Hobbies are Not Free and That Includes Podcasting

Saturday Kickoff And Sponsor Thanks

SPEAKER_03 0:17

Ask the Podcast Coach for April 25th, 2026. Let's get ready to podcast. There it is. It's that music that means it is Saturday morning. It is 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 one and only Jim Cullison from theaverage guy.tv. Jim, how's it going, buddy?

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Greetings, Dave. Happy Saturday morning to you. Happy spring. I listen, this is spring day here in Nebraska. I think we're finally through the winter. Is it okay to call it? Do you think it's okay to call it?

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Uh let's see. It's April. It's close. It's one of those where I put my my winter coat away and had to dig it back out. And I was like, really?

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Yeah, that's true. So it always happens. It's a lawn mowing day. So after the show, definitely get on the lawn. That's that's my plan today.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

That that was the plan until like it's just our forecast is nothing but rain. And I was like, all right, well, doggone and I I really, really want to do that. Well, what you could do, what you could do is you could drink a little coffee today, right? That's right. Exactly. That coffee pour is brought to you by our good friend Mark over at there it is, podcastbranding.co. Um I oh I forgot to make examples, but the artwork is done for uh how to pitch a podcast. Uh and in true fashion, it's amazing because Mark did it. Why? Because he's got a bazillion years as a graphic artist and a web designer. So if you need more than a piece of artwork, if you need a whole website or a PDF, uh that's the place to go, podcastbranding.co. And uh I decided to go uh without there's no Dave face on this one. I know everybody's like, you need to put your face on it. And I went for the one and then just made it a little easier to uh read. And he was happy and quick to do the um the changes. And so, yeah, take advantage of those 30 years in design, and he's been podcasting himself since 2013, which makes it even easier because you don't have to explain what a podcast is. So when you're ready to look your best, there's only one place to go, and that is podcastbranding.co.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

And of course, tell him Dave and Jim sent you. Big thanks to our good friend uh Dan Lefebvre over there, based on a true story at based on a true storypodcast.com. From the archives, you got you reminded me of this, Dave, in our pre-show. We were talking a little bit about a show you were watching, had Harrison Ford on it. Was that right? He came in going right. So head out to Dan's site, 356 Indiana Jones. The whole collection they talk about what is yeah, yeah, he covers that out there in uh in the archives. Episode 356 in Indiana Jones with Neil Lard. You'll want to check it out. It's gonna be awesome. And uh check it out today, based on a true story, based on a true storypodcast.com. Dan, as always, thanks for your sponsorship.

SPEAKER_03 3:31

Yeah, little little word of mouth corner here. It's on Apple TV, and the show is called Shrinking, and it's got Jason Siegel who was on How I Met Your Mother, Robin, whatever Robin's name was on How I Met Your Mother, she makes an appearance. The guy that was Al Bundy's neighbor, who was also on Happy Days for a half a second, he's on it. But the big one is Harrison Ford, and what's great is he plays a crotchety old psychiatrist and at times is being funny but not trying to be funny, but it's just really good writing, and they pull in Michael J. Fox uh this season, which is kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yeah, so it it's it's a good show, and yeah, there's a there's a guy who didn't has not let Parkinson's beat him. No, uh he is man, you know what what a guy for standing up to it. You know, actually typically you know, years gone by, he would have been shunned from that from the community and kind of just put to put to pasture, so to speak. And and that just hasn't happened. They have really, really, really continue to bring him back and showcase you know what he what he's doing. So so congratulations to him for that, for the work that he's doing. Certainly, you know, very difficult life. And he's done a great job of of managing a bad, really bad situation.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

Well, there was a friend of mine that did a show, and I'm trying to remember the name of it, it's something three, like fire something three. He was reporter, TV reporter, and always loved kind of covering stories about fires and firemen, and just you know, really respected all the work they did. And so he started a podcast and he sent his thing in for the podcast rodeo show. And I'm like, I think this guy's drunk because he's just like, Welcome to the show. This is uh and it's Scott, I can't remember his last name, really great guy. And he emailed me, he's like, I have Parkinson's. And I was like, Oh, I go, Well, dude, here's the thing. You know, I'm sorry I said you sounded drunk, and he's like, No, I I sound drunk. I I have Parkinson's. I go, well, I said, is there a way we can just call out the elephant in the room? And so his next episode, he was like, Welcome to the show. I'm Scott, and I will not let Parkinson's stop me, or something like that. And all of a sudden your brain went, Oh, that's why he sounds you know. And the other thing that's always interesting about that, I remember Michael Hyatt did a show with Michelle Kishkton, and she had something, some sort of tongue cancer, and they cut out half her tongue. And when she came back, she had one of those S's kind of thing where you talk like this. And I'm not making fun, that's just how she sounds. But what was weird about it, because I remember when she first came back and she had that that slight speech impediment, I was like, oh well, bless her heart that she's because people are just gonna and it was weird because after like five minutes, I didn't even notice it.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Yeah, you can't stop hearing it, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:36

Yeah, I was like, Well, that's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

So no, good, good on them. I mean, uh, it it certainly shouldn't stop you, right? It shouldn't stop you. It can, though. I mean, listen, that we can if we think about how this pertains to all of us, we all have that thing, right, that we struggle with. And it might be, you know, well, yeah, you fill in the blank. What do you think think about what you're doing and what you struggle with, or what's the you know, what's the imposter syndrome that you might have, or what are you afraid of, or what are the fears that going into this? And so you you can overcome them. I mean, or just work through them. You know, just spend some time working through them. Be be okay with whatever that is. The other thing, uh, you know, some folks will want to superimpose a style or a standard or whatever on you, and just resist it as much as you can. You know, there's listen, we can all grow, we can all change, we can all develop, right? So there's that. You you've gotta you've gotta at least try. You've got to learn growth, you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, but yeah, don't don't you know, lean into it, man. Lean into it. Certainly, Michael J. Fox has leaned into his Parkinson's like and he and he's he's he's been a really good example for folks who have had it. And so be an example.

Zoom Pricing And The Free Myth

SPEAKER_03 7:53

Well, and I'd love to uh because I've read his last book. In fact, I've read all of his books. And he's talking about how he just falls down all the time now. It's just a thing. So he's he's but also I would love to know how many times it took him to do his lines because there are times, again, that his his words are kind of slurred together, and it's just like, but you know, if you got the patience to do it, and he's playing the part of a guy that has Parkinson's, and I gotta tell you, he's amazing at it. But a bump. Anyway, so because he's not acting. Yeah. So anyway, let's start off with uh one of these. And now it's time for a power rant. I was kind of like, really? Are we gonna be done grumpy Dave today? But I see this all the time. And on one hand, I get it because you know it's it's you know, you're new or whatever, but this guy said, I've been using Zoom. Zoom, I tell you. It's gotten better for my remote interviews since I started my podcast three years ago. I tried things like Riverside, but my guests are not very tech savvy. They've always had troubles with it. I also used to have a free Zoom membership with my university, so it made sense to just use Zoom. But when I looked into actually buying a membership, it's like$20 a month for video conferencing, and I'm the only one who thinks this is crazy expensive, to which my answer is yes, it's not crazy expensive. Go look at, you know, go look at what's the one that that we used to use? StreamYard. Go look at and because Zoom only does one thing. It it makes your voice get from one person to the other with video. Yeah, it does a little compression that's not great, but and he's like, what happened to the days of Skype where it was free? And I was like, well, Skype, like many free programs, went away because 90% of the audience that was using it used it for free, and free is not a good business model. He says, I think I'm gonna switch to descript, which is who knows, probably 30 bucks. And he goes on and on, but I just there was another guy that was like, I want to do a video show, I want to do everything on my phone and record, and I was like, Well, Riverside does have a uh phone version of their their tool, but it's always like I want to wait a minute, Todd says Discord is still free. Oh, Discord, yeah. That's really the way that's I was thinking descript. I was like, wait, what? But that's just one of those where I'm like, look, I get it, we don't want to spend money, but it's the people that like I want to do a three-camera shoot with great audio, and I want to spend no more than twelve dollars a month. And I'm like, yeah, that's just not gonna kind of work.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

No, not anymore, not anymore. I mean, listen, this is the maturity of the markets, right? This is what they do. They consolidate, they always start free. This is where we are in the AI cycle right now. It's always free or freemium or close to free or some free options or whatever. Then it consolidates down, and then you know they gotta pay for this stuff somehow. And so it'll, you know. At this point, they're very there are free options available, but not very many left. No, you know, I try to keep track of them all, and there's just a handful.

SPEAKER_03 11:26

Well, that, and then when if it is free, then they complain that it doesn't work that well. And I'm like, well, okay, don't pay them anymore, you know. So I forgot. I said I was going to use Clubhouse, and then I forgot to start Clubhouse. So I'm starting Clubhouse in the background. We'll see what happens. But yeah, I just I I get it. And then the other one, it just I'm starting to see it, it reminds me, we we do a thing every Friday at the School of Podcasting, and it's called Lunch with Dave. It's basically just you know asking Dave questions, but we also all chime in on the answer. And so yeah, we do have a person here. We have a couple people listening on on Clubhouse. Interesting. The thing I don't know is how to get them to raise their hand. I guess if they they do something, there's some sort of raise your hand, and I will bring them on stage.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Or our Clubhouse listeners, Dave, give a give a one minute what they've what they've joined today.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

Yes, you've uh well it's it's Tim and Michael, so both these guys know what they're listening to.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Yeah, it's so like okay. But the uh the the just the whole free thing and you know, I want to do uh and Craig from AI Goes to College, he said, is it just time to like are we all just gonna do video now? He says, because it just because if you go there, he says and if you go to Reddit, every question is now about F stops and oh man, half the there we go. Invite as a speaker. Everybody is coming into the chat room here in uh clubhouse. Okay, so Ralph has raised his hand, so I'm gonna click on Ralph and say invite to speak, I believe is what I have to do. And now Ralph comes up on the stage somehow. He's supposed to. I invited him to speak, so I guess he has to uh figure out. Ralph is now a speaker. There we go. So Ralph, thanks for helping me test uh Clubhouse. In theory. Is there a 30-second delay on Clubhouse? Good morning, Dave. There he is, cool. Beautiful. That might be the Good morning, Dave. Do you know Ralph if there's a how you doing, Dave? Okay, so apparently he can't hear me. It sounds that way. Okay, so that or he's got he's listening to the audio on YouTube, which is like a 30-second delay, and instead of, you know, the clubhouse thing.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Oh, yeah, that mutual what did they used to say? Yeah, turn off your radio.

SPEAKER_03 14:04

Yeah, turn off your radio. Turn off your radio. Yeah. So because I can hear I can hear Ralph, but this may have been a I'm not a this this I'm not I'm not a fan of this. Yeah, well the thing was is like now I got it fixed, I think. Okay, beautiful. So can you hear us?

SPEAKER_02 14:20

I can hear you now. I just switched out of the YouTube and over to Clubhouse.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

That was it, yeah. So but he sounds and I tried to, well, per Randy, I tried the Rode virtual, whatever that thing was. That and it's weird because it it looked like it was gonna work. It gives you so many inputs and outputs. So in theory, whatever the name of that software that you download that lets you do Clubhouse, I forget the name of it. But I could not deck Club Deck. I could not get Club Deck to use my virtual gizmo that I just installed. And I was like, you know what? It works if I just plug my phone into it. So I just plug my phone into it, and that's what we're we're doing now. But it is cool. I mean, it's it's great. It's just for me, it's another thing to watch. So I've got and I'm not sure. Jim, what what what interface do you use? For yeah, you're just using a Mo 2 something for oh the audio interface, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Mo 2 M2 is what I use.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

So yeah, Uncle Marv is like, hey, use Road Call Me. Well, we had to ditch Road Call Me, unless I got a Rodcaster Pro, which would be yet another thing to watch.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Hey Dave, can I can I comment on the question you were asking? Sure. So because I have a little bit of a opinion on this, and I think people need to understand that hobbies cost money.

SPEAKER_03 15:50

That's I and try to spend some money. Yeah, there was one person that was like, I'm starting a podcast, blah, blah, blah. And they said, I've I've heard about Riverside, but I don't want to spend any money. And I was like, bowling, golf, painting, anything that's your hobby, you got, you know, even if it's walking, unless you're doing it barefoot, you gotta spend money on shoes. And it's just the like, and I get that you want to do it for a little bit of money, but when you want to do it and you're serious about wanting to do it for free, I'm like, yeah, that's like where where does that come from? And yesterday Craig was talking about are are people just dead set on doing video? And I go, it appears that way. I don't, you know, that's just one of the things that it was a buzz sprout group I was in, and I said, here is what I hear from content creators, and I disagree with almost all of it. And one is the the one is be consistent, and I'm like, that's true, but also consistently deliver value. Because, you know, if somebody's off when they sing and they're like, Yeah, this is me singing, okay, and next week they're like, and this is still me singing. Yeah, okay, you're consistent, but you're bad. Like, I don't want to hear that. And they're like, here I am another week. Look, three weeks in a row of me singing, it's still bad. Like, so consistency is not the key. And then keeping it real, you know, like we want to have real conversations. And I go, well, real conversations can also be really boring. And so edit out the bat, you know, the boring stuff, and it just seems like people think, oh, all I have to do to do a podcast is put up a camera, have an honest conversation with my friends where nobody's gonna get any of the inside jokes that we're doing because we've known each other for 20 years, and you know, money will fall from heaven. And I'm just like, there's a part of me that's like, that's not new. Like, we've heard that, it just seems to be really prevalent now. And then to what Ralph was talking about, throw on top of it, oh, and we want to do it for free. And there's just a part of me that goes, uh at least today, uh it it it scratches my grumpy itch where I just want to go, come on, people, like can you name me something else that that's a hobby that you can do for free?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

So that means smoking and drinking and all those kind of things cost money, so if you're gonna do those, you're gonna spend money.

SPEAKER_03 18:22

Yeah, and yet they want to do it for free. And I'm like, the I I guess because music is almost, you know, even though you pay ten bucks a month for your Spotify or whatever, you know, it seems like music is almost free. And I guess they just think that, you know, podcasting is is free. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Well, listen, you you put your you put your treasure where your heart is, right? And so if you're gonna if you're gonna really get into this and do it, yeah, it's gonna it's it's gonna require some of it, you know. There's and listen, there's a difference between overdoing it and value, right? So there's some of us are a little value-driven. So I'm trying to squeeze every ounce of value out of everything I get. You know, I hold on to stuff for probably longer than I should, I use equipment longer than I should. I I probably use too many free services when I can't. That's the way I'm wired, and I'm okay with that, right? Some folks want to get after it and throw money at it. You can do that too. That's fine. Just don't, you know, just be okay with whatever you're doing, I guess is what we're saying, right? Just be okay with it.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Yeah. John, you are now on stage, Mr. Jamingo.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

You know what's funny? If this guy that he was complaining in Reddit, I bet you he golfs. And one day a golf would probably pay for a year of podcasting. Posting, Zoom, all of that. So it's funny that it's okay to spend that much money on golf, but if you want to do something like this, you know, they can't do a, you know, they can't pay 20. Five hours, it's a cup of coffee. It's five hours a week.

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Which is trying. And and now he wants to go to Discord, which I love Discord, and Discord has a way to record. It's horrible. You'll get three-quarters way through, and it'll just stop recording and won't tell you. So he'll have fun with that.

SPEAKER_03 20:14

Yeah. Well, I I saw on the on his post, he later says, I'm thinking of going to descript, and then puts an affiliate link, which I thought was against the terms on Reddit in that that specific one. And they have a lot of, you know, no self-promoting, no this, no that, no blah, blah, blah. There's nothing in there about affiliate links. And I was really surprised because I was I was gonna be the narc. I was gonna go, look, this guy's, you know, breaking the rules, but apparently there are no rules against putting affiliate links in Reddit. So I was like, yeah. And then Uncle Marv says, yeah, probably spend a thousand dollars on their phone or PC gaming rig. Yeah, exactly. So it's always and then Mr. Wait a minute. Are you talking about me, Uncle Marv? Is that is he said I did for sure. Yeah. I've never heard of this. Chris Nessie says Meld Studio is also great. So there's a new one. And that's always you we'll have a new free one pop up, and then about three months later, they're like, hey, free is not a good business model. And they'll start charging, and then people will complain. And I'm like, well, it is what it is. So always fun any way you slice it. So just for me, you know, I usually say it's about the and and John brought up golfing. Try go look at what it costs to bowl right now. And the place where I used to go, you don't bowl per game now. You rent the lane for X amount of hours. And I was like, well, that's a different way of doing it. That's fun.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

It's just another way. Yeah, you know, it's just another way of that way you could kind of plan your time. Right? Yeah, uh you ever go bowling and you're like, okay, I'll bo I'll buy a game and you're done in like 15 minutes. And you're like, Well, geez, that was not very long. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

RSS Versus YouTube Podcast Claims

SPEAKER_03 22:04

Well, and I just bought tickets. One of my favorite bands is King's X, they're coming to Cleveland. It was 37 bucks for the ticket, and it'll probably cost me another 20 bucks in gas to drive back and forth to Cleveland or whatever. I'm going to see Devo. I'm not even a huge fan. Yeah, Devo is a band from Akron. I've never seen them. I bought their first album when it came out, and it's Devo in Akron at the Civic Theater, which is like this historical theater. And I was like, huh. And usually if you buy a single ticket, you can kind of sit wherever you want. And the good seats were$269. And I was like, you know, I'm not even really a Devo fan. This is it's like I saw the Ramones, so I could say I saw the Ramones. So the the basically the last seat in the place was yeah, Uncle Mark says, crack that whip was$73. And so I thought about that a long time. I'm like,$73 for a band that I don't really like, but I ended up pulling the trigger on that one too. So, you know, hobbies cost money, and you know, that's not even, you know, Randy Black says, I'm going to see Weird Owl on June 6th. There you go. Yeah. And the the fun part of that is when you get into musicians, they used to make money selling records, and now they make zero money selling their music. So that's why your concert tickets are, you know, the cheap ones are 73 bucks. Coach Ed says, hey, if you don't post an audio version of your podcast to Spotify or Apple, are you are you a podcast or a YouTube show?

SPEAKER_00 23:41

You are in the Ed, hold on, Coach Ed, you are poking the bear. Yeah. You don't know that because you just been this is your third week here, but it's okay that you poke the bear. Dave, I'm gonna let you run on this one. Go.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

Yeah, I will I will be I I won't spend an hour like I normally do on this. You know, you are not a podcast. You need an RSS feed to be a podcast, and YouTube does not have a podcast, no matter how many times they tell you it's a podcast. I tell you right now I'm a male model, and yet I am not getting any jobs. So, you know, I identify as a male model. Well, yeah, that that doesn't make me a mobile.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Maybe for AARP, right? Maybe it's just you're starting the right, you're just not pitching your services to the right.

Content Warnings And Listener Trust

SPEAKER_03 24:25

And so, you know, as much as somebody went, I dub thee a podcaster, and they wave their magic wand at all the YouTubers, no, you're not a and so that's where you'll hear some people say it's a YouTube podcast, because an actual podcast delivered via RSS goes to Apple and Spotify and Overcast and Pocket Cast and and They're a Cast, There a Cast, Everywhere a Cast Cast, all those different apps. A YouTube podcast goes to YouTube and YouTube Music. That's it. And so if you say booger too many times and they kick you off, there was a I saw a thing this week where a guy was upset, he's an animator, right? He actually draws animations and he does all this stuff, and one of his friends who's also an animator, so they're making cartoons, and the cartoon got kicked off of YouTube because it there it wasn't lifelike enough. Like the AI was like, hey, that's not a real person. No, it's not, it's a cartoon, and they got kicked off, they got demonetized. I always need to make sure there's a difference. They got demonetized, they didn't get kicked off. So yeah, let's see. Z-Man says, is it okay to state a might not be for you disclaimer before the show? Oh, this is a good this is a good question. Yeah, especially if it's like John's show. John will, you know, use use adult words and a lot. A lot of adult adult words. Yes. And so, you know, I th A, he probably marks it explicit, but I know people I just listened to Scott Johnson who does what was that like? And he was talking about this. And basically, Scott should rename his show. Man, that really sucked, because that's kind of the answer to the question, because he has these people that go through horrendous situations, and then he has them on to talk about it. And so he had one that involved drugs, I think suicide, a couple other things. And at the beginning of the show, he's like, hey, just so you know, today's show deals with sexual assault, drugs, and suicide. And he's like, So he's just kind of letting people know if, hey, if that's going to trigger you, now would be the time to to tune out, especially if you're listening in the car with with kids. But Jim, any thoughts on on this?

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Yeah, I know I'm a big fan of like letting folks.

SPEAKER_03 26:52

Well, well, what happened to your oh, I that's what happened. I turned your slider down.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

That's your good. I was getting animated about it too. I'm a big fan of letting folks know what's coming, right? Don't surprise them. Most folks don't want to be surprised, just to be honest. They want to tune in, they're tuning in for a reason. They don't they they well and I'm not saying don't be shocking. You can, if that's what they're expecting every week, be shocking, right? But uh most folks are looking for something that's consistent, right? They're coming because they've listened to it once, they're coming back to listen to it again because they liked it the first time. And so I I don't I I I don't think if you've got some content that you think is gonna not necessarily or it's not gonna be safe for young ears or some of those kinds of things, I don't think it's a bad idea to just to just disclose it right out the front. And just be kind to your listeners in that case, you know. So is it the end of the world if on a regular podcast you drop you know you you drop something you didn't expect and you leave it in? Well, you'll find out. That's the good thing about your listeners, is if you do something they don't like, generally they're gonna let you know. You know, especially if you've given them your email and how to contact the show and you know, all those things. They're gonna let you know.

Clip Overload And Better Workflows

SPEAKER_03 28:14

So yeah, Working Cows says, or you can just title your show Working Cows, and 99.5% of people in the world will know it's not for them. Ray from Around the Layout says, just like South Barch disclaimer, should not be viewed by anyone. And I think that's maybe what he was talking about, just coming from the standpoint of the topics. Yeah, I I've done episodes that were just about monetization on the school of podcasting. And I'll say, hey, today we're talking about affiliate marketing, which is a way that you can monetize your show. If you never want to monetize your show, this show is not for you, class dismissed. And the reason for that is if I can save them time, yeah, because I know some people like, yeah, but then they won't listen to the show. Yeah, that's the whole point. It's not for them. Why wait till 10 minutes in till they go, oh, this is just about blah, blah, blah, and I don't care about that. I'd rather let them know up front, and that way those that want to hear it can hear it, and those that don't can uh go listen to something else. So yeah, I always and for just letting people know, like, we can't do that on this show. Uh, we don't know what we're talking about because we kind of go off you guys. I mean, I could have said, hey, today we're gonna talk about, you know, why podcasting for free is not really a realistic expectation, but that's there in case you guys don't come up with something. So I I don't announce that at the beginning of the show. And then later I go back and put in chapters. So if somebody goes, Yeah, I'm done with this free podcasting discussion, they can just click the next button and go to the next chapter in the show. So that's how we handle it here. If you've ever wondered why don't I guess I could if I wanted to re-record an intro and say, hey, on today's show we talked about podcasting for free, yada yada yada, blah, blah, blah, yada yada, and this and that. Enjoy the show. But that's anytime you add something to your show, you're adding more time to it. And it's just not something at this point. I'm like, just use the chapters. So keep that in mind. So let me check. It is it also, as we're using Clubhouse today, that's another thing I occasionally have to check, which means I'm not always checking the chat room. So it's it's it's more to do. So, but another thing that I get that I saw that I thought we could talk about today is editing. And so this guy says, anyone else spending more time on clips than on the actual episode? Um, he says, I need to vent and also genuinely ask if this is just me. I've been podcasting for about two years. It's a solo show, weekly, record remote guests. The actual recording and editing part I have dialed in at this point, maybe three or four hours per episode, including prep, recording, cleaning audio, bouncing the final file. He doesn't say how long his episodes are, but anyway, but the clips, the clips are eating my life. Every episode I try to pull eight to ten clips for TikTok, reels, and shorts. Well, maybe there's not eight to ten clips there. There's a novel idea. Maybe you're mining for gold that's not there, because apparently that's the only way anyone finds podcasts now. Nope, that's wrong. The way people discover podcasts is the thing I did at the beginning of the show where I go, have you guys seen shrinking on Apple TV yet? It's really good. I like it. That's how people discover podcasts is when somebody goes, Hey, did you hear the Boomer Bunker show? John went off on blah, blah, blah. Wait till you hear it. The guy about blew a gasket, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Hey, I can I can I get all my soapbox about clips? This aggravates me. Sure. So I go in and I pull clips and I put pull clips, short clips, put it on social media. They get more views than my podcast gets listens. And I'm like, okay, but so people are more attuned to watch a short clip than they are to listen to a long podcast. So I get his pain, but I think that's how you pull people in. I think the short clips, I could be wrong, might be able to pull people in like word of mouth.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Yeah, it's one of those things where also keep in mind a view on a short is zero. So if somebody mouses over that and it moves, that's a view. So that's that was one of my favorite. They changed the whatever, the criteria for for what equals a view on a short, and then they came out like next one. We had 20 million views, and I was like, Yeah, but aren't aren't most of those 0.03 seconds? But yeah, he says I try to pull out eight to ten clips because apparently that's the only way people find podcasts, and each clip takes me 20 to 30 minutes to cut, to which I go, wait a minute, if the clip is a minute, couldn't you just open up your phone and go yada yada yada blah blah blah, yuck yuck yuck, old McDonald had a farm, yeah, yeah, I oh, and then put it out there. That's the for me, the thing about clips he hold on, is that they uh you're you're basically if I go and grab a book, so let's grab uh stories story cell by Matthew Dix. Okay, great. And I go in and I go, let's go to this chapter and let's go. Oh wow, it pulled all of this whole paragraph, which is amazing that it pulled the whole paragraph by itself. I didn't have to tell it, it pulled a paragraph. But if I were to read this paragraph, it's important to note that at the beginning of the film, Grant uses the claw that he lets fall to the ground to frighten a smelly, stupid boy he doesn't like. Now instead of holding on to this precious bit of fossilized ancient dinosaur, Grant lets the claw go because it's holding on to the children, one who he made one who had made him laugh and one who was comforted like a father. There you go. Now, does that make you want to buy the book story sell? No, it does not. It's out of context, it doesn't work. Thank you, Rich. And so on one hand, I know that some of these clips are great, but not all clips are great. And when you're spending this guy 20 to 30 minutes, maybe that's why it's taking 20 to 30 minutes, because there aren't eight to ten clips. To me, I think it would be what do you think, Jim? Grabbing eight to ten clips, automated, or maybe when I say something brilliant, I just drop some brilliance. I look down and I go, Oh man, we did that at 1107. Okay, so that's you know, 37 minutes into it, go look for the brilliance that I drop. And then go back and find and find the good clip.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

That's hard for a lot of people. Yeah, it it that takes practice to know to do those kinds of things. I think if you're gonna go the clip strategy, you you you've got two options. And the the one option is pull them in editing. If you do, if you do a full episode edit, that's the time to listen for them. And then, or AI assisted, and there can be some version of both, right? You could give AI your transcripts and say, pull the most likely clips from this. Then you can read what the transcript pulled, and it'll give you timestamps, and you can go back, you know, you can go back and get those clips from there. It'll even there's even some services that'll cut them for you, right? Hey, listen, I think it's an opportunity if you're doing it, and you know, yeah, we we kind of poo-poo them sometimes, like hover over and um nobody's really watching them, and they're not really Yeah, that's all true. But it somebody might. So, you know, I I don't think it's a bad idea, you know. Unfortunately, YouTube is full of these. And so just realize, you know, it's another market that's just flooded with AI stuff that's out there. Have I ever gone to somebody's podcast or somebody's um excuse me, YouTube from seeing one of those? No, I've never have. I just I just don't, I just don't, you know, it what's interesting is YouTube tunes those based on my preferences of videos I'm watching. So oftentimes those clips, I'm like, no, I'm gonna catch it any episode that I watch on a weekly basis, or no, I I already know that or I've already seen it. And so it's it's in some ways, it's a lot like remember when you used to shop, maybe it was even Amazon, you'd buy something, and then in your search for the next three days, all it served you was the item that you bought, and you're like, I bought this already, you know, like it don't stop. You know, the the smarter thing would have been okay, you bought this, what's your not your next likely thing to purchase from that? But I don't know, in the early days that didn't work very well. I think YouTube is that way now. You're kind of like, you're kind of feeding me a lot of the same stuff. No, that's not always true, and there's things that that that where that's different, and you have Jim, you're like, no, Jim, it doesn't work that way. Uh okay, fine. Fine, you know better than me. But I I think if you've got the time to do the clips and you can do them in an artistic way that you enjoy, if you'd like it, do it.

SPEAKER_03 37:38

That's okay. Do it, do it the the part that you enjoy. And then Ralph's got something to say here in a second. Rich says it's funny. I actually do go to see the full version after I see the clip. So, Ralph, you wanted to chime in.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Yeah, I just wanted to kind of champion what Jim was saying. I think the problem is so many people just use AI to go and find the clips they want to use, and AI is not putting out good information. So I think we need to really be aware of that. Just because AI says this is a good clip doesn't make it a good clip.

SPEAKER_03 38:09

Yeah. Artificial intelligence, my friends, yes. Because he says here, and each clip takes me 20 to 30 minutes to cut, caption, tweak the hook, and export. So we're talking three to five hour per episode just on clips. And I'm like, mmm, that sounds like a whole lot of time. And especially if it's if it's sucking the life out of you, then quit doing it. I do see the other reason why using Clubhouse is a bit of a problem on this show, at least. Because like when Ralph's on podcast morning chat, they only, I think, only use Clubhouse, but there's another chat going on here.

SPEAKER_02 38:48

No, that's not true. We actually are are live streaming on Riverside as well, Dave.

SPEAKER_03 38:53

Okay. But do you guys so so do you have somebody watching the chat on Clubhouse and somebody watching the chat on Riverside?

SPEAKER_02 39:01

No, we kind of just Mark and I kind of do that together with the other people that are moderators. We haven't found that to be an issue as of yet.

SPEAKER_03 39:08

Okay. Because I'm just uh for me, I'm like, there's too many, too many things flying at me.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

The issue that I have right now, though, it's interesting. On the live stream, it's about I don't know, it's a there's definitely a delay. I'm not sure why, but there's definitely a delay.

SPEAKER_03 39:23

That might be an e camm thing. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 39:26

It's uh No, it's YouTube if on well, I think all of the services in it put some kind of delay in there. It's shorter on some and longer on others. YouTube's definitely got a delay. So it's it's just I think that you know, it's just some buffer. It's going to space. You know? Give it a break.

SPEAKER_03 39:44

It's going to space. Yeah. Chris Nessie says, can we just say you can do whatever you want with your podcast that you're willing to pay for or uh dedicated time for? Yeah. Because Randy's Randy says, Man, it's like somebody's typing their own transcription if it's taking, you know, three to five hours. My I smell a bit of perfectionism in there as well. Yeah. He says YouTube has a buffer, Randy does. You have the control of it in latency settings. Two to four second delay on Twitch, ten or more seconds on YouTube, says Todd Negator. So there you go.

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Dave, I would just go with the YouTube chat. Don't worry about the clubhouse chat.

SPEAKER_03 40:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:28

Because it's way too much to do. As someone that streams and I turned off my chat because I couldn't handle doing the show and looking into chat. I let Kate handle the chat.

SPEAKER_04 40:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

So or one of you might be able to get a moderator. I don't know if that would work.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

It's an idea. I need to see how many are listening on Clubhouse. Let's see if we count Ralph and John. Eight.

unknown 40:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

And there's a lot of there's I'm not I'm not out there. Obviously, I'm not out there. Is there chat for with all you guys or are people chatting? Is it that group that's chatting?

SPEAKER_01 41:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:04

So it's but it's hard to keep up with. But the thing here's the great thing about Clubhouse, and I I hated Clubhouse. And Ralph had me gave me a an enlightening back to Clubhouse again. It's great to pull in audio or people that want to talk to you. It's easier to do this than the the other ways that you have right now. So it could be used for that, which you just don't want to chat room.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Yeah, that's why I'm launching my I'm starting a live show this coming Friday on Clubhouse and live and on the video too, because I just see as a way to really interact with people one-on-one.

SPEAKER_03 41:36

The interesting thing is, at least in my headphones, and I do not know why, John is more in my right headphone, and Ralph is more in my left. It's automatically splitting the audio, Michael. That's kind of wild.

SPEAKER_02 41:50

I'm certainly not on the left, Dave. Don't don't put me in that category, Dave.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

We should both be on the right. Ralph and I should both be on the in your right here.

Make The Process Fun Again

SPEAKER_03 42:02

That's too funny. Yeah. So yeah. So this guy's just like, I'm spending too much time, which brings me very nicely to Matthew Passey is a guy I've known forever. And this isn't even a question. It's just to me, I was like, this needs to be said. And so what he said, he's a great guy. He's now working with Tracy DeForge over on some things. But he says, I've been thinking a lot about content creation lately, and I've come to believe this. There's one right way to do it. If your content is fun, your process should be fun. If it's serious, own that seriousness. If it's a grind, make the grind meaningful. But underneath all of it, this is what I think matters most. Creating content and putting it out into the world should make you happy or fulfilled. Ideally both. If it's just stress and obligation, that'll show up in the work and in how long you can sustain it as well. What does your content creation process feel like now? He was generally curious. And that's funny because at the time I was I always about Wednesday get somewhat anxious about what am I talking about on Sunday and really start working on it. And by Sunday, I'm like, oh, I'm excited to talk about this now. So Jim, what's your how do you feel about your podcast?

SPEAKER_00 43:28

Oh, it's a hobby. For me, I mean, home gadget geeks is a hobby. And so I, you know, I d I don't actually honor I don't worry about it that much. Like it's, you know, we we're in a rhythm. I have a bunch of hosts. We record every Thursday night. I just did one last night or two nights ago. And I I don't, you know, I just don't I don't worry about it that much. Yeah. 678 episodes. So you just keep going.

SPEAKER_03 43:56

You know, and I think any episode, if I had a show that I really just dreaded doing, I would stop. I mean, life's too short. So I mean, there are some episodes I'm more excited than others, but if I was really like, Oh, I can't believe I gotta get up on Saturday and do ask the podcast, I'd quit. Like that's No, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

I think if either one of us, you know, we've got that kind of agreement. Like I think if either one of us showed up one Saturday and goes, I think it's we've run the gamut on this thing. And w we we both would be like, okay, it's it's okay. Will this last forever? It can't, right? At some point, something will get us to stop. But for now, you know, it works. We like hanging out with you guys. We love having the conversation. Yes, it is repetitive. This is the danger of this kind of format, is you know, the whole first half of this show, we talked about, you know, kind of do what you want and do as much as you want or as little as you want. You're in charge of your own stuff. We that's every fourth show, maybe third. We spend a lot of time talking about that. So the danger in a format like this is you can you can run into that situation where you get a little repetitive, you start saying the same things over again. Doesn't change our live numbers. You guys all still come out 30 to 40 live every single Saturday morning, hang out with us, join us in the chat, have great conversations. But it that's the reality of it. However, we still like doing it. So it's fun to it's fun to come out here, it's fun to be a part of it. I learn a lot, you know. Every week, you know, you guys teach me stuff. Yeah, I've been spending the last four weeks on open claw digging into it, figuring it out, how good is it? I'm kind of some days I call it dumb claw because it's not as smart as it thinks it is. And it committed it it committed suicide on me the other day and just drove it like drove a knife right into its head. Just it, I was updating something and it just wiped out and overwrit overwrote a config file that I needed. And wasn't a backup copy of it anywhere, wasn't it? And then it couldn't connect anything. It was literally dead in the water. Like there was at that point it updated and then it gave me a message like I'm dead now. And so I was like, What what? What I thought you I thought you were smart. No, apparently not. Dumb claw sometimes. But we see what we're doing. Go ahead. Go, John.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

I'm sorry. I said, see, what I love about this is Jim teaches me not to put open claw on my computer. So the great thing about this is Jim comes in and says, okay, it's it's safe, it's safe, it's safe and stable. You idiots can go over there and start using it. And then that's when I go over and start using it. But the great thing about this show is you never know what's going to happen. With podcasting, there's always something that's coming up to talk about. And we as podcasters need other podcasters to talk to about podcasting. So that's why I love this show.

SPEAKER_03 46:59

There you go.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

We have by the by the way, John, it it's getting closer. It's still not prime time yet. And let me say this from a podcast production standpoint, I think it's gonna be a really good tool for that. I think it's gonna be one of those customizable tools. Yes, you can buy those services today that does these things for you. But if you want to customize it, it's a lot like OBS in this way. If you want to completely customize the way you do your podcast production, you know, hey, I'm gonna give it the show notes, or hey, I'm gonna give it the transcripts, hey, I'm gonna give it the MP3 file. Hey, I'm gonna, I want it to create some stuff for me, you know, some some art artifacts. I want it to I wanted to connect to my website and automatically update the website. I wanted to connect to YouTube and automatically update that kind of thing. By the way, if I want to change those at any given time, I could just go in there, change those, it'll update them for me. It could do that. It's amazing. So I think there's gonna be some things coming for some people, but you know, I've said this a thousand times on the show. The the the equation is options equal confusion. And right now, it's a million options. And so, you know, it's one of those kinds of things. Yeah, if you're techie, all the techies are like, oh, it's not that hard. No, it is that hard. Let's just be really clear about this. It is that hard. But John, to your point, it it's coming. That's it's gonna there's gonna be a day when you're gonna want to use maybe not open claw, but something like open claw.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

I stumbled into something that I didn't even realize. So I have cast magic. I bought it from App Sumo when you could just buy it and it's one price, it's not a monthly price.

SPEAKER_04 48:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

So what you can do is you can go into the prompts, you can go into the prompts and use your prompts that you wrote on Claude or whatever, put it in there, and it'll do that with your transcript. It actually saves you a step. So I had written some well prompts for show notes, and then I went and put that right into Cast Magic, and it does my show notes right in Cast Magic now. Yeah, and have to use it the other.

SPEAKER_00 49:01

Hey, one of the things interesting from John, as you mentioned that this week, so I was I've got a process at work I was doing on Claude, and it had I'd built this process and it gotten kind of expensive from a token uses perspective. And one of the things I did was take that output and I gave it to ChatGPT and said, Hey, can you do this better? Right? What's wrong with this? And ChatGPT came back with a whole like, okay, this could be better, you could do this, this is good, you might want to try this differently. And you know, if you have access to any of these and you're thinking about your your show notes, this would be a perfect thing to do. Like pit them against each other, you know, write them the way you like them, dump them into each and say, what would you do differently? And then take those outputs and dump them, you know, swap them around. It's super interesting. Now you don't have to do everything it says, but it's super interesting to get that kind of feedback. I think that's a great use of the AI for some of that feedback, what it thinks, what it does. Now, it can absolutely be overwhelming too. You can get so many new suggestions, you're like, uh, and then you don't get anything done, so you got to be careful.

SPEAKER_03 50:16

You have to be careful to not let it AI you write out, like take your personality out. That's that's something you have to be careful with. Chris Nessy says you guys like doing the show, but what's the ROI in reality? I've got for this show, yeah. Is that what he's saying? For this show, yeah, yeah. I mean, the big thing is I get to talk to Jim Collison every week, so that's a that's a big plus, you know. I've gotten a few School of Podcasting members. The Z Man is now a member of the School of Podcasting, so that's cool. And yeah, so it and what you know, obviously the awesome supporters, so I get a couple hundred bucks a month, which means I'm probably making less than minimum wage right now.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Look at Chris Nessie's comment. That's the the that that sums it up as we think about services and stuff. Yeah, you have people who can't decide between two$70 mics, those folks aren't ready for Opa Claw. And you're probably you're probably right, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:14

And we do have some breaking news, and that is Bandrew Scott got engaged on Thursday.

SPEAKER_00 51:21

Congratulations, man.

SPEAKER_03 51:22

I wonder what happened to him. That would explode.

Local AI Tools Explained Simply

SPEAKER_00 51:24

It is wedding when we throw boxes behind them. And I pronounce you and then blah, blah, blah. And then yeah, right over the shoulder. Just throwing boxes.

SPEAKER_03 51:35

The Z-Man has a question. Speaking of the Z Man, have you guys ever tried LM Studio Workplace? I'm assuming he means Google Notebook? Or is that different?

SPEAKER_00 51:46

LM Studios a different, so if you think of like a it's like Olama, which is a an AI, a local AI aggregator, right? You can you can uh locally, so on your on your computer. Do we need the jingle? Yeah, go ahead. We just and now oh, he's been waiting for this. It's time for Jim to get his nerd on. So these aren't the only two, but Olama, LM Studio, these are two real popular AI kind of aggregators. You can go out, there's a bunch of open source AI models. So all these companies, right? Everybody's releasing these models, and then on the web, by the way, you're getting some of the best, you know, some of the best models are being used on the web, and you're using the web their hardware to run these, right? These models are very intense. They it's not like you're gonna download these models to your PC. In some cases you can, but and run them locally, they're gonna go much slower because they take a lot of memory, take a lot of compute. They're they're designed to run on like a on a video card. This is why you can't buy RAM, by the way. This is why you can't find like this is why video cards tripled because these AI companies are all using this hardware to run these AI models, right? They don't run magically, they run on a lot of RAM, a lot of DDR5 out there, a lot of G uh GPUs running these things. So these LM Studio and and and Olama are local, you can run them locally. You can go out and download the open source versions. These are versions that these companies have put out there that you can download and you can run locally. It's kind of cool if you have a high-end, if you have a high-end PC, so if it's got a GPU in it, that's pretty good and a bunch of RAM. Or if you've got a Mac or a Mac Studio, you can download these and try out these models. The benefit of them is they're local. So you can do anything you want on them. They're private. You can, you know, you can, if you're concerned about the things you're putting in AI and you don't want that data to get out. And I'm not mean in a bad way. Your budget might be one of those, where an uh some of the AI models may be great at doing an analysis on your budget. You want to dump in your financials and you want to keep it local. Okay, so they can they can do this for you. So the big connection between what we were talking about earlier in this is you can actually use open claw to connect to a local model through LN Studios or OLAM, and in theory, run the whole thing locally. That's theory. Like today it doesn't really work very well. It's the the open claw has not really necessarily been optimized yet to use them locally. So if you can use them on your browser or you can use them on your local PC, and they're pretty fast. You attach them to open claw and they're super slow. So there's a little bit of work that needs to be done there. But yes, you know, if you're if you're worried about privacy, I would look in personally. This is my advice. I would look into Ellen Studio. It's easy, it's got a web, it's got an it's got a you know, you can install it locally, it makes sense, it's designed actually really well. It's a little complicated, right? There's four sections and you can download models and stuff, but it actually once you get into it, you're like, oh, this is pretty easy. So if you're interested in trying your own private AI, LM Studio would be my recommendation. That is an average guy tool, right? That is something that the average guy or lady could use in that case, and and and give it a try. It's free. All the models are free. There's no right now, today, there's no cost to it, and you can give it a try. You need to have a fairly new fast computer on an old laptop.

SPEAKER_03 55:36

Randy says the most GPUs are on GDDR7. Good old GDDR7. That's the memory type. Yeah, the problem is DDR5 is being pulled for the building of the server infrastructure. So yay, nerd talk.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

Yeah, no, it's it, yeah, for sure. That's that is that's the ultimate nerd uh talk for uh for that. They're you know, the data centers are the the AI data centers are pulling all of this equipment off the consumer market to be used in these data centers, and that you know, RAM prices shot through the roof. So DDR5 got hard to find, so that's you know, fast RAM. So people started buying DDR4 because they couldn't find any DDR5. Well, that drove up the prices of DDR4, right? And and so then the stuff we're making GPUs out of is it you can't, it's in it's like impossible to find. So that tripled the price of a GPU. If you if you're a gamer and you you know you're just trying to buy a you know a modern video card, you're spending 900 to$3,000. Those things used to all be under a thousand. Right. Listen, uh I had a hard time with GPUs when they went from a hundred to three hundred. I was like, what three hundred dollars for you right, you know, for these cards. Now they're you know three thousand dollars. So this is not this is not a good time, friends. Here's my PSA. This is not a good time to buy hardware. No, so if you can avoid it, don't I mean avoid it. Don't don't buy hardware, don't feed the beast. Don't if you don't have to, don't pay the extra cost on this. We need to get these prices back down for them to be reasonable. The bubble will burst eventually, and these prices will come back down some. So if you can avoid it, wait. Now is not a good time. Only buy if you absolutely have to.

SPEAKER_03 57:29

Yeah. I had a question for Ralph since he's in Clubhouse. When I know you use you said club deck. Do you use the virtual uh whatever those are called, slider inputs, etc., etc.? Or do you just plug in, you know, your club deck and it, you know, one of those cases where the roadcaster just does its magic?

SPEAKER_02 57:52

So I went to the Rodecaster Pro 2, so I would have one, two, three, six sliders. Yeah. Because I did have the duo, and that was a little bit of an issue. What the what you have to do, Dave, in the actual club deck settings, go to audio settings and change it to your roadcaster. But I think you're gonna have a conflict no, you won't have a conflict, it'll work actually, because this is what we do on the podcasting morning show. We just rebranded the name of the show now, by the way. It's not podcasting morning chat anymore, it's podcasting morning show. But so anyway, that said, you can make it work. If you want me to help you with that, Dave, I'd be happy to help you with it. It took me a little bit of getting used to, but I love Club Deck better because I'm not staring at my little phone trying to figure out what's going on.

SPEAKER_03 58:35

Yeah, that's I just was surprised it kept when I loaded it. It usually, you know, if there are people on Clubhouse, it'll show you different rooms and stuff. And I could make a room, I could do all this stuff, but there wasn't anything I could really jump into live to to play with it. And I was like, so I don't know if that maybe I just need to reboot my machine, which I did this morning, but I wasn't sure if I had to to use the virtual stuff to to get it to to work, but uh it's yeah, you can use one of the virtual connections too.

SPEAKER_02 59:05

I did that when I had the duo.

SPEAKER_03 59:07

Okay. Cool. Thank you.

Losing A Show On Spotify Hosting

SPEAKER_02 59:09

Anytime you want to test a man, just hit me up. I'll be happy to help you.

SPEAKER_03 59:12

All right. That sounds good to hear. Jim, we haven't talked about this in a while, but it's it's sad to hear. This guy says, Hey, I just lost four years of work. I got my entire podcast removed. This is from Spotify after I was already fighting other issues of being no longer monetized from having an episode. Keep in mind, Spotify takes 50%, YouTube takes 45%. From having an episode being claimed for not enough speaking, as I do a lot of sleep ambiance things, and because of that, my entire podcast was flagged. So he's playing some sort of music or something, and I wasn't told or why or what, just that I violated terms and I looked and didn't see what I did. Welcome to dealing with a big huge company. I know I got excited and uploaded multiple episodes in one night, and then in the span of three days, everything was taken down. That's a new one. So I had to use a spare one that I was going to use to expand my community, to basically tell my community, I'm not dead yet. This happened because I stupidly had not made a Discord or anything like this because I only had like a thousand followers. I'm so upset. My Apple is still awaiting judgment to see if I can get back, get it back. That's true, because if you're using Spotify for your feed and they take you out, you're you're everywhere gone. I'm so scared as I have this for so long. Any advice would help? Well, yeah, quit using Spotify as a media host. If you need free, go over to rss.com. What was interesting is speaking, I've I've I've said his name, so he showed up in a chat room. Scott Johnson said, It sure sounds like if you got removed from one place and you're gone, was this a YouTube channel? He says, No, I was using Spotify. So, yeah, anytime you're doing anything with Spotify and you're playing music, you're just asking for it. They don't want any music in a podcast on Spotify. It doesn't matter if it's 10 seconds, 10 minutes, they do not want music in a podcast. So I'm sorry to hear that guy lost four years worth of, but also we've talked about this a million times on the show. Back up your stuff. I had I had the power go out on Thursday and it was off for a while. And when it came back, I had done some stuff and I my whatever that thing's called, the the battery backup, the battery had gone dead. So it was when it finally came back on, it did its job. It it kept the power on while I was turning everything off. But when the power came back on, I got the dreaded e and I I let it do that for two hours while I charged up because I went to Best Buy and bought a new one.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:59

You you can push the button, by the way, and it'll shut that.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:02

I trust me, pound it pounded on that button, and it was really. I was like, oh, and I'm just tapped Yeah. And so long story short, when I plugged everything back in, I forgot to plug in the power to one of my hubs for my Mac Mini, which that hub powers my hard drive, my external hard drive. So all of a sudden, for a good 45 minutes, I thought I'd lost every single podcast I ever had. And I did check. I I had it in the cloud, but I was like, but where's the podcast folder? Why do I not have my podcast folder? So in this case, this guy didn't have any backups anywhere. So we I know we were talking about iDrive and Dropbox, and you know, I always forget the one that begins with a B.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

Backblaze.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:53

Backblaze, yeah, that's another one. So but luckily when I finally went over and I'm like, wait a minute, why, you know, is the hard drive dead? And I turned it around and I saw it didn't have the little green light. I was like, oh, it just unplugged. So that was I was very worried about that. Speaking of free services, here's a you know, again, I always see this everywhere, but error with ACAST, the site can't be reached. Trying to upload a podcast via ACAST, but the login page cannot be reached. Anyone else with ACAST having the same issue? Let's scroll down and see what they said. I'm experiencing the same. So that means that you know ACAST had a bad day. Anytime you have a situation and you can't get to a website, the one thing you want to do is go to a website that you never go to. So for me, that might be is MSNBC still around? I think they've rebranded. I think they're MS Now or something, but I would go to some some sort of website that I normally wouldn't go to. And if that site comes up, then I know the site that I couldn't get to was having a problem. It's just a little troubleshooting in that case, and you're like, you know, just just it's it's okay. I know we want to panic because I panicked when I thought I lost I panicked, and then I was like, no, I don't have to panic. I have backups of everything. I don't have to worry about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:12

Yeah. Listen, backups are only backups if you tested it. Like it's not really a backup unless you've tested it. So that's that's the other thing. Just make sure you know you can actually get to them. One of those, you know, you mentioned the backblaze. A lot of folks have done backblaze B2, which is like their glacier instance, right? It's cheap to put in, not so cheap to get back out. So, you know, when you you're paying for a little bit of storage, you know, I think I had a terabyte and a half or two terabytes for, you know, maybe 20 bucks a month, which is actually pretty reasonable for that much storage. But one time I had a process go awry and it started pulling and downloading the whole thing, and I spent a couple hundred dollars in a month because I they call that egress, right? Getting all of that information back out. You're not gonna you're not gonna see that in iCloud or OneDrive or Google Drive. You're not gonna see that ingress, egress. So that for a lot of people, I always recommend that's the first place to check, right? You might have already been paying for a service with Google or with Microsoft or or with Apple. You may have a service where you already have a terabyte or maybe two of storage. Um Google just up theirs to two terabytes. They're kind of their minimum now is two. So, you know, if you're like I have a I have a domain service through Google, and I I was paying, like I was paying, I don't know, eight bucks a month for it for per account. So let's say 16 bucks. And then they came to me and they're like, hey, we'd like to offer you the new AI service for the same price. And I was like, Yes. So I got their I their Gemini tools as well as the email service, as well as the storage of two terabytes. And I pay, you know, like I said, I think I pay eight bucks a user for something like that. Now I don't your mileage might vary, but you might have these services already. So if you haven't checked that out, you know, I I have six terabytes of Microsoft because I have the family account. I could be squirreling away things in there as well as you know, as well as the Google. I don't I I use iCloud but only to back up my phone, so I I have the ninety-nine cent plan. So check what you're already what you already have. You might be able you might have services you're not using and a good place to you know, a good place to store them. Just know that copy, sometimes like on OneDrive, not not technically backup. It's sync. You're syncing that file, right? You're syncing that file. Unless you are moving it there and you don't have a local copy of it, then it's backup.

Backups That Actually Save You

Short Form Retention Rules Questioned

SPEAKER_03 1:06:46

Excellent. Well, one thing that is our backup is our awesome supporters. We love them to death. People like one, as soon as I say awesome supporter, like this worked so much easier at the beginning of this. People like the content creators, accountant, Chris over at castahead.net, thhelion.com, yep, podcast. We love these people that you know you have to spend 20 to get on the wheel of names, which we'll see here in a second, but we appreciate all the five and ten dollar supporters as well. And uh this show is brought to you by the School of Podcasting, where you get courses, coaching, and community. And later on this uh next month, we are having Rox Codes, who is the guy behind Flightcast, and who is the co-partner, co-founder with uh Stephen Bartlett, so the guy from Diary of a CEO is going to be coming and showing off Flightcast. So if you're thinking of doing video podcasting, that looks like a really cool platform. So that'll be coming to the School of Podcasting. If you need some honest feedback from your show, check out podcasthotseat.com. If you need a website for your podcast, check out podpage. You can go to trypodpage.com. And if you need more Jim Carlson and hey, who doesn't, then just go over to home gadgetgeeks.com or theaveregeguy.tv. And now it's time for the supporter of the week. Who will it be? Will it be Max over at Aviation News Talk? Will it be Ralph? You know, you can just go to askRalph.com to check out all of Ralph's shows. It could be Glenn over at the Horse Radio Network or Jody. Who will it be? We will click the spin button and it spins around, it goes around, and it's going to land on. Is it going to stay on him? Ooh, so close. Aw. It was almost Ralph. John Munz, who's been a supporter for a very long time. Uh, he works on a lot of different areas in podcasting. If you want to check him out, check out John at John, which is J-O-H-N-M-U-N-T-Z. So, John, thank you so much for being an awesome supporter. We deeply appreciate that. And you know, you, you right now listening, could be an awesome supporter and help pay for Dave's basement. Just go over because it's expensive. If you go to AskThePodcastcoach.com slash awesome, you might ask yourself, hey, these guys saved me a little time. They saved us money. Maybe we saved you from a headache. Maybe we kept you educated. Just go to Asthepodcastcoach.com slash awesome. And we appreciate everybody who does that. And what's fun is I see I've somehow moved our chat from YouTube. And maybe if I click around. Hmm. Great fun. Well, we'll go back over to Reddit while I do this. Oh, here's a I saw this earlier. And this guy says, I spent way too long researching short form retention. He says, I fell into a rabbit hole on retention research, compiled a bunch of it, and I don't know how much of it is actually real versus people, just repeating the same stuff. And he says he he said a hook within two seconds. So don't have a slow build. You should have jump cuts every two to four seconds. I'm not sure about that one. Some kind of yeah, some kind of pattern interrupt mid-video. Okay. He doesn't say where or how or what. Animated captions mid-screen. Okay. Audio synced to edits, no kidding. Duh. And the end connects to the beginning if you can pull it off. Oh, he's talking about shorts. I have seen this where the end of a short will lead right back into the beginning of the short, so you don't notice that it's in a loop. Which I'm going to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:53

Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah, that's tricky.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:56

Tricky. I find that somewhat annoying. One idea only, yeah, duh. Preview on your actual phone, not the desktop. Readable and bright light with sound off. And the right length is 15 to 20 seconds for tips and 25 to 40 seconds for tutorials. That kind of stuff drives me nuts. I'm like, your show needs to be as long as it needs to be. Like, you know, if that's 20 seconds, it's 20 seconds. If it's not, it's not. But when you're like, oh no, it has to be 48 seconds exactly. I'm like, I'm not quite so sure about that. I know the Z-Man had asked about how long it should be for an hour, like how many clips or whatever. And I have always gone by whatever the topic is, cover the topic as long as it takes to be to cover the topic, and then from there go to the next item. Like my show is usually around 40 minutes, 45, maybe, but there are times when I'll go 50, and there are times when I'll go 35. I basically, here's what I need to talk about. Here's the who, what, why, when, and you know, etc. And then I, you know, when I'm done, I look up and go, oh look, 38 minutes. Okay, that's good. Oh, look, 42 minutes. I don't really, you know, as the old saying goes, there is no such thing as too long, only too boring. And I don't really I think sometimes you can end up filling up time just to fill up time, not so much to deliver value. And that could be a problem in my book. So, Jim, when you do your show, do you even care? I mean, I knew you're doing interviews and such, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:38

You know, with the guys that I podcast with, I always say, Hey, we're just gonna do 60 minutes tonight. Like, and they all laugh at me and they're like, Okay, we'll go 90. And it for whatever reason, it just always works out with the style that I have and what I do. They end up being 90. I try to wrap them at 60, I start kind of bringing in for a landing, right? And every guest just keeps going. Like they're having they're they're having a great time. They just want to talk, they want to talk about this stuff. So they don't, they don't, it's they don't take my cue of bringing and even at the 90 minute mark in some cases, they're they're having a great time. They they'd go on for two hours. And I've done a two-hour podcast before with on that topic. So yeah, I you know, I I don't I don't really worry about it that much. When it gets tiring, man, we start at 9 Eastern when we start the show, right? 9 p.m. Eastern. So for some of my Eastern friends, you know, it's getting late for them. Yeah. Right? You know, you're kind of like in the early days of podcasting, that didn't seem to be as big of a problem as it is now. W when I get contacted, you know, all those emails we get of for people wanting to be on our shows, right? You know, the thousands of emails you get every single week of, hey, I think I'd be a great fit, or I represent so and so, and I think they'd be a great fit. Almost every single one of them when I say we record live on Thursdays, 8 p.m. Central, 9 Eastern. Crickets. Never hear back from. They don't want to, they don't want to be up that late. They don't they're they're looking for an easy slam dunk, something during the work day, whatever. It almost always turns them off. So I don't, I I don't, I don't get as many of those as I used to. But yeah, it's Dave, at some point, you know, we've even done that here on this show where we've gotten five minutes out and we're kind of out of content, and you're like, I think we're gonna wrap this up, you know. So I think that's smart too. Most interviewers, if you're in on an interview show, you're probably doing it because you're curious, you're just curious about people. The longer you do it, the better you get asking questions. If the guest is good, get as much as you can. I I wouldn't I wouldn't shorten it up just for time. If it's really going well, go along. It's okay. You know, it's just fine. That's back to the beginning of the show. If you're gonna warn your if your regular listeners are used to 30 minutes and you go an hour because the guest was good, just the beginning of the show. Just say, hey, look, I know we're normally 30 minutes. This is an hour. Hang tight. It's good stuff and stay around. By the way, you can never tack on stuff you didn't record. So record everything. You can always take it away, but if you didn't record it, you can't get it back. So, you know, I would I I'd error on the side of too much. Listeners can always stop listening if they need to, you know, but they can't get more if you didn't put it in there. Right. So I I err on the side of length.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:36

There you go. Ralph is looking to maybe test out True Fans with Sam Sethy. That would be cool. Yeah, here was where C Man had asked, how many segments are sufficient for an hour show? And what's weird is I I do a show called Your Podcast Consultant. It's one topic every week. And I started it off and I said it has to be nine minutes or less. And the reason I picked nine minutes is that's how long it takes from the beginning of the tonight show for Jimmy Fallon to get to a commercial. And I was like, all right, let's just make that fun little thing. I rarely ever even come close to nine minutes because I'll be like, hey, today asked, you know, what's the best microphone? Blah, blah, blah. And I'll answer that question and I'll look up and I'm like, wow, that took six minutes. And I'm like, yep, that's I answered the question, and I could go on and on, but I'm like, nope, I don't need the other three minutes. I I did it. And on a case, I think, I don't know, twice. I went to like nine minutes and twelve seconds, and I was like, you know what? I don't think anybody's gonna, you know, unsubscribe. Oh, you lied to me, whatever. But just the the point is know what you're gonna say before you press record, unless you're doing a live show with Jim Cullison, in which case we just kind of we know what we're gonna say because Well, we've been doing this so long.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

We've got the experience, but 600? Are we have we hit 600 yet? We don't even this is crazy. We don't even ever tell anybody how many we have these. Well, I think it's six, right? Are we up to the 600? Do you know? We're close. Five forty something. Yeah, we crossed five fifty a while ago, I thought.

When A Town Hall Turns Pitchy

SPEAKER_03 1:17:21

Ralph says, Do I want to talk about the town hall issue from the other day from Pod Match? Here's here's what happened. Because I love Alex and I still love Alex. Here's the thing, because it started off great. Had Adam Curry come on, had Tom from Bud Sprout come on, and he did say, if you go back and listen at the beginning, he said, I thought, what would I say if I didn't work for PodMatch? And I would still say this answer. But his answer was you should use PodMatch. So it came across like a pitch, because it was a pitch. What he should have done is come up with another alternative. That's when you remove the pitch. When he if he had said all he said was this is what we need to do. We need to put the the the field in for that, we need to hide email addresses, and another one was this if everybody used PodMatch, and that's when everybody was like, dude, that's a pitch. And the reason was is because it was a pitch. Now, I don't think he meant it as a pitch. He would be the first to say, Oh, I can see why it sounds like a pitch, but he was like more interested in how do we get people to stop getting all this spam, and that is a solution. It it's you know, there is there an absolute 100% solution? No. Why? Because marketers ruin everything. But it was a pitch, and it all he had to do to fix that would as if he had said and then named, you know, there are like four other companies besides PodMatch that do the same thing. If he had named somebody else, he would have been perfectly fine, but he didn't. And that was like, well, I'm not arguing that that was a pitch. I don't hate him for it, because I I know him enough to know where his heart is, and he's like, look, we need to because when he went in and saw where, you know, the he'll he'll see where just this large number of people that aren't making it to episode 10, and part of it is they're getting spammed to death and all this other stuff, and he's like, How can we stop this? So that's one of those where in the same way that when your fear of looking stupid is smaller than the need to serve your audience, you will press record, right? When the need to serve is greater than your fear, you press record. And he was worried about this is probably going to sound like a pitch, but his need to serve the audience of like, let's find a way to get some of this spam under control. And so he went ahead and did it, knowing that some people, and I again I'm not arguing, that was definitely a pitch at the end. Where is the town hall? It's probably on the pod match YouTube channel, you know, but it wasn't I I if somebody said asked Alex at the beginning of that, like, what are we doing today? He would have said, Oh, I'm doing a giant pitch for pod match. He would have said, I feel that he would have said, I'm trying to help podcasters, because that's what that guy's all about. So I, you know, great, how's that work? Great idea, bad execution. You know, and I saw that that was basically it.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:33

I was like, Oh, good intentions, though. Good intention, right? Don't you think? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:38

Yeah. So but yeah, it was I I was kind of like, oh, okay. And then I was waiting for him to be like, and here's another thing you could do, and there wasn't a plan B. It was and use pod match. And I went, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:51

So when because I know Dave, Dave, don't you think that and I agree with you, he's a great guy. Yeah. I love Alex. But I think the fact that he kept saying this is not a pitch actually made it sound more like a pitch.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:03

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:04

And I felt like that's what kind of dug him in deeper when he kept saying, Oh, I hate to do this, I hate to do this. I think Alex is a great guy. I think he has great intentions, but it just felt icky because he kept reinforcing the negative.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:16

Yeah, he's that's one of those where every time you hear an athlete go, you know, it's not about the money. I would love to stay here in Cleveland, and then they leave for another, you know, 50 million.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:29

Easy, easy on LeBron. Easy on LeBron.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:32

No, that was there was a Cleveland Indian, the Jim Tomey was a phenomenal guy, was our first baseman forever. We love Jim Tomey. It's not about the money, and then he went to the White Sox, and we're like, oh, for how for another 40 million. Oh, well, uh, it looks to me like it was the money. So yeah, I get your point. Yeah, it's um yeah, and and as it went longer, it it kind of was like it is. It's one of those things where you're like, oh, this is I I wish this didn't sound so much like a pitch. And they're like, wait, it's almost it's like everything for me always eventually goes back to being in a band. My favorite was when you'd have a band that would go, hey, we're gonna do one of our own songs. And I'm like, no, don't do, don't do that, because it makes everybody cross their arms and go, all right, what do you got? Where is if you had just just done your own song and at the end seen what the reaction was and go, Oh, you guys like that. That's one of our own. But when you call attention to it, then everybody's like, wait, is this a pitch? Oh, hey, this does sound like a pitch.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:36

And yeah, that was yeah, it was unfortunate, but uh you know a little great, little grace.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:42

Yeah, that's it. I was like, it's out. So my guy's given a lot of money to podcasters, he's made a lot of free stuff, so I was like, you know what? Yeah, so it is what it is. But as we let me see here. Here's the other thing that happens. Somebody just either joined or something in Clubhouse lands somebody. Oh, Larson, there we go. And then he left. Okay. So here's the thing Larson raised his hand. I saw it, but I couldn't read it. Probably like Ralph said, I was on my it's on my phone. And by the time I figured out that he'd raised his hand, when I went to then go, okay, come on stage, he left. So apparently we I need a a banner at the top of this. Be patient, Dave will get with you. That's okay. Get with you. That's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:32

Come back next Saturday and listen to us if you forget. We'll see. If we do it again.

Wrap Up And Monthly Question

SPEAKER_03 1:23:36

If we do it again. If we do, yeah. It's it is another thing. Not that I hate it, but it is another thing to look at. And I'm like, I you know, we we get enough questions from YouTube. So anyway, speaking of wrapping up two minutes early, holy cow, Jim Cullison, what's coming up on uh Home Cadget Geeks?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:56

Yeah, Mark Robson joins me. Every year I have Mark on to do our annual grill and barbecue show. We used to talk a lot of tech around grill and barbecue. We do a little bit, but it's mostly food on this one. We get super foodie on some of the things he's doing on his grill and the way we're doing it, some of that kind of stuff. Pictures, uh, you want to head out to the YouTube on this one because there's a lot of pictures of what he's talking about. Don't come to the show hungry because you will get hungry while you're Mark does a fabulous job of you know geeking or nerding out on the food. It's available right now, home gadget geeks.com.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:33

And on the School of Podcasting, you'll have to turn in on Monday because I've been playing with my lovely basement issues, and uh I know I've got three different things in my Notejoy that I have set up, and I can't remember which one. It's it's a game day decision on what I will be recording on Sunday. Uh so that's coming up. Um, thanks to the chat room. Uh, always great to have you guys here. And uh thanks everyone on Clubhouse. That was a fun experiment. And uh thanks to Ralph for the the insights on that. You can find him again at askral.com. Speaking of websites, oh, question of the month. Oh, that is the qu it is. Thank you, Jim. Er Ralph. Um, this week is quite I always forget when it's the last week of the month. And this week's question, if you want to answer it, is are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of podcasting? Get your questions in now by going to school of podcasting.com slash question. I will be taking those till really the end of Saturday. Um, even though I say Friday, that's for all the late people. Um, thank you, Ralph. And um, we'll be here next week with another fun filled episode of Ask the Podcast Coach. Tell a friend, like and subscribe, ring the bell, all that stuff.