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Victorians took pictures of their dead loved ones and the easy reaction to that statement is how creepy but here is the useful lesson for podcast hosts the things you make become part of people's memory of you and sometimes part of their memory of someone they love today we're going to talk about how to make a podcast that leaves people with something more durable than another disposable piece of content so
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Welcome back to Your Mic.
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My name is Freddie Cruz, founder of Speak Podcasting, and this episode is presented by the Speak Originals Network, home to shows like Made in House Houston and The House of Theft.
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Learn more about the shows at speakpodcasting.com slash speakoriginals.
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Now first, we've got to get the history right.
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Postmortem photography was a real morning practice in the 19th century.
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Families sometimes photographed loved ones after death, especially children.
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Photographs could be expensive and rare, so for some families, that photograph was the only image they would ever have of that person.
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These were not necessarily creepy souvenirs.
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They were mementos of love and loss, something we take for granted in the iPhone age.
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And the internet, well, we made this history stranger than it ever needed to be because not every old stiff-looking Victorian person is actually dead.
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Early photography required people to sit still for long exposures.
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The stories about every corpse being propped upright with wires or given painted eyes are heavily exaggerated.
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Now, why does that nuance matter?
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Because creators should be allergic to a story that gets more viral by getting less true.
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If the real story is quiet, human, and complicated, like all of us are, but the fake version is more shocking, tell the real one anyway.
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Trust is built in those choices.
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It's all about creating artifacts and not just posts and not just recording episodes.
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Photography changed morning because it gave people something to hold on to.
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Podcasts do something similar, but with our voices.
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A person's voice carries more than just information.
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It carries pacing, humor, nervousness, accent, odd phrases, the exact way they say somebody's name.
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And that means your work has a second life you'll never be able to measure in analytics.
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A listener might save an episode, one that you possibly might despise because it helped them through a hard year.
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A family might keep an interview because it captured a grandparent's story and that grandparent may have just passed away last month.
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A client may return to an episode years later because it reminds them why they started.
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You'll never be able to manufacture that kind of meaning.
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But you can make space for it by asking better questions and by resisting the urge to turn every episode into a race for speed, novelty, and reach.
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The personal is not automatically meaningful.
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Here's the other side.
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Just because a story is personal doesn't mean it belongs on the internet.
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Right?
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You never have to bleed on the microphone just to create something lasting.
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The question is not, how much can I reveal?
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Or in the LinkedIn bro space, how authentic can you be?
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The question is, what does this story help somebody understand?
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If you talk about grief, give the listener somewhere to stand.
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If you interview somebody about losing, don't treat their pain like a dramatic beat.
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If you share a hard personal experience, identify the purpose, what changed, and what they can take from it.
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That's how you make memory without making trauma content.
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Here's another lesson.
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Record the stories that disappear first.
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If you host an interview podcast, and this is where it's most helpful, here's your action item.
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Find one person in your life whose story you assume you already know.
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Record an hour with them.
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Ask about their first job, the place they grew up, the worst decision they ever made, the best advice they ignored, the thing they wish people knew about them or even asked about them.
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Do it cleanly, do it with good audio, and do it ASAP.
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Maybe you'll never publish it.
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And that's not the point.
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The point is that every good host has the power to preserve a voice, a memory, and a story that would otherwise vanish when people who know it are gone.
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Victorian post-mortem photography was not about a fascination with death.
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It was about refusing to let a person disappear without a trace.
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Make work that does the same thing.
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Not louder.
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Not more dramatic.
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Instead, something that lasts longer.
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So, do us all a solid.
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Send this episode to a podcast host who needs the reminder that their voice can be more than just content.
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It can be an artifact.
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This is your mic.
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Leave something worth keeping.