Hey, I heard you have a podcast! What is it about?
I have a podcast called Younger Smarter Better, which is all about teaching young adults essential life skills and habits to get a better start to their adult life. Some of these skills include money and time management, goal setting, building healthy habits, and other topics along those lines. I have had the honor to interview various authors, teenage entrepreneurs, and even an ex-NFL player.
That's Interesting. What made you decide to start a podcast?
After editing for my YouTube channel for multiple years, my Mom reached out to me to see if I would be interested in learning how to edit podcasts for one of her upcoming projects. Of course, I agreed because audio editing can't be too much harder than video editing. So we both got tickets to go to the Podcast Movement 2018 conference.
A selfie from the first day of the PM2018 conference.
Initially, I was going to learn about podcast editing and see if it was any different from video editing. My Mom and I decided that it would be best for us to split up, take notes, and then teach each other what we had learned. Mind you, I was the youngest person there by a long shot. I was 16 years old, and I think the next youngest person must have been in the mid-20s. So I joined these discussions talking about building a podcast as a 16, kinda just chilling out talking to 30 and 40 year olds about their podcast dreams.
After one of these long brainstorming sessions, I started coming up with the idea of making a podcast to teach other young adults about skills that I had learned from reading instead of paying attention to math class. I found that reading business books and time management books were a much more practical use of my time than measuring angles of shapes.
The original note that Justin gave me for a title idea.
At the time, I was talking to Justin, who was a teacher who had his own podcast about soft skills, and he came up with the name of Younger Smarter Better. The name stuck, and I decided that I would start taking steps to make the Younger Smarter Better podcast a reality.
Podcast concept art Circa. 2018
Eight days later, I had concept art made for the logo, and One month later, on September 3rd, I released the first episode of the Younger Smarter Better podcast. Fun Fact: This episode was recorded in my uncle's closet with a microphone I accidentally brought with me on our vacation. (Closets are great for recording because the cloth on the walls absorbs the ambient noise)
One of my more recent episodes reflecting on some of my lifestyle decisions.
I have swayed back and forth between making an episode every week, every other week, and taking breaks for months at a time. I am currently in the middle of a break to collect myself after entering quarantine, graduating college, and moving to another state, and then moving three more times in the past few months. I plan to get back to the podcast as I begin to collect more and more inspiration from new books and a new phase in life of starting college and starting new productivity projects.
You can listen to the past 69 episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcasts are available. Links to those platforms are available below.