Experimenting with EvMux

David Jackson: 0:20

Ask the podcast coach for june 13, 2026 Let's get ready to podcast. Hey, at least you know I'm not AI. There's that music. It means it's Saturday morning. It's time for Ask the Podcast Coach, where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from the School of podcasting.com and joining me right over there is the one and only Jim Cullison from The Average guy.tv Jim, how's it going, buddy?

Jim Collison: 0:51

Greetings, Dave. Happy Saturday morning to you. Always good to be back on As the Podcast Coach. A thunderstorming morning here in Omaha, Nebraska, maybe an inch of rain already, so hopefully the lights will stay on.

David Jackson: 1:03

My favorite, we had, like, it was because, you know, I had all this work done to my basement, and yet it never really, really rained. And then, and then it did. It was raining sideways, and I ran out in the leather jacket and a hat just to watch the water stream out of my way into the street, and I was like, yes, it's working, yeah. So that was exciting, but yeah, we.. it's.. we had a lot of.. I just swear I had like a thunder cloud above my house, and it just looked like.. remember when before LED lights, you'd have the basement lights, the typical workshop light, and when those things started to go, they would just flicker constantly. Yeah, it's what was going on above my house for a very long time, when I was like, all right, so, but you know what can cure up the rainy day blues? That's right, a cup, a popping hike, yeah, a popping, popping, yeah, whatever it is, it's it's Java, and that coffee pour is brought to you by our good friend Mark over at Podcast branding.co because the beautiful thing about Mark is number one, he's an award-winning graphic artist, he's made some great artwork for me, and probably 1000s of people at this point, and he's going to sit down with you one on one and kind of figure out what the vibe of the show is, what kind of look you're going for. He's going to make sure that it's exactly what you're looking for. It'll give you multiple options to pick from, and then you can tweak, and then you're like, well, this is really cool, but now my artwork doesn't look as good as my website. Well, you

know what? Here's the good news: 2:48

Mark can do the whole website, he can do business cards, PDF, whatever you need to look good in front of your audience. It's super simple. You just go over to Podcast branding.co you're telling Dave and Jim sent you, and he will start working with you to really make that great first impression that you're trying to do

Jim Collison: 3:22

awesome. awesome big thanks for good friend Dan Lefebvre over there, based on a true story, based on True Story podcast.com And this week, like last week, the legend of, I think, it's Bagger Vance, Bagger, yeah. And check it out today, you know, Dan, you know, Dan, Dan does a great job, he's got great album art over there. If you ever wanted to see how to do album art, his is the site to do it. Check him out today, Based on a True Story at Based on True Story podcast.com And, as always, Dan, thanks for your sponsorship.

David Jackson: 3:54

That, that makes sense now that I switch scenes, and we'll go back to us over here. That, if we're down the on the screen, they don't hear it, so that's good to know. Oh yeah, going forward. In case you're wondering, Dave, what are you doing? I decided to play with EV Mooks today, or Mux, take your pick. And the reason why, because I'm not unhappy with eCamm. I've used them, in fact, my subscription to eCamm doesn't run out till November, but I was doing, I've been doing this class podcasting in six weeks, and we got into gear, and so I went over and looked at Stream Yard, and I looked at Riverside and Descript, and you know, and then I was like, I remember good old Evie Mux, and I was like, wait, it's only $25 a month, and I was like, huh, and I was like, how much is eCamm? 40, and I'm like, okay, granted I'm on the top tier VCam. And then it dawned on me, I'm like, well, why did I get eCamm again? And I'm like, well, because I was on a Mac and I could, and I was using eCamm to make videos for the School of Podcasting, and I was like, "Oh, do you do that anymore? No, I use a tool called Tella, which records my camera and my screen separately, and I can then go in, in post-production, and say, "Show Dave, show Dave in the corner, zoom in on this, like it's really great for making. And screen tutorials, and so I was like, oh, so I'm not really using that in eCamm, and I'm like, I'm using it for live streaming, and then I looked at my live stream, I'm like, do I switch scenes all the time, a little but not a lot, and you know, now we can do fun things like this, where I can say, here are our $20 supporters, and have little scroll, which I could do in eCamm if I wanted to, but I just was like, huh, let's, let's go play with this thing. So we've already learned a valuable lesson, which is, you know, if you're not on screen, they can't hear you.

Jim Collison: 5:56

Yeah,

David Jackson: 5:56

so good, good to know. But yeah, and I've turned up my volume, so hopefully that sounds

Jim Collison: 6:03

a little bit better to me.

David Jackson: 6:04

Yeah, I was definitely low. Yeah, Ralph is like, you get what you pay for. Yeah, and see their comments fly in and make little flashy things. Yes, dances, playing with a new tool. Yeah, always fun. Yeah, and it was weird, because they had kept a lot of what I had done in the past, so like this thing that's above us, the, you know, the background art and things, was all still here, I was just like, oh, I just need to give them money to use this, because my, whatever, 14 day free trial had burned out many, many, many moons ago, so, so it's, it's a cool little tool, you know. There'll be a little bit of a learning curve. There's built-in sound effects, so you know, we can, you know, yay. Now, the bad news is that's really loud, like, so it is what it is, but so I

Jim Collison: 7:05

do like the comments better here than I like them than on on ecam, so the way they display, I like it, I like this, this version better.

David Jackson: 7:17

I wonder, I'll have to look and see. See, here's the other thing I hate about their comments, is if I in an eCamm, they turn themselves off and Dan is stuck on. Now I gotta go find his tutorial or his comment to it, but I wonder if there is a way to like if there's an auto level on that I'm not aware of, and somehow, because the audio for us is the same as it always is, so we'll, we'll have to play with that, same as

Jim Collison: 7:50

it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was,

David Jackson: 7:57

but now the fun thing is, I had planned, see, this is where you know I tested this last night, but I, I didn't test it enough, apparently. I, you know, what I can do this. We'll just.. it's going to be a little clunky today, but I can come in here, I believe I can, and say I want to add a new layer, and I want to add a screen share, so this is just gonna pop on top of us. Maybe not all right. I swear, I did this last night, and it was a piece of cake. Hold on, we'll do this. If I click here, that's the wheel of names. Let me add another quick scene. This is the fun thing: creating live on the fly, and I can

Jim Collison: 8:44

hear you with since we're not on the screen, that's a good

David Jackson: 8:46

thing. I bet they just like it with it went dark

Jim Collison: 8:50

here again. Then we disappear.

David Jackson: 8:52

All right, let's go. All right, we're gonna go up here. So Dave didn't test this enough, because we dawned on you guys just went, 'Hey, this green went black. All right, so I will, I will just, instead of sharing my screen and looking at Reddit, we will, I will just say these, so somebody, and I just love the headline of this, it says, "I've tested a pile of AI clipping tools, and they all kind of suck. Am I the problem, or are they? And he goes on to explain that he's tried this, and it's fully automated, and it just seems like, you know, they'd always give them clips that aren't that great, and, and what gets me is that that's like in the top five of like problems now is, hey, it's taking too long to make all these clips, and I'm like, well, yeah, you know, I've always said, instead of searching a 45 minute, you know, interview for the perfect clip, why not just have the host hold up their phone and go,"Hey, on today's show, we interviewed Jim Collison from The Average Guy TV, wait till you hear what he said about, you know, blah blah blah, stop, like that takes 10 seconds, and instead we're looking for the perfect clip. And I realize if it's an interview and it's already done, but for me, I don't know. It always sounds like everybody wants these tools to get it perfect, and I get that. That would be amazing, but they. Don't, and what they're doing is they're getting you like closer to like instead of having to listen to the whole 45 minute clip or the 45 minute interview, you kind of now know where to start digging if this was a gold rush. Yeah, you know, and so, yeah, yeah, Dan says everyone wants the everything immediately and work without any errors, and he goes, it's never going to happen.

Jim Collison: 10:50

Well, I won't say never, but it's we're still a ways away from it, right? I mean, I think you have to, with a lot of, with a lot of the AI stuff, you got to kind of treat it like it's a child, or probably not a child, probably like a teenager, in the sense that it can do some things, it has a lot of capability and a lot of potential, but if you want it to do a very specific job, you really gotta train it and teach it how to do it right, and then, because you, this is what I have found, I've got this, these ideas in my head, and I think I've already said them to somebody somewhere on some long line, and so I put in very vague prompts, I don't give it enough detail, I'm not specific enough about things, and guess what, it can't read your mind, you know, much like your spouse, it can't read your mind, and so you've got to do some work to kind of engineer that information out to get it there, and it does take a little bit of work. I'm finding the more I work with it, the better it gets. Yeah, for me in some ways. Now you know it's not.. I think, and the other.. the other mistake I think people are making is they think the AI versions we're using are like, hey, do this thing for me, and you, so you kind of train it and teach it. Chances are the second time it does that, it's not going to do it the same way. No,

David Jackson: 12:15

I, I was listening to Adam Curry, who's.. it's interesting, he started off with AI is stupid, there's no intelligence there. And then he started vibe coding, and there are these things where you can say, like, you'll say, whatever you do, don't post to GitHub, and then it will post to GitHub, and he'd be like, "Hey, I told you not to do that, and it'll go. Oh man, I'm sorry. I'll make a some sort of file that it then uses, and he says, unless you say, "Hey, I want you to do this, be sure to first look at your memory file, and he says,"It still occasionally will like go read the memory file. It's like a, it's like a nine year old man. It's like it kind of listens, it is this, this

Jim Collison: 13:02

is, of you know, I've been working with Open Claw and Hermes, yeah, and this is the power of those orchestrator platforms, is you, you know, you have an LLM behind it, but when you're training it and teaching it and work with it, it's working, working with it, there we go, it's it's actually writing code that for your processes will run the code the same way each time you do it.

David Jackson: 13:26

Yeah, so

Jim Collison: 13:27

you're like, hey, I want you to go out to my Amazon affiliate API, I want you to grab the data from it, want you to bring that in, put it in a table, and then we're going to run some things against it, right? The process of it going, of it creating the API layer, the process of the way it pulls it, the cron job it makes to pull it on a regular basis, right. That's just a scheduled job. Those are all that's just code, so that's gonna run the same way every time. It's not going to try to make stuff up or interpret it, right. The power of AI is really that, making stuff up and interpreting it, when it's like when it's rewriting things for you, when it's giving you ideas, it's making stuff up, right? That's that's the power of it, right. But when you have these processes that you want to be the exact same every time, if in those systems, and there's going to be dozens of these here, but if you're using, if you're using some of the new Claude code or the codec stuff, you can do this as well. It's writing the code for you for the processes that need to be standardized, and so that's the power of those. If you're trying to do these kinds of things in your browser, I mean, it's it's good, but it's not good for that, that kind of stuff. Now there's offerings and things are changing all the time, and you know, you're.. I'm sure you, the listener, are on the forefront of AI, and you're telling me I'm wrong. Whatever, that's fine. You there, I think it's getting better, right? And so, there's.. there's some.. I think there's some good stuff coming with all this, but you still, from a prompt standpoint, you still got to kind of think like an engineer. This is what I've learned, is you got to kind of engineer these things a little bit, and be like, hey, if I was meeting somebody for the first time, and I was explaining a task to them, how would I explain it, you know? Or trying to get my kids to mow the lawn the way I mow the lawn, how would you explain to them? You can't go mow it. And then as they're mowing it, no, go straighter, no, no, don't, don't mow over the flowers,

David Jackson: 15:26

right,

Jim Collison: 15:27

you know, those kinds of things, you kind of got to say I want you to mow the lawn in straight lines, start here, and then in the process, don't mow over the flowers, don't mow over the, you know, don't, don't mow the dirt, don't, don't run into the rocks, so you got to give us some guard rails too, so it kind of understands.

David Jackson: 15:46

Randy says someone needs to vibe code a tool for clipping content, like the Pod Father did. Yeah, Adam explained how he's got it, like going out, finding clips, and then automatically clipping for Godcaster. He says they're actually pretty good. I was like, well, that's interesting. And good at

Jim Collison: 16:03

code, it's really good at code.

David Jackson: 16:05

Yeah, Chris from Cast ahead.net says AI clipping tools should get you to second base, and then yeah, it takes a human to bring it home. Ralph, we're gonna get to your question in a second. Dan says, I say never in this case, because the more it can do, the more expectations we have for that's true. And then Uncle Marv says, remember, AI doesn't think it does not yet have consciousness, it hasn't received total consciousness on his deathbed, it lacks a body and feelings that is not idea, and that's where somebody brought up a good point with why clipping isn't always great is sometimes somebody, it's not so much what somebody said, it's how you know these pretzels are making me thirsty, is really not that funny of a line, but it's how somebody says that, and AI is not going to get that, at least not to the best of my knowledge, so that could be interesting to say the least. I do like the fact behind the scenes here that Ev Mux has a way to star comments, and then I can just, when I'm ready to show them, although we still have Uncle Marv on the screen, so here I'll put this. Dan says, I agree to disagree. AI just is just programming with human languages instead of programming language. Now, hopefully, if I unhide him, okay, we're all clear, but it's.. I can, I can pin people here, and just like eCamm, so that's always fun. But yeah, I just. it seems like, because I hear people like, I spent 36 hours making clips, and I'm like, that seems a little, a little harsh. So I'm not sure,

Jim Collison: 17:52

Cinderella story.

David Jackson: 17:53

Well, and somebody said, How do you get new listeners in 2026 And I thought it was interesting that the fact here, if how do we get new listeners? See, I could do.. I wouldn't do this on the fly, but if I.. if I knew this question was coming, I could put this up here, create this, and in theory, now just do this. Ooh, how do we get new listeners in 2026

Jim Collison: 18:24

Oh, like little topic. I like that little topic. Yeah,

David Jackson: 18:27

and what I thought was interesting is he said listeners, and guess what, everybody's answer was

Jim Collison: 18:33

clips, videos.

David Jackson: 18:35

Well, yeah, kind of, yeah, videos. And then videos turned into clips, which then turned into the how do we get clips to be good, and I was like, I don't know, it was kind of weird, but to me, I don't think I'm.. this is where I guess I'm just an old curmudgeon, make good content, and then I think it changes every now and then on where you go to get to your audience, because you know, okay, I've made this, I've tested it with a test audience, so I know it's good, and then figure out where your actual audience is, go to where they are, make friends with them, and then tell them about your show, and so you know, if we go back to Danny Pena, when he had a, he still has Gamertag Radio. He would go to the local video store, where everybody was waiting for the new version of Doom to come out, and there's a line at midnight, and he would hand out business cards and interview people in line. Why? Because that's where his audience was. And then you have other people that go to Comic Con, or they go to wherever, because that's where their audience is, and sometimes that's online, and sometimes it's in other places, but to me, I don't think that's gonna change. Make good content, get it tested, make sure it's resonating with your audience, and then go find out where your audience is, and tell them, you know, where. Hey, if you like this kind of stuff, I do a podcast about it once a week over there. I don't know, Jim. And any thoughts on how do I get a bigger audience?

Jim Collison: 20:09

What you say make good content, I'm not sure the good is actually required. Like, okay, just just bear with me here. Good isn't, you know, beauty is in the eye. Of the beholder, right, and so what is good content for some is as boring and awful for others, right. I make content like make your you be you, make what, do what you want to do, make it as professional as you want to, or make it as casual as you want to. Yeah, the in the days of Vine, remember Vine way back in the day. It's just, it was just an early TikTok. My daughter just had all these Vines that she just loved, and she would reference them all the time. And then one day she made a Vine compilation for me, because she's like, "Dad, I want you to understand these things I'm saying, right? Because she was quoting these Vine videos, and I watched them, and they're terrible, like these videos are terrible, they're awful, like I would never watch them. Now they have a, they hold a special place in my heart today, because my daughter says these things all the time, you know. The, we've got these sayings she does, right? Do you think the, you know, the video of the kid running around with a knife, and his mother chasing him, trying to get the knife out of his hand, is that good content? No, but it was good enough to make a Vine video, and somebody, you know, for her, that was a, that was significant, right, a significant video. So I, I don't just, just do your thing, right? Make content, do your thing, get it out to your audience as much as you can. You're gonna, if you, you know, depending on what kind of numbers, what you need, you're gonna need a little bit of luck or a lot of advertising. You got to stick with it. I can

guarantee you this: 21:54

if you stop doing it, people will stop watching your content, right? You know, if you quit, yep, nobody, nobody's gonna watch it, yeah, no one's gonna watch it anymore. And so I think you just got to create content, right? Just do it, and have you know what, have fun doing it. And if you don't want to have fun, be angry while you make it, just get angry and frustrated, right? Just do you, do you, you go out and do your thing, and I think sometimes it's gonna, you know, it's some of those are gonna hit. Why I sometimes I don't think we know, and yet other things, you know, some of these bigger podcasts, they're they make it because they've got a lot of support,

David Jackson: 22:35

right?

Jim Collison: 22:35

Right, they have a lot of people around them, they have a system and a process, or they were famous before, some of those kinds of things, so yeah, just make content, man. Just make content.

David Jackson: 22:44

Stephanie, speaking of growing your audience, says, "Hey, does anyone use Reddit to market their podcast? And the fun part of Reddit is, at least as long

Jim Collison: 22:55

as you don't post in the podcasters one, that though, don't, don't promote your podcast, yeah, in the podcast, yeah, that's

David Jackson: 23:01

the thing, is there's no self promotion, and that's a tricky self promotion is where you put a link to something that you did, so in fact he's in the Randy, you know, I still love you, I, Randy got mad at me this week because Randy made a really great post. It was, hey, in fact, you just said it, Jim. You know why Weird Al Yankovic is still making money as Weird Al Yankovic decades and decades later,

Jim Collison: 23:31

is

David Jackson: 23:31

because he found out what he's good at, and he loves doing what he's good at. Great post, Randy put that in the school of podcasting, and then said I talk about this on my podcast, yeah, and I went,"Oh, now, now we're.. it's.. it's.. and I even said, I'm like, "Hey, dude, we're like that self-promotion, like right, please don't do that again. And Randy got mad and left the school of podcasting, and I was like, "Okay. So then the fun part was.. now here's. here's how you learn kids, so then Ralph, my beloved Ralph Estep Jr. turn around and made a post about he had a really great show on Friday on podcasting morning show. I have to remember it's podcasting morning show, not podcast morning show, podcasting morning show, and was talking about what happens if your spouse doesn't like your show, and so Ralph posted this in the School of Podcasting. Great post, put a link to his thing, and yeah, I did. I saw, I said, Ralph, you know, I love you, buddy, but that self-promotion, and so if Randy was still around, I've learned. What do you do? So I went over and I read, like I said, that was a great post from Randy. So I just said, Ralph, if you have something you think would benefit the class, like email it to me and let me self promote you. And Ralph was like, totally cool with that. So I should have done that with Randy. So, Randy, my apologies, for like most people don't self-promote in the School of Podcasting, and so that's how I handled it. So, keep that in mind. So, I say that tonight, when you go to Reddit, I don't want to say the Reddit, because if I say. Banks naughty bits too many times, he banks

Jim Collison: 25:22

naughty bits, banks naughty bits. Now you'll show up. Yes,

David Jackson: 25:26

but Reddit, especially, and Facebook, almost all forums say no self-promotion.

Jim Collison: 25:33

I know I have to, it, I have to cut those out at work all the time. Yeah, always squash them. So,

David Jackson: 25:39

what I do on Reddit is I go over and I do my

best, and I've learned this: 25:43

read the question, because I got in a bad habit of just popping in answers before I read the whole thing, and they're like,"Hey, thanks, but that's not helpful, and I'm trying to be helpful, so I go over and I answer questions, and I might even say when I did my research for my book on podcast monetization, but I won't say what it is, and I won't link to it. I talked about this in the data, and then if somebody really goes, 'Wait, this guy wrote a book on podcast monetization, they will click on my profile, and if I'm smart, there's a link or something of mentioning my podcast, my websites on my profile, so you're not going to get a ton of people promoting yourself that way, because you're not promoting yourself, you're just being helpful. But make sure your profile mentions your stuff, so if you get somebody who goes, who is this Stephanie Graham woman that is always coming in here with this great stuff, they click on it, and it's there's nothing, but and I get, I mean, I go there every day, I go over to Reddit, and I get maybe 10 people a month that actually end up at the School of Podcasting, so if we then go, okay, and 3% of those 10 is point 3% of a person is actually going to sign up, so I haven't really, if I wanted to, I should make a coupon code, like use the coupon code Reddit, but here's the thing, I can't say that on Reddit because it's self promotion, so it's a tricky little thing, and the only reason I do that is because of Zig Ziglar, Jim, you've had to listen to Zig Ziglar. Oh yeah, for sure. Zig was this guy from Alabama, I think it was. Didn't

Jim Collison: 27:28

he say, 'God helps those who help themselves? Wasn't that his thing?

David Jackson: 27:32

Was like, if you want to wait, I got to get this right. If you help enough people get what they want, they will help you get what you want,

Jim Collison: 27:41

one, yeah,

David Jackson: 27:42

yeah. And I was, so that's kind of what I'm doing over

Jim Collison: 27:44

the truth to that too, yeah. So

David Jackson: 27:47

it's, it's tricky, it's a line, it's a great bumper sticker.

Jim Collison: 27:52

Oh no, no, no, the whole moderating, you know, moderating forums and those kinds of things for moderators, there's no more thankless job than then content moderators in a Facebook or Reddit or LinkedIn or whatever group, because you hear both sides of it, right? I always would, I ran a group for a while, and then I started getting a lot of complaints about all the advertising, you know, all of the just everybody, all all anybody was doing was posting in, like, look at, look at my stuff, look at my stuff, yeah, my stuff, look at my stuff.

David Jackson: 28:28

Well,

Jim Collison: 28:28

and not hardly ever, like, hey, let's have a, you know, let's talk about this, or I've got a concept I want to talk on, look at my stuff, look at my stuff, and it's, you know, I had, I had listeners, or I had listeners, they were listeners. Contact me, and, like, I'm, I'm leaving the group like this, and it was more.. it was a lot, like, it was a lot of folks, like, ah, this is just getting tiring. So, there's no, no more thankless job than then being a moderator on those kinds of things, because it's.. it's a tough one, you know? You got to draw that line somewhere in there, and make a decision, and say this is, this is kind of these are our rules, and this is what I kind of see. I know in that podcast group they're pretty, they're pretty confirmed.

David Jackson: 29:10

What's weird is somebody will say, What are your thoughts on the Samson Q to you, and I'll say probably the most recommended microphone I've ever done, and hit send, and I will get flagged, because I have not disclosed that I'm the head of the School of Podcasting, and the head of, and I'm like, and I'm always, because to me I saw that as self-promotion, and they're like, nope, you got to let people know, like, especially when I worked at Libsyn. If I said something like Spotify sucks, they were like,"Do you got to disclose you work for Libsyn? And I was like,"Okay, that's

Jim Collison: 29:52

tough. It's tough business. Yeah, anywhere two or more gathered there is conflict. Yeah,

David Jackson: 29:57

Stephanie says,"I see people that you have Reddit groups around their podcast more so than post. Now that is a great idea, because you know who loves Reddit, AI.

Jim Collison: 30:10

Yeah, if

David Jackson: 30:11

you want to get crawled by AI, start a Reddit, and the reason I think that's a smart idea is because the one and only Jordan Harbinger. I started a Reddit for his show, and I went. If Jordan's doing it, that's probably not a bad idea. So, yeah, if you're looking for a place now, Reddit does not have the best reputation for kindness and patience and things like that, but

Jim Collison: 30:41

people are there, yeah, but anywhere people are,

David Jackson: 30:46

yeah, so you know, be aware that there may be some moderation going on, it is what it is, so, but it's not something to try any kind of community, whether it's Facebook, Reddit, you know, heartbeat, whatever you're doing. We did Discord.

Jim Collison: 31:05

We have a Discord group for, for Home Gadget Geeks. It's on, we're on Discord, and it's great. I, it's heavily moderate, moderated. It, I don't, I don't have to now. I don't have to moderate it at all, because everybody that's there knows the rules, and they're like, okay, we don't have to, you know, and it's sometimes just be kind to each other, for you know, for God's sakes. You don't have to come flying off. We know, right? Written text comes off as negative by default, right? When you, when you're reading something, you're kind of like,

David Jackson: 31:34

oh, you kind

Jim Collison: 31:34

of read it negatively, not everybody, and not all the time, but it kind of happens that way. So, people, those that like people just I watched this happen all the time, is fly off the handle after a sentence.

David Jackson: 31:45

Well, and

Jim Collison: 31:46

like, hey, did you really mean that? Like, did you mean to sound that way? And if you, if then all of a sudden it escalates. I can't tell you how many conversations I've watched escalate in three lines. You're like friends, I wow, settle down. Somebody

David Jackson: 32:04

on Facebook, and her inbox was immediately ruined. She said, "Is there.. do you know anybody that could help me grow my show? And so I went over, and I said, "Well, I.. I could do that. I've been, you know, podcasting for a while, and we could do an audit, and blah blah blah. And I go, you know, have you gotten any feedback, and then, of course, I did my fun little line, is you know, Mom doesn't count, to which she then the next day replied, My mom's dead, and I was like, and so I went to her and said, Welcome to the club, I've been in the club since I was 24 I'm sorry, I didn't, for you know, I'm sorry for your loss, blah blah blah, and then the reason I say that is, you know, most people ask their friends and family, and I've had many a client that said that's weird, because my, you know, all my friends and family said it was great, and I'm like, well, okay, but you know, here's, here's why I don't think it's great, and here's, you know, you're taking 27 minutes to get to the point of, you know, so that's one of those things where I was surprised, it was like, oh yeah, you never know, and again, it was text,

Jim Collison: 33:14

no,

David Jackson: 33:15

you know, and so it's, it's tricky, and as many, you know, wink emojis as you can do, and smiley faces, you know, it's always tricky on how you got somebody.

Jim Collison: 33:26

I had somebody, I mean, write a line, it was an obvious shot across the bow, right? I mean, there was some discussion in then, but there was like the winky, you know, wink emoji, and a smiley face, and in you're like you're sending some mixed emotions there, friend, and so I removed the comment, and then told them why. I said, like, this isn't obvious. Well, no, no, I was just kidding. Didn't you see the winky, you know, the wink yet? And I'm like, no, no, that, no, no, you can't, you can't, like, you can't take a shot across the bow and then just say, I'm just kidding, that the it's already been fired, friend, you know, you

David Jackson: 34:11

did, you're sucking to the worst person on the planet, I wish you were dead, wink emoji, no, that doesn't,

Jim Collison: 34:17

just kidding, no, it doesn't

David Jackson: 34:19

work,

Jim Collison: 34:21

you can't, you can't. That's a little passive. Yeah, that is.

David Jackson: 34:24

Well, earlier Jim said, you know, what do you have? People there. This is also, as Ralph points out, the issue is so many people getting assaulted if you disagree with them. That's true. Welcome to America. Welcome to

Jim Collison: 34:34

Welcome to our show every week. I mean, it's not like we say things that everybody agrees with, you know. You gotta, you gotta kind of be willing to, I think most people are. I wouldn't, I wouldn't paint Ralph, I wouldn't paint everybody in that light, or even most people. I mean, there, there are, there are some, there's some reasonable folks out there. Yeah, I mean, you and I, for sure, we're reasonable, right? Sure,

David Jackson: 34:56

we're, we're amazing right here. Let's do right here. Well, I am weird. I, if somebody has a really different opinion, I want to find out how did you come to that opinion, not to go, yeah, you're an idiot, but just to go, where did that exactly come from? Yeah, Craig says posting on social for some people is like being inside a car surrounded by protective metal. And glass, yeah, I can say anything here. I'm like, well, I know people that have been, well, you know, fired for posting things on it's a bear trap, exactly. Ben Shapiro, my facts don't care about your feelings. I'm like, that is not the most compassionate thing I've ever heard, like I get it. So, yes, Rich says absolutely, this show is horrible. Yes, exactly. There, I agree with, yeah,

Jim Collison: 35:47

Rich Graham. I agree with you,

David Jackson: 35:49

yeah, you're still here. Well, oh, my favorite line ever was when Jillian Michaels had a show, and this is before she went political. She was still doing her fitness training stuff, and this guy was always just leaving her nasty grams and stuff, and the guy said, "You know, I listened to the show, and she goes, "She goes, you listen to every show? She goes, "Bitch, you're a fan complaining every day, and I'm like, I'm writing that down. If you listen every day, whether you like me or hate me, you're a fan, because it's short

Jim Collison: 36:29

for fanatic, by the way. That's what that fan means, right? Short for fanatic. Yeah, good or bad, good or bad.

David Jackson: 36:35

John Dramanko says most of us are Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. For those of you that aren't aware, when it comes to sarcasm, yeah, we're just not good at it. Speaking of John Germango, he had a question. In case you're just tuning in, John is saying,"Hey, you're using EV Mux. Well, we learned a very valuable lesson, and I will demonstrate this here as we go to mark slides, you'll see where, yeah, they can't

Jim Collison: 37:05

really hear you now, yeah. And so, John, if you're wondering

David Jackson: 37:07

what I was doing, I was still talking, so if you can't see me, you can't hear me. So, do the

Jim Collison: 37:13

wheel, if I'll

David Jackson: 37:16

have to, I'll have to add myself to the wheel or something. We'll be making up scenes as we go, so, but I can do this. This is great fun, although they can't hear us all right. We're moving on to the next topic, which doesn't mean that you can't comment on something, because we realize that many of you are on a.. I cannot get rid.. that's the thing that's going to drive me nuts, is I cannot get rid of the comments if I forget to click unshow. I'm gonna have to see if that's that's be that would be my first thing. The fact that I can't get rid of comments, although I can in this case.

Jim Collison: 37:53

To be fair, though, you've used this thing for like 30 seconds, so right? And I played

David Jackson: 37:59

with it last night, but because it wasn't live

Jim Collison: 38:03

right,

David Jackson: 38:03

I would just go, and I had one fake comment to go, "Oh, how do I put that on the screen? Click. Oh, how do I get it off? Click. And then I wasn't live stream. I like, I didn't actually do a live stream. I should have to say,"Hey, what's the deal? But Ralph had a fun question here, and that is, well, what do you think about the whole discussion about licensing bots to reduce the fake RSS downloads? It's an interesting discussion in my view. Also, wanted to take 30 seconds, and that's where there apparently is a limit character limit that, wow, interesting. So, what he's talking about is there are.. it's kind of nerdy, but you, if you're a programmer, when you make an app, you say this is Apple Podcasts, and nobody questions that. My favorite is, you would have these guys writing their own app, and the name of the app would be change this later, because they wouldn't go back and change it later. So, what's happening is people are faking being from Apple Podcast or from Overcast, or whatever, and they're bots, and so I just saw someone today on Reddit, they said I normally get between 10 and 30 downloads an episode, and they said the last two episodes I've gotten 100 and they're like, well, either A, somebody found you and downloaded all of your episodes, or B, that's a bot, and so I like the idea that you kind of have to like an app would go to a host and have to say, you know, they will go halt. Who goes there? And, like, I am overcast. Prove it. I've got my badge right here. I'm from Overcast, the app. All right, you may have my download, which I guess happens in milliseconds. So, I like the idea. What people don't like about the idea is, if I don't know, some app does something that you don't agree with, you can now block that app from downloading stuff. So, I like the idea. I don't quite get it's.. it is kind of.. it's a tool that could be used for censorship. So, for instance, Substack takes a lot of flack because the owner. Owner said, hey, somebody said you have Nazis on your platform on Substack, and he goes, Yeah, it's free speech. He goes, I don't agree with what they say, but I agree that they have the right to say that. I see Ralph is saying he was talking about AMP. I think it's stupid. I think it's really stupid, so we're switching gears, but that's the other one

Jim Collison: 40:45

that was fast, that was quick, you ADHD, that changed right out of it. Yeah,

David Jackson: 40:50

so yeah, Randy says Spotify has adapted, and I talked about this at the very top of the show. I think it's stupid, but people will be wetting their pants, they're like, hey, I used to get 100 plays an episode today. I log in, my show's brilliant. I got 200 and I'm like, so that I think is stupid. I, well, here, let's just.. well, here I'm going to try this. This is going to get ugly. So, here's the new.. and I realize, if you're listening to this, I'm going to describe what we're looking at. This is first of all, I'm not huge in Spotify for the School of Podcasting, but I can see that I now have 383 plays, which is sad, because it's down 21% and that's after I've doubled my doubled my plays, but I can see, according to them, new, how many new people are coming to Spotify, and or to my show in Spotify, which is weird, because it's like, wait, I had 39 okay, out of 8239 were new, and 43 were returning. And then I can come over here to analytics. I definitely have to show you one. I did look at this this morning, and if I go in, I'm missing the one thing they had, where it showed you how many times was your, your, your show shown, see that three times fast. Your show was shown in Spotify. How many people clicked on it? How many people played it? I loved that, and they don't kind of show this anymore. So now I'm looking at again plays. If I scroll down here now, I'm looking again at plays, but I could look at consumption time, which is the more important one, so I can see, you know, how far people are listening, or whatever, so they do have some Nito, and over here I see, I just did what I want to do, I said, if so, for all the people listening, and you just heard me say over here, my apologies on the screen, it says 26% above normal, so it's giving you a grade 8% above normal. This one down here, 22% below normal. So, apparently, and so I might look at this and go, oh, that was the lavalier shootout, which I was surprised, because my audience typically loves gear, and so you kind of can get a grade of this, and then streams, so they don't want to say downloads, everything is a stream, anyone that's what, so if it's, if you watch 30 seconds, it's a play, if you watch or listen to 60 seconds, it's a stream, but they're not going to use the word download, because again, they're trying to kill the download metric, and I agree, I go look, it's, it's, it's not the world's best metric. Under audience, you can. This is the only place you can get your gender, unless you ask people for them. So, it's showing me that 60% of my audience is male, and 32% is female, and 7% doesn't want to say it. Shows me my countries under discovery. This is showing you that, okay, 1800 people found me on the homepage, 3389 did a search, and I don't know what the library is, they don't explain it, I'm like somebody went to the library to use the free Wi-Fi, like, what they mean, but it then shows me the top,

Jim Collison: 44:01

maybe it's their content library.

David Jackson: 44:03

Oh, maybe, yeah, maybe that means that's the one thing I'm missing is like, how many followers do I have? And then this, I was like, this is not something you want to brag about, even though it's up 12% the average completion rate is 59% because in my land that's that's a very high F, right? If we go by teaching, you know, 50 to 60 is F, 60 to 70 is D, 70 to 80 is a C, etc. And then engagement, so the consumption rate, the average consumption time. Comments, you know, my top episode was listened to 18 minutes and 20 seconds. Now I need to look at this and go, well, how long was that episode? Like, what percentage of that? So you can get some, you know, your average weekly completion rate is 51% The episode completion rate is 52% That's not great, and that's over the last 90 days. If I will go, hey, oh, and there's no more all time that stinks, that's no good. Oh, 34% weekly retention rate. And let's go back to 90. Let's just choose the one that makes me look the best. There we go. So, there are different dates up here. There's the all time now. If I do that, does that affect the whole page? Yeah, fun. Feeling exciting, so more things to obsess over. I do want to show this, though. Is this the.. I want to show the video version. Nope, that's the audio version. Here's the video version. And if we go to analytics, so I'm looking at Ask the Podcast Coach. I upload videos every now and then, and I'm going to, because you know, Jim, video is the next big thing, and video and audio is, is like, you know, you got to be there, or you're an idiot, and all time, so I've been doing this for, you know, a month, I took many months off, yeah, you'll see where April, yeah, so I took a break from March of 2024 to April of 2026 but you can see all the downloads, look at those, and if you're like,"But, Dave, there's no data there, I would go, "Uh-huh, not a single play of video on Ask the Podcast Coach. So, as much as you're like, "Oh, you got to be on video, and you got to be in Spotify, you know. Now, all these four impressions, those are me, and so.. and I do not promote this at all, because everybody's like, well, no, you just got to put your video up, and you'll become a star. And Spotify is, they love video, and I'm like, do they like.. but maybe they just don't like video about podcasts about podcasting, so there are new stats in Spotify. I am really bummed. I loved the one where it was, how many times was your show viewed, how many people clicked on it, how many people clicked on play, because that kind of showed you, like, a where you know, where am I showing up at? And then the one about how many people clicked on it, that was huge for your thumbnail and your title. Now we're in the land of YouTube, where you can go in and see what's going on and start to view that, but that's that's the new exciting Spotify. But here's, here's my thing about this, right? So this, you know, this amp thing, they met in secret, and I'm like, and the fact that, wow, Amp announced this, and again, remember, Spotify was part of that group, but Amp announced this, and then suddenly, out of the blue, Spotify just, you know, accepts it. I go, no, no, no. Spotify probably created this. They were in the group, and they waited for this to be announced, so then they then turned it on, and I'm just like, yay, okay. I still think this is all I'm trying to figure out. What's the benefit like? And do I care that a play used to be 60 seconds and now it's 30? The only thing I can think of is a pre-roll ad that was 30 seconds long will now count as a play, but I, according to their own documentation, they count advertising plays differently, like there's a special metric for that, but if the ads at the beginning, then it's a play, and it, that's the whole part. I'm like, I don't get, but I just, I'm just, Spotify makes my brain hurt. I don't get, I love them as a music service. I absolutely adore them, but I'm just not a huge fan. I don't know, Jim. When you see these, would.. does your heart go pitter patter?

Jim Collison: 48:45

Nah, I don't care. I mean, I do, but you know the point, I think, in all of this is trying to get a solid metric around making money, right? That's always about it's always about making money, right? So they're just everybody's kind of trying to figure their way, Dan. It's a Dan Lefebvre said this in chat a little bit earlier. YouTube has such a stranglehold, and that's not really the right way, because it's they're not, they're not, they're not necessarily holding others back by doing this, but they, you know, with a closed ecosystem, they can do basically anything they want. Yep, and so you know, when you have, when you have an open, I've said this 1000 times, when you have an open architecture, it creates, it's great for everybody, but it doesn't allow for some, the consolidation of control, and so this will always be, as long as we have RSS, this will be a problem, and who's it a problem for? That's the real question, right? You know, with all this openness, you're just gonna.. we're just gonna struggle to get that.. what is the thing? If we're gonna count things, how are we gonna count them? And there's gonna be a disagree.. two or more gathered.. there's.. we're gonna always disagree on.. oh, I think it should be 45 seconds. Oh, I don't think I should. I think it should be one millisecond, you know. And so you're just gonna have, you're gonna have a differing of opinions.

David Jackson: 50:09

Well, and Ralph says, I feel the feel in quotation marks here. The reason they're moving to the 32nd play is to boost the audience numbers for the sake of appearing. Showing to advertisers and showing larger audience that could be very big part of it, which is dumb. Now we're back to Norm Pattis from Podcast One, who wanted to inflate the numbers just to have big numbers to show advertisers, and I'm like, Norm, like when I worked at Libson, you could talk to people that sold advertising, they're like, yeah, if you're advertising and your host is podcast one, we're not going to pay you as much, because we know you count things differently. So the fact that, yeah, it's like it's just, you know, there's..

Jim Collison: 50:56

if that's why, if there's.. if it's an ego play in some regards, like you just want big numbers, we're just going to count everything, okay? But if you count, the problem is if the counting isn't consistent, right? If you're consistently counting on a platform that everybody's the same way, eventually everything kind of adapts, you know? Like, oh yeah, that's YouTube, they count everything, so they're always.. it's always going to be big, right? From from that standpoint, and the advertisers start picking up. It's not like that. It's not like advertisers just want to throw money at these platforms, right? They're trying to be savvy about, though. They have, they don't always have unlimited budgets. Some might well, but you know that's the thing that gets me.

David Jackson: 51:38

They're like, we're leaving a billion dollars in advertising on the table, and I'm like, are we? Are we really like, okay? We look at Spotify now, are they going to get half a billion dollars because you changed that? Randy says this is like radio changing from five minutes to three minutes threshold to count as a listener. It got them 23% up life numbers, basically. They, they, it's you know, we all know that stats can make, you know, you can manipulate those to say anything. My favorite is when, if you ever hear somebody quoting percentages, why aren't you saying exactly how many people did this? They're like, well, 30% of the people we polled. Well, how many people did you pull? Three. Oh, so one person didn't like that. You're like, okay, hold on a second. You know, so that's always kind of, you know, when we get into stats and things that nature, it's like, really. So my whole thing is, we know what we're leaving all this money for the advertisers on the table, and I'm like, then you're not doing a good job of selling the power of podcasting in my world. I'm like, so John's coming up with his own system. He says, I'm starting up the John Dramango rules. You get a download if they download, and if someone listens for five minutes, you get to listen. There's a novel idea. Nobody would like that, but I know Adam Curry was saying he wanted to take kind of some of the, you know, the.. I hate the word "fringe" because it sounds negative, but it's not the top 10, but there are apps like Fountain and Podverse and Podcast Guru, and things like that, that if you put them all together would equal 10% ish, of the listening, and he said it'd be great if we could, you know, Power Rangers Unite, we'd have a central database that everybody would feed just the plays and the listens and the percentage, couple other stats, and we could get an idea of how far people listen and watch, and things like that, based on the 10% I love that idea, and he was saying, look, it's if you want to get this kind of information, just pay the app developers, just give them a small percentage to do this extra work to feed this database with all the data, and then you wouldn't have to guess anymore. If I'm sure there would have to be a way where you could opt out to, like, don't include my numbers in that, and that's somebody wrote an article about how nobody wants their numbers to be public. Then I'm like, I think, ask the podcast coaches on op three, I'd have to go look, but there are a lot of places that you can list them. I'm like, I have what I have based on what I'm at. So, yeah, Stephanie says I'm not mad at, you know, them streaming, but I fear it can hurt independent podcasters, but maybe it won't. A lot of this is going to be, you know, wait and see, like Dan says, software companies, especially the big ones, are usually smarter than making huge decisions for one-time bots or boosts. Yeah, yeah, so we'll see what happens. I don't know, I.. I'm just going to be interested to see what happens when. I don't know, six months from now, when we've, we've got all the HLS, and everybody's doing the HLS thing, and you know, so yeah. Jason says I interviewed a guy this week on the School of Podcasting. He says, I used to spend time monthly with a spreadsheet, going through all my shows and adding up all the stats. Pod analyst.com is a free tool that will, you can basically go in, because what, what they've done is you go into Apple Podcast, and you say, I want to add a team member to this podcast, and it goes, okay, who, who is it, and you go, oh, it's Jason. Here's his email, and he can only view my stats. That's it. And so there are these platforms now, like Pod Analyst, that you can go in and add, you know, like, oh man, I'm drawing a blank. Pod Analyst is one. There was another one that just came out. We bumper bumper came out and gave access to the bumper dashboard, which also you can get Spotify and Apple, and if you want to, YouTube stats all in one dashboard, that's like a thing now, and I guess they've, you know, somebody cracked the code and now everybody is adding this, and which is cool, it's also again, you're kind of a little overwhelmed by all the data, but if we could get everybody then to agree that a play is 30 seconds, it'd be cool, because then a play would be a play would be a play, where now it's like, you know, well, you have, like, how do you, how do you put that into a dashboard, like, well, YouTube says you have this many plays, Spotify says you have double that, yada yada yada, so you know, Stephanie, or here on, let me, let's, let's go dark for a second, Stephanie says, Should I buy Magi or perplexity. My opinion, I've never used perplexity for images. I think Magi, Magi is a suite, like I can go into Magi and go make an image, like I go in every Saturday and go make an image featuring Dave Jackson attached, so I attach a picture and Jim Collison attached, and have them doing such and such, and I'm using Nano Banana for that now. If I wanted to use Chat GPT 12 or whatever is out, or if I wanted to do use Grok, or I can use them all there, and you basically, I've never come close to using all my tokens, but all I'm using it for is images. On occasion, I will have it come up with episode titles, so I can go no, no, no, no, maybe that one. But I love Magi. I don't use it, I use maybe a 10th of its power. Jim, do you know if you, I like, I love perplexity for research, but I've never used it for like images and stuff. Do you know if it does anything like that?

Jim Collison: 58:08

I don't, not on that. So I was asking Stephanie, you know, like, what are you going to use it for? Yeah, you know, some of these lately I've been using them to ask the same questions, just like you know, if you're gonna, if you're gonna run them, give them, you know, there's free versions of all of them, for the most part. Although Grok has gotten a little grumpy with me, keeps trying to get me to upgrade, and I just want to use you for free right now, you know. I just want to date, I'm not interested in getting married, but, but I was asking, I asked both a ChatGPT and Claude the other day, break down all the AI services by their strengths, and then started getting, you know, they start, well, this is good for that, and this is good for that, and then took that over to Gemini, and was like, do you agree with this, right? And so it's just a good for me, it's just a good way to think through some of those, some of those decisions, I'm going to do this, and, like I said, many of them, you get an opportunity, you get an opportunity, they're all getting really close to each other. So, if you get a chance, go out and see what you get with images. What I'm finding, Dave, is the images start all night, I want to say looking the same, but that's not true, but each platform has kind of a tendency, unless you feed it different things, like if you just go, like, you know, give me a picture of a beach and a blue sky, the.. and I see, I see this more often in the tech space, where I'm trying to get tech images, the.. they look similar by platform, they kind of have a tendency to default to a certain kind of look and style, style, unless you give it some specific instructions. So, Stephanie, if you can, I would, I would try a few tests of some things on these platforms, if you can, and just see what you like coming out of those. It's really a preference for me, it's a preference decision.

David Jackson: 1:00:03

There you go. We've got some more fun-filled.. it's.. I just find number one behind the scenes again, because you know how I'm always like.. I think he says that because I'm trying to read this really small text in Evie Muck. If there's a little magnifying glass, and so, for instance, if I, if I click show now, this is on the screen, but there's a little magnifying glass, and now for me this comment is like, I don't know, 25% of my screen is huge, so I can read it, so I can say, hey, in this case, Ralph is saying, in my view, these types of things are just the widening the gaps between the DIY podcaster and the large networks, I, you know, what, there's a part of me that goes, I think that's going to be happening, but I also think the reason the large networks are the large networks is because they have shows that are really popular, and the reason they're really popular is because, you know, they're really, really, really good. They're not just good, they're really good, and so, or they're really, really niche. So, you know, John says, "Hey, the only time I see my stats is when I go to publish a new episode, and I really don't look at them. Maybe I should. That's kind of what I do. I'm in the habit of that. I do look at them occasionally, like usually once a month, they will go in and look at retention rates to see what's going on, because Craig says, look, if you focus on the quality, and you can always win from the Stoics, you can be invincible if you enter into no contest in which it is not your power to conquer. I have to read that again to really understand it. If you enter into no contest in which it is not your power to conquer. I could be invincible if I don't try to conquer somebody. Still not. This is why I don't read the Stoics. So crates really confuses me. So to use

Jim Collison: 1:01:57

with the dust and wind, dude, you see

David Jackson: 1:02:03

now I can't find Craig's thing to turn it off the screen. He's just going to be up there the whole time. There we go. Well, you know what, we're here's what's going to be fun. I'm going to try to thank my awesome supporters, but the bad news is we're not on the screen, so I'm going to put this on the screen and then see if I can manually add Dave and Jim, so there's our awesome supporters, and we still have the thing from Jim, and I will add me to the scene. There we go. So now at least you can hear me, and I will put me very, I'm very, very tiny, and we, and we will add Jim to the scene. There he is. We're very, very tight now. What's fun is, if I go to a different screen, well, guess what, we're not gonna.. we will thank our awesome supporters today. Um, because they're awesome, and it would be people like, can I somehow view these without viewing it could, if I was on eCamm. Our awesome supporters. Well, first of all, the show is brought to you by the School of Podcasting, where you get coaching, you get community, and one on one consulting with me. Just don't ask me how to teach you how to use EV Mux, because I apparently have a lot to learn on that. And we're also brought to you by Podpage, and if you want a great looking website, well, then just go over to try podpage.com and we're also brought to you by The Average guy.tv where you can check out Home Gadget Geeks and get more Jim Cullison, and with that, now I actually did have this set up earlier to where we could do the wheel of names, so I'm going to try. If I switch gears now, nope, that's really cool that it remembers the scene, but I have to now go in here and go remove from scene and go yes, and then say I want to add a new layer that is a screen share from Dave Jackson, and it's again taking me when I have to kill this scene. Stop the screen share, stop it. And now I can go in here and click on this share my screen, and I want to go to ask the podcast coach. There we go, the wheel of names. Who will it be? Will it be Jody? Will it be the ladies from the Flame Alive pod, or Ralph, or Chris from Cast ahead.net He spins the wheel, and the answer is the one and only. Boy, it took a while for that to come up. Chris from Cast ahead.net If you need a producer, an editor, a live streaming fiend, video input, he does it all. It's all over there at Cast ahead.net Chris, thanks so much. Chris Stone, thanks for being such an awesome supporter. We deeply appreciate that, and we know that Dave has lots of homework between now and next week, or maybe this was enough of an experience to go, yeah, I might jump on this in November. In the meantime, I'm kind of missing the familiarity of what I had with eCamm now.

Jim Collison: 1:05:15

Well, if you did this long enough, yeah, that's true, you would, you'd learn, and then the show. And morph to the changes to the strengths of the platform, you'd figure some stuff out. Oh, we got to do that. You'd set up scenes differently, like, you know, it's.. it would be tough. I mean, we'd do this for an hour. Yeah, it'd be tough to make a decision, you know. We should probably try it a couple more times, because each week you'll get a little bit better at it. If you decided to stay here, you'd get really good at it, and then you know it works fine from this side. The hardest part is just the confusion on your end of like, hey, where's this at? And how do we do that? I'm not, I can't really help that much. I mean, I could put, I think I can put stuff on the screen, right? Can I do that? Does that,

David Jackson: 1:05:58

you can, if you

Jim Collison: 1:06:01

work I don't think I can,

David Jackson: 1:06:04

there's no little button there for

Jim Collison: 1:06:07

no, so I can't help you. Hold on,

David Jackson: 1:06:09

let me go.

Jim Collison: 1:06:10

You're screwed. If

David Jackson: 1:06:10

I go here and say I want to add a screen share, I can say from see this is weird. You are listed as an editor, okay? You're, you're a speaker, so if I click on that, in theory,

Jim Collison: 1:06:24

okay,

David Jackson: 1:06:24

you could share a screen.

Jim Collison: 1:06:26

Yep, yeah, no, the screen share just came up for me. Yep,

David Jackson: 1:06:29

interesting. I'm

Jim Collison: 1:06:31

not gonna do it. Oh,

David Jackson: 1:06:32

well, it was.. I was sitting here in anticipation, like, what's he going to share? Please don't.. I was trying to

Jim Collison: 1:06:38

click on comments from the to see if I can bring comments in to help you with the comment side, but is there a comment sharing? Can a co-host,

David Jackson: 1:06:46

in theory, you're supposed to be able to?

Jim Collison: 1:06:49

Okay,

David Jackson: 1:06:49

so I'll be looking at that as well.

Jim Collison: 1:06:52

Yeah, because that was one of the things I was excited about.

David Jackson: 1:06:54

Yeah,

Jim Collison: 1:06:54

it'd get better, you know. My preference, I still.. my preference is Stream Yard. I was just in there this week doing stuff, and I was like, "Wow, they really have not screwed this up, you know? I was really anticipating them kind of hammering the platform, or chunking it out, or adding a bunch of useless stuff to it. For the most part, works pretty well. Now, again, it works well for me, because I'm super familiar with it, right? So, I think it's.. it is, I think it is a lot of what you're, what you're most comfortable with. You're also Dave, when you do this, you, you're very transparent about what's going on behind the scenes. You could be, you know, in a lot of this, you could have been not saying anything, and most people would have not known it was writing what it was doing, right? So, some of that's being transparent too, from from that standpoint.

David Jackson: 1:07:43

Uncle Marv says you're being very supportive until you said, well, you're screwed.

Jim Collison: 1:07:50

I just kidding. Yeah, I'm just kidding. JK, yeah, JK, Randy's

David Jackson: 1:07:54

like, hey, you've, you've got this set up, you know, wrong in EV muck somewhere. The audio is independent of the video source. Yeah, I, well, here's the thing that is somewhat again disappointed with. I went over to their YouTube channel, because you know it's software, you should have videos about it, and they do from like 2023 and I'm like,

Jim Collison: 1:08:18

yeah,

David Jackson: 1:08:18

all right, now those might still be, but on the other hand, you know, it wasn't. I don't know, it just wasn't quite as organized as, yeah,

Jim Collison: 1:08:31

yeah, it's okay. Yeah, we'll continue to, you know, it's what's worth, it's worth another try. The, it doesn't hammer your computer like, like eCamm does eCamm, just hammers your computer, like,

David Jackson: 1:08:45

yeah, you're depending on what you're doing, but, yeah,

Jim Collison: 1:08:47

yeah, just hammers it, and so this is more, you know, this has been a better for me, anyway, it's just been a better experience of being in it with you, because that your computer is not from my end on eCamm. Everything's jittery stuff, like, like I lose audio when you're spinning the wheel. Yeah, I lose audio. I just.. I don't.. I never hear that thing. That's the first time I've heard it click in the end. There's cheering on this thing, yeah. Again, it's, it's all comes down to implementation, how you have it set up, and what hardware you're on, and some of those kinds of things. But

David Jackson: 1:09:29

I've got, I've got a week to play with it. I decided this, I think, Thursday night, and went in and was like, oh yeah, I remember this, okay, blah blah blah, and you know, set up the scenes, and set up, you know, that we can do, you know, this fun little gizmo, you know, where I'm showing the $20 supporters at the bottom of the screen, you know, Craig has come back to help me out. The whole thing about it just means that whole saying from the Stoics, it means you can always win if you choose the right definition of wind everyone together, oh, so wise, oh yeah, excellent dust. Well, there is a saying, I forget what YouTube video I was watching, and they said, remember when people like, if you. Ran up. I remember Richard Pryor. He had a whole thing. He goes, if some guy comes up and he's gonna, you know, he goes run, like just turn around and run. And he goes, nobody retreats anymore. He goes, it's like they all wait for people to pop open their phones, and then it's on, and we're fighting in the street. He goes, you know, you might want to, whoever this YouTuber was, was like, remember when people used to retreat, you used to just like, okay, well, you'd be weird, I'm just gonna go over here and you can have my, you know, half a burger or whatever it is you're fighting me about, and I was like, that is true, nobody, you know, now it's just like pistols at dawn, that's it, how dare you say that, here we go. Ralph has.. ooh, I didn't switch to my new section. Section, are you still using the road call me feature? Yes, I may test that for a call-in show. If you go to, as it says at the top of the screen, ask the podcast coach.com/question that is still an option. However, that would mean Dave would have to turn it on, which he did not. So, there you go. Just batting 1000 today for all that's

Jim Collison: 1:11:29

okay. That's right. We're trying it out.

David Jackson: 1:11:31

Well, I do have it. If you wanted to come in here, there's a button. It's no longer. That is one thing again, as you're comparing this to other platforms in eCamm. Granted, it was another thing that was running in the background, but you could run Zoom, and people would join Zoom, because you know everybody knows how to join Zoom. And I'm here to tell you, I met someone this week that did not, so not everybody, which is fine. We all start from, you know, where we start from, but that was on one hand an easy thing, because people could join Zoom, and you could bring them from Zoom into eCamm, but on the other hand, now that means Zoom is running in the background, which I don't know how much of a memory hog it is, but this I have a link, and what's cool is you set up a studio, so this is Ask the Podcast Coach with all the fun-filled bells and whistles and the branding and all that stuff is here. And then next week I can just go in here and schedule a new recording, and I don't have to add all the stuff here, it's there. So if I wanted to, I could have a studio for Ask the Podcast Coach, I could have a studio for School of Podcasting, I could have a studio for Podpage, and they would all have their own branding and their own stuff and things like that. So, and again, you can do that in eCamm, just different scenes and stuff, so it's. it's different. I've now popped out the comments, so they're now ginormous on my second screen. So, there's another thing that you can do if you're like me. So, Ralph is saying, "Do you have any recommendations of what I could use if I wanted to take genuine calls via telephone? No, not really, because here's why I don't want you to do what I did. Now, your audience may be different, but you can, I mean, Jim and I have gone through, I mean, the in the early days I had a board that was, I think, 18 channels, because it allowed me to do two mix minuses. So, if you wanted to, the easy way to do it today, except you have no call screener. Is you could get a Google Voice number, tie it to your phone, and tie your phone to either the Rodecaster or the Pod Track. Before next, I'm just here to tell you that I forget the name. There's a thing you can get that's a call screener, so people call that number, it's an 800 number, it costs you like two cents a minute or something like that, and then there are.. it's still out in the archives, you'll hear me say like ending in 6794 you're on with Dave and Jim, what's your question? And they go because they were on the phone and it was another box to watch, but we maybe had, and we even had a jingle, like, you know, when people, people, people, 357765549 just dive on and call in the show right now, and nobody, every, I have learned it's a very hard lesson for me to learn, that my audience likes to use a chat room. I mean, we have this every week. Ask the podcast coach.com/question and you have all very loudly said, Dave, we don't want to jump in. It's 1030 in the morning on a Saturday. We don't want to call in. I'd rather just type it, so you can try that, but that's that's what I think would be the the easiest thing to do would be just tie your phone into that, get a Google Voice number, you've already got it, Clubhouse, if you wanted to. Now we did get people that would ask questions on Clubhouse, but we also got some questions that weren't really related to what we were. Talking about, because they would just pop in, and you know, go that route. So, yeah, he says, "I looked at that one, Dave. I'm going to be taking financial questions and want to reduce the friction. Yeah, so that's where I don't know, Jim, do you think it would be a hindrance for someone, because if they, if they type, like right now, like when somebody leaves a comment, right, I can see that Jason said just Blog Talk Radio, and, man, that's that's how this show started. I was testing out Blog Talk Radio, but I mean, we can see that's at Jason Bryant one two, and I could go hunt him down on YouTube, is that going to be a hindrance for people asking financial questions?

Jim Collison: 1:16:06

Well, there's always going to be a hindrance to some. There's always going to be a person where anything you do is going to be hard for them. It just, you know, you're going to run into that regardless. It's not a bad idea to try to lower the friction, if you can do it. You just got to find the right technology, and then the less complicated it is on their end, oftentimes mean, and the more complicated it is for you on your end. So just know, you know, you're going to need to do, you're basically redoing all the heavy lifting for them, instead of them coming in, and you know, Zoom's not hard to get through, or some of these services are not hard to get in, but you know, if you try it, and if you find it, you know it removes friction and allows them to get questions in. I say, why not? Give it, give it a go. If that helps your audience connect with you, it's awesome.

David Jackson: 1:16:59

Yeah, I really, I think you hit the nail on the head. What do you use chat? Do you use video for them to jump in? Do you use that? I wouldn't do video. Well, here's

Jim Collison: 1:17:10

the, here's the deal, Dave, though. This on this right, if you have 1000 different ways for them to connect, right, because you're trying to get everybody now, you've created, you know, options equal confusion, then they're like, well, which one of these do I use? You know, we've again, we've done that, where it's like, okay, you can call or you can text, or you can, you know, then people are like, oh, I just want one way, right? What they really want is their one way, what they really want is no, they don't want any hassles, they want to get right in, they, you know, that's what they really want. Unfortunately, to give them too many options, there's confusion on their side, or they sometimes they just get overwhelmed by all the options.

David Jackson: 1:17:50

Yeah,

Jim Collison: 1:17:51

and they're like,"Oh, I'm not doing any of this. I get it.

David Jackson: 1:17:54

The phone is the easiest, you know? If you can bring it in, the only problem is, and this would probably not be a problem is if you're on the phone with somebody answering their question on your live phone call, and somebody's like,"Oh, well, I'm going to call in now, you don't have multiple lines, and you've got call waiting or something like that. So that would be something you'd have to.. there's

Jim Collison: 1:18:14

no easy.. there's no easy button. The more options you give them, the more confusion that will be. If you give them a single option, then you'll have a bunch of people saying, I don't want to do it that way,

David Jackson: 1:18:25

right?

Jim Collison: 1:18:26

If you only did call in, right, you're gonna have people like, why can't I connect on Zoom, or why don't you make this easier for me where I live, right, or whatever. You're always, you know, the, the, the exceptions will always be among us, you know, and there's no matter how much you try to weed out all the exceptions, there's always somebody who's like, no, no, I want to, you know, can you change your time, I'm not available at that time,

David Jackson: 1:18:52

yeah.

Jim Collison: 1:18:53

So, anyways, it's tough, but do you want to do it? If you want to do a call-in, do call-ins.

David Jackson: 1:18:59

Yeah, he says Clubhouse is hard because you have to sign in. Yep, you have to download an app. Yeah, road call me takes them to a web browser, and people can make a call. That one is, and it sounds so much better in theory, because if they're calling you on a phone, it's gonna like when they, when you dial, you just cut out the base and the treble of every person coming through. Now that's somewhat accepted, because we've heard Dave Ramsey on the radio, right, and they're like, all right, next up we got Carl from Poughkeepsie, and they're like, hey, you know, thanks Dave, big fan, first time caller, longtime listener, whatever, and it doesn't sound bad, it just sounds different because he's on the phone, so it's not the end of the world if they call in, it's just when they're on the, you know, hey, thanks, Dave, I've come on the road, that's when it gets, and that's when you, you'll hear people go, man, thanks so much for the call, but like, if you can call us back when you're not in the middle of a tornado, that would be great, or

Jim Collison: 1:19:56

swimming at the bottom of your pool,

David Jackson: 1:19:58

yeah,

Jim Collison: 1:19:59

yeah,

David Jackson: 1:19:59

yeah, Randy says, if they have a road caster, they can create a smart pad. Yeah, they're not going to have, because if they, if they can afford a road caster, they don't have money problems. It's like the old.. I remember Sam Kennison was talking about rehab, and he was going to go to the Betty Ford Clinic. He goes,'It's $10,000. He goes, 'If I had 10,000...' $1,000 I wouldn't have a problem yet. It's like I'd have money for Coke, and I'm like, okay, yeah. And then John says to take calls, if you're going to do it, you really need a screener and a way to put them on hold where they can hear the show. I use Discord for Collins, yeah, that's another option, because you are going to get that Baba Booey call every now and then, or the person that shows up on video and flashes their wang, or whatever it is. There's always going to be a knucklehead in the crowd, and that's where the hardest part of that whole situation is remaining calm, because I know we've had a couple, and the one time it really flustered me to where my brain is going click the close button, click the close button, and my body was just going, yeah, what would you say, and then it's a matter of like once you get them off your screen or off your phone line to go, okay, where were we? I think we were talking Socrates, now you know, and you just, it's hard to bounce back when you have a knucklehead call in, but that's lives a different beast. It really is. I, I've had some people recently say, "Oh, I want to do live streaming, and I'm like, "It's different. You gotta, you gotta really be ready with your content, you know? And if you're smart, you would have practiced using the software you're using to live,

Jim Collison: 1:21:41

even if you to practice, you know, there's some things you learn live, the, you know, even even chat is dangerous. We, you know, you can, we have live chat here via YouTube, and you can have folks, it's open to anybody, they can come in. We haven't had one in a while, you know, knock on wood, or whatever your superstition is, and you can get some, you know, some flamers that come in via chat too, so that's not always safe. This is my favorite mode by far, which is a controlled, you know, controlled guests, where you're not, I you know, bringing people in. I even though we open this up, we get very, very few, right? But then to have a chat room like this is my favorite from a control standpoint. This is all the benefits of live, and you still have a lot of control over the content, and I like control. There you go. So it, this what we're doing here. For me, for me, I'm not, you know, a whole show. Listen, I know that was a radio thing for a lot of years, but

David Jackson: 1:22:43

right, whole show of folks calling in for me, for me that's too stressful. I don't, I don't like that. We have a channel radio station at Akron, it's the talk of Akron, and it's been talk radio since day one and it is one of those things where number one, it's just the right calling the left stupid, it's just the left calling the right stupid, and it's people that have maybe half of an opinion, and then you, the fun part for me, because I'm kind of listening outside of it is listening to the host politely kick them off the air because they're like all right and they're like well that's why you know like in in Cleveland every year we start off the football season with a quarterback controversy and I could care less and it's just after a while it's like well we need to play the other guy we need to give him a chance, and you're like, okay. And then he goes on, and you just hear the ghost, the host, just like, okay, next caller, we've got, you know, and then his whole thing is, please come back to your radio, please call her, you're on. What's your question? You're on with Dave and Jim. Okay, we're gonna give you five seconds, one more time. You're on with David. That's stellar audio right there, so you might have to do that, but it is nice that we have

Unknown: 1:24:08

the world's greatest chat.

David Jackson: 1:24:10

Yes, so they disagree that you guys do your own show sometimes. You're in there arguing with each other, it's great fun. Yeah, Ralph says I have my team looking at options of a call screen, as well. Yep, I'm also looking for a co-host. If anyone's interested in joining him daily, there's the word that makes me.. it always gives me a lump in my throat, man. I'm like, I don't want to do daily. Daily, holy cow, just to find wow content, you know? Is that five days a week, seven days, that's that's daily, is man. Yeah, John says, I love live streaming warts and all. Yeah, you have to be okay with things not working, or you know, knuckleheads coming into your chat room, or whatever it is, you're gonna get that, and you just have to be okay with, you know, doing whatever it is, yeah, and Ralph says Dave Ramsey does tell people that they are stupid, and I feel there's a better way to actually help people. Well, that's not as entertaining, though, but that's that's what got him his original attention was like, wait, because you're expecting him to go, well, you know, if you're doing these, he's like, ah, the lottery is just the. Stupid tax, quit playing, you know. So that's that's kind of his shtick, is that he's, and if you think about it, Dave Ramsey, who was the dude on American Idol, Simon,

Jim Collison: 1:25:32

oh, Simon Cowler, yeah, Simon

David Jackson: 1:25:34

Cal was another guy, yeah, who, Howard Stern, famous for being blunt and honest, you know, that's that's a thing that seems to apparently work, but until you try to be Howard Stern, and then you find out there's more to him than just part jokes and that all nine yards. So, yeah, Randy said, I just finished 30 consecutive weekdays for a show, not sticking with it, not gaining traction, and is taking a lot of time, yeah, it's, and it's hard, because remember, there's one thing to be good, it's another thing to be remarkable, and you know, Randy always points out remarkable goes both ways, you can be remarked about because you were awful, but I'm talking about remarkable when it's good, so keep that in mind, but Jim, we made it through nothing, nothing's nothing's on fire, that's good,

Jim Collison: 1:26:27

that we know of. Yeah,

David Jackson: 1:26:29

exactly. So it'll be fun. Tune in next week and see what Dave has learned. Jim, what's coming up on Home Gadget Geeks?

Jim Collison: 1:26:37

Yeah, I've been doing so much open claw and Hermes work this week, I decided to take the week off. I've been writing about it, so remember that thing where you'd post a blog. Yeah, so two, I posted two, and they're not how-tos, and they're not even opinion or story, they're kind of frameworks, like how I thought through this process, you know? I know there's been a lot of instruction manuals and those kinds of things, that's not this. This is what was I thinking when I set it up. So, if you're interested in a more thoughtful, that's you can be the judge of that. Two two brand new posts out this week on that. Check it out right now. The Average guy.tv

David Jackson: 1:27:17

nice on the School of Podcasting. As I mentioned, I interviewed Rox Codes, who's the co-founder of Flight Cast, and that's that video-first media hosting company that was started by Rox and Steven Bartlett, who's the guy from Diary of the CEO, and it was an interesting experiment, because the first part of that was him demonstrating the video, so obviously I'm not gonna put that into audio, but he said some really things that I was like, wait, what? And then he pointed me at some resources on, like, well, how do I learn how to do a thumbnail? And I watched that video, and that's when I went, oh, this is why I'm not huge on YouTube, because there are people spending days, days, and she even mentions, and if you need to a week on your thumbnail, and I went, yeah, I'm not doing that. So that'll be on the School of Podcasting. And thanks for everybody showing up, and we'll see you next week,

Unknown: 1:28:21

you.