Take us behind the scenes. How do you keep the show going?
“I never thought of myself as a creative person, but now I do.”
Not to be corny (I'm gonna be corny), the listenership and feedback keeps me going. It's the people. I really enjoy talking to people and learning more about them, I did that with your founder, Joseph. It was a great time. I get to meet you guys and here I am, a small fish in a really small pond.
What do you want this to become? Do you have a vision for your podcast?
Patrick Gorton
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your story?
Well, my name is Patrick, I'm from a small town in upstate NY called Oswego, about 45 minutes south of Syracuse—most people haven't heard of it. I'm just a small-town guy with big dreams and ideas. I'm a husband, a father, and pushing on 50. I really don't have any big stories to tell, but somehow I happened to fall into hosting a podcast—We Live On A Planet.
I got kind of lucky with it to be honest. I hadn't really thought about it and didn't really know anything about podcasting. Once a week I'd go to the App Store to see what was new and then one day I saw this ad saying "Anchor - Make a podcast". And it wasn't even really a podcast in the early days. It actually marketed itself as "radio re-invented". And I said "Oh, well this is cool".
What about your tools? What does your setup look like?
Well, a tiny little one would be that I would love to be on iHeart and then maybe get noticed to be a syndicated type show where you have a place on the FM dial. I would love to see it evolve into that. To be able to talk with people and make a little bit of difference It's been something that has been something very healing for me.
To know that we all live on a planet is amazing. And we all want a lot of the same things. It sounds so grand, but its so simple. It's important to just have fun with it. Try to be a kid playing in a sandbox if you can. We don't play enough anymore as adults. We're living in this push push go go kinda world and we don't take enough time to laugh or play or laugh at ourselves and have fun. Just push that scary button because it will push you to learn so much about yourself.
It takes quite a while to do a 25-30 minute show. And to do that I do it all in one take. There's this morning process of "Ok, I'm going to talk about what? What is going to grab the audience this morning?" So I always just start with the weather just to get my mouth moving. And then the rest is pretty free form. I'm going over to the history channel to explore that day in history, I'll do word of the day, and explore things to spark a thought in the moment. It sounds so boring when I talk about it, but it's so fun. I just enjoy it. I can practice my thought process with my show and I really like that.
This week we chat with Patrick, creator and host of the podcast, We Live On A Planet. On the surface he’s a totally regular dude, but his story will make you think otherwise. Listen to his story or read on below.
Find We Live On A Planet
I grew up in the time of radio DJs (my age might have given that away). I remember when it was popular to sit by the radio and record your favorite songs to make mixtapes. You looked up to those DJ guys and so I kinda came up with We Live On A Planet to follow a similar radio type format. But it's changed since then and I've really progressed.
For my first episode I talked about self driving cars. You know just to get my feet wet. Just to talk about something. After a short while I got picked up by Anchor and they featured me for quite a few months— and that's when I began to get a lot of exposure. I was very fortunate to get a listenership by being early on the platform, that's really hard to do. 300-plus episodes later, here I am.
So what was the inspiration for We Live
On A Planet?
I enjoy the creative aspect of strengthening my podcast with different apps. I use a little bit of everything to create and I do it all on my phone. I got really caught up in making things perfect early on and got carried away, but now I look for things to help me keep things simple. That's how I found Universe. I wanted a website to market my podcast and Universe made that super easy for me to do. I've found apps like Picsart to help me make graphics easily and I've got a small little mic setup to record on with Anchor. It's so cool what these apps allow me to create. I never thought of myself as a creative person, but now I do.
During the show I'll have my soundboard app I'll say it's my editor.In my mind the red light is flashing "On Air" and I'm behind this glass booth and boom it's on.