The Real Time Cost of Podcasting: Editing, Publishing, and Promotion Breakdown

Dave Jackson:
Ask the Podcast Coach for March 14th, 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 theschoolofpodcasting.com and joining me right over there, the one and only Jim Coulson, not in a Nebraska shirt today. I just noticed.

Jim Collison:
I should be. We lost a big—

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, insert your logo here.

Jim Collison:
Last night. Did you? Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jackson:
Not feeling as proud as usual.

Jim Collison:
Not as good as school. But happy Saturday morning to you. Happy Pi Day. 3.14, right? Today. Get a chance to get out to the old Village Inn. You'd have to be here in the United States. Get out to Village Inn. They're giving— I think they still do free pie.

Jim Collison:
But today is Pi Day. Happy Pi Day to you.

Dave Jackson:
I didn't know there was. It makes sense. 3.14. And you know what goes good with pie?

Jim Collison:
Oh, a little coffee for sure.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, absolutely. It was a great— it should always be Pi Day. It's the best sequence ever. And that coffee pour is brought to you by our good friend Mark over at podcastbranding.co, because, you know, people are going to see you before they hear you or watch you or whatever, and you want to make a great first impression so that people know what your show's about. They want to click it. They're like, oh, that looks cool. And Mark has done hundreds if not thousands of artwork for podcasters along with websites, PDFs of checklists, whatever you're giving away, anything that you want to be in front of your audience. You gotta give Mark a call over at podcastbranding.co.

Dave Jackson:
He's an award-winning graphic artist and a web designer, over 30 years in the design field, and what's great about it is he's gonna sit down with you one-on-one come up with some ideas. He's going to give them to you. You pick your favorite and you're off to the races and ready to look great in front of your audience. I'm here to tell you there's only one place to go, and that is podcastbranding.co. Tell him Dave and Jim sent you.

Jim Collison:
Nice. Big thanks to our good friend Dan Lefebvre over there, Based on a True Story. Basedonatruestorypodcast.com. Looking at the archives this week, uh, one we didn't really talk about very much here on the show, but Feud, right? Uh, Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon— I think that's how she pronounces her last name.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, yeah.

Jim Collison:
Uh, check that out. Uh, based on an actual Hollywood feud that was going on maybe before there were reality shows, there were these. So check it out today, Based on a True Story.

Dave Jackson:
Basedonatruestorypodcast.com.

Jim Collison:
Dan, as always, thanks for your sponsorship.

Dave Jackson:
Well, here, let's talk a little podcasting. I got this question out, um, because we hear, you know, people want things to be perfect and such. And so this person says, I tracked where my time actually went producing a weekly podcast, and here's the breakdown. He says, I've been producing a weekly podcast for a while now and kept hearing it only takes an hour line. I don't think that's true. Maybe if it's a 5-minute podcast. Decided to actually log it for a month down to the minute. Good for you.

Dave Jackson:
Here's what a single episode looked like on average. Research and reading source material, 90 minutes. Outlining and writing the script, 60 minutes. We're gonna come back to that in a second. Recording, 35 minutes. Editing, removing ums, Fixing levels, cutting dead air, 2 and a half hours. Now he doesn't say how long this episode is. He recorded for 35 minutes, so I'm thinking it's 35 minutes-ish.

Dave Jackson:
Um, writing show notes, episode description, metadata, 30 minutes. Okay. And then uploading, scheduling, tagging, 20 minutes. Creating social clips and posts to promote, 45 minutes. That's roughly 6.5 hours for one episode. He goes, that was eye-opening. The recording was maybe 10% of the total time. The biggest time sinks were editing and promotion, neither of which are the part I'm actually good at or enjoy.

Dave Jackson:
Since then, I've been experimenting with ways to cut the production overhead without killing quality. Some things that help: description for editing, NotebookLM for prep. Ooh, that's okay. Batching research for multiple episodes. Sure. Using templates for show notes, sure. So I'm not writing from scratch and being more aggressive about cutting scope, fewer segments, tighter episodes. But here's the one that made me confused is he said, I took an hour to outline and write the script.

Dave Jackson:
Okay, that's, you know, you do you. But then he spent 2.5 hours removing ums, fixing levels, and cutting dead air time. And I'm like, wait, why do you have ums if you wrote a script? That was the one. And then the fact that fixing levels— I mean, as we were talking, I set the levels here on my RODECaster, uh, and also HelloAuphonic, uh, there's all sorts of ways you can fix the levels that don't take 2 and a half hours. And then dead air. Then I'm like, you have a script in front of you. Why is there, you know, 2 and a half hours on fixing ums, adjusting the levels, and cutting dead air? He also doesn't say if this is a solo show, if it's two people, whatever. But I just— to me, when I see 2.5 hours for just editing out ums, fixing levels, and cutting dead air, I was like, I, I would— yeah, I think he's over-editing.

Dave Jackson:
I know people that cut out every breath, every blank. Like he said, dead air. Like, let's make some dead air. You ready? There you go, that was some dead air. But, you know, people sometimes have to pause on what they're gonna say next. I don't know. Jim, when you do your show, I mean, you're doing interviews. Are you taking— yeah, see, Chris from castahead.net, 2.5 hours.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, it comes down to your process and how much you're willing to allow to be good enough to move on. The more you record, the better you can be at delivering an unedited content. So how do you handle editing or— Do you do any editing or—

Jim Collison:
Well, to this individual and to all of us, I would say you have your own individual presentation style that you write, right? And you may be in a situation where scripting is actually hurting you, not helping you. It's not speeding things up. We're all not good at reading things. We're all not good at, you know, that script may be getting in the way of creativity and maybe getting in the way. Of having to go back, oh, you know, oh, I didn't read that right. This is— Dave, this could be the problem. You read a sentence and you're like, oh no, I didn't want that exactly that way. So you say it again and say it again.

Jim Collison:
And then, OK, so you're creating this bit, you know, in having a script and wanting it to be exactly the way you want it. And then your talent may not be there to be able to read those perfectly. So you're creating 3 or 4 versions of every sentence. Well, heck yeah, that's going to take a while to record. And that's going to take a while to edit, you might be better just going off script or having notes, having bullet, you know, bullet points that you come to. It just kind of depends on you. And then I think we absolutely have to get to the point where you figure out your own rhythm, your own process, the way you do things, the way it works for you. And this gets better with practice, right? The more you do it, the better you get, the more it gets, it gets better for you.

Jim Collison:
So, you know, we, we don't— we're one-take wonders. I try not to. I only— I mean, I needed a Thursday's— Thursday night's episode, we had a section where Paul's video was, was rough and we had to reset some stuff, and so I took all that out, right?

Dave Jackson:
Right.

Jim Collison:
But the rest of it, for the most part, I'm like, I'm gonna keep in. But I also have guests that are pretty good, right? And I've been doing this for 10 years, and so I don't I don't create a lot of mistakes that I worry that much about. Do I create mistakes? Absolutely. Do I create mistakes that I worry about from a content perspective? No. Now, does that hold me back? Maybe. I mean, maybe the fact that I don't have the most professional edits in what I do, maybe it means I don't get as many downloads. But that's— those are the choices I make.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. John says podcasting, like great food, It takes time. As for editing, I listen to every word and cut every breath, and a 35-minute finished edit could be an hour of raw audio. Yeah, what I do when I edit somebody else's stuff, and I don't do a lot of that, but I listened where someone said something, they said something like this. So where like I can actually cut out the first time they said that and leave the second one. So I will go in, I can see the WAV file, I highlight it, I press delete, I go back, I hit play. Does it sound like I edited it? No, that sounds perfectly natural. Moving on at 1.8 speed.

Dave Jackson:
But that actually then drives up their bill 'cause I have to listen to the whole thing. I use resound.fm, which all it looks for is ums and extra long spaces. And I will go in, I will go through an hour-long file in about 10 minutes. 'Cause it's just, A, I can now recognize what an um looks like, so I go next and I go cut, next, cut, next, cut. And then I'll see this big old space and I'll listen to what they said, and if it's just, I don't know, they're trying to figure out what the next question is, I might cut that in half. I don't cut out all the spaces because my last episode, speaking of editing, I did it narrative style. So I had talked to, Uh, Jamie— Jamie— Jayna Marie from Big Lash Energy. And we talked for like 2 hours.

Dave Jackson:
She was just a lot of fun to talk to. And I was like, okay, I can't put out— I was gonna either do 2 episodes. And what I did was I listened to each of her answers and just cut them up and then labeled them. And then I loved it. It was like the most creative thing of like, okay, I have all these ingredients, how do I want to put this together? So I was like, well, let's have her talk about how she makes her episode And then let's talk about how she edits her show and some other fun things along the way. But that took like, I don't know, probably 3 hours just to do that part, to cut them up and then have me be the little bridge that connects them together. Now, on the other hand, I had people contact me and say, that was like your best episode ever. And I was like, every time I do a narrative style, I get more feedback than I do when I do a regular show.

Dave Jackson:
So it definitely creates a better product. I just don't have 3 hours every week. To edit a show. So Ralph says, I think you can over-edit and drive yourself crazy. Yep. And guess what that is? How people speak. Yep. We're not networks.

Dave Jackson:
But what I had done, and it dawned on me, is I was being, I was saying something like, and Jaina didn't realize that this was gonna happen. And she would come in like right there. And what I was doing in many cases is we're both talkers. And her point was made as she was going into the next word, and it's hard to cut that off without just making it sound like she was, it's not natural, the voice inflection. So what I was doing was I was fading out her next word that I didn't need, and I would put me over top of it to kind of hide the fact that this is a bad edit. But in doing that, it was like, it was just bam, bam, bam, bam. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to leave the bad edit in and I'm just going to put a little space for people's brains to absorb what the heck I was saying. Because if it never stops, especially if he said something really good, I was like, I need a space there for people to go, huh, yeah, I never thought of it that way.

Dave Jackson:
And so yeah, John says I can't edit anything but at 1.0 speed. Yeah, it depends on what I'm doing, but I usually— yeah, I usually listen to it before I upload it and when I listen to it, depending on the time I have and what I'm listening for. If I'm listening for pacing and stuff, definitely 1.0.

Jim Collison:
Um, Dave, I find in the edit process— so we have this big conference that we're doing next week and I recorded 11 spotlights. So 11 people, uh, I needed 1 to 2 minutes of their best content, right? So we, we sent them emails and then scheduled the time, then we jumped on StreamYard I'd record anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes of content from them, and then I'd edit those down to the best 1 minute. Right. And I tell you what, just having those 11 after I recorded them hanging over my head for like, I was like, oh gosh, that's, that's 11, you know, that's 11 edits that I need to go in there and re-listen to them again, find the best. Yeah, I could have taken better notes, you know, I think some of the key is take good notes while you're doing it. Like, "Oh no, at this minute mark, this is the best one," right in the moment. Although sometimes going back after the fact, you get a better, you have better context if you go back and listen with a fresh ear. One of the things I have found, and I think as podcasters, we think we have to sit down and do all of this at one time.

Jim Collison:
Like, "Oh no, no, I need to, like, oh, it's gonna be 6 hours. I gotta knock this thing out." And over the course of the weekend, I did this over the weekend because it was just more convenient, just little bits. So I would, I'd be like, OK, I'm going to download them all and gather them in files and organize them. And then I'm going to walk away. Then I'm going to come back and I'm going to commit to have getting 3 done. I'm just going to do 3. And for some of you, you just need to commit to one at a time. I'll just do one, then I'm gonna walk away.

Jim Collison:
I'm gonna do one and then walk away. If that's, you know, my situation might be unique, but you know what I'm talking about, right? You've got these complicated processes you've come up with and you think you got to edit, produce, pimp, schedule, write, socialize, the whole thing all at once. What's wrong with putting your episode out and then maybe a day or two later doing some social around it? Right? There's, there's no— it doesn't all have to be done at the same time. You can break that stuff up. Many of you do. I know in the chat room, I'm the guy, I break it up. You do your own way. I just think for me, sometimes I overwhelm myself by thinking, oh, I got 5 hours of work to do to get this kind of thing done.

Jim Collison:
I split my process up, you know, recorded on Thursday and download it Friday. I do all the edits and the recordings, dump them into AI. So on Saturday morning, they're all ready, they're all processed, everything's ready to go, build the show notes, drop it, produce it, get it done, promote it. So I split mine across 3 days. Maybe thinking about your process not being all in one day or sitting might be something that helps you break it up.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, the, the thing that got me and I was like, oh, this is where people freak out, is I started it on Wednesday and then I remember did some on Friday and then I actually did some on Sunday right before I was getting ready to post it. Like, I realized I didn't say her website when I kind of introduced her. And if you go back and listen now, now that I've told you, you'll hear me say, uh, and her website is biglashpodcast.com. And if you listen to it, the tone of it is a little different because most of it was recorded in the evening. That was recorded about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, plus I was still kind of working on a cold. And for me, it was insanely different, right? Because it wasn't quite as bassy, and I was like, nobody— it's, it's 6 words. Out of, you know, however many thousand words there were. I'm like, no.

Dave Jackson:
And if they notice it, by the time they go, hey, that sounded different, it's on to something. We're back to how it originally sounded. And that's the thing I think people sometimes kind of freak out on. Um, if we go to, uh, let's see, Ivan: What editing software do you recommend? I've used GarageBand and I think it's fine, but I've heard people use Audacity or Adobe Audition. I'm not sure what software is the best. The one that you like and use is the, the best one. Um, Jim, I think you use Audacity, right?

Jim Collison:
No, well, not anymore. I used to use Audacity a lot. Um, I'm using Auphonic, and then I'm just dropping that into— well, actually, before I use Auphonic, I drop it into iMovie and do the edits that I need that way, export it out. I've got to say this, Dave, this week, I don't know why it's taken me so long, but I was At work, I have another editor that helps me do some of the stuff that we do. And in Auphonic, he has been using that filter that's like partial deverb, right? It's kind of designed for somebody where they're in a room and you're getting that reverb, that room noise from it. And I was like, I hadn't seen that before. And I was like, you know, I'm going to try that. This Thursday, my guest was in a room and it was fairly, sounded fairly roomy.

Jim Collison:
And I thought, well, I'm going to try that filter. OMG, right? Oh my God. I'm like, how? I should be running this filter every time I do that. Why have I not been doing this? The, the audio, that KS Audio pre was so roomy, right? Yeah, it was just tinny and roomy. I ran it through that filter on the back side and it's almost like it fixed it with AI. I mean, it did, but let's just say, you know, The, the, it was amazing. So I like for, for the, for the processing, this is what I use. There's all of them can do, right? But Auphonic, that just— I had that moment this week where I was like, why? I could have been, I could have had a V8.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, I use on this show, I, I use, it's a plugin from a company called Accentize, and they have a D-Room. And I just ever so slightly turn it on because, A, I'm not as close to the microphone as I normally am. And, and again, totally, this is like 200% listening through the ears of a podcaster, but it takes— I'm like, yeah, there is a little room in there. And so, you know, there are plugins that'll do this. It's, uh, but I use Hindenburg, um, and the reason I— because when I first got on a Mac, I was like, I'm going to use GarageBand because it's so pretty. I mean, it's a very pretty, you know, software. And then I saw where if I wanted to cut out an um, I had to go split, split, delete, move over. And I went, wait, there's got to be— I can't just highlight and press delete? And unless they've changed that, that was, you know, 10 years ago, uh, I— that was a deal breaker because in Audacity, if you want to go with free software, you highlight and you press delete.

Dave Jackson:
I use Hindenburg because you can make kind of presets, and I have like all the jingles I use a lot. Like, I have one called Transitional Whoosh. I have a school bell sound. And when I open up, all those sounds are there, and I can just drag them in. They have this little kind of— they call it the clipboard, and it's just super easy. My favorite one is, I think it's like Ctrl+Shift+Alt or whatever, and it highlights everything from this point to the end. So when you need to insert a 5-second jingle or something, you just Ctrl+Shift, right, drag everything over 5 seconds, put in your jingle, drag. It's just, it's a really cool— and I think it's, I don't know, $12 a month, something like that.

Dave Jackson:
So it's not free, but, um, I'm a big fan of Hindenburg. Um, John says, uh, used to take me up to 5 hours to edit the feed. That is, uh, that's a 78 minutes of raw audio. Two Hall of Famers, uh, Rob and Elsie. I can't wait for, uh, In and Around Podcasting to come back, he says. But when I was done, the, the, uh, show sounded good. I got to be on the feed and it was pretty scripted. Like, they knew exactly what was coming then and there.

Dave Jackson:
And Rob would actually occasionally, like, write in an um so he didn't sound So scripted here. I'm peeling back the curtains. Um, and he said the finished product would be about 65 minutes. So yeah, um, let's see here. The best audio— the best audio editing software is the one that you know the best. Yep. Uh, go ahead, Jim.

Jim Collison:
I edited for some lawyers who were doing a podcast. It wasn't on legal stuff, but they were— it was, it was on higher ed stuff. And they wanted— they wanted it clean, you know, they did not want the ums. They weren't necessarily professional media folks and they weren't bad. They got better as they went. But yeah, it was, you know, I would take, you know, I'd probably taken 90 minutes of content and bring it down to about 60. You can cut a lot out. We'd actually go 2 rounds of editing.

Jim Collison:
So I would take— I'd get it down to kind of manageable mistakes, ums, spaces, whatever, those kinds of things. And then I would send it back to them. Then they would do content edit, say, "No, no, with a K. Take these kinds of things out of it here," that kind of stuff. You mentioned, Dave, a few minutes ago of making an edit. You know, sometimes we try to make an edit and the tone of our sentence doesn't line up with what we want the edit to be. And I hear The Wall Street Journal— I listen to The Wall Street Journal podcast on a daily basis. They do two.

Jim Collison:
They're 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon. So you know they're cranking these out. But when they have a guest on, they often just whack it. And you can tell, like, it was right in the middle of a thought, but they have a very strict time that they're holding to, right? And so they just cut it. And, you know, at the end they're like, hey, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me, you know, the person says. But you can definitely tell they are making some hard edits in there. And sometimes you just have to do that, you know.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, uh, Chris says sometimes we over-edit but the audience doesn't care as much as we think they do.

Jim Collison:
No, I'm, I'm true. Yeah, we—

Dave Jackson:
that's— I— and it's true, once you start editing, everything you listen to is through the ears of a podcaster. I know there are many times I've been in church going, is there a 1.5 speed on the— like, you know, could you, could you, could you speed that up a little bit? Can we get to Is there a 30-second skip here? Can we get to the— yeah. Wrap it up.

Jim Collison:
Wrap it up, Pastor. Wrap it up.

Dave Jackson:
Uncle Marv has a question. If someone doesn't edit at all, what is that called? See, my knee-jerk reaction sounds mean, and I would say lazy, but sometimes they're busy.

Jim Collison:
One-take wonder is what I call it. A one-take wonder.

Dave Jackson:
A one-take wonder, that's it. Daniel J. Lewis from The Audacity to Podcast. I think over-editing is when you can tell it was heavily edited, and that gets really frustrating to hear. That's how a lot of shorts get edited. Yeah, I— when you just hear, like you said, things getting cut off in the middle, when there's no breathing, there's no— everything is just next, and I'm like, and then again, it doesn't give your brain a break. Uh, yeah. Oh, Uncle Marv dusting it off.

Dave Jackson:
And I— and this is still around because I heard Rob talk about how— if you listen to Rob's process on Podcast 411, I'm like, that sounds a little excessive.

Jim Collison:
Um, he's soldering the computer together. What he's doing— okay, well, I took this, I soldered the computer together.

Dave Jackson:
Should have said that I use the old Levelator program first, then I use Adobe with voice at 0 setting, uh, music at 80 background. Yeah, there's a thing in a, uh, if you pay for the Adobe Enhanced product, you can say reduce the music by this much, reduce this. Well, that's weird, my Zoom meeting just quit itself, I guess because there weren't any participants. Um, so Randy, I saw Randy in the chat room. Randy, if you're coming in, uh, call me is turned on today. Um, yeah, Daniel says, I think over-editing. Did I already say this? Yes, I already said that one. Yeah, it seems like it's jump—

Jim Collison:
you get jump edits. Like, it's like, you know, we, you know, jump videos are super popular, but on the audio content side, if your edits are that short, your brain doesn't have time to process it. As you know, you're used to hearing things. Now, if you speed up your audio often, those jump edits may actually make sense to you. Or if you speed up your audio and they're making jump edits, that could be really, really frustrating too. So it kind of depends on what you listen to.

Dave Jackson:
And Randy, I'll turn up your fader here in a second. The thing I just heard is with this new HLS video. HLS video, it's coming. That if you switch to audio, it's not switching to your MP3 file that you have if you're doing both. It's pulling the audio from the video. And I was like, that's a bummer, because often the audio is edited better than the video, because unless you're, you know, 19, jump cuts don't go over well. And they're, they're very noticeable. And I was like, well, that's not what I want.

Dave Jackson:
I did figure out why HLS is very popular because I was like, who wants this? And the answer is advertisers. I was listening to, um, I think it was the Media Roundtable, and they interviewed somebody from some, you know, uh, oh, insert big name for advertising here. And she was like, oh, I'm very excited to see if, you know, how this is going to get used. And I was like, oh, there we go. Another great, uh, big, big, uh, change in podcasting based on the audience? No. Based on the podcasters? No. Based on advertisers.

Jim Collison:
And I'm like, well, sometimes that's how things get done. Like, yeah, listen, if Apple hadn't jumped in, it's in the early days and made this legit, we could still be hand-coding RSS feeds. It's— I don't know if podcasting would have survived as long as it has if they hadn't jumped in and made it legit. Boy, there's a hot take. So let me drop the bomb on that one. Hey Randy, come on in.

Dave Jackson:
There you go. Yes, Mr., uh, Randy Black. Here's the thing, I was, uh, I have a RODECaster Duo and I just happen to be kind of putzing around with it and I saw where it said, hey, an upgrade is available, and I was like, oh, I wonder what's in that. And I had a link to RØDE's website and I can't find it now. But Randy, how are you, buddy?

Randy Black:
I am great. How are you doing this morning, guys?

Dave Jackson:
We're doing good, man. But you, you had contacted me on Facebook and said, oh man, have you seen the new update? It's amazing. It does, it slices and dices and even juliennes.

Randy Black:
Well, it's pretty close. What they've done, and some of it hasn't been fully documented by RØDE yet, like I did some playing around and figured out a couple things. What they've done is actually created more parity between the Duo and the Pro 2 with the firmware upgrade. The, you know, when you look at the Duo, you've got 4 physical faders, 3 virtual ones. You now have 5 virtual faders, so you have a total of 9 channels just like the Pro 2. So they're on an even playing field with that. They also completely changed the multi-track output. The multi-track output was designed for specific channels, so your Bluetooth, your XLRs, all those were specifically assigned to, to pairs or individual channels in the multi-track output.

Randy Black:
That is no longer the case. The way the multi-track output now works is there are 20 channels of multi-track output. 1 and 2 together are your stereo mix. As you then go down the list, 3, 4 is fader 1, 5, 6 is fader 2, all the way down the list until you hit your virtual. So, you know, on the Duo, channels 11 and 12 would be your first virtual fader. On the Pro 2, channels 15 and 16 are your first virtual fader. So what you can then do, and I tested it in GarageBand, You can assign anything to any fader and it takes over that multitrack output. That includes the virtual devices that you could not record through multitrack.

Randy Black:
You only got them on the stereo, and Call Me can now be recorded as individual tracks into a DAW over the multitrack instead of having to record it on the device.

Dave Jackson:
Got it. So you can basically— it sounds like a big router, basically. You can—

Randy Black:
yes, it has turned into a real true mixer with multitrack output instead of it being locked down the way it was. I've played around with it for the past, you know, day or so after I've got home from a conference, and it's pretty slick and it's working great. I thought that might be something some other people might be interested in hearing about. And if anybody wants the channel mapping, I can— I can— if they find me on Facebook, send me a message, I can send them an image file that has those channel maps. It's also been posted in a couple of the RODECaster groups out on Facebook. So if you need to see what those are before RØDE gets their documentation done, which for whatever reason they haven't, but I have that. Even reached out to a gentleman out in Indiana, Andy Lehman. Andy is the guy that taught me how to use the virtual devices using Loopback before RØDE had the software for macOS.

Randy Black:
So I sent that to him and he's like, man, we keep figuring this stuff out before they even document it. We might as well take their jobs. So we'll see what happens with that. But I just thought there's something quick I found and wanted to, wanted to share because I know there's some, some couple other people who watch the show, you know, and even you who host the show using a RODECaster that this might be beneficial for. Um, and thought I'd throw it out there for everybody. And like I said, if anybody needs anything with it, uh, just give me a shout and I can send, send it over to you. And if you need any help, just give me a— just send me a message. Uh, like you can ask, you can ask Ralph.

Randy Black:
I've, I've been on calls with Ralph trying to help him get his RODECaster situation lined out at times, uh, with some different things he was having issues with, and I'm glad to help anybody with it.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, that's, uh, because obviously you're gonna get those tracks right individually in, you know, on your SD card, but if you wanted a backup and you wanted to send it into Hindenburg or GarageBand or whatever you're using—

Randy Black:
I did it when I recorded something this morning with GarageBand. It's exactly what I did. I had it recording on the device and in the DAW.

Jim Collison:
Yeah, Randy, what's the update number?

Randy Black:
Uh, 1.7.3.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, it's, um, if you go to RØDE— well, actually, if you just go into your RØDECaster and say, you know, hey, check for an update, or what— like, when I go into settings, it goes, hey, there's a firmware update. And I was like, not before I go live on a Saturday morning, but I'll do it when we get done here. Um, but yeah, there's a thing that came out March 11th. And 3 improvements and a new feature.

Randy Black:
Yeah, so I see, I see Uncle Marv asked a question there in the chat about, is about the update, because he says he didn't see those. If you've done the update and you've not updated the drivers, you may not see them correctly. So I always, you know, go pull the drivers and pull the RODECaster app and get those updated at the same time, and you should start to see them.

Dave Jackson:
Nice, very cool. Well, thanks for the update, my friend.

Randy Black:
No problem. Before we leave, yeah, I gotta play it for Jim.

Dave Jackson:
Pinky, you so crazy! And where can we find your stuff?

Randy Black:
Uh, the best place to just go to randallblack.com. From there it links out to the different podcasts and things I'm doing. Um, and I also got my blog running there with, with stuff that, like I said, occasionally something just hits me and I have to share, so I'll write it up in a blog or I'll record a podcast and stick it out there.

Dave Jackson:
Excellent. All right, my friend, well, thank you so much.

Jim Collison:
Thanks, Randy.

Randy Black:
Thanks, Dave.

Dave Jackson:
Yep, we'll see you. Chris has some fun news. He says, I've been invited to a big car event at Willow Springs as the official podcast for the event. I need to figure out how to pull this off. My friend, that is called Glenn the Geeking It. Um, the beautiful thing is about that is what you can do is get yourself a table and maybe some sort of, you know, tablecloth over it, whatever. Get yourself a mic, and if you can, get a— what I call a clown nose, you know, those foam things that go over the end of the microphone— that matches your artwork. Like Glenn did this, uh, uh, when he was— well, he's still on the Horse Radio Network.

Dave Jackson:
Let me see if I can find this. Um, and he went to let me go Horse Radio Network on a Google image search. Um, but he went, he had this table, just had a microphone, wasn't recording anything. He did have a backdrop that said Horse Radio Network, and it just looked like something was happening at the booth. And so if you're at a car event, have some either a QR code or a business card with a QR code so that you can point people right at—

Jim Collison:
I would—

Dave Jackson:
Jim, what would you point people at, your website or the page where you have your Apple, Spotify, like where they could just follow the show?

Jim Collison:
Website. And then I'd make the website have a page that had all that.

Dave Jackson:
Is that— yeah, on it.

Jim Collison:
Yeah, yeah.

Dave Jackson:
I'm— I can't— when I Googled Horse Radio Network, I didn't see, uh, anything.

Jim Collison:
I miss— I used to do these twice a year, these on-premise events where we were the official podcast of this conference. These tech conferences that eventually got purchased by the same organization. And so we just lather, rinse, repeat for the last couple of years. But where we'd step in, they'd give us a table up front. We kind of became the, the official podcast for the event. We did live. Then I got the speakers. One year I got the keynote speaker.

Jim Collison:
One year our keynote speaker was the CIO for the Obama administration. And so I got to interview her, which was super cool. But you get some interesting interviews. I found folks for my tech podcast through that, but it was an easy table setup. I just used ATR 2100s and I put in earbuds. I didn't require that they did because they could hear me across, you know, we're sitting across the table. So I had earbuds in, didn't require they do it. I put these mics on stands and I think I ran it through a little mixer in those days, maybe, that we had to get it done.

Jim Collison:
You could do it through any audio device running it into a laptop. So you can take today, man, that is so much easier today than it used to be. And you could even take— you can even get a little tiny battery, you know, you get one of those, you know, EcoFlow River 3s, or you could get a Jackery or any of those, right, to take with you. And you don't even have to worry about— because, you know, some of those conferences, power is a little sketchy, right? You're like, yeah, hey, could you run power out to my table? And they're like, no, we don't have that. Or in some conferences, yeah, that'll be $1,000. And you're like, you know, because they got to get a union laborer to, you know, run an extension cord.

Dave Jackson:
Oh, yeah, of course.

Jim Collison:
Really takes real skill, right, to get that done. So one of those backup batteries may be a handy thing to have.

Randy Black:
Yeah.

Jim Collison:
You know, at the table, if you're—

Dave Jackson:
you could use— this is where, you know, having— I've got a pair of Hollyland Lark M2. It's the longest name, but you can basically, you know, get yourself a pair of lavs if you wanted to do some recording at the show. But the thing that Glenn did is, A, I don't know that this— this is a different— it's a car show, so I don't think there's anybody speaking there. It's just people going, oh man, check out that 'Vette. But if there are speakers there, get to know the speakers. And then if there are other people there that would make really good sponsors for your show, go make friends with those people. Because Glenn, I think, still has people that sponsor his show from like the very first show he did. And this, I think this is a screenshot of it, because you see he doesn't have a Horse Radio Network background, but you can see he's got the little red thing that matches his Horse Radio Network, uh, uh, little thing on his pocket there.

Dave Jackson:
So he's got all the branding down, but he just went in and by meeting all the speakers at this horse event, he grew his network. And then he went to all the sponsors that were sponsoring the event and they went, what is your radio thing again called? And got it in. So, but just, I would just, you are where your target audience is, right? You're looking for car people. So have QR codes, business cards, Business cards are so cheap now. I was like, holy cow. And I use Canva. I was really surprised at how well they did with that. So, you know, it's— that's really cool.

Dave Jackson:
I saw somebody else had a question.

Jim Collison:
Well, Uncle Marvin said power to the table, right? Which— yeah, but what about Wi-Fi? This is like— this is an area at these conferences that's gotten infinitely easier and better. Like, I remember in the early days, you know, we'd have them run a cable like I had to pay extra, like $400 or $500 to get them to run a cable out to the table. I'm like, no, no, I need network. I need a network connection. I can't be using your Wi-Fi because conference Wi-Fi used to just be terrible, right?

Dave Jackson:
Oh, dude, it is so bad.

Jim Collison:
Laptops connected. Yeah, it has gotten better, like, and even to the point now where I would use my phone and it's a is a hotspot and it would work great. Like, you know, in a lot of cases, you know, my phone, I can get probably 100 down and 50 up in most, and even in bad situations, and that's enough, right, for what you're doing there. And then if you're recording locally, like if you're using a StreamYard or if you're using, you know, fill in the blank, you could also be recording that all locally. So even if the Wi-Fi is bad, if you're doing it live for whatever reason,— which I'd encourage you to do. Do it live if you can. You won't get a ton of listeners, but try. And then the recording, now you could record a local.

Jim Collison:
It doesn't matter which bandwidth is that at that point. It's going to just, it's going to pick up the best of everything that was there. So some, that part, it's not perfect, but it's gotten better. The Wi-Fi, you know, the network connectivity has gotten better. And then Mark says, car battery under the table. I wouldn't use a lead-acid car battery, Fred.

Dave Jackson:
Have fun dragging that into the conference.

Jim Collison:
There's so many great lithium-ion products now with the— like I mentioned, with the Jackerys and such. Um, you can pay a little bit more for them, but they're so much better and cleaner power. This is important. You don't want a battery that's going to make interference in with some of the audio that you're making. And a lot of these lithium-ion batteries have— they're, they're very—

Dave Jackson:
they test very well for that kind of Yeah, the other thing I bring is, uh, if I'm doing a booth, I'll have like 2 or 3 power bricks to power the laptop. Luckily my laptop's, I don't know, a couple years old, and it lasts a long time because usually booth time is like 4 hours. It's not like you're there from 8 to 5. Um, but so that's keeping the laptop, and then if nobody's there I just, you know, I close it and it goes into not completely shut down but paused or whatever. And then the problem with an iPhone is that if I'm using it to power my Wi-Fi, right, if I'm using as a hotspot, I can't charge it and use it as a hotspot. So if I were to do this again, I might get one of those where it's a charging station that you just sit the phone on to charge it. So I could have a power brick with two outputs, one to the laptop and one to the phone to keep the phone charged because the phone is powering the Wi-Fi, that whole nine yards. So it's kind of a problem.

Jim Collison:
So I have one of those batteries that's got that phone charger on top. So the Bluetti AC180, you could— Dave, in your case, you could have the battery, it could— you could put your phone on top of it, it would be charging your phone, and you could plug into it for the hotspot.

Dave Jackson:
So yeah, uh, Randy says, just came home from a conference, One of the sponsors was a network hardware vendor. Nice. Uh, the provider, they provided Wi-Fi for the whole thing. I've had that happen, not a lot, but I remember when I went to the Ecamm event, they had a Wi-Fi person there. Um, yeah, Uncle Marv says, I don't, um, I've don't the hot— I don't basically, I don't do the hotspot, but I'm, uh, but I'm a tech and I have friends helping build a portable travel router with 100 megabyte 5G gig. Nice. Um, yeah, that's what I I could connect the phone to the laptop to— that's true, I never thought about that. If I plug my phone into it to be a hotspot, in theory the laptop is probably charging my phone.

Dave Jackson:
Somebody charges— yeah, so, um, but that's, that's fun. Are we, uh, I, I don't know, Jim, how, uh, is it time to— if, if I say the word OpenClaw, do I need to hit the jingle?

Jim Collison:
No, that's—

Dave Jackson:
oh, he's been waiting for this. It's time for me to find the question here. Uh, Daniel J. Lewis just did a deep dive into this, which was so good. I was like, oh, this is so Daniel. It's so— it's nerdy and specific and lots of details. It was a really good episode because it really let me know I don't want anything— I don't want any part of this right now. Is anyone using OpenClaw-type programs? If yes, how are you using for your podcast? Because I've listened— I heard Adam Curry say he was talking about using it because OpenClaw is this AI thing and you can have it do stuff for you.

Dave Jackson:
And, uh, Adam was like, yeah, I can do the stuff. And then it dawned on him that anything that it could do, he's like, why am I having it do this? So I was like, I think that's the question is what do you want it to do? But Jim, have you played with OpenClaw yet?

Jim Collison:
Yeah, I've looked, I've looked at it. It, it's kind of a nice integration, or, you know, I've, I've been working with, uh, um, LM Studio as well as Ollama that get you both localized LLMs so you can do your AI stuff locally if you want to. The Open Clock kind of takes it one step farther a little bit and it gives you some local productivity stuff that it can do. Dig in a little bit if you're interested in your own. They've got some great examples on the website. The beauty of it too is that it's running locally. Now, be careful of what you wish for, friends. Yeah.

Jim Collison:
So. These, these programs, you know, in the tech space, we have gone back and forth between what I'm going to call client and server, right? Where in the early days before the internet, everything was client, right? That's your PC, that's you being— before we connected to the internet, right? When you connected to the internet, that became the server aspect of this. And since the time of the internets, um, we have gone back and forth on where the processing happens for some of the things that we do. We figure out how to make them work on a server, and then all of a sudden that takes too many resources. So the server friends say, hey, we should push these out to the clients or the endpoints and get them to do the processing. Or the endpoints start to say, hey, I, for security reasons, I really don't want my information on a public server of sorts. It can— those things can get hacked and such. So I want my own client version of this.

Jim Collison:
And we've gone back in the various— over the years, we've gone back and forth on this. We're in an iteration now with the AI where a lot of folks are saying, hey, I want my own private AI. So let's do the— let's do most of the processing at the endpoint. You got to have pretty significant gear to do anything significant if you're going to do these endpoint processing with LLMs, right? And they all vary and they're all different. We're getting more more and more. You know, this was the, uh, you know, when, when the, um, shoot, I'm struggling to remember the name of the Chinese LLM that came out that— oh, uh, yeah, that one. You know, everybody's shouting at me, uh, live. They're like, Jim, it's, it's this.

Jim Collison:
Uh, I don't— it's right there and it won't come to me. Doesn't matter. The, the LLMs will get better and more efficient, but then of course— DeepSeek, thank you. DeepSeq was what it was. Kind of rocked the AI world. Smaller, more efficient. We're gonna get better at this, friends. I mean, we're gonna get better, but at the end of the day, we want these things to be super smart and they're gonna take up giant amounts of resources.

Jim Collison:
And you're pushing a lot of that, you know, you're not building the LLM, but you're pushing a lot of that processing use that it's gonna do onto you. So just eyes wide open, friends. This isn't free. That, yeah, you can download these open source versions. By the way, they're never the, they're never the most current ones. So you're not— in a lot of cases, you're not running the most current. But just realize you now are becoming— you're, you're taking on the, the, the processing, right? And it's going to run on your computer and it's not going to run— in a lot of cases, it won't run as fast as to the cloud. So if you have a 10-year-old laptop and you're trying to run some of these things, or you got a 10-year-old Mac, and you're like, oh yeah, bring this stuff down.

Jim Collison:
Yeah, probably not. No, probably not. But if you're in the newest, if you're in the newest realm of things and you got lots of memory and you want to, you know, you want to burn some watts, yeah, it's not terrible. It's not like you're processing the LLMs, but just, just eyes wide open, friends. This, these aren't— yes, they're free. Yes, they're open source. But yes, they're— you're, they're— you're pushing the processing to you for the work.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, the, uh, The Audacity to Podcast, again, Daniel's show, uh, if you go over there, it's, uh, titled Should I Try OpenClaw in Podcasting? And another thing I found interesting, um, there's a guy who normally talks about music or the music business, his name's Rick Beato, And he did a video called How AI Will Fail Like the Music Industry. And he kind of talks about what you were talking about, Jim, the fact that he goes, it used to be you spent, you know, hundreds of dollars an hour to use a professional music studio. He goes, because they had all this gear. And he goes, and then he said, here's the— he actually has the very first interface he had in an old Mac. He goes, and then you know, I got this stuff. And he goes, I could plug a microphone and it would go directly into my computer and I could use— I forget the, um, the other version of, um, not GarageBand, but it's the, the next version from Apple up. I forget what it's called, but basically he was using that. Could have been Pro Tools as well.

Dave Jackson:
Um, and he said what was interesting is then Pro Tools moved into the studios So they still had all the, you know, the big stuff, but they were also using Pro Tools. He goes, and they would charge you $500 for a guy there to be the Pro Tools guy. He goes, except I knew as much as he did, if not more. And he goes, and eventually we— he goes, nobody in the music business now— he goes, studios are hurting because everybody records everything at home. And he said, so it's not going to be anytime soon He goes, but they're spending trillions of dollars on these data centers. And he goes, and maybe by the time software gets ready to actually use that power, people will go, I'm just gonna spend extra money on a super beefy computer and do it from home. And I was like, and I've heard Adam, Adam Curry's not a big, it's funny, on one hand he'll kind of bash AI and call it slop and this and that, but he's also vibe coding And he's also now saying he's going to try to run a local copy of it. He's like, because it just, you know, you end up spending— he was saying, he said, I was spending like $50 an hour because he was, you know, just dabbling and trying this and that.

Dave Jackson:
And he goes, all of a sudden you look up and you go, wait, whoa, hold on a second. Then I was like, well, maybe that might be something where— the other thing that worries me is Podpage did a town hall And Brendan, the lead developer and founder, was talking about some really cool stuff we could do with AI where it could do your show notes for you and all sorts of really cool stuff using AI. And I'm like, okay, also keep in mind that AI stands for always increases your bill. Um, and I was like, and even if it doesn't, let's say we all tie into these data centers and then they decide, hey, you know what, let's raise our prices. And what are we going to do, go to another data center? I, I guess maybe. I mean, I know we do that with bandwidth, but I was like, it's, it's never been done in the history of technology.

Jim Collison:
No, it's not. It's not like— remember when Netflix was like $4? Oh, it's $24 now.

Dave Jackson:
I remember when I used to ship DVDs back and forth.

Jim Collison:
Yeah, no, I mean, the, the, um, friends were okay. The days like We're in the golden age of AI. You should be— if you have a $20 plan for OpenAI or whatever, for ChatGPT, if you've got a static plan right now, you should be using that as much as humanly possible to get as much productivity done. It's not going to stay that way, right? We're already starting to see, like, we got an enterprise version of Claude, uh, just recently, and I saw behind the scenes I have a meter That's tracking like, hey, for this month you have $200 worth of use. And, you know, and I have a meter that resets in April. And I thought, oh, here's the future of AI where we're going to build all these processes, we're going to get dependent on it, and then they're going to start saying, well, that's the old model. If you want to use the new model, the new one, you have to convert because like Friends, this happened in podcasting, right? We had these plans, these pretty reasonable plans, and then all the podcasting platforms were like, well, if you want AI in your stuff, you have to have this. And if you want more bandwidth, you have to, right? So friends, don't, don't be silly.

Jim Collison:
Like, we know this is coming. And so get ready, right? Don't, you know, just know that the bills are coming. Use it today. It's fairly inexpensive. They're losing money like crazy. This is not going to be— this is not the future. This is death. So this does play into the local versions of things, right? Again, like this OpenClaw, you might want to do that as well.

Jim Collison:
But in the future, you're going to have to feed those local AIs something. And they may not always be open and they might not always be free. So just eyes wide open, friends. This is coming. We've seen this. We've gone to this movie before. This is nothing new.

Dave Jackson:
And one of the things I forgot to ask last week, I went to the internet and I said, give me an image of Jim Cullison. And there was an old picture I used of you. It's pretty good. And I went through and I was like, I should probably ask Jim, can I use your likeness? Uh, because we're talking about we're going to end up podcasting from a Lazy Boy. You got a Lazy Boy? Still am in my office chair, but I was like, well, that was interesting. And then I did a different one for a square version, and that was chicken back. Uh, plus we got the dad bod going. I'm like, excellent.

Dave Jackson:
And I was surprised it went with the— I think that's— no, that is a new version. It's not a Duo, but I was like, the fact that it's got a RODECaster, it's got something back here., you know, a bunch of cables just sitting here doing nothing. But I was like, that's not bad. And I was like, I should probably ask Jim if it's okay if I use his likeness.

Jim Collison:
I saw those. They're pretty good. I knew it was AI. I would never tuck my shirt in in that scenario. So that shirt would not be tucked in. The AI thought it should be tucked in. I would not tuck it in because, you know, I'm a '50s guy. Like, I leave the shirt out.

Dave Jackson:
That's how you— That's how you cover the dad bod. Right, exactly. And I laughed. I tried that when Glenn filled in the one week and I had an old picture of me and Glenn standing in his office from like 15 years ago. And we were both, well, Glenn's in great shape. I am not. And it was like, oh, I remember when I looked like that. And that's what the AI did, because that's what I fed it.

Dave Jackson:
And I was like, I just need to find a lot of old pictures and feed it that way. Um, yeah, I thought that was, uh, and I'm using Magi for that because that has a bunch of tools in it, and one of them is Nanabanana, which is from, um, Google something something. So, um, that's fun. But, uh, you know who also was fun? And you don't need to, uh, you know, you don't need to Photoshop. It's going to be weird because like it used to be, oh, that's Photoshopped, and now we're just— Photoshop is going to get replaced with, ah, that's just AI. It's like, so, um, is our awesome supporters. And, uh, you can be an awesome supporter by going to askthepodcastcoach.com/awesome. And you could be like the— let's see here— Fighting Through Podcast.co.uk, uh, the Flame Alive Pod, uh, Content Creators Accountant, uh, Voiceovers and Vocals, uh, Yep, Yep as in Y-E-P, Yep Podcast, All these awesome supporters, you could be part of them and be on our website.

Dave Jackson:
And I need to remind you that today this show is brought to you by theschoolofpodcasting.com where you get courses, coaching, and community. You can use the coupon code COACH and remember you can join worry-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you need some honest feedback from your, about your show, check out podcasthotseat.com where I go over an episode that you pick as well as your website and let you know what you're doing right and maybe some things that might need a little bit of polish. There's the Podpage page. Say that 3 times fast. If you want to try Podpage, go over to tripodpage.com. We just released 6 new features and we've got some big announcements coming very, very soon. So keep your ears peeled for Podpage news.

Dave Jackson:
And if you need more Jim Collison, and hey, who doesn't, just head on over to theaverageguy.tv and check out Home Gadget Geeks. That's always a fun show. And it's time for the Wheel of Names. Who will it be? Will it be, uh, the ladies from Flame Alive Pod? Will it be Chris from castahead.net? Will it be Ralph from the Content Creators Accountant? John Moots? Um, uh, Ed Sullivan? I couldn't remember Ed's last name from Sonic Cupcake. Well, we're gonna spin the wheel and find out. And the winner is the one and only Ralph Estep Jr., who is also the— I was going to say supreme leader of the Empowered Podcasting Conference 3, but I don't think supreme leader is the title. He's the lead sponsor. That's what it is.

Dave Jackson:
Uh, that, uh, so if you want to hang with Ralph, and, uh, he does the Financially Confident Christian, he does the Content creators' accountant. He does a bunch of stuff. If you want to find all of Ralph's stuff, instead of going to Financially Confident Christian, go to askralph.com and you can find all of his stuff. And I was just looking, 'cause I saw Mark was here in the chat room. If we go back to us for a quick second, Mark is the man behind the Empowered Podcasting Conference, one of the men behind it. August 21st through the 23rd. Oh, I'm coming. Yeah, that's definitely one worth returning to.

Dave Jackson:
I am kind of missing being at Podcast Movement Evolutions just because I've been to every single one, but I heard they're having fun in Austin. But if I had to do it again, I would have bought a ticket because A, they were free, and B, is it really that hard to get a hotel in Austin during South by Southwest? I know the answer is yes, But there's a part of me that's like, hmm, probably should have gone. I broke my streak. But anyway, does this show, the show you're listening to right now, Ask the Podcast Coach, does that save you time? Does it save you money? Does it save you headaches? Does it keep you educated? Well then you might want to give some of that value back and go to askthepodcastcoach.com/awesome. You can sign up for a one-time— if I say donation, Ralph's head is going to explode. If you want to tip us, there we go, a one-time tip, you could do that all at askthepodcastcoach.com/awesome. This kind of ties into what we were talking about earlier. This guy asked, eye contact with camera while reading part of a script, how do you do this? He says, I've started a weekly athlete biography type podcast called The Discipline of Greatness.

Dave Jackson:
The Discipline. Of greatness. And I like to script out a good portion of the show to keep me on track because I have a tendency to ramble and get sidetracked. I've been recording video as well, but I can see my eyes moving side to side in the video, which bothers me. Now, one of the things you can do is move your teleprompter back if you have one. Um, and he says, uh, which bothers me, and I assume it will bother others. I don't know. I don't know.

Dave Jackson:
Again, this is watching through the eyes of a podcaster. I occasionally will kind of see, oh, they're reading from a teleprompter, or they're just, they're talking to the camera like this because the teleprompter's over there and they're looking off to the left. He says, I'm looking for recommendations on what others who use video and may read all or part of a script for their show do to maintain camera eye contact, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Well, number one, I've done, I've played with this a little bit. And if you never look away from the screen and you're always looking at it like I am now, it gets a little creepy, especially if you never blink, if you use that thing in the script that keeps the eyeballs going. But if you watch even the news when they're reading from a teleprompter, on occasion they will occasionally kind of look away just for a second. So I think again, we're probably not over-editing but over-analyzing this. But my, who was I listening to? It was an actor and they were talking about remembering lines and things like that.

Dave Jackson:
And they said just before the scene, they would read their lines top to bottom, like 3 or 4 times out loud. They would read it and then they would read it again and they would then read it again. And then they would put the script down and they would look at the camera and they would just, and they said, now sometimes the words weren't exactly right 'cause they kind of paraphrased them. Into something they would say, which may not go over well if you're an actor. But I was like, that's not a bad idea to just read it out. And the problem is we're going to read it, and then when you do it like the second time, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, read it out loud again, and then read it out loud again, and then put it down, and then just ask like, hey, somebody said you went to South by Southwest, what was it like? And then you go, well, I had this script. Okay, now just answer The question, I don't know, that's one of the things I don't worry about on this show.

Dave Jackson:
I mean, my eyes are all over the place on this show because I'm producing as I'm hosting. But, uh, Jim, do you ever worry about stuff like this?

Jim Collison:
I try not to. I've had some folks say to me, you know, boy, it'd be— on, on the podcast they make for work— it'd be great if you'd look at the camera a little bit more. And I'm like, well, sorry, not gonna. I just, just not gonna. It's just not the— it, it's distracting to me. It slows me down.

Randy Black:
It—

Jim Collison:
I I start worrying about when I, you know, some of the things that I'm— and I just, I'm not as good. So it's kind of like, so what the method I've come up with is just squint a lot and then they can't see your eyes, you know. So that's, that's, that's what I'm going with. Just, I'm going to stay squinty and, uh, you can't see mine.

Dave Jackson:
Forget if I was watching.

Jim Collison:
I don't know what I'm looking at right now.

Dave Jackson:
There was a guy— well, you kind of look like De Niro. I do. Everybody, you talking to me? You talking to me? He's kind of squinty. There was a guy on, there was a whole thing on, I don't know why I watched it, it was on YouTube, about the, did you ever watch the show Third Rock from the Sun?

Jim Collison:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Dave Jackson:
20 years ago, right? Yeah, it was really popular. And they were saying how it was weird because John Lithgow was a serious actor and he was like, "I will never, TV show, huh?" And then they're like, "Comedy." And he was really good at it. And they were mentioning, and then you're like, Dave, why are we talking about Third Rock from the Sun? The actor French something, his first name was French, and he chose that his character would always be squinting. And so they said that was just a choice of his. It wasn't like a normal thing. He just was always squinting.

Jim Collison:
And I'm like, well— He was always squinting. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah.

Jim Collison:
Just close your eyes a little bit. That way they can't see what you're looking at. You have no idea. I could be looking completely— completely off screen.

Dave Jackson:
You have no idea. Yeah, so there you go. Here's a, a painful one. If you've ever gone into your Apple, you know, Podcast Connect to look at your data and you see that it says not enough data, you're like, oh, I wonder how much data you have to have. And so I saw this on Reddit and they actually quoted the, the Apple spec If your show displays not enough data message in analytics, your show has not met the data threshold for the time frame specified. So number one, let's, let's back off of that, that threshold. Instead of maybe last 7 days, let's go last 30, or for the month or something. It says at least 5 unique users must play content from your show within the selected time, for the analytics metric you selected.

Dave Jackson:
So if you get that message, it means in the, the time you have specified, you've not had 5 download or 5 listeners in Apple Podcasts. And I was like, that, that's kind of painful. Now, when you see that, you're like, wait, I don't have 5? Like, I got 8 people in my family. I don't have 5. And I was like, ow, that's kind of painful. So keep that in mind. If you're going to go on a show, like somebody asks you to be on a show, how do you decide if you're going to go or not?

Jim Collison:
Oh, that's a good question. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go look at their show. I'm gonna make sure I'm gonna sample it just to kind of see what they're talking about, what they do. I want to make sure I can bring value to what they're trying to do. I'll try to get like, is this a fit? You know, are— it's my style and their style kind of a fit? And then I'll make a decision like, okay, can I— do I want to give up an hour or whatever, half an hour? A lot of folks won't go the full hour anymore. So yeah, I do, I do a little bit of work before. I used to not do that. I used to just say yes because I was excited.

Jim Collison:
That was a mistake. That was a big mistake. So I got on a few shows that I was like, I probably shouldn't be here. I probably should have listened to their style for 15 or 20 minutes before I jumped in.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. This guy says, I've been doing podcast outreach for a few months and I'm trying to get better at qualifying shows before I reach out. So he says, how recently have they published? Are they still active? That's a good thing. Episode count. Established versus brand new, not a bad thing. If they're on episode 3, you might think about it. Um, whether they've had guests before in my niche. Yeah, whether they've had guests, period.

Dave Jackson:
Like, if it's obviously a solo show, you know, you might want to not waste your time. He says, but I feel like I'm missing stuff. Do any of you look at per-episode listener estimates? No, because they're all way off. Platform distribution. I look at who the host is, like the media host. Like, if you're on Spotify and I'm on the fence, that's going to lean negative because I'm like, you got no skin in the game, you're not even paying for hosting. The biggest thing I look for, for me, is not the podcast but the audience. Does that audience want to hear my message? And if it's like, oh yeah, we talk about whatever And then you have to kind of think about what, why am I doing guesting? Is it to sell more books? Is it to do this? Is it to do that? And if you listen, and I think I mentioned this last week, if it's one of those shows where they talk about Jim's story in the early days in the Army, and then he moved to, you know, blah, blah, but there's nothing about how great you are as, you know, a podcast, you're like, Okay, how am I gonna sell a book? Because, you know, I've got 6 kids, 5, 6, 5, 5.

Dave Jackson:
Okay, well, go talk to your wife, she has a surprise for you. I hope not.

Jim Collison:
Could you imagine that? That would be a Festivus miracle right there.

Dave Jackson:
But I, so I look at, and this is just me there, I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. I look at, you know, their website, So if their website is the free Podbean website, that's kind of a negative. If I look at the host and they're on, you know, something that looks cheapy, I'm looking just to like, hey, how serious are you taking the show? And then I listen to an episode and if it starts off and there wouldn't be anything wrong with it, but if their vibe isn't really my vibe. So if it starts off and it's like, hey, we're here. All right. It's, you know, Binky and the Wiz, right? Hey, we got Dave Jackson coming on today. You know, I'm like, I'm not sure this is the, you know, so I, I'm with you. I used to say yes all the time.

Dave Jackson:
Uh, I still kind of say yes because to me the biggest takeaway is the relationship you make with people. But if they're on episode 2, they're using Spotify, they don't have a website, and if it's not a really great fit, I will probably just go, yeah, thank you, but no thank you. So, but that's, um It's one of those things where a website does make a difference. And I know you're like, oh, you say that because you're on Podpage, but it's—

Randy Black:
it's—

Dave Jackson:
yeah, I said that before I was on Podpage, so keep that in mind.

Jim Collison:
I make an exception in some cases. I, I did a podcast one time of a young podcaster, was just getting started. It was their first— it was somewhere in their first 10 episodes, and they were just trying really hard. And I was like, you know what, I, if they, if they think this is a big deal, then I will absolutely give them the time that they need to do it. It was, you know, so I think you've got to make that evaluation. I don't say no if they're, if it's always just a startup or they have terrible technology, maybe you can help them out with a little bit if they, you know, you make that determination. But in this case, I was trying to encourage this young podcaster to keep podcasting.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, that's a great point. I think the other thing is the pitch. Like, if it's an actual written by a human kind of pitch and they really— I'm like, you know what? And I go over and I'm like, oh wow, they're only on episode 4. Because I've been episode 2 and 3 and 6, and those people are really thankful that you came on the show. And then when they're on episode, you know, 98 or whatever, they're like, man, I remember you came on, you were episode 4. Again, it's that relationship that you build. I remember Todd Cochran when he was doing, talking about South by Southwest, right? He, what's the GoPro? GoPro would come on when they were nobody and he would interview them and he built that relationship with them. And then of course GoPro went huge.

Dave Jackson:
And I can't remember, there was a certain part where they got a little too big for their britches, but for a long time, Todd had a relationship with the GoPro people because he connected with them when they were just starting out. So that's another, you know, thing you might want to think about. Speaking of media hosts and things like that, Podbean sent out an email that said, oh, by the way, we're stopping our ad, you know, our programmatic ad in, um, and basically it was all the GDPR countries, which makes you— which is really about privacy, which makes one ponder the thought, were they doing things that were revealing customers' privacies to other people? And, uh, I was like, hmm, that's— that was interesting, the fact that there was— there was an announcement, but it wasn't like, "Hey, this is coming, plan accordingly." It was like, "Oh, guess what? If you're feeding your kids on ads, you're going to get a pay cut because half the world just got cut off. Now, if all your ads are in the U.S., then you may not have that issue." That was one that I was like, "Hmm." And then, the other thing, and it's only 10 years too late, was Libsyn. Back in the day, Libsyn 4 had 4 tabs. You'd put in the information about your episode, you go to the next tab, and you put in your information about that, you go to the next tab, and the last tab was schedule it and publish it. And everybody was like, your interface is old-looking, it's not, it's not modern. But the, the technology behind it was amazing, and It was, you know, like, okay, so what did Libsyn decide to do? Oh, we're gonna rebuild Libsyn 5 from the ground up.

Dave Jackson:
And so they did, and they never fully moved— well, actually, they said they did, and then they, they never moved their Libsyn Pro to Libsyn 5. Rob and I were screaming about that for many months over there, and they never moved it. They started working on a Libsyn 6 and they were just gonna call it Libsyn. And Rob and I are like, hey, like, can we, like, hmm? Yeah, so they started Libsyn 6. I just found out, and I'm forgetting the guy's name, but kind of one of the product managers of that, in the immortal words of Monty Python, has been sacked. He's now looking for a job. And they finally did what they should have done, which was, wait a minute, Libsyn 4 worked great and it was rock solid, there were no bugs. Maybe we should just put a new face on it and make it look more modern.

Dave Jackson:
And that's what they just did. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. So, uh, I also— I've, I've come to my own little conclusion about Libsyn, and that is listen to every press release about Libsyn. Like, the last 4 have been Oh, Lipson is the, um, what's the word, where exclusive sponsor of Slightly Big Show. And then it's Slightly Big Show has decided to partner with Lipson for ads. Like every time I hear James mention Lipson, it's about something with advertising. So I'm just starting to look at them as an advertising company, but it was weird. I logged in and I was like, wait, what's, what's going on with the dashboard? And I was like, oh man.

Dave Jackson:
It's Libsyn 4 with, with a new face. So if you're wondering why they made those changes, uh, that's what they did. So yeah, and then, uh, yes, here we go. Ray says, you know, if you handle your own ads, there you go, then you don't have a problem with this GDPR stuff. So yeah, Ray from Around the Layout, where he's, he's smart, he's partnering with companies that are actually, you know, that make sense. Like, his audience might want to actually hear about that company as opposed to yet another Geico ad or whatever. Um, Daniel says the GDPR thing might not only be about revealing information but about their ability to allow audiences to opt in or opt out. Yeah, that's, that's an issue.

Dave Jackson:
And they also killed their— I guess they had live streaming. I didn't know. Podbean has always been kind of weird ever since the short woman with the black hair There were some people over there, like they fired all of their American-based people. When I go there, I see, I still see them, they're coming, they just don't work for Podbean anymore. And so they had one person at the booth at the National Religious Broadcasters, and she was from the marketing department, which makes sense if you're gonna be in a booth, but I wouldn't say she was a master of the art of podcasting. She knew the product, but if you asked her like, 'Oh, well, what software do you use?' She'd be like, 'What? What?' So that's another company that I'm kind of like, 'Hmm.' So, uh, Mark has a question. He says, 'I listen to podcasts about podcasting with questions about increasing listenership and engagement, with most answers focusing on marketing and equipment when it's really about improving the content.' Well, amen, brother.

Jim Collison:
That man— it's actually about both though.

Dave Jackson:
It is actually about both.

Jim Collison:
Well, yeah, you can't Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is about both.

Dave Jackson:
Because if you don't promote it, you can have the best content and nobody's going to hear it.

Jim Collison:
Uh, yeah, yeah, it's really about both is what I would say in that. I mean, we just— to your point, Dave, you, you can't— you can create great content, but if it doesn't get out there, nobody finds it. And yet, listen, I watch YouTubers all the time that their content, the way they make it It's okay, but I have a relationship with these guys through YouTube, and I look forward to seeing what they make, even though their content— most people would be like, well, that's not the greatest. So subpar content in front of the right audience is incredible. So you still have to get it in front of people, right? You still have to figure out how to get it out there. For people to discover it. You got to do some things to market it and get it out there. And then I think you got to make the content for you, like, because if you're not making it for you, eventually you just quit, right? And so make it the best that you want it to be for you.

Jim Collison:
Listen, my Home Gadget Geek style is old. Nobody's making podcasts that way that much anymore, you know, interview style kind of fireside chat is what I've had my audience say it is, right? We don't go in-depth. We don't do a lot of details. We chat about our, you know, chat about our family and our tech and some of the things that we want to do. There's a certain audience that likes that. And I still pick up new listeners all the time and they're like, how have I missed this for the last 12 years or 15? We just celebrated 15. Yeah, like, I don't know, I didn't work hard enough to get it in front of you. So be careful in the wording there.

Jim Collison:
It's really about, you know, well, no, yes, but it's also about marketing as well.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah, I always say the equation for downloads is value in the episode multiplied by smart promotion equals downloads. And that's, that's kind of a, that's a little, it's a little harsh, uh, but I think it's kind of true because if you don't have any value in your episode and you just promote it, you know, just you're spending money everywhere and billboards and stuff. Okay, it's going to move a little, but yeah, but if you have great stuff and you don't promote it, yes, that will also grow at a trickle via word of mouth. But if you can kind of do both, uh, that's the best. Yeah, Daniel has— Shannon Moore was one, but there was another one. She also ran DC Podfest, um, that worked for Podbean. But Shannon was awesome. Um, she was— she lived in China, which is basically where Podbean is based out of, if I remember right.

Dave Jackson:
Um, so, uh, here's another question from Ivan. Says, I know you use Ecamm, Dave, but what is the one thing you don't like about it? I have a few things I don't like. Here's— it's— it's— there's two words: learning curve. It's— it's like no other software you've ever used. Um, can I— I know I can do— well, here, let me I don't think I'm doing this because, because I'm using Ecamm, but if I share my screen and drag this over, can you guys— no, it gets confused. It's like, why are you Ecamming Ecamm? Um, and plus you're looking at Reddit. Um, my Zoom is now going, do you want this meeting still? Nice, keep me active. Um, but I have 5 little windows over here now.

Dave Jackson:
And so it's just, if you're ADD, it's like a nightmare. It's like, oh my God, what do I look at now? I was one of the first, 'cause you gotta remember, I've been teaching software since like Microsoft Word 2, you know what I mean? Since like the early '90s. So software doesn't scare me. This is just not like any other. You end up with all these little boxes. On one hand, you can change, like I could change, the width of the, um, border around Jim's thing. I could change the color because it should match his little light green thing.

Jim Collison:
Um, it kind of does need to be changed because you're bigger than me in the— like, my window, see how it drops, goes through my tag?

Dave Jackson:
Oh yeah, that's it.

Jim Collison:
Yeah, so this is the problem.

Dave Jackson:
This is the problem. You, you have— it is so much control that it's kind of— now there are ways you can copy and paste, and I should probably do that or whatever. So the thing I do I do like about it— he asked it, does it do local recordings? Yeah, it does. And I get a local of, of Jim and a local of me. And I need to use this for my interviews and just, just have two big— you know, I could have something. I know I have three people, but you can go in here and, you know, I could make just me and Jim, like no, no Ask the Podcast Coach branding at all, and just be side by side. And then I could have, you know, because when I look at the recording of Jim, it's just Jim. It's basically I get a recording of this, you know.

Jim Collison:
So, um, so it's cool and it works handy, which is handy to have. Yeah, we— this week we were doing some videos and I wanted this view, and then I wanted it to switch to the full view and then go back to this view, and we didn't record it that way. It was on StreamYard. We didn't record it that way. But because I had both the live view and I had the backup of the individual, we could then B-roll that in and bring it in to the, to the, you know, the produced video. So getting the full person's video is super helpful. I mean, it's a lot. It's a lot of wasted space if you're not using it.

Dave Jackson:
But having that full video is super, super handy. Yeah. Coach Dave says, ask the podcast coach provides a good vibe. To relax with on Saturday mornings. We can't bring cigars. You could. So a small monthly donation.

Jim Collison:
It is a little early. Ed may disagree with me on that one, but it's a little early.

Dave Jackson:
Yeah. And Daniel remembered her name, Jennifer Longworth. Isn't Jennifer Longworth Barrel Bourbon Podcasting in Kentucky? That's definitely a Jennifer. Um, but she worked there for a while. Um, getting tired. Okay. Um, yes, the size of our windows is bothering Randy Black.

Jim Collison:
I need to work on that.

Dave Jackson:
It's bothered him for months, months, months, Dave. Losing sleep. Sorry. Um, Chris said, yeah, uh, on Ecamm you can select live demo mode. That is true, and it will show you your Ecamm windows. Um, Jeff C., who's a big Ecamm power user, is powerful because it is so customizable, but it can be intimidating for new users. And that's why I bought, um, I forget his name. This is where Rich Graham will save me because I always forget this guy's name.

Dave Jackson:
It's, it's something like One Take Productions. I should remember this because I have an affiliate link for his stuff. But I took his course because I wanted someone to just go from head to toe through the whole thing They do have a Zoom integration, Jeff points out. It's pretty awesome. I was able to have 6 guests on this week's show. How cool is that? Yeah, uh, I had mine up. What I found is after 45 minutes, if nobody is in your Zoom meeting, um, the— it's, it's weird because Jim is listed, he joined via Ecamm, but in Zoom I have no participants. So That, or I had a participant— I don't know, it's again, Alec Johnson, thank you very much.

Dave Jackson:
Jeff C. Um, yeah, Take One Tech. So I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to learn Ecamm. It's really cool. I mean, it's just a matter of, uh, and once you get it, you got it. It just, it takes a bit. It's like a Heartbeat. Heartbeat is a, uh, the tool I use for the School of Podcasting's community and the, the, um courses.

Dave Jackson:
My brain's on like a 4-second delay today, but I figured out that—

Jim Collison:
yeah, you are a little— yeah, you're struggling. I think maybe we're both—

Dave Jackson:
it's because it's Pi Day and it is Pi Day. Nice callback, my friend. Uh, but I learned in a heartbeat you have an offer, and that offer could be free or paid or have multiple tiers, and that offer is then, and you just go in all the, like, you have access groups. So you can say, oh great, when you sign up for this offer, if you pay, you're in Access Group 1, and Access Group 1 can see this, this, that, that, that. So it's one of those things that once I got it, like, the light came on and I was like, oh, I get it. But it took me a while because again, it's so flexible. That's the hardest thing when you, when you have these things that they do everything, you know, it comes with a learning curve some case. Uh, Jeff C says, for our new carving show, we're using the Ecamm interview mode and Zoom, one for the face, uh, fronting camera and Zoom for the hands-down shot.

Dave Jackson:
That's cool. So they can be on screen at the same time. Um, yeah. And then Coach Dave says, it's almost time to start the thumbs up train. It is about that time. So, um, Jim, what is coming up on, uh, theaverageguy.tv?

Jim Collison:
Wow. Coach Dave just killed the vibe, brought the show right to a conclusion.

Dave Jackson:
I looked up, I'm like, we got 3 minutes, we can end early.

Jim Collison:
I was just kidding. Paul Baron joins me. We talk a lot about heating and heat pumps and home insulation and all the tech that goes into that kind of stuff. It's middle of winter, although it didn't feel that way here. But he joined me to talk about those topics.

Dave Jackson:
It's posted right now out at homegadgetgeeks.com. On the School of Podcasting, I officially don't know what I'm doing, uh, partly because I spent so much time on last week's episode. When I was done, I was kind of like, ah, but, uh, I think I'm going to be talking about SEO and does it still matter, because that seems to be a popular question. And the answer is— the quick answer is yes, it does. Please don't just Dude, because people keep— and I noticed I did this myself, I just created this wall of text and I was like, oh, there's not a single heading in there. And if I'd— A, nobody reads, so keep that in mind. And number 2, had I put some headings in, people could skim the headings and then decide if they want to read it. And then those headings could have, you know, keywords in them and things of that nature.

Dave Jackson:
And, um, so there you go, there's the episode. I don't need to I just did it. So, and I have a bunch of things in my notes, Joy, that I could be talking about. So that will be coming up on Monday's School of Podcasting. Also, keep your ears, uh, low to the ground for Podpage announcements are coming out this week, and, um, those are going to be fun. And, uh, thanks to the chat room, thanks to all the awesome supporters over at askthepodcastcoach.com/awesome. We will be back Next week with another episode of Ask the Podcast Coach. And holy cow, we're 1 minute early.

Dave Jackson:
It's 11:59. We lied to people.