also if you're the one editing, learn about LUFS and how to normalize loudness. Having your podcast at the same levels as the big boys will make you sound like a pro.

- Respect the fact that you have an audience. If they're expecting an episode every week on a certain day, do everything you can to meet that expectation.

- If you're looking to get rich, start a pyramid scheme. If you have a specific point of view that you think a niche audience might rally around and form a community of like-minded people, welcome to podcasting.
 

Search for "We Don't Have a Podcast Yet" anywhere and we should be the top result. Other people might be saying that phrase, but we're the only ones who had the guts to run with it. Join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/wedonthaveapodcastyet, follow our Instagram @wdhapy, and if you have an idea for a podcast we would love to hear all about it. Call the Podcasp Hotline at 702-PODCASP (702-763-2277) or send us an email at wedonthaveapodcastyet@gmail.com