Episodic podcasts don’t require the listener to back up to the beginning to get caught up. The most recent episode is sufficient, and even someone does take an immediate shine to your content, they might go back and pick up two or three of your prior episodes. It's not all that common where people download your entire catalog. 

Or is it?

My bigger concerns when people back and listen to everything ever produced by me are twofold.

1. Dealing with evolved best practices. 

2. Dealing with evolved cultural norms.

I am deep in the process of fixing some poor decisions I made when I started this show back in 2018. In short, I’m (finally) combining everything into a single property instead of relying on various disparate systems to present the show and episodes. The hard work is the boring part where I copy and paste content from various platforms to the new platforms. As I do it, I'm seeing some things that I'm not sure should be out there anymore. 

Can I trust a listener will know that any bad advice I gave back then has been updated? I don’t think I can. I don't mention the date during the recording. And podcast listening apps don’t go out of their way to show the date when a show was recorded. And I don’t really want them to, as I’m working hard to make evergreen content that is discovered by search engines, so I don’t want someone turned off by thinking the content is old and outdated. Except sometimes it is outdated! Agh! The angst is real.

Should a podcast be held responsible for what they said 10 years ago? Or should the responsibility fall on the listener to examine publishing date so that they take the contents with the context of time? That just sounds weasely as I type it! 

I don't know the right answer to this question. I want you to think about it. I think everybody has to come up with their own right answer. 

What are you going to do? What's your plan with all of this? Maybe you should have this conversation with another podcaster to find out what their plan is. I think these kinds of decisions are best made when we discuss them together. So talk with other podcasts at the next meetup, online chat, or when you go to Facebook or Reddit to see what the various forums have to say. Ask your fellow podcasts how are they dealing with the skeletons in their podcasting closet. 

And of course, you can tell them it was an episode of Podcast Pontifications that sparked the question. Yes, this is me asking you to tell someone to listen to this particular episode (and the whole show) because it’s helpful for any working podcaster, right? I mean, that's why you listen. 

If you want to tell me what you're doing to address your podcasting skeletons, email me at <