This is another thing with Jamie Thingelstad.

So how does one start a podcast?

Well, that’s the thing I’ve been thinking about lately because I’ve had this desire to do just that and haven’t really known how to go about it.

I was thinking a bit about how one starts a website, and that I did over 20 years ago when I started blogging and has continued to be something that I thoroughly enjoy to this day and reflect back on my blog as one of the kind of creative endeavors that I’ve made and contributed to the web.

I didn’t think a lot about how I started it.

I just set up a blog and started typing.

And it all seemed pretty easy then because nobody was probably reading and, you know, just see what happens.

Similarly, about eight years ago, I started to have a thought about newsletters.

I’d read newsletters for a long time, and newsletters were kind of all the rage, and people were starting newsletters, a lot of things happening on various platforms.

And I thought, that sounds like something I would like to do.

And I pondered for a while, what would a newsletter that I create be?

And I went to the fact that I’d been curating links for years and years, and even at one point had had a link blog, and thought, hmm, why don’t I create a newsletter out of these links?

And thus the weekly thing was born.

And I’ve now been publishing the weekly thing for eight years, and it’s been a really fun project, and one that I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people that they really enjoy.

And over the last couple of years, I’ve had kind of the same itch as it relates to audio and podcasting.

I eyed the medium and thought, that sounds really kind of interesting.

Maybe it’s a little fun.

Maybe it would allow me to express some things or share some things in ways that neither my blog nor my newsletter really lend themselves to.

I’d also gotten a lot of feedback from readers of the weekly thing saying, hey, I wish that this was a podcast.

I wish that you had a podcast to go with this.

And some of them actually just wanted me to make a podcast of the weekly thing, and I actually took a little detour and explored that at some length, and particularly thinking about all the new AI tools, and took the weekly thing content and tried to say, okay, could you create this into a podcast?

And it kind of comes back with what your definition of a podcast is, but for me it didn’t really hit the mark.

There were a number of things about that.

First of all was when you write, you write to be read.

You don’t typically write in a way that is meant to be listened to.

And even more kind of substantial is the weekly thing is a collection of links on the web, and when you’re reading, it makes sense that you would just click on things and then go to that article to read more.

And on a podcast, you’re not going to do that.

So the content just didn’t really make sense to me.

And lastly, a friend of mine was saying, well, hey, if what people are really looking for is just something to listen to instead of read, they could always do that with their own tools and use a text-to-speech engine and make a podcast out of your newsletter as it is.

So I decided to kind of go a different way as I was thinking about this, and I started to think, well, you know what?

I need to kind of think more basic.

What is it that I want to do?

Well, there’s just certain times when there’s something on my mind, and writing about it or putting it in the weekly thing really just doesn’t feel like the right way or the way that I would like to explore that topic.

And as I started to think through that more, what I realized is that I needed, get ready for it, another thing.

And so I started thinking about, well, I have my website, thinkalsit.com.

I have my newsletter, weekly thing.

And now I can also have a podcast called Another Thing.

And so that’s kind of how I got to where I am.

Now, I’ve mentioned that this is something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years, and I’m just now here doing this.

And I think a big part of that is because, frankly, it’s something I’m pretty anxious about.

The idea of recording my voice and sharing that feels, for some reason, just much more anxiety-producing than writing or publishing on a website.

I’ve also kind of tried to figure out, well, is this something I’m going to do on a regular schedule?

Will it be every week, just like the weekly thing is?

And honestly, a big part of the challenge, I think, with podcasting is that when I listen to podcasts, I listen to a lot of what I would call professional podcasts, or podcasts that are recorded by teams of people.

They’re professionally edited.

They’re really a product of a company.

They’re not a hobby project or something that somebody’s doing just for fun.

And as a result, kind of your expectation is a certain level of quality that is just not going to be there for something that is a project like what I’m doing here with Another Thing.

So it seemed very anxiety-producing and hard and so easy to kind of say, like, well, let’s wait and do that later.

And frankly, just like when I first sent the weekly thing and when I first started blogging, I really don’t know what is going to become of this structure and this format, and maybe it’ll evolve into something with guests or doing something more formal.

But for right now, I’m just going to play an experiment.

So we will see together where this goes.

Now, the question you might be wondering about is, well, why now?

Why today, after a couple of years, are you finally deciding to sit down and record some audio?

The interesting thing is that last weekend we were at an art fair in Afton, and we were looking at various things and walking around, and as we walked down this one section of the art fair, there was a little blackboard set over to the side, like a blackboard easel kind of thing, and on it, written in chalk, was the saying, be brave enough to suck at something new.

And when I read that, to me, I instantly read that and thought, that’s that podcast that you’ve been thinking about doing.

Be brave enough to suck at something new.

I love the thought there because it connects back to kind of a beginner’s mind, right?

Like to know that you’re always learning, that at some point you have to be new at something, and you’re not going to be great at it.

You’re going to have to figure out things, just like I did with my website, just like I did with the newsletter.

Try something new.

And that sign resonated with me so much that I actually took a picture of it and I shared it on my blog, and then a reader of my blog, actually somebody who knows some of the same folks that I do, said that that reminded him of a saying from John Carlis.

And John Carlis, also known as Dr. Carlis, was the dean of undergraduate studies when I was at the University of Minnesota studying computer science.

And John Carlis is somebody I actually took a class from.

And Brad, who shared this, said that it reminded him of something that Dr.

Carlis had said, which was, quote, it’s important to do things from time to time where you are the dumbest kid in the class, end quote, which I thought was also a very good kind of nudge in the way of saying, let’s do this.

And it reminded me actually of a story, my favorite story from Dr. Carlis.

I took, I’m not sure what the name of the class was, but it’s the class when we learned Scheme, which is a Lisp variant.

And Dr. Carlis was, it was the first day of class, and Dr. Carlis was kind of taking inventory in the classroom, and he asked all the students, he said, if you know a programming language, raise your hand.

And it’s a computer science class, so everybody raises their hand, of course.

And then he said, if you know two languages, keep your hand raised.

And pretty much everybody has their hands up, and he gets to three, and most people still have their hands up.

He got to four languages, and at that point, a number of people actually lowered their hands.

And then he got to five, and there were just a few hands up in the class.

I was one of them.

And he then, you know, I was feeling kind of proud, and knew five languages and all that.

And then he said, all right, for everybody that has their hands up, this class is going to be very difficult for you, because this language uses different structures, and it’s going to be very different than the other languages you’ve programmed in.

And sure enough, he was right.

So that story of Dr. Carlis and all this kind of brought me to the mic today to say, all right, it’s time to get unstuck.

It’s time to do something new.

So here I am, sucking at something new.

I’m looking forward to learning what I want to do with this and how I’m going to explore it.

And until then, I will see you next time.