Pablo Trincia, the king of podcasts: “I’ll reveal my secret: embracing change”

“What is the added value of your podcasts?” “That the King of podcasts makes them!”, replies Pablo Trincia , king of audio narration on digital platforms, guest at an event organized by Zeta Service at Magma dedicated to the theme of change. Born in Leipzig, at the time in East Germany, to a Roman father and Iranian mother who gave him the name of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda , a friend of his maternal grandfather, as a child Trincia moved with his family to Milan.

What memories do you have of your arrival?

“I was four years old, my father had found work in Milan and we went to live in the Leoncavallo area. My memory is of an ugly, grey city.”

Has it changed?

“A lot. Now I find it a very beautiful city where I live very happily and to which I am very attached.”

Is it true that he speaks Hindi, Swahili and Wolof in addition to the other 20 better known languages?

“Yes, that’s true. And I remember that in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, my father told me that we should go there to discover new markets. He made me study Russian with him from scratch.”

How important is internationalization?

“I studied abroad and I realized that today English is still a huge limitation; maybe not for the new generations that. I think it's a very nice thing to open up to the world. Today Amsterdam is really closer than Reggio Calabria and, therefore, why not?”

Like his father?

“He came from a family in the province of Rome, a graduate, a great career. He was always on the phone, he spoke a little English, a little Russian, a little German, with great ease. He went places, opened doors, found contacts, talked to people, saw opportunities even in new places”.

What is change for you?

“When I entered the world of work I had always thought of working in government organizations, I never thought of being a journalist first and then a narrator. From that moment on, change has always become for me not only something I experience, but something I look at with a positive perspective. Even now I am in a phase of great professional change, from narrator to entrepreneur. What I have built up to now, I put aside to start again. Change is part of my life”.

Journalism is changing too.

"New tools are born every day, new generations that have a completely different mentality and need different languages. I believe that journalism is going through a complex moment, in which new content, new investments and also the courage to explore different languages ​​are needed. I have built my own world, it cost me a lot to leave my comfort zone".

But do today's kids want to get out of their comfort zone?

“Not much for now. They don’t have the mentality that we, born in the 70s and 80s, have, still children of that “Come on, you can do it”. Maybe they are satisfied”.

You have moved from journalism to television, as a correspondent for “Le Iene”, “Chi l'ha visto?” and TV writer. What changes?

“I dreamed of writing on paper and I did it, but there were few jobs, they paid next to nothing... That world was a closed door and I decided to face the change by trying TV. I had to learn everything from scratch: for TV you write differently, the language changes, I had to reinvent myself from scratch. In 5 minutes I found myself in a suit and tie without ever having spoken about a contract, about money, and they sent me out for a story. I was in a panic, I said to myself: “What do I have to do now?” After years I can say: “I did that thing, I faced that change in a very positive way””.

Today he is an author, journalist and podcaster.

“I moved from TV to podcasts when they exploded in America 10 years ago, and I understood that this was the new world, that audio on digital platforms could be my future. Print and TV were an old world that was too small for me”.

What is storytelling?

“It is an act of great transparency and honesty. When I tell a story, a series of episodes, I do an almost scientific job. I study the story, the protagonists, I look for documents, witnesses, audio, video, which in that moment allow me to reconstruct that story, to tell it, to offer it to the listeners, then to the viewers. You always have to take a step back and remember to have a detachment from the protagonists. Storytelling is very tiring, it is something that consumes your days, your nights”.

A big responsibility?

"It's not always easy. You have to be impartial. Remove the adjectives, the judgment, the comments, stick to the facts, lining them up so that they tell their own story."