Basketball had Michael Jordan. Politics had Abraham Lincoln. Cooking has Martha Stewart. Podcasting, however, has Leo Laporte (founder of the TWIT network), the unparrelled king of the audio broadcast medium. While Leo was not the inventor of podcasting, he has taken it to levels unimaginable in terms of notoriety and revenue, for an independent producer.
Leo is not without his critics though and I am one of them. I appreciate his talent and consume his products on a regular basis. However, there are couple of issues which are very difficult to ignore. Leo’s “nice guy” persona seems to rise and fall depending the show and guest.
Recently, I noticed a Twitter account dubbed “@leofail“, apparently another one of Leo’s critics. I tweeted to the owner of this account that I liked what he was doing because Leo is often not “nice.” A few hours later I received an “@” message from none other than Leo himself:
While at first I wanted to argue with Leo, after thinking about it a bit more, his point raises interesting questions: How many interesting people are “nice”? How many “nice” people are actually “interesting”? I must admit, many of the most interesting people with which I am acquainted are a bit rough around the edges.
So what do you think: Can a person be both “nice” and “interesting”?
Shaun. Being nice is something you do. No one does it all the time. However making a choice to be nice while in the public eye is something you’d have to strive for. Take Marie Osmond and Marth Stewart as examples. Behind the scene they’re both wicked. That’s the difference. What the public is presented is almost never the truth.
Nic:
Thank you very much for the comment, I appreciate it!
You make an excellent point, it probably isn’t easy to be nice in the public eye. While I have not heard much about Marie Osmond, I have plenty of stories of Martha Stewart’s off air persona.
Shawn