By: Rick Bontkowski
Summer breaks are wonderful.
Just like with almost every other project in my life, I take a break from the podcast every summer. I need it. It gives me time to recharge, clear my head, ride my bicycle with the sun on my face, journal, take notes, scribble out ideas, throw random thoughts into my phone, catch up with friends and family, and just step away from the microphone for a while.
But stepping away from the microphone doesn’t necessarily mean stepping away from the podcast. There is always something happening in the background.
When I first started AMP’D UP211, I created something on my computer desktop called the “Submissions File.” So original, right? It was basically a place to dump information about people I thought might make interesting guests. This what not an excel spreadsheet, not very organized, just a wishlist. We had an official contact form on the podcast website, but in those early days nobody was exactly beating down the door to use it.
The truth is I was chasing, always chasing.
I would stumble across someone interesting and send a DM. I would leave a quick note on somebody’s feed. If I was lucky enough to find an email address, I would sit down and write a carefully crafted pitch explaining who I was, what the podcast was, why I thought they would be a great guest and why they should trust some guy they had never heard of with their story.
Then I would reluctantly hit send.
And wait.
Most of the time, nothing ever happened.
There really wasn’t some sophisticated system for finding guests. I just went back to my business roots. Throw enough at the wall. Follow up. Keep moving. Don’t take silence personally. The problem was pretty simple. I had a podcast, cool, but… I just didn’t have any guests.
I remember nervously reaching out to people like Jamie Gane, a British adaptive athlete and world champion, and thinking, Why in the hell would this guy come on my show? Because that’s how I felt. I was nobody, I mean seriously, nobody. I’m not a journalist, I don’t represent mass media in any way, I’m basically sticking my toes in a pool that I literally have no business visiting. Who is this guy? What is AMP’D UP211? Who listens to it? Why should I give him an hour of my time?
Jamie eventually responded with something along the lines of, “Sounds interesting, but I don’t have time. Keep chasing me.”
Keep chasing me.
Funny how three words can mean so much when you’re trying to build something from nothing. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, so I kept chasing.
I remember reaching out to Gary Weiland too. Gary is a Texas firefighter who lost his leg and fought his way back to full-duty firefighting while also becoming an adaptive athlete and motivational speaker. Gary didn’t answer right away either. But somewhere in that sea of unanswered messages and polite no thank yous, Gary eventually circled back to me.
He said “Yes.”
I had actually done it. I had somehow closed the loop. I booked a guest. That sounds almost ridiculous to me now, but at the time it felt enormous. That was years ago. And the problem of procuring guests which I thought might kill the podcast has changed quite a bit since way back when.
That little Submissions File isn’t so little anymore. Sometimes, if I’m being completely truthful, it’s terrifying. There are dozens of names in there. Amputees. Practitioners. Athletes. Professors. Authors. Researchers. Technology specialists. Advocates. People with enormous accomplishments and people simply trying to make sense of an enormous thing that happened to them. They come from different countries, different backgrounds and completely different corners of the limb loss and limb difference community.
And increasingly, I’m not finding all of them. They’re finding me. That still feels strange.
I felt it recently when Jeremy Campbell entered the picture. Jeremy was born with fibular hemimelia, had his right lower leg amputated as an infant and went on to become a five-time Paralympic gold medalist and world-record holder. He messaged me on Instagram, and was commenting very posityively on a piece of writing I had done. I was flattered, he was reaching out to me, the nobody podcast guy. He said something like, “after reading this, I knew I wanted to meet this man”.
Then completely unsolicited expressed an interest in sharing his story with me. I remember hearing those words and having one of those moments where the past and present collide. There was a time when I would have been trying to figure out how in the world I could get someone like Jeremy Campbell to answer my email. Now I am staring at a file filled with people who actually want to sit across from me.
And that’s when something else hit me hard.
When did I become the gatekeeper of which stories get told?
I don’t particularly like that word. Gatekeeper. But sometimes that’s exactly what this feels like. It feels like yesterday I was begging people to sit in that chair. Now I’m the guy who sometimes has to say, “No, thank you.” Or, “Not right now.” Or simply leave a name sitting in a file because there aren’t enough recording days, episodes or hours in a year to tell every story that comes through the door.
Nobody warned me about this part, and I certainly never planned for it. Because I truly believe every story matters. And here’s the part that makes selecting guests even harder: I have absolutely no idea which stories are going to resonate with the audience. I don’t possess some magical sixth sense that tells me which conversation is going to reach somebody at exactly the right moment.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than that. A dramatic story doesn’t necessarily make a great conversation. A long list of accomplishments doesn’t guarantee wisdom. A huge social media following doesn’t mean somebody will connect with the person behind it. And sometimes the person whose story looks almost ordinary on paper sits down, the microphone turns on, and something happens that I never could have predicted. Those are some of my favorite moments.
That’s probably why I’ve never wanted AMP’D UP211 to become a scoreboard.
I see enough of that in our community already. All the comments about who has it harder? Whose amputation is more difficult, what trauma is more significant, who overcame more, who deserves more attention, hey what about me?
I don’t keep score.
I don’t believe one person’s trauma becomes more legitimate because another person’s circumstances appear easier from the outside. I also don’t sit down with a programming formula and start filling boxes. We need this many below-knee amputees. This many above-knee amputees. This many upper-limb stories. This many athletes. This many clinicians. This background. That profession. This diagnosis.
Of course I want the show to reflect the enormous diversity of this community. That matters to me deeply. But I firmly believe human beings aren’t programming quotas. I want the creative process to remain organic enough that I can still be surprised by it. Maybe that’s naive. Maybe there is a podcast consultant somewhere reading this and screaming about demographics, analytics, audience acquisition and content strategy. They’re probably right.
But I don’t want to choose someone because I think they’ll generate clicks. I want to choose someone because something about them makes me curious. Because I want to ask another question, and another. Because somewhere inside their story there appears to be something worth understanding.
Which brings me back to that chair.
There is an empty chair across from me every time we record. For years, my biggest fear was whether I could convince someone to sit in it. Now I look at all those names in the Submissions File and realize the chair represents something completely different.
What is the weight of the empty chair?
Who gets to sit there, who waits, who gets told “not this time”? And who am I to make that decision? That’s the part I’m wrestling with during this summer break. I am not thinking about download or followers. Definitely not how many episodes we can squeeze into the next recording schedule. I am thinking most often about responsibility.
How do I respect this community and serve it through stories that matter, interviews that matter and conversations that remain authentic? How do I keep my fascination with people who have found ways to become something extraordinary after their lives changed completely without accidentally suggesting that extraordinary is the price of admission? Because maybe extraordinary doesn’t always mean medals. Maybe it doesn’t mean climbing mountains, breaking records, building companies, writing books or standing on stages.
Sometimes extraordinary is getting out of bed. It might be going back to work, or raising your kids. Maybe it’s falling in love again. Putting on your leg, or making the decision to take it off for a season. Sometimes extraordinary is simply figuring out how to live a life you never planned on living.
An amputee asked me recently, “How do you get followers?” I didn’t have a good answer, in fact, I don’t really have an answer at all. I still don’t. I think I blurted out something like, “Just be yourself.” Your authentic self. It sounded almost too simple when it came out of my mouth. But I’ve thought about it quite a bit since. Maybe it really is like friendship, the way we learn as children. Some people will appreciate the real you, some won’t, and that’s okay.
Maybe that’s the lesson buried somewhere in this for me too. I can’t know which episode will matter most. I can’t predict which guest will say something that changes someone’s afternoon, someone’s relationship, someone’s recovery or maybe even someone’s life. I certainly can’t decide whose life has been important enough to deserve a microphone.
All I can really do is remain curious. Desperately curious to seek out people and circumstances that make the world a little more understandable. A little more human. A little more beautifully tragic. And hopefully, ultimately, a little more worth living to the fullest, whatever the circumstances.
So, yes, the Submissions File is full. The microphone will turn back on, and that chair across from me will soon have someone sitting in it again. I still don’t know exactly how I’ll decide who that will be. Maybe I’m not supposed to feel completely comfortable making that decision. Maybe the moment I can look at someone’s life and easily decide whether their story matters is the moment I shouldn’t be sitting behind the microphone anymore.
So for now, I’ll keep filling the chair. I just hope I never stop feeling the weight of choosing who sits in it.
