Building a Story Arc

0:00 Ask the podcast coach for June 29, 2024. Let's get ready to podcast. There it is. It's that music. That means it's Saturday morning. It's time for ask the podcast coach where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com, and joining me right over there is the 1 and only Jim Cullison from the average guy dot tv. Jim, how's it going, buddy? Greetings, Dave. Happy Saturday morning to you. I realized I was not center of frame. I had to kinda I had to kinda get back into the get back into the center. Hey, 4th July or pre 4th July weekend for our American friends, have a very safe week. Keep all fingers and toes inside the boat at all times. And if you're in the UK, get out and vote because it's the best time to vote. It's the best time to vote ever. This is the best show called Ask the Podcast Coach. There will never be another better show. So Yeah. That's a We're not gonna be talking politics today, but I think I think all countries can kinda go, hey. Can you please not judge us based on our like, I do wanna take a I wanna take a page out of the UK.

1:11 They have 6 weeks. That's it. Not a year. Yeah. Just, like, get it in, get it done. I'm like, oh, I like that idea. It'd be kinda nice. It would be nice if it was shorter. Yeah. So You know, it's not shorter though. You know, we we do have we have got a good long coffee pour. Right? We do. We also have somebody in the green room, which is great fun. Oh, nice. So hang tight. So hang tight, Doctor. And that coffee pour is brought to you by, of course, our good friend, Mark, over at castbranding.co. The the beautiful thing of Mark, really, is the fact that he's a podcaster. He's an award winning podcaster, and that means you don't have explain. It's kinda like a radio show, but it's not no.

1:52 No. And I've used Mark for really the last any like like, the last 5 shows. Ask the podcast coach, school of podcasting, podcast rodeo show. I used him for podcast hot seat. I used him for your podcast website. So I'm not just saying this. It's like he does really good stuff, and the beauty of it is he's gonna sit down with you 1 on 1, and you tell him what your show's about, and then he'll come back with a marketing idea because he really wants to make sure that everything is just in alignment. He's gonna make it look amazing. He's gone over 5 100 different artwork for people. And if you're like, well, I kinda like my artwork. You're like, well, how do you like your website? And you go, looks like a kindergarten made it. Well, Mark does that too. He'll do your website.

2:35 He'll do anything that you want to look good. Check him out. He's over there at atpodcastbranding.co. And, of course, big thanks to Dan LeFebvre over there, based on a true story, based on a true story podcast.com this week looking at black sales. And if you need a new podcast to listen to, something different by the way, he's got, he's got tons of these available for you. Just about as many movies as you can think of he's maybe reviewed out there. That may not be a true statement. But he does have a lot that is out there Visit it today based on a true story podcast dot com. Dan, thanks for your sponsorship, and the coffee is always delicious. It says, hey, coming to the stage is the 1 and only Doctor, and it should take us over to no. It's not. Okay. So How are you? Hey.

3:30 I'm great. I wanted to, number 1, give you kudos, Dave, for the advanced strategies podcast for podcast creators. That video that you did Cole for Lipson. Yeah. Watch yeah. I watched it all the way through. It was great. But you said something in it that really perked up my ears, and you kinda said it as, like, an off the cuff kind of passing kind of thing. It happened in minute marker 40 a minute 41. Okay. And you were talking about editing Yes. And taking out the boring stuff. Right. And what if your guest said something really, really great at the 20 minute mark and you're like a 25 minute podcast?

4:18 Nothing stopping you from taking that and putting it up forward. And then you said, I wrote these words down, maybe make a story arc if you wanna get creative. So that's my question. What do you mean what is your definition of a story arc, and how do I create it? Got it. The it it's takes more work, of course. Anytime you say I wanna add this, you're going to add some time to that. A story arc, if you Google the phrase the hero's journey or just go watch the original Star Wars. So it's you have the reluctant hero, in this case Luke Skywalker, and then some sort of bad thing happens or he doesn't want to do something. In this case, he doesn't want to be a Jedi. And then he finds a mentor. Now typically, the mentor is you. If you're I knew I'd get the nerd out of you. I knew I knew I could bring that nerd right out of you. And then from there, the mentor then talks him into it. He doesn't think he's gonna do it. Oh my gosh. The world's gonna end. And then it doesn't because, you know, the hero comes through. And then there's at the end, there's the coming back home.

5:27 And, you know, the he gets the girl, whatever the final thing is, and then you walk off. So it's this whole, like, oh, I don't think it's gonna work. John Lee Dumas did this. And I don't know if he did it on purpose. If you listen to entrepreneur on fire, it's like, why did you start? What was your biggest hurdle? And then what was your moment? So there's you know, that's where you get your mentor, and then you came through. And then so it's it's that whole, like, another great book is I hate this book, but it's called Out on the Wire. And the reason I hate it is because it's a comic book. I'm sorry. Adult. What do you call these things? It's, It's anime. It's it's a graphic novel. This talks about there is a person, and you're not gonna believe what happened, but this. And then they actually go, oh, but wait. There's more. And then this happened, and you're like, wait. What? And then sometimes they'll throw in a third 1. And then it's and here's how they overcame it or here's what the result was. And here's why you should care is the thing. And then if you listen to any NPR, they follow this like a textbook. So I basically got the book and boiled it down to, like that's that's the big takeaway of the book. You could probably Google that and find it. So how I do that is I use Hindenburg. And so if I if I can, I will there's a in fact, it's it's funny? I just had somebody say, how do you do a what do you call these things? I call it NPR brain oh, I'm drawing a total brain fart on this. But what

6:57 narrative. It's a narrative style podcast. So now I'll be like, Doctor thought she was getting into the podcasting business and make lots of money. And then there's a clip of you going, you know, I just love to help people and I I've always loved podcasting and blah blah blah. But what she didn't know was that, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. And you're like, yeah. I tried to do this, and I couldn't find out. I'm knocking on all the doors I know of, you know, but then she met this 1 person who really needed her help. Yeah. I got this 1 client. His name was so and so and blah blah blah. And it turned out he knew a ton of people that, you know, and so it's just the whole, oh, I don't think it's you're injecting. I wonder what happens next is the key to kind of a story arc. You're you're kind of that. Jim, am I missing anything off of It's a good think it's a good it's a good summary. You're just building tension. Right? And it Yeah. It's listen. Story arcs and clickbait are super close.

7:52 Like, there's a fine the the there's a very fine line between the 2 of those as far as, like because some I've heard I've heard this story arc built in a way that's disingenuous sometimes too, where you it's manufactured. You know, you're like, you'll never believe the the the beta. You'll never believe what happens next. That's kind of a derivative of a story arc. So I think you have to be careful that you don't you don't create something that's not there. Not there. Yeah. Right? Or make a bigger deal about it. You know? He he lit the match. See what happens next. Like, that kind of thing. So Yeah. Yeah. IIII think that's a good explanation. Just just an example of just a narrative style is episode 873 of The School of Podcasting where I interviewed Deidre Chen from CapShow, And we, I basically just took it. And how I do that the last time I forget the last person I did this with. But it's weird because I have separate tracks.

8:53 So I have my track. And then I have the guest track. And I last time I did this, I just took the guest track. So I don't even know what the question was that I asked, and I listened to the answer. And then I go, does that deliver value to my audience? Yes. It does. Good. Okay. Over here. And then I'll rename it. This was them talking. Then I'll go to the next answer. Okay. Does this deliver value to my audience? No. They're kind of rambling, and I don't know what they're talking about. Okay. You're not going in. And I just go to each answer, and then I rename them. And I look at it and go, okay. How can I group these so that they kind of make sense that there's a little bit of momentum? Just anything to make it flow. So and then it's and then there's some types when I'm like, oh, that's a good answer. It doesn't really fit in. And to me, being the musician, I'm like, that's where you have a bunch of hard rock songs, and you got this 1 reggae song that's fun and makes you wanna it doesn't fit with the rest of it, and, you know, you give that to as a bonus to somebody or whatever. But, does that kinda help? It does. It does. Thanks for coming on, dear. Great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. The choice of technology. The here's the 1 cool thing Well, let and let and let me just say, just podcasters, just do do yourself a favor. Make sure your default sound settings, whether in PC or Mac, are are always set to your mic. Because oftentimes, the software will just pick up whatever's default. Yeah. And for in in a lot of cases, this is probably the first time Doctor was coming in or To Ecamm, I guess. Yeah. Right. And so it'll just pick up it we think the

10:24 computer is being feisty. Like, why can't it pick the right thing? Well, you told it or you defaulted to it of of a default mic at some point in in some cases. So just make sure both Windows and Mac, I think, have default settings. Windows for sure, I know that. Make sure your default microphone go into the settings is set to whatever microphone you use on a regular basis. This gets to be a problem if you're switching microphones all the time for whatever reason. It'll it'll get confused. So, anyways, there's your there's get your nerd on about default settings for mic. Yeah. No. And and no no shade at all at Doctor. I mean, obviously, she's been around forever. In fact, she she just apparently, someone is is has a like, I have the school of podcasting where I help you podcast. Somebody has a, like, podcast coach school. It's I think it's Adam from Podcast Business School. Because I saw on Facebook, she's like, hey. I passed.

11:16 I'm now a I I'm now a certified podcast coach. And I was like, is that a thing? Because I'm not certified. Like, I'm you know? So Well, we're certifiable. Well, that's it. There's that. Yeah. There's that. But but Doctor, thanks for coming in. And Yeah. No worries, Doctor, on the microphone. No worries on it. It happens to I it happens to me all the time. In fact, there's never been a more frustrating moment than when I've actually recorded a podcast at work. And somehow, Windows does some weird things. This is where Windows is against you sometimes. It'll set that default microphone on its own for some reason. Something like, if you unplug it and then plug it back in, it'll get confused and reset the default to something else. And then it ends up going to the microphone. And it's so frustrating when I have hosts guest hosts that don't tell me I'm on the wrong microphone. Yeah. I've I've done a whole podcast off the webcam, and you're like, why didn't you say something? Like, I didn't know. Like, how can you not hear how bad that was? So that's frustrating too. So I've gotten kind of in the habit and just checking every time. It's just kinda before, you know, before we get started. I'm okay. Did it pick up the right microphone? I hope it did.

12:26 I know with you, Dave, you'll know for sure. You'll be like, ah, stop. Well, as soon as she started talking, I was like, she's got a q 2 u this far from her mouth. I'm like, that's not the q2u. And it was okay. Like, I was like, that's, you know, no big deal. Yeah. Well, my thing that I'm trying to figure out how to do on my Mac is it keeps picking up my earbuds. Yes. And I'll be like, I don't want to use my earbuds. I use those with my phone, and I have to go in because I'll be listening on my phone. And all of a sudden, my earbuds just go dead. And I'm like, what's I'm like, oh, it's they're connected to my Mac. I'm like, I don't want to connect to Yeah. The Mac. Todd Todd the Todd the Gator says sometimes a Windows update will change your default input as well, and that is true. That's what happened with my Mac. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes an update will reset some things or so it's just good practice. It's a good habit. Just check it from you know, before you go on, just do a dive in fact, I did a double check just a few minutes ago. Like, I knew you you would have said something if I wasn't on my mic, because you can tell the difference between the 2, but it's good to check. Yeah. Gary says I had a guest who had a loose cable. I was last night, I rewired the sound system in my church, which was tons of fun, if I do say so myself.

13:38 Also, you know what's funner than a paper cut? A cardboard cut. I had to I had to I was opening up a new keyboard and had to get the the thing and just was like and I was like, ow. And I was like, didn't even think about it. Like, I looked down later. I'm bleeding all over my head, and I'm like, it Cool. Cool. The blood all over everything. Yeah. But the the fun thing was I could not get the audio. I'm testing this because we do our church on Zoom and which for the record sounds horrendous. If you do any music on Zoom, even if you say I'm a musician, forget it. It just completely squelches it out. But I could not get the audio from the soundboard into the Zoom meeting. I'm like, it's going to the Mac and blah blah blah. And I went over and just jiggle the cable. And I was like, there you go. When in doubt, jiggle the cable. But she mentioned I did basically it's it's something I've done on the School of Podcasting. It's like everything I know about interviews. So things like, number 1, your podcast is your home. And if your guest comes in I had some people push back on that. I said, look. Unless it's a celebrity that you can only get this way, if it's somebody like, if it's an author and they don't have they're gonna use the built in laptop mic, I'm like, no.

14:46 Not in my house. Sorry. Go get a microphone. And they're like, I don't know if I feel comfortable. Ask them to go buy a microphone and go. If they're going on a publicity tour, you know, go get a microphone. Come on. Give me a break. But the fun part was I found out they use Restream, and I found out that it's kinda cool. You have scenes kinda like we have scenes here in Ecamm. They have scenes in Restream, and my solo stream was here. And then my other I'm off center. Wait. I need to go here. And then the 1 with my slides was here. So I found out, oh, I could just go up and down. And then once I got to the the scene with my slides, I could use the up down arrow key or the left right keys. So I'm like, cool. This is easy. I don't have to worry about clicking the mouse and this and that. So I'm just cruising along. Everything's fine. And all of a sudden, I went to go back up to where I'm the solo guy and I accidentally hit up twice. Well, the scene above me was a video and it start which we played at the very beginning of it. So all of a sudden, the middle days back to the opening video and I'm hitting down, down, down, and nothing. It's like, nope. Going to play this video first before we move. And I'm like so I just went completely transparent. I went to our video guy at Lipson. It's Brian. I'm like, Brian, if you know a way to get that to stop, I'll be happy. And I just went back to it. And finally, I'm on my solo page and my great. I go, let's see if we can get slide 19 to show up. And I just clicked on right.

16:10 And there it was. And even the chat room's like, yes, slide 19. And so my point is that if that had happened because I get when I get done with Libsyn webinar, I am drenched in sweat. I don't know why it's somehow being the voice of Libsyn for an hour is a little more stressful. And if that had happened, you know, 5 years ago, I probably would have cried and ran away. So it's like but it's like, oh, alright. Well, this is happening. Okay. We'll do this and do that. So it's, you know, you just and and that's just shame on me. I should have prob because I figured that out, like, 15 minutes before we went. And I I did a little, like, oh, just up, down, up, down with blah, blah, blah. And it just, you know, I fat fingered it, and that's what happened. So, it is what it is. Jody says make make sure to check your levels too. Yeah. Windows has a habit of changing my levels from what I have it set to, you know, the whole a 100% and have it set to oh, I see a 100%.

17:07 And then, ugh, I've gotten the habit of checking my sound. Yeah. I know for a while, back in the days of Skype, and now actually with Zoom, that whole automatically set the level thing, Skype was horrible for that. Because what would happen is when you weren't talking, it would be listening and going, oh, I don't hear Dave. And so it would turn the volume all the way up, the input volume. And all of a sudden, it sound like you're at the at the ocean. It's like and then the minute you talked, you're like, well, I think it'd be like and it was like this was it like Yeah. Okay. You'd come in at a 1, 000 decibels too. I mean, you'd come in and blown out and then you you because and the better your mic or, you know, especially with a condenser mic where, you know, the spy camera mics where you can hear all the way across the room, those were particularly bad. And so if you didn't if you weren't careful, yeah, it was it was it was kind of a mess. You know, you were talking about Zoom and and not using that for for church stuff. We we've been using Zoom at work, and we try to play videos through it. And there there isn't just a there's there is no worse experience on Zoom than trying to play videos.

18:20 Like, why why doesn't Zoom they've been around long enough. On StreamYard as an example, you wanna play videos. I think you can use this way too. You upload the video to their servers, and then it plays from there as opposed to it trying to play from somebody's desktop. And, yes, we've gotten better with Bandwidth and some of those kinds of things, but it's such a terrible experience on Zoom. And you just wanna, you just wanna be like, Zoom, have you not figured out And maybe they have, and we don't we're not doing it right. But, you know, you're like, have you not figured out? People wanna play videos on these things. Make it e make it a better experience to do that. They're just terrible. Well, that's where their goal is to make sure that I can hear you. You know, it was made for meetings, you know. For sure. Yeah. For sure. It does a great job of that. That's where if you compared it to, you know, the good old days of of Skype and all that, it was like, oh, this is great. And it was easier to connect. You didn't have to install, any software. That was the big thing back in the day. So, yeah, Jody says I have 2 mics, 1 inside my booth and 1 outside my booth on my podcast. And it's frustrating when Windows decides Yeah. It knows what I need.

19:30 It doesn't matter what my default is set to. So that's always fun. Yeah. Yeah. Narrative style. Yeah. Rich brings up something. If you go to your podcast website right now, there's only 1 interview over there, and it's with Greg, and he's a web designer as well. And I did that narrative. I love narrative style. It just takes more time. And so if I have an interview where I'm not editing out anything, and everything is just the way I'm like, ah, here's just the interview. But what was funny is I'm getting ready this weekend. I'll be creating the first episode of Podcast Hot Seat, formerly known as Podcast Rodeo Show. And this is different. I'm bringing the people on. And so I brought on Stephanie Graham. And at the end, I said, well, let's put me on the hot seat because she's part of that deal is you get a month at The School of Podcasting. Is there anything I can change at The School of Podcasting? She's like, no.

20:21 Not really. She goes, but the 1 thing I I wish I could figure out is, like, what's it like to be like, what's your day like? And that whole 9 yards. And she she goes, like, I'd love to know how to do a narrative style podcast. So I'm going to take her episode. This is gonna get very meta of podcast hot seat. Do it narrative style and make a video for the school of podcasting on how I did it, which is just what I basically said. You you figure out how many pieces you got and then you figure out what story you want to tell and where you can kind of throw in some I wonder what happens next. And we'll go that route. I'll give you a little preview. If you wanna know if you're and I I'm waiting for her to get back to me on this, but I am listening to her opening music. And do you remember the old Batman show with yeah. They had this weird kind of Yeah.

21:17 Between in between the breaks or in between the segments. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this cool kind of hip hop vibe. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's that's like and it sounded great. And I was like Oh, like a remix. Yeah. So I grabbed Shazam before she came in, and, you know, there's, like, a whatever, 3 seconds of music. And Shazam was, like, oh, that's insert rapper's name that I can't remember here featuring so and so. And I just said, hey. Just so you know and she actually said I bought it from this company that said I have the license to it. And I go, well, go back and check your license because if it's for radio, podcasting and radio, really different because a podcast is a download and you get into really boring things like mechanical rights and blah blah blah. And I said, so what was cool is I have a tool, and I know everybody's gonna go, what's it called? Let me fire Pinnenberg in the background here. And it's a noise reduction tool. And I was able to take out the music and still hear her. And I was like, that's pretty crazy. Wow. That's cool. It is called it's from WAVES. It is called ClarityVX.

22:33 And I saw the they have a thing right now where most of their plug ins are $29. And the mhmm. And the demo of it is somebody's on a New York street. So you got cars whizzing by and the whole 9 yards, and you just watch the guy turn the dial, and they totally dialed out the the noise. So it's not so much for, like, hiss, but more for just isolating the the vocal. And I was doing something and was like, Let me see if I have a I do not. I thought I had a I know if you go to support the show dot com, and I don't know if it's waves or WAVE, probably WAVES. That's more or less probably my affiliate link for that. And I'm making a mess in the chat room. Excellent. Here's a fun thing.

23:15 We've talked about this before. Sometimes, how do you know I've got a couple things here on, like, finding ideas. And so this 1 is from Michael Hyatt, who I'm a huge fan of. And he this is on Facebook yesterday. He says, the digital planner. Michael is all about planning and making the best year ever and really just goal setting, that kind of stuff. And so he says, the digital planner, it's not happen happening. We decided to pull the plug on this project. Frankly, we only had about 3 to 5 people submit feedback in Q1, which we took as a proxy for broader market feedback. As a result, we just don't feel the opportunity is big enough to justify the effort, which is sad because had I known that, I would've Micah would love a digital planner. But he says in another post, I commented that I was going to try to have the q 3 planner ready tomorrow. Unfortunately, well, that's not gonna happen, but we don't wanna leave you hanging. So if you legitimately didn't order a paper planner because you were waiting on the digital 1.

24:15 See, that's cool because he's trusting people here. Like, hey, if you were gonna buy this but you didn't, please private message me. We'll send you a planner a paper planner for free. Just tell me which 1 you want. We'll also expedite shipping at our expense. So it's kind of a cool way when you and he didn't really make a mistake. He thought his audience wanted this, and he created something. He asked for feedback, and that's where I'm like, I'm on his email list. So somehow, I missed him asking for feedback because I because I don't like paper planners because I, you know, I want something I can have on my phone. And so but that's something where I just thought it was interesting where he's like, okay. I'm asking for feedback. I'm not getting any. That kind of is a red flag in itself that, okay. If I can't get any feedback on something, you know, we're just gonna pull the plug on it. So sometimes, you know, you try something and it works. What I would love to know is how long he's been working on that. I was trying to find that out because it's 1 thing to pull the plug after a week. Okay. That's not enough time for people to get caught up or whatever.

25:21 But I was like I just it's like sometimes it doesn't work and, you know, so it I just thought it was interesting. Yeah. It's yeah. That's a tough call. Like, do you I mean, there's a lot of things you could do there. You could release it, and and it can have a very short life span. That's kind of the Google model. They're gonna try. They're gonna release it. They're gonna let it be out there. Then they're not afraid to kill it after it's been released. You in in this in and maybe in this case with Michael, that that, you know, you think, boy, this isn't really this didn't really turn out like we thought it would, and it's gonna generate a ton of support tickets. Let's kill it before it gets there just because we have other things in the pipeline and we we we know we can do differently. I think, listen, I think our podcasts are this way sometimes too, where, yeah, coach days is not getting feedback mostly means you're living in 2024.

26:13 Oh, unless you're on YouTube. The I I think well, but not us. Yeah. But not us. Last week, We even asked for it explicitly in the video, and then I left a comment on the video saying what no comments, and we still got no comments. So whatever. Whatever YouTube. What? See, I'm telling you, it's it's it's us, not them. So with with podcasting, I think sometimes we think we should release just everything we've recorded. And listen, most of the time, that's true, but I think there's some moments and I've listen. Physician heal thyself. I'm I'm talking to myself at this point. There are times we record things that should never see the light of day. And before they ever go public, you should just absolutely kill them. And I know, you know, yeah, maybe you had a guest on and you're afraid you're going to be embarrassed because you gotta tell them what they did didn't work. You know, some of those kinds of things. But just kill it before get mercy. Have a have a have a mercy killing and and don't release it. So that it's smart in some cases. Now the trick is knowing when to and when not to. That's the hard part. Like, yeah, it's not, it's not always an easy decision. You don't always know And you never know if it was the right 1 or if it was the wrong 1, even in the future sometimes. But but there certainly, some there are times when you get to the end of a cycle, and you're, like, yeah. I shouldn't have I shouldn't have done this. I should not have released this. Right? I had an

27:45 episode of the logical weight loss when I was doing that show. And I remember going kinda like, should I click publish on this? And it was a woman that had an air conditioner in the background. And I even I said, let's be quiet for 10 seconds so I can get a good sample of the noise and I'll remove and it just sounded horrible. And I was like, you know, like, well, it's listenable, barely. And I put it out and woke up to 3 emails going, what was that? You know, and I was like, sorry. You're like, you sound like a tin can. Yeah. Danny says, I've been enjoying these zombie Google podcast updates from James Cridland. Yeah. So they announced, you know, Google podcast is going away and it's going away globally on this date. And then and Google Podcasts Manager, it's going away. And then it kinda didn't. And then it did. And now it's back. And it's like, yeah. So this whole I was like, well, more great examples of how you can trust everything from Google. I was just like, come on, boys. Is this a case where you already filed you already fired the Google team, and nobody else had to go in and kill it? Yeah. Yeah. That makes that makes sense. Or they've moved on jet most likely, they moved on to other things. Oftentimes, they'll redeploy those folks. But Yeah. Yeah. No. You're right. You kinda you gotta kinda wonder.

29:03 I don't know if I have this 1. No. Not really. I'll just read this 1. This is from our over at Reddit. She says, Hello, everyone. Me, United States and my buddy from the UK are starting a podcast. And she says he's now full time in the States. So it's go time. This has been on my mind for years, whether solo or with a co host. I'm at the same spot I was before. I'm ready to record. I'm ready to market and ready to make people laugh. My problem is, as she has the title here, I'm still struggling to come up with a topic. So her title is struggling to come up with topics or single topic to focus on. She goes, whether it's broad or not, I can't seem to find something I'm confident in recording. I'd rather I'm rather knowledgeable in a variety of topics, but nothing is sticking. I've been thinking about using our social media to reach out to run polls and come up 1 with 1 topic or just our first topic. How do you decide what works? And so to me, anytime I hear this, I'm like, don't press record yet. Like, figure out because to me, most of the podcasters that are really, like, having fun or they're getting past 7 they really wanna talk about this subject. And they, like, no. I wanna help people with this, or I just I love to just tell stories or whatever it is.

30:26 And I I said, come up with 10 topics for whatever your first 10 episodes are, and then go in and, basically, you know, pick 1 and go with it. And I said, even do this. Record it on your phone. Bring up voice recorder and pretend you're doing it. And when you're done, delete it. Like, just just do it. And I I don't know if this is a case because what happens a lot in some cases is you think about the audience. I'm going to put this podcast out to the oh, I need reverb. And, you know, you don't you don't have 1 yet, And so don't don't worry about it. And in the past, I would have said, don't start at all. And now I say, hey, maybe this is your your training wheels. Like, start a podcast that you probably aren't gonna be doing in 6 months because you'd be like, oh, I don't wanna talk about this. And then start your real 1. I do something. But I just I don't know. When you hear this kind of stuff, Jim, what do you think? Yeah. Same same same old what you're saying. Record some things, put it out there, listen to it, edit it, then throw it away. Yeah.

31:39 Like, the the the the hardest part I I we just we're talking about this. Like, the hardest part for most podcasters is deleting things. And everything you make is not good. Right? So delete stuff. You gotta get good at it. You gotta kinda realize, like, yeah, that's garbage. I should cut that part out. We shouldn't do those kinds of things. That's and so you you just get get in there, get some stuff recorded, get some feedback. We're so sometimes, we so are focused on starting. And I wanna just say you need to practice. Like, NFL players, any any professional sports player have been practicing for for years before they're they're any good at what they do. And and so just make sure you're getting some practice in there and let and be okay with that. It doesn't have to Your first thing is gonna be terrible. They're awful. Yeah. So just record them, get them out of the way, and then throw them away. Yeah. Because you're not ever gonna wanna listen to them again. No. Oh, well, that's Whatever. I I might in the future. Somebody asked me, about, you know they were like, oh, your background looks cool. And I was like, I didn't start this way. I go, you are seeing 19 years of tweaking. I go, so and I thought about I just don't know how, again, looking my audience like, oh, here. I I'm gonna tell you the story of me. And then I'm like, boring. Like, what's in it? I I have to figure out what are the Maybe. Maybe not. Yeah. Well, that's that's me. I'm

33:10 like, I gotta figure out what's what's the takeaway, you know, that type of thing. Right. So Yeah. And and you your your takeaway may be just for a few people. I mean, again, the oftentimes the work that you do, you don't know. You don't know how it's it's gonna be till you get out there. So and Ken Ken Blanchard says, you know, start ugly. Yeah. I mean, well, we all do. That's just that's just we we get better the longer we go. We get more practice. We figure some things out. We get comfortable with some stuff. You know, it's like doing voice voice over work, and Jody's out in chat. She she can probably attest to this. Voice over work, I think we just think you turn a mic on and start talking. And, yeah, that's great. No. No. There's actually a lot of talent and skill and practice and education that goes along with doing voiceovers. Yes. I'm a podcaster. I tried doing voice over voice over, there we go, for Gal for Gal back in the day. I'm just I need more practice. And just because you're a podcaster doesn't mean you're a voice over artist. Like, that takes a different skill. So anyways, get in there, Get some practice. Practice some stuff. It's just like if you're gonna do a host read, you should probably read that at least 25 times before you read it for real. Like, practice the thing. Get get read it a couple different ways. Get comfortable with it. Get it read it in front of some people, and get some feedback from them. It's just it's 1 of those the best read host ads that I've ever read are ones that that they've done a lot. The host has done it a lot of times,

34:42 so they're good at. Well, think about what we do in the very beginning of the show. You you've got Mark's ad down. Right? And so there isn't you're not stumbling, trying to figure out, like, okay, what am I gonna say next? You know what you're gonna say. That's because you said it through 200 I don't know how long Mark's been advertising here, but at least 200 times probably. Right? Now imagine if you put that work into the ad before the first time you read it recorded. I mean, think about how good it is today. I think if you went back and listened to the first time you did the ad for Mark Oh, man.

35:23 Like, it was it it we got it done. It was just kinda average. Right? I mean, it was just like, oh, okay. Well, that's that's okay. You got better as you went. So imagine if you practice before you record for the first time how much better you could be. So so don't don't stop stop doing things the first time live or stop doing things. Right? Don't practice. Some good comments here from the chat. Chris says no 1 goes to the gym once and comes back shredded. Yeah. Well, I mean, I do, and you do. But nobody else does. Nobody else. Craig from Inglia's podcast. It doesn't matter how you start. Nobody's going to be listening. Yeah. That's that's always the fun thing is when you watch people go from nobody's gonna listen, and then they freak out. And I'm like, what's the problem? They're like, I got a 100 downloads.

36:14 And I'm like, yeah. They're like, we have some people. I gotta watch what I say now. So Danny says it took me 7 years to get to a place where I'm happy with the recording space and the sound. We do need to help new podcasters learn to ignore anyone telling them they need a SM7B when starting. Yeah. That's Samsung Q2U. Anything. But if you're gonna use a blue Yate, just use it right. And then Danny had another comment in here. I hate to hear this. Oh, so crappy. He's we were supposed to he's got a new podcast coming out called I think it's 5 random questions. I've got it on my calendar. But, basically, he has to reschedule. His his basement flooded. And I did that once in my back in the day when I had a house. Well, I have a house now. But, anyway, I had all my musical equipment in the basement, and our hot water heater broke. Right? And so just 30 gallons or whatever it is, is now all over the basement floor. And my little guitar pedals are underwater. And my wife tells me, I look at the steps, and I'm halfway down the steps looking at the pool that is now my basement floor and seeing things underwater, and I jump off the steps. And as I'm in midair, I'm like, oh, there's still electrical things plugged into this. I wonder if I'm going to get electrocuted when I land. And there's not much you can do when you're in the air. Luckily, that was not the case.

37:36 But flooded basements are definitely no fun. So I'm sorry to hear that, buddy. That sucks. Ever had a flood basement, Jim? Minor. Nothing we ever had to repair. We we got a drain in the middle of the floor and sometimes, And it's not far from my podcasting area, so I have to make sure that we don't we don't do that. But nope. Nope. Danny, sorry to hear that you do. It's a mess when you do. Our friends up north got a bunch of water that's now coming our way. Things are flooding on on the Missouri here. By the way, just as a side note, this week, we did a company a whole company kinda update. Once a month we all get together, everybody jumps on Zoom. And and our CHRO did this flood update. We have a little deck that's kinda built over the Missouri. So he stood on the he stood on the deck and had the Audio Technica, the ones I had bought, I had had the company buy those Audio Technica BPS ones, you know Oh, nice.

38:31 Yeah. Over the head. And we then we used the Focusrite solos. That's not what they're called, but let's just well, you guys know what I mean with the solos. Right? 1 1 input goes in. And he was standing on the deck with the headset out doing a live update on how the river is doing with the headset on. And everybody was, like, that's awesome. Right? And and so I was like, you're welcome. You're welcome for for that getting all you know? Yeah. I I didn't it didn't happen directly, giving everybody advice. Like, what do we need on these things? And so having the right it's it's it's having the right equipment when it when you do and and this is again, physician heal myself. I need to remember this. Having the right equipment, not the cheapest, the right equipment is when it does work, it it's amazing. You know? And you're, like, that's super cool. So everybody was, like, well, you should start doing the weather. And, like, You know, in Zoom chat. It was super it was super funny. That's funny. Basic Max says, would you add a side widget with a subscription button on your podcast page? If you want 1, they're they're super easy. You go to pod page and you put in the links to your show on those particular things. And then inside of pod page, you can say, put this in the sidebar. Do you want big buttons, small buttons? Do you just want the name? And likewise, you can have them on your front page if you want them. So it's super customizable that way. And it's super easy if you just go to any like, if you go to music.amazon.com, find your

40:05 show, which can be a challenge. But once you get your show, there's a share button right there. And so you click on share, you copy the link, and that's the link you put into your that's your Amazon link. And you do the same thing to Spotify. And if you go into Apple Podcasts, their dashboard, you can get the link there. You can get buttons, all sorts of stuff. But, yeah, if I this is what are we looking at? We're looking at building a better Dave, and you'll see where I have subscribe buttons right here on the the right hand side. I could also have those up here at the top if I go to my home page. Is this is my home? But yeah. I have this 1 set up so that there's there's no big thing at the top here. It just starts off with the different episodes and stuff. And if you're if there's too much money at the end of the month or too much month at the end of the money, check out the episode there. Get your money working for you. I've been doing, you know, a wise a very wise businessman once told me that pennies make dollars. And I've been paying attention to my pennies, and lo and behold, I'm ending up with more dollars. So that's always fun. Good work. Yeah. Question from Danny. He says, when it comes to podcasting apps, are you trying to encourage listeners to do so on apps that support value for value? I do. Or still pushing to the usual Apple, Spotify? It I am torn. That's a great question. Because I think Cast Magic Cast O Matic is a great iOS app. It looks just like, in my opinion, Overcast. It's very, very similar, and I loved Overcast. It just doesn't do value for value. So I like to put Do I have yeah. I have Cast O Matic there on the

41:37 last page we just looked at. And so I want that because I want the streaming satoshis. However, Apple and Spotify both give me the ability to see how far people listen. And you can kind of reverse engineer that with value for value. You can see when somebody was giving me, you know, whatever, 10 sats a minute, and then all of a sudden at minute 13, they they quit showing up. So you can kind of do that. Not quite as easy as you can in Apple Podcasts. But, yeah, I have been. And I just listened to the latest episode of the Podcasting 2.0 show. And there the problem is we all were using a service called Alby to set up our wallet. And because of all the companies are getting a little worried because if the U. S. Government just says, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. This is the new rule on crypto, everybody breaks. So they're they're all worried about which makes sense. They're all a little worried about, you know, building their house on rented land in a way. And so they there was some new thing that Adam found from a bunch of ham radio guys, e cash or something like that that that might work. And we're just trying to find the loophole so that in the event uncle Sam comes down with some bad news, we we've still got, you know, we're not sunk.

42:50 Because if if Albie went away because they're still doing things in Europe. They're just they're not issuing US wallets right now. And Sam Sethi over at TruFans has kind of found a hack around that, so we're not dead in the water. But it's just 1 of those things where, like, I'm a little little worried on that. We'll we'll see. There's still a lot of great features. I mean, as much as we all talk about the streaming satoshis, and why wouldn't you? That's the fun part where you get paid. There's still a lot of great features in in 2 0. But right now, it's like, can we can we kinda shore that up a little bit? Because it's that makes me worried. I've been talking about that a long time, and I don't wanna see it go away. It's crypt crypto is still a largely unregulated, and some people love it that way. It's but it's it's largely unregulated, and they can do a lot of things.

43:35 Just they just decide. This is what we're gonna do. And there's not a lot that can be done about that. I just it and it's not right, and it's not wrong. You just you gotta go in eyes wide open on this kind of thing, just knowing what you're getting yourselves into. And so I love the value for value in the sense of finding another way. I just don't think, Dave, I don't think as humans, we're built in a way to actually make that work. Otherwise, radio, newspapers, television would have figured that out a long time ago. A lot smarter people, with a lot more money than us doing this for a lot of years. I mean, mass media, we're at least a 100, maybe 200 years into this if you think about newspapers. They would have figured out how to make value for value work. It would have worked by now, and it doesn't. Advertising is what works.

44:31 That's how that's how any of this meet kind of media stuff works. I'm not saying you can't do it because there's certain there's certain cases where it does work and, you know, Patreon. And we think of some of those kinds of things that those do work. But far and above, I think history says and you might you might say, Jim, you're the old, you know, you're the old guy saying get off my lawn. No. This is gonna work this time. Well, maybe. It might. I doubt it, to be honest. It just doesn't work yet. So Yeah. Danny's like, that was kind of a bit of a stumbling block. And and Dan makes up the great point. In fact, Adam said this months ago. He's like, if we all use Albie, we are then using a centralized system. And that was the whole part of podcasting 2.0 was that so people couldn't shut us down. Rich has a question about changing your name. He says, when you change your RSS feed name because I'm changing the name of my show, what places do you have to update that? Well, in theory, here in Libsyn, if you just go to settings and go to podcast, you can like if I want to just make this whatever pre podcast advice or whatever, I could change the name here. And then the way RSS works, if I was in Captivate, you can go just here. Here's your podcast website. Go to podcast settings. It's super easy to just come down here and just change the name because the way casting works is RSS the last s of that is syndication.

45:53 And so here's your, you know, your RSS feed is the source of truth, and then Apple looks at it and Spotify looks at it. So if you change it here, in theory, you shouldn't have to change it anywhere. What you don't wanna do is if your show is mywebsite.com/rss, you don't wanna make that yourwebsite.com/rss because that will break it because everybody's looking at that address. And all of a sudden you went, oops, I'm over here now. And it's gonna go, where did he go? And so you don't want to change the actual name of the RSS link, but you can change everything inside of it. I mean, for years, I was laughing. I had my first show was the musician's cooler, and I think I forgot the, like, an I or a c or something, and it had a typo in it. And I was like, you know what? Nobody sees the actual feed. Like, I don't know. Jim, what's the show you listen to? Windows Weekly. Windows Weekly. And their RSS feed is? I don't know. Yeah. We have no idea. Well, humans still look at it. It don't really care. It could be anything. Well, Lipson used to allow you to change your feed name. And we would explain to people. We're like, hey, if you do this, like, everything explodes. It's you're back to 0. All your ratings, your reviews, it's like it's all gonna go up in flames. Is there someone holding a gun to your head? And in some cases, it was a legal thing, and they like, no. No.

47:18 I have to. But in most cases, it wasn't. And then they would change it, and you're like, okay. And then 2 weeks later, like, hey. My new episode is not showing up in Apple. Like, yeah. Remember when we said so we finally just said, yeah. That's enough of that. It it created a lot of support calls that were just you're like, I we don't need here to explain people how an RSS works. It was a lot of fun. So that's and I would give it 24 hours after you change it for that to show up. Also, if you're changing your artwork, make sure if it was called artwork. Jpeg, like make the new 1 artwork 2.jpeg, some sort of different file name because sometimes Apple check and go, oh, that's the same file because it's the same file name when it's not. But it should take about an hour or an hour a day to an hour would be great. Yeah. Todd Gator said, I added a subtitle to my podcast name in Libsyn, and it transferred nicely. Where does that show up?

48:11 Like, the name I get, I've never been able to find an app that shows the actual subtitle. That it shows the author name. Almost all app show name and then the author, but I was like I remember 1 time I put, like, just gibberish in the the subtitle. I'm like, where does this show? I went to every app, and I'm like, I don't think Libsyn 5 has the subtitle anymore because we couldn't figure out where it went. There's, like, 1 lonely app somewhere that's displaying the subtitle. I'm like Mhmm. So that's a Don't don't forget, couple days after you've submitted this, Google the old stuff or search however you wanna do it. Go search for the old stuff and see because you there there may be apps you submitted the RSS feed to that are disconnected from things for whatever reason. They don't pull updates. They don't do whatever. You might have had to put some things in manually.

49:04 So give it a give it a couple days, then go up. Make sure you go out and search. You're gonna have to be vigilant for a couple weeks, maybe up to a month, just to make sure you caught, you know, everything that you submitted. Oftentimes, as podcasters, we submit to absolutely everything. We never write any of that stuff down. I made a spreadsheet when I was doing some work on Home Gadget Geeks to say, here's all the places and I did this at Gallup as well. Here's all the places we submitted to. And so I would know then, like, okay. If I've gotta change anything or if I have to go back in and manually give them the the RSS feed or whatever whatever we need. I know where to go back and do the checklist. So if you haven't done that yet, it might be a good idea if you've gone outside of your host, certainly with Libsyn. Spreaker does this as well, where they'll help you submit your RSS feed to other places. If you chose to do that, you might wanna just follow-up with those places and make sure that an update has been done. You might need to log in and physically run an update. You might need to just up you might need to contact their support and say, this was the case with 1 of those fms something dot FMI can't remember what it was. Where once it was submitted, it was completely disconnected from anything at that point. They weren't updating. You had to go in, and you couldn't just update it on the site. You had to send them an email to their support team and say, hey. Could you change the name of this thing on your on your site? You know? So yeah. Just just and then document it. This would be a great time to get it documented. Yeah.

50:36 And if you if you are moving from let's say, you were on Buzzsprout, you moved to Captivate, the you know, both those hosts make it super easy for you to just click a button and submit to everybody but Apple, cause you don't want to automatically submit to Apple. I'll explain that in a second. But if you've already done that and then you move to a media host number 2 and you do it again, your show is now listed twice. So that's where just by updating the the feed and then in most hosts, there's a thing. If we get our nerd on called a 3 0 1 redirect, and you basically say, hey, it's like a change of address for podcasts. And so that's where if it was looking at a Buzzsprouts feed and now the feed says, hey, they live at Captivate, it'll update Apple and Spotify and Amazon to look over there. So don't do that twice. And with, Spotify, what you do is you submit it there and then you go over to Spotify and you make an account and you claim it. And it what it will do is it will send something via email. We all know the whole double authentication. So if you're using something like Buzzsprout or Captivate, you have to you have to go in and say put my email back in my feed because both those host have it so that they pull your your email out of it so you don't get as much of that annoying spam stuff. And so you put your email back.

51:55 Spotify goes, hey, is this you? And you go, yep. And then you can go in and see all the fun filled stats. Spotify is the only 1. You can see how far people listen. Apple does that. But Spotify allows you to see demographic stuff, which is also very weird because you can see, like, mine's primarily male, but you can also see, like, who your favorite artist. And it's like, oh, Ed Sheeran and Meshuggah or some death metal band. You're like, I have a very weird audience that listens to a wide range of stuff. Coach Dave, is Sharon here. We're talking about, you know, the whole crypto, things like that. He said in Moosehead Lake Moosehead Lake in Maine, it's a small business owners branded together and created Moose Dollars, locally redeemable monopoly money that exchange between businesses. You buy axe and use so many moose dollars for ice cream at this. So that's what we need. We need some sort of podcast tokens, and that's kind of what Bitcoin was gonna be. In fact, James Crinland used to call it Internet tokens. So we'll we'll see what happens. So but yeah. And Todd said he was. He updated the subtitle in Spotify. So apparently, there's a shocking that Spotify would have something that only works in Spotify, but they have apparently a subtitle that you can update there, and it didn't take long. So are blogs still a thing?

53:14 The 1 and only Ken Blanchard wants to know. Yeah. Actually, there are probably still more blogs than podcasts because people don't know there's podcast. I don't know. But it's you know, YouTube is the king, then blogging. I need to research that. But I heard I heard it on another show. They said that if you're if you're trying to be found, you know, be a big fish in a small pond, It's easier to be found as much as we go, but coasting has a discoverability problem. It's easier to be found in podcasting than it is in blogs because there are people that have been blogging for ever, you know, so they're still there. I don't read as many blogs as I used to. I I use Medium every now and then or Substack. That's kind of more my my jam at this point because I can really fine tune.

54:03 But I think that's probably I don't know if it's more. But in terms of what I read, I read more newsletters than I do blogs. And in theory, if they're smart, their newsletter should be a blog. I don't know. How about you, Jim? Do you read any blogs or newsletters? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, blogs have their well, I mean, if we're just gonna say it's a page associated with podcasts, sometimes we call those show notes, right? That's a blog. Some people are still writing. There's a lot of writing. I mean, AI is gonna change this where you can just so easily create these pages that there's gonna be 100 or 1, 000 more being created than ever were before. So, yeah, they're still out there, and they're still helpful. You see a lot of these, you know, best product for 2024 blog. Yeah.

54:51 Yeah. Now if you if you're looking for information I mean, the the the old blog idea was more of a journal or more written from an individual's perspective or more, you know, kind of that it was like a rev I wanna say reviews, but they were kind of more, you know, a human from a human perspective on things. But I think most media has gotten away from that for the most part. I don't think there are many people out there doing as many. There's certainly there are. I just don't think there is many doing individual reviews and stuff via blog style. It does happen. I just don't think it's as popular as it used to be. Yeah. Well and with our good friend AI, they're probably more popping up that are giving you extremely mediocre content. Dan says, in my honest opinion, text versus audio is like audio versus video. It's different mediums with a lot of overlap in the content, but they still, you know, it's different mediums with an with an audience. So yeah.

55:48 Jeff says, I agree with Jim. I think getting people on your list and hearing them, hearing from you, not an AI, is the best place to connect with people. Yeah. I somebody asked me. They're like, what would be the number 1 call to action? And I said, get on my list. Because once they're on my list, I can ask them to do whatever I want. Now, if you ask too much stuff without giving them anything, they'd be like, this guy's just a spamming robot and they're they're gone. But once they're on, like, my my newsletter, I I there's a section where it's like what I've been up to, and it's a link to every episode that I've done since the last time I put out a newsletter. And it says the name of the show, and then there's a follow link. So I'm hoping I'm getting more subscribers over there, But it's just 1 of those things that I'm surprised at how much traffic I'm getting from people who probably maybe saw it in the in the app. And then I go off to listen to that later. And then they see, oh, yeah, I was going to listen that. I never did. They they're jumping back to the audio in that.

56:44 Craig says, I think human opinion and analysis is going to be valued a whole lot more going forward. Yeah, me too. Although I am finding some AI, I'm working on an episode on here are ways, you know, you can use AI as a podcaster. And I finally started taking time to learn Descript. And normally, we end the show at noon. And by 4, 4:30, I'm done because I've putting in chapters and editing out. And between myself, this is primarily it's about 90% me and about 10% Jim. We will have somewhere over 300 to 400 umms in that. Especially, I'm gonna try not to do it today when we get to our awesome supporters, But I am always looking over here and switching this. And as I'm doing it, I go and and just an end up machine. And so I went to Descript and I said, remove filler words. But I said, don't do them all. Just look for umms. And I think I said look for double words. So where I'll be like like that thing. Well, that's a double word.

57:48 And it put them out, and then I said add markers. And that's basically so it basically kind of figures out where we change subject and put those in there. I was kind of bummed because I could say add timestamps and it gives me timestamps. So I'm like, yes, add those to the script. And it's like, nope, I can do markers and I can do timestamps. I can't do markers with timestamps. I'm like, okay. So I copy the time stamps because that's great for YouTube ish because it is edited. But bottom line, I was done by 1:30, and I'm normally done about 4 o'clock. And so the the beauty is when you have chapters in Descript, you can then export the audio and say, hey, those markers that you made, use them as chapters. Because this show kinda needs chapters. We we bounce around all over the place. So that's 1 where I was like, So I the more I get into Descript now, granted, everything I learned last week in Descript is probably gone because they changed their interface on an hourly basis.

58:47 But that's that's an example of of AI. And, Jim, you were talking about how you have something in Otter that you do where it finds businesses or something? No. I asked, what are the products we discussed? And it'll it'll bring back the product, the product names of the things we talked about. It's, you know, it's a gadget show, so it's kinda helpful to to be able to pull some of those back. I could add links to them if I wanted to. That'd be 1 of those summary. That's 1 of the things AI is really good at with some of these summary you know, taking a conversation, ultimate summarization summarization, I can't say that word right, is to then just give me a list of those things. I also ask it, give me some quotes. This is in this is in Otter. OpenAI does it just as well, but give me some quotes from it. And it it it pulls back 3 or 4 quotes that I add to the show notes, which is kinda nice. Nice. Craig asked, did it still sound natural? And this is where I was almost positive I was gonna have a bad edit because I listened to, like, 3 fourths of it. I was like, ah, good enough. And, yeah, I didn't hear any. So that's that's good. But Jeff says you might wanna be careful with that double word thing because it's not always great. But, I just I was the 1 thing I did notice is as I was listening, it did not mark our let's thank our awesome supporters as a chapter, as a marker. And I was like, oh, I kinda wanna make sure people can

1:00:18 can jump right to that. But speaking of that, we should probably thank our awesome supporters. If you wanna be an awesome supporter, it's super simple. Just go over to ask the podcast coach.com/ awesome, and you can be like all these awesome people. And, of course, the show is brought to you by The School of Podcasting where you get awesome courses. I had somebody join this week. They've been podcasting a while. They went through the planning your podcast 1, and they're like, wow. I didn't do half this stuff. And I was like, well, there you go. That's why you're here. And our community is awesome. We've got we just had somebody yesterday that's doing 14 podcasts. 14. I thought I was like, well, there you go. I can now say I know somebody with more shows than I do. And he's they're all for boomers, which is great. And then you get unlimited coaching. So if you wanna hang out with me, people go, so, like, unlimited. I'm like, yeah. That means unlimited. Like, if it's available on my calendar and you want it, you take it. And, of course, that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

1:01:18 And we run on PodPage. If you want to try PodPage, it's super simple. Just go over to tripodpage.com. If you want to learn PodPage, I got a free course. Go over to learnpodpage.com. And right now, we're using Ecamm because, it's so good. If you ever wondered why it says Ecamm with 2 m's, that's why. So good. And I'll be going to Ecamm Creator Camp, later in October. I'm looking forward to hanging out with those peeps. And if you need more Jim Collison and, like, you know, who doesn't want more Jim Collison? Just go over to the that 1. Speaking of hitting the wrong buttons, the average guy dot tv, And check out Home Gadget Geeks. And it's time for the Wheel O names. So let's jump over there. And so who will it be?

1:02:06 Will it be John Munce? Will it be AI Goes TO College or Ross Brand or the Ask Ralph podcast? Well, we'll find out when I click the button here. Round and round she goes. And it is wow. Wow. That was almost Craig. But, no, it's our buddy, Ross Brand, and he does I know his show streaming. I see I should know this. This is how well I know my awesome supporters. I know Ross. Just Google Ross Brand live streaming. Do you know the name of the show, Jim? Yeah. Here. Let's just do this live. Let's let's see how good Ross's SEO is.

1:02:47 Ross Brand Podcast. It's something streaming. Streaming world, streaming live stream universe. Live stream universe. There we go. Just total brain fart. I was like, I know I know, and honest I do. And so thank you, Ross, for being an awesome supporter, even though I can't remember the name of your show. That wasn't embarrassing at all. If you if you want to be an awesome supporter, how can I forget that? You know, I think about You forget sometimes when you're doing things live. It's hard. Yeah. Forget it. So this is a show. Are we saving you time? Are we saving you money? In fact, coach Dave says, where did it go? He said where he did something with with and that's coach Dave is an awesome supporter. But he said he fixed something with knowledge from the school or from Ask the Podcast Coach. So, for saving you money, for saving you headaches, then go over to ask the podcast coach.com/awesome and be an awesome supporter. And we do have an interesting question here. I don't know if you can fix this, but, she says this is from Susan Flamingo over Reddit. Hi, friends. I narrate my podcast. I record in Audacity and enhance with Adobe Voice Enhancement, which really makes the recording, perfect.

1:04:01 But I have a problem. I sound like I'm talking with a, with my nose clogged because it is. I have a disorder in which 1 nostril is almost always totally blocked. It causes sleep apnea and a bunch of other stuff. Is there a way I can alter the voice over so it will sound normal with this effect? Thank you, and have a good day. And so I just picture Rudolph, you know, the with with clogs like this, they think my nose, that whole like so this is how you set. Number 1, nobody else is gonna sound like you. You're always gonna be kinda clogged up. So that's gonna be like a good thing. But aside from going into the EQ and maybe taking out a bunch of the mid I mean, if you literally sound like Rudolph, the you're like, you're gonna sound that way. I don't know if there's anything we can do to make you sound less clogged up. Any thoughts on the top you're in? If there are moments, we they they said always, but maybe there are a few moments when it's not always. Yeah. This may be 1 of those areas where AI in the future can help you, where you record sit down and record a bunch of you not in that sound and then reproduce your you know, you have to do transcripts and some of those things. As Danny says, he says, think that could be fixed with EQ. It's a lot that's a lot to ask of of EQ. Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe you're gonna have to fix it every single time.

1:05:31 Like Well or set up. You could probably get a plug in for a paramedic EQ, And that sounds like a big fancy word. But, basically, you find that frequency, and you can pick how how many other frequencies around that. So you end up with this this kind of dip, and that dip can be really super specific for just that 1 frequency or a whole frequency range there. And then you pick how much of that you want to take out. So that could but I if you sound like you're stuffed up, it's you're gonna sound like you're stuffed up. Yeah. It's gonna be hard. Yeah. It's gonna be hard. Yeah. And that's what yeah. Danny says create a template. But they they if you go to again, I'm a big fan of WAV's plugins. I'm sure they've got a paramedic QE there. But it could be yeah. Craig says, my cohost had a blocked nose passage and had a minor operation to clear it. So there is fine. Yeah. Or cocaine. You know, that's always Yeah. I don't do that. Yeah. We neither endorse nor The problem with that is then you lose your nose. And you're like, hey, the great news is I don't sound stand up. The bad news is my nose fell off. So yeah. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. I'm sure this individual has has consulted with with medical people and those kinds of things as far as what you can do about some a long term. Listen, the other option, and you kind of alluded to this, Dave, is just embrace it. Yeah. Like, that's your voice. And if it's that way most of the time, embrace it for what it is. And and yeah. Will people have a problem listening to it? Maybe. And if they do, that's their problem.

1:07:03 Right? It's there's not I think of all the unique, you know, of voice folks that are out there, and many of them, once people start listening to him, he stop hearing those kinds of things. And if people have a problem with it, maybe they shouldn't be your listeners. I think he's still I think he's still around. There was, doctor Dave shrink-wrap radio, and doctor Dave sounded like this. He kinda always sounded like he was a horse, like a Doc McGee from the Celtics used to sound, oh, it's a horse. Right? But the minute I heard him, I knew it was, you know, doctor Dave. And for the record, doctor Dave ruins my voice. So totally cow. Yes. Don't do that. But, yeah, there are all sorts of people with different, you know, Rob Greenlee has his I I when as soon as I hear Rob Greenlee, I know it's Rob Greenlee. And that's, you know, and then Todd Todd over there, new BDX. But, like, everybody sounds the way you sound. My the 1 that really blew me away was Michelle Coshocton did a show with Michael Hyatt. It was Michael Hyatt's show. She was kind of color commentary. And she got tongue cancer, and they ripped out half her tongue. And so she had a saying where her s's were kinda like and I'm not making fun of her, but this is how she sounded. And it was weird is there's a thing called, I think it's nose blindness. This is basically hey, let's talk about farts, shall we? This is where when you like your farts don't smell that bad. Right? But if somebody else does Not mine. For sure. Not mine. And and then if you're in some place and you're like, oh, this is so bad. But after 2 minutes, you're like, okay. It's not as

1:08:35 bad. Like, your nose somehow in your brain filter out that so it's not quite as bad. Right? So with Mel Michelle, when she first came on, because she had taken off because she had cancer, and she came back. And I was, like, holy cow. How courageous to come back with a little bit of a speech impediment. And within 5 minutes, I totally didn't even notice it. I don't know if that's, you know, ear blindness or whatever. But my friend, like, once you once you once you first started, it was like, oh, wow. I can't believe. I mean, anybody with an accent. You know, Danny's got a kick butt Scottish accent. And so when he first comes on, it takes me a second to go, oh, wait a minute. I gotta I gotta put on my my filter or you know, and I'm sure Danny does the same thing to me. He's like, oh, wait. He's speaking American. I gotta gotta figure this out because that that guy sounds weird compared to me. So it's I and I absolutely adore accents, man. I'm we have Mark Lawley from Practical Prepping, and he's from Alabama. And he sounds like he's from Alabama, and I could listen to that guy talk forever. It's great. He's always like, oh, Dave says I have an accent. I don't like you know, it's like, or Dave Ramsey. There's another guy with an accent. Just just be you. It's Yeah. Be be you. Be comfortable with it.

1:09:51 It it does, you know, does say, I think we can push through. The brain will push through some of those things, but it won't push through really bad audio. No. You know? So those are I think those are 2 different things if you're getting bad audio. You know, I've I've started podcasts where I've listened to them, and they it's obvious they were recording in a big, big empty room with 1 microphone. And I get 5 minutes in. I'm like, my brain cannot adapt to this. But but all the other things, and I think you're right. I think we're really good. Our brains are really good at adapting to that. And, I I think we've been doing this long enough now. I mean, Dave, maybe 50 or 75 years ago, accents were a thing.

1:10:34 Listen, we all in the global world, we all come with some kind of whatever in the way we speak. We all do it a little bit different. And I think I I don't think it needs to be a thing anymore. I think we can just, like it just it's fine. I think we're more self, yeah, I think we're more self conscious. I was listening to the podcasting 2.0 show last night, and 1 of the developers from rss.com, I'm pretty sure is from India. And he had an accent. And again, it takes you 2 seconds. You're like, oh, that's okay. And, you know, there's milliseconds of where you have to kinda like, oh, he said aluminum instead of aluminum. You know what I mean? It's like but it's it's not that big a deal. Oh, we know what they mean. Yeah. You know? I mean, you're you're the first time you hear it, you might be like, wait a minute. What what what does that mean? It's just like I was over I was over in London giving a presentation, and III mentioned something about warm ketchup.

1:11:34 What I meant was room temperature ketchup. But they were thinking, like, I was warming up Heating it up. Putting it on the stove. Throw it in the microwave. Like, pants mean different things to them than they do to us. Right? But so you make a mistake, and there's some giggles the first time. And people are like, oh, actually here, when we say that, we mean this. And then you go like, oh, okay. I'll work on like, it doesn't we can change, especially in those environments. And then you go, okay. I'll work on saying that. Or you just the the other thing the the other culture can adapt to, you know, when when when people say, I'm trying to think, you know, we call it a car. We call it a trunk. We call it in America the trunk. The British call it something else. I forget I forget what's going on. I know the hood is the bonnet because I remember the 1 time this guy told me a story, and he goes, I hit a stair and it flew up on my bonnet. There no.

1:12:29 I hit a stag, and it flew up on my bonnet. I'm like a stag. Well, a stag is how I went to prom, and a bonnet is a hat. And and I found out later he hit a deer and it flew up on his hood. So, yeah, that's always fun. A boot. Yeah. Gary says a boot. Yes. And so you you gosh. We're we're smart enough to just go, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I get it. I get what you're saying now. And so it doesn't we we don't all have to say the same things. It has it doesn't all have to be said the same. Right. You can we can we can do this culturally. We can adapt. We don't need to make fun of it. We don't need to, you know, we don't need to call it out. Just if you know what it is oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. No. I understand what you're saying. Let's let's keep go let's go you know, let's keep going forward. So I think because the you know, we've got so much communication going on around the world, I think we can get past most of that stuff. You know, accents and the different words for things. Doesn't have to be the same. And I think we can stop calling it out in a lot of regards.

1:13:29 Yeah. Yeah. If we know what that means, say it. If we don't, say, tell me tell me what that means. Yeah. You know, just say that so you you have the clarity. And then remember it. What do you mean when you say I'm a wanker? What does that mean? Yeah. But yeah, I think a lot of that in the same way that we hate the sound of our own voice. I think if we're, you know, if we're doing English as a second language, those people get really obsessed over their accent. I mean, I'm with you. I'm like, look, you I can understand you. Let's move on, shall we? So yeah. Yeah. But Danny's got kind of a it's adjacent, but still kind of talking about this. At what point does the audio stop you from listening to what might be really good content? And, again, I'm I'm not throwing shade at Doctor, But towards the end of her little segment there, it was getting worse. That would have been, I'm out of here. And again, that wasn't her fault. We're not blaming her. It's probably your PC kinda thing. But that, like, you know, or if if if let's do this. If I kinda did this, Orica, and you just yeah. Yeah. That's not gonna work.

1:14:39 So different if if the guest is really loud and the person is really soft, anything else you can think of just Well, there I don't think there is a point. I think because your mood can determine whether you're gonna continue to listen to it or not. You there's been lately, I have just really been struggling to listen to my to podcasts. Like, I put them on. I'm like, I don't feel like I don't like, I've got a lot of things going on right now. I don't feel like learning more at the moment. So that can also be those that tolerance can also be I don't I don't think you we could say 7. What what point? Well, at 7, they stop listening. It doesn't I don't know if it really, really works that way. There's a whole bunch of factors, including the person's tolerance for what's going on and and the volume and what they're listening to it on and all those kinds of things. But, I mean, I I guess the point is make the best make it the best possible audio quality you can. Listen to the feedback if you're getting stuff, and and continue to hone your craft. I can't remember if it was 7 or 17, but it was it was a ways.

1:15:41 And there was a guy that was it was tips for people that teach computers, like computer software. And I'm like, this this episode was made for me. And the guy came on and talked about how much he loved Bob Seger or how much he hated Bob Seger. And I was like, okay. But, like, the title is tips for people that teach computers, you know, blah. And he just kept going on about Bob Seger. And I just kept thinking, well, surely, he's going to start talking about and it was I can't remember if it was 7 or it was a long time when I'm sitting there going, you gotta be kidding me. And the audio was pretty bad. And I remember thinking, I wouldn't listen to this except he's going to talk about the thing I wanna hear. And whatever it was 7 or 17 at 1 point, I ejected because I was like, okay, he's not getting to the point.

1:16:30 And the audio was really bad. But, yeah, it's, you know, and I I don't tie into this whole bit of, like, we have short attention spans. I think what it is is we're much better at diagnosing, like, when somebody's gonna waste our time. And so you do have to kinda hook them at the beginning. And that and that's to me. Try to get to watch the video on YouTube when they were talking about STV, which is seconds to value. And that's if you notice, I noticed a lot of the channels I used to watch where they used to go, you know, big opening line hook, yada yada yada, and then it'd be like, and flashy graphics and blah, blah, blah. And like, that's gone. It's like, I think it's Think Media. They literally put their logo up and you hear somebody go, just press record. That's their opening, like, sequence now. It's like really, really short. So that's always fun. And, yes, Gary says breathers.

1:17:26 Here's the problem. I don't think a lot of times it's with breathers. It's that somebody who has they're maybe they're a little too close to the mic. Maybe they are a little bit of a breather, and then they run it through Auphonic. And if you're breathing loud enough, Auphonic thinks it's a word. And so all of a sudden, it's just I just had somebody, a friend of mine. This was hard to do. Timothy Kim O'Brien does a show about finding new podcast. And I said, Tim, you know I love you. I said, but once I hear this, I can't unhear it. And sometimes he would breathe and, you know, people breathe. I always say, like, don't obsess over that. But there are other times when it was literally, like, just super loud. And then once I heard it, I couldn't unhear it. So that would and that I think is not again Tim's problem. I think like, I don't think Tim is Darth Vader. I think that's a case where all Phonic thought that was a word.

1:18:17 And its its goal is to make all the words the same level, and it boosted his his breathing to where it was. So I I think there was a time in this show, I remember going back years ago, you were running this through you're running the show here through some level or whatever that whatever it was. And you were giving at the feed, and you were high, and I was low, and it Yeah. It leveled me. It really changed my breath. And you could Yeah. You know, in there, you could really hear that. And and like you said, that's 1 of those things where once I heard it, I could not Yeah. Hear it. Yeah. You know? And I think we fixed that since then. But Yeah. The people do breathe. We do take a breath when we're talking. So that does happen. You can't get all of that out. I guess you could go through and individually take out.

1:19:07 That would be so much work. Been there, done that. Yeah. I, for 1 of my editing clients, had the same thing, and that's where I have to I'm I'm better at this now because I used to like, if I could hear it, it wasn't quite so much. It was like Darth Vader lite. And I was like, is this me being an obsessive podcast listener, or is that actually gonna be So we're talking to people when we're spending time with people at a party, we So We're talking to people when we're spending time with people at a party, we don't say to them, stop breathing. I'm hearing you breathe. Right. Like, it's just a part of it's just a part of what we do. You know, it's a part of life. God, get get past that in some in some regards. If you're it also is super weird. I edited a podcast 1 time, and it took out all they didn't like the breathing. And I took it all out, and it was eerie. Like, you'd listen to it, and you're like, this doesn't sound it sounds AI is what it is what it sounds like. That's kinda 1 of those things you can tell an AI voice because there's no breathing in it.

1:20:12 Yeah. Danny says podcasters can also help make their guests sound awesome with some post production. I have a Debreath plug in that I use. And sometimes, the thing I hate about it is it will work great 95% of the time. And then there's 1 word that somebody raises their voice or to different, like, actual like, the the note of it is a little higher. So it's now into the range. Glyca breath is probably up around the 10 k range if we get our nerd on. And now they're talking up there, and so the stupid breath thing takes out half the word. And you're like, ugh. You know? And so it's it's, again, it's a a fun thing. Dan says, I think it's similar to listening to bad audio.

1:20:54 We don't need we don't need we don't oh, yeah. We don't need long to know it's something that we can listen to or not. Yeah. You can usually tell right up front. As soon as I hear it's some it's 2 people on a Blue Yeti in a room with it set up to go pick up in every direction. I'm like, yep. And we're out of here. Like, I can smell that a 1000000 miles away. So Dan also says they've added he was listening to some voices in 11 Labs, and they've added breathing to those voices to make them sound a little more Oh, nice. Could you imagine okay. Let's think in a in a alternate world where we have we have robots that are speaking to us, And they add in they don't need to breathe. Right? They but they add in the breath to make it feel and sound more human. Could you imagine how I mean, they would have to. Right? It's like when Tesla before Tesla and other there there were other there were EVs before Tesla. But Yeah. There's been some talk about initially adding some engine noise to EVs so that people can hear them coming because you don't hear you know, there's no engine noise. But what if we we added some engine noise when it was around people so people would know they're there? I mean, that's kind of weird. Right? But so I I imagine an Android or a a robot that's added breathing.

1:22:11 That would be so weird. Yeah. The gator says, that moment when you hear your guest and you think, gonna be a long night of post editing. Yeah. I've been there with that. Speaking of of weird robot stuff, it's not gonna let me see it. I was looking at a book. It was something like words that compel or whatever stupid thing it was, and it's not gonna but anyway, I I look for it in Audible because I have the Audible account that gives you audiobooks. And I was like, oh. And it was like a condensed version of this. And I hit play, and the first thing I heard was an ad. And I'm like, that's weird for an audiobook, and it wasn't an ad for Audible. And then the narrator came on, and it was so blatantly AI. And I was like, is this what people are doing now? We're just gonna, like, come up with a summary of it, let AI read it, and then get paid from Spotify, which is next to nothing from what I hear. Because, you know, they're they're known for paying their artists so much money. And I just thought, wow, that's that's okay. And then do you look at how much we're gonna be doing on time? We can do this in 3 minutes. Jim, do you look at reviews? I usually don't look at reviews for podcasts, but I do on books because I've only got so many credits.

1:23:29 Yeah. Or before I buy something or what Yeah. What's the criteria? Yeah. If you buy I guess, in this case, I'd be buying an audiobook. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll take a look. Well, I I don't buy audiobooks, but I use generally, I use reviews. If I'm gonna be buying something, I'll take a quick look at the reviews just to see if it's a a sham or if it's, you know, if somebody's got some I don't I don't believe everything that's in the review, both positive and negative. But, yeah, I'll take a look at the reviews. Yeah. Because I was gonna buy this book, then I went to Amazon. And I always look at the 4 star reviews and the 2 star reviews because they're usually a little more descriptive. And the 2 star 1, the 1 was like it's it's really this guy talks about some sort of software around whatever it is, neuro linguistic programming, and they said it's really a mild advertisement for this guy's software. And I saw a couple people mention that. And then the people that really liked the book were really super nerdy about NLP. And I was like, yeah, this is not the the book for me. So I was just like, hey. Look at that. A review actually, you know, influenced me to not buy that book, or I can get the ebook. And I talked about this in my last episode of The School of Podcasting. I can actually get that ebook from the library. So why spend money on something you can get for free? And the library's fun. I I haven't been to the downtown. I wanna contact my local library. I'm going on vacation in a couple weeks. We're still doing the show and stuff, but I'm gonna take a vacation. And that's 1 of the

1:25:01 things I have on my list is contact the local library about kind of a not so much how to podcast, but how to listen to podcasts because what we need is more listeners. So that's what I'll be working on in the future. And, Jim, speaking of the future, what's coming up on Home gadget Geeks? Yeah. Ed Sullivan from Sonic Cupcake. You know him from Sonic Cupcake. I know him from the Cigar Authority. He's on the show. He got an iPad Pro M4. The newest 1 just came out about a month ago. Talked about how he used it on vacation. We spent some some time why. And at the end of the show, Ed predicts my next Mac purchase. So is that a is that a little hook? A little cliffhanger? That is a hook. Get get some story arc. You can get it. It's already published. It's out there. Home gadgetgeeks.com. And the fun thing is because it's Saturday and it's coming out Monday. I'm not sure what the friends. Leading challenge. Woah. Okay. Leading June weight loss challenge with 2 days left. Okay.

1:26:00 Thanks. I'm I'm in a in a weight loss challenge with a bunch of friends. Thanks. So, yeah, The good news is I figured out how to get Siri to tell me when my meetings are coming up. And apparently, anything that pops up on my screen, I'll I I thought I do have do not disturb. Nope. Do not disturb is turned off because it's 12 o'clock. There you go. But I on the school of podcasting, I think I'm gonna do an episode on how much I spend to make the school of podcasting. Somebody asked me that question and I was like, But in that, explain that this is me 19 years into it. And I didn't start this. Like, I didn't start with video and cameras and all that stuff. I started and worked my way up. I think that's where we're going on the school of podcasting. I have a list of, like, when you don't know what you're gonna do, here are the top issues you could do for the school of podcasting. So that's coming up. We are here every Saturday morning, unless I'm on the road, or if Jim's off saving the world, it's always ask the podcast coach.com/live. Thanks to Mark over at, podcast branding dotco, and Dan over based on the true story podcast. Thanks to the chat room. If you haven't liked it yet, click the like button, you know, subscribe, smash the bell, that whole 9 yards. And we'll see see you next week with another episode of ask the podcast coach.