From Troubleshooting ThinkBot to Choosing the Perfect Android Podcast App

0:00 Ask the Podcast Coach for August 30th 2025. Let's get ready to podcast. There it is. It's that music. That means it's Saturday. It's time for Ask the Podcast Coach, where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from theschoolofpodcastingcom, and joining me right over there is the one and only jim cullison from the average guy dot tv. Jim, how's it going, buddy? greetings, dave. Happy saturday morning to you. Happy like I think it's international pancake day or something like that wow everybody should be having pancakes today but anyway, we're here. We're here today, I already see that I'm rocking and rolling in the chat room.

0:41 Good morning and happy saturday morning to. It is. And August is toast. It's just toast. It's like I looked at it and I was like, wait, like I know, it's Labor Day weekend here in the States and it's just weird to think that, like you know, new Year's Eve was like last week and now summer is over. It's feeling Christmas is already here, like if you haven't done your christmas shopping there's no time left. That's about I didn't see halloween stuff out. I'm like, guys, we have august, september and october and I'm like got two months till halloween and this stuff is already out what's the store that pops up in in broken down malls and shopping centers that have empty? oh something yeah, what's the name of that?

1:24 you can always tell it's fall when that thing pops up and uh you're like, oh wow, the cvs went out of business and then like, oh wait, there's a store in there. It's, you know, halloween central. Yeah, something like that obviously I care a lot about it, but you're like, oh, falls on its way. It's football started that too this week. And of course, what is it? The pumpkin latte Pumpkin. spice latte Latte yes. Yeah, so that's always you know. But you know what's better than a pumpkin spice latte? That's it, that's right. Fresh cup of coffee. There you go, and that is brought to you by, and I'm going to bring up the slides, and they're not ready. Dave was doing other things this morning and we're still on the last slide.

2:07 So I'm going to go backwards now before I hit the music, cause I want to wait where okay, yeah, there we go, that um coffee pours brought to you by our good friend Mark over at podcast brandingco, cause you know they're going to see you before they hear you and I see a lot, a lot of bad artwork that just we don't need your face. In many cases we don't need a microphone. You know, I don't know who told you that green text on a brown background or blue background is that's another one, blue and green. No, you need somebody who's been a graphic artist for a while, that knows what works. He makes really pretty stuff, whether it's your artwork, whether it's your full website, whether it's a PDF or a PowerPoint.

2:53 He's been podcasting for quite some time, which is also an added bonus that you don't have to explain to him what a podcast is. You basically tell him what your show is about and he'll meet with you one-on-one. You're not going to get that from a guy on Fiverr and he's going to make you look amazing. So when you're ready to look good, go over to podcastbrandingco and tell him Dave and Jim sent you. Big thanks to our good friend, dan Lefebvre over there, based on a true story based on truestorypodcastcom. Couple weeks ago dan was in chat and he said no podcast is released on my site until it's ready, until it's time, and so last week we talked about amelia, this week we'll talk about amelia.

3:39 It's still out there, still available for you. I mentioned last week. I love his cover art. He always tries to. He takes, you know, cover art for the movie and then makes his own version of it, which is super cool. Sometimes it's strikingly close, other times it's a take on it. If you're kind of interested, if you're thinking about cover art or art in general for your podcast, it might be worth popping out there and taking a look at what he does. And you can check it out today, based on a true story based on truestorypodcastcom. And, of course, as always, dan, thanks for your sponsorship and for just coming out and being a part of the chat room each and every week. Yeah, I was at the movies last night, another horrendous experience filled with gallons of ads.

4:21 But there was one new movie called Eden by Ron Howard and it actually looked pretty good and of course it said based on a true story, and I was like, oh, as soon as I hear that phrase, now, dan, dan, just comes into my brain and yeah, the thing we were looking for is Spirit Halloween. Yeah, that is the name of the store that pops up. Spirit Halloween. It just seems to like. It seems to go in overnight Like yeah, it was a Cracker Barrel Speaking. That's a whole other topic. It was a Cracker Barrel yesterday, today. Spirit Halloween. You know. You're like, how did that? How does that happen so fast? They just they kind of just grow in that way.

5:02 So anyways, yeah, do we want to talk about Cracker Barrel? No, no. That's the only lesson no, yeah, cause that's that's, that's just a big cow. Yeah, you know it's got all kinds of implications, that's true. Like we can go. So actually, you know what I have. Instead, we have voicemail. That's right. We actually got an actual question and this is from Jill from flamealivepodcom. She is an awesome supporter and she has this question. Hey Dave and Jim. It is Jill from Keep the Flame Alive. I was doing the one thing we're not supposed to do, which is look at podcast stats, and we've got Libsyn.

5:45 I noticed something really weird this month. We've had a nice bump in terms of downloads, but in terms of user agents, thinkbot topped Apple Podcasts this month and ThinkBot accounted for about 25% of our show's downloads this month. If you compare it to last month, thinkbot was between one and 2%. So I had never heard of ThinkBot, tried to do a little research, didn't find a whole lot, but it seems like it's some kind of web crawler bot. What do you all know about it? And if it's a bot like, how do we think about downloads from it in terms of actual listener numbers? Thanks so much for all you guys do.

6:27 I really love this show? Thank you, jill. Yeah, this is one. First, I would reach out to Libsyn and go hey, we got a bot and, for whatever reason, iab is not blocking it yet or whatever. And I tried to do some research. I went to a bunch of very nerdy sites and no one could either say yay or nay on, is this absolutely bad? Now, if it's above Apple, that to me is a humongous red flag that this is probably not real. Everything I read about it was it is some sort of web crawler, but like, okay, you know, google's a web crawler, so it's something, whatever it was, went a little haywire, cause I usually, if it's a bad crawler, you can find info on the internet that says, yeah, this is, this is not great, it's fake, it's whatever it is, and so I couldn't find anything like that.

7:22 But everybody, even I, went to Perplexity and Perplexity was like, well, it's kind of a thing, it's a web crawler, but it's definitely a bot. Now, the thing that sucks about that is now, if you're dealing in a situation, maybe with sponsors and they want an accurate number of your stats, you have to go into Libsyn, and I think this is only available on the $20 plan. You have to download your stats and do it by user agent and then remove that one because those aren't real, which sucks. But this happens from time to time where something it is the whack-a-mole and it is the mole that got through the whack, and so I would let the guys at Libsyn know and they can go in and either tweak their system or alert the IAB or whatever needs to be done.

8:19 But yeah, and you're not the only one, when I was researching, there were a lot of people like, hey, what is this ThinkBot? Because it just sounds like some sort of new AI tool, right, which is probably what it is, who knows. It probably is, but it was very weird and it was like hmm, so I wish it could be more help, but there's just, whatever it is, it's new and there's not enough info on it, and that's kind of the problem. The other thing we got another question in from our good friend, kim Kradge, and I think my answer works. But, jim, are you an iPhone or an Android person? I am an iPhone person. Yeah, see, I'm no help either. I'm an iPhone, Because she's like what is a great podcast app for Android?

9:03 And I think she said she tried Spotify and things. That's what I said. Pocket Cast. I said because I love me some Pocket Cast. That's the one that I recommended. If anybody else is on an Android and knows one that works, you know there are all the. There's the podcasting 2.0 stuff. So Podcast Guru, I know, works on everything, but Pocket Cast is my favorite app period at this point, no matter what you're on. And the biggest thing I love about it is DR says Unite Droid Droidnoids. Yes, the thing I love about Pocket Cast it's a little pricey compared to other ones. It's like I want to say $30 or $40 a year. But I love the fact that I can be listening on my computer and then pick up my phone, go to the kitchen and hit play and it picks up right where I left off.

9:52 I don't know how it does it that quickly. And then if I go back to my computer and forget that I have the app running and I go to the web-based version and I hit play, it picks up right where I left off. It's somehow always synchronizing, which would be a lot for any kind of server, but if I remember right, I think they're owned by WordPress now, so they've got some teeth behind it. Randy Black says Podhome just put out a new, really solid app. I've heard a lot about it and they have a page where they're showing Podping, which is that thing that basically is always checking or is alerting people that there's a new episode. And yeah, yeah, stephanie says pod news gave out premium trials last year and she's really been enjoying pocket cast.

10:35 Jody Crangle says you can create folders and I have it for free and I use it on my desktop too. Yeah, it's pocket cast. It's in the top five. It's usually us, it's usually Apple, then Spotify, then Overcast and then Pocket Cast and then maybe Podbean, which is always weird. But Podbean Overcast is iOS only, though, right. That is true. So it's. Cast-o-matic is another fun one. It's kind of the 2.0 kind of app, but it's only iOS. So that's the problem is you need one. So for me it's Pocket Casts. And even if I had like I have an Android tablet, in theory I could install Pocket Casts on that on my Android.

11:19 Hit play, listen to three minutes, hit stop, pull up my iPhone and pick up right where I left off. Yeah, stephanie says I might pay for it, though it's really nice. My favorite feature, because I'm always wanting to put bookmarks in like Ooh, I need to come back or I need to talk about this on the show or whatever. When I do a the podcast hot seat, I listen in. I find the episode you want me to listen to and then I can go in and put bookmarks where I want to give you a note about oh, this was really good. Oh, this was really good. Okay, I got confused here. I use that. Danny from Captivate checked out. Podhome Developer clearly doesn't know. Canada is a big podcast listening and producing country.

11:59 Not in its country drop-downs. Oh, that's yeah. Hello, well, it's new, you know everything. Like I went and played with the oh, I forget the name of it now. But blueberry came out with a guest hosting thing where you know it's basically a dating app for podcasters where you, you find guests. And when they released it at podcast movement it wasn't bad. It was like every other you know guest matching service. But there were parts of it that I was like yeah, and I was like that is the first week of being live, so you know, you gotta sometimes give them a little bit of a break I miss the old days.

12:40 Uh, spreaker, had you could, you could buy your own app from them, like they built this. They had like a templated app right and you could. You could buy one for for ios and for android and then put it. They'd put it in the store. You had to create a developer account, some other things to make it work. I think it was 100 bucks a year per app or something like that, and I did that for a couple years. You know I got I don't know 25, 30, 40, 50 people to listen to it that years. You know I got I don't know 25, 30, 40, 50 people to listen to it that way through, you know, through the app. But it was an option for folks who didn't. You know, if you have a podcast that is fairly niche-y or it's in an audience that may not be podcast app savvy like we're talking about right now. So this is what kind of reminded me of that. You know, if my mom wanted to listen to the podcast, you know you're like, well, you go buy pocket casts.

13:32 No, my mom's not going to pay for pocket casts, right? Or you know, even even on iOS it's a little bit easier. On Android it's kind of a nightmare to find the right you know, to find the right podcast app. So it was it. For me it was. Was it worth it, I don't know, but it for me it was. Was it worth it, I don't know, but for me it was interesting to have my own app. And that may be something depending on how big your podcast is, how much money you want to spend, but that may be something where you consider having someone write an app for you and the podcast gets embedded and then you could also deliver other things to them that way. So again, depends on your audience, depends what you're trying to do, it depends on the community you're trying to make. Certainly, we live in an age where making an app is not that hard anymore and you can probably pay somebody to do it pretty quick.

14:18 So it'd be a consideration, I think, maybe. Yeah, we don't talk about that very much of having your own app for your podcast where people could go in and listen to it. We spent a bunch of time at Gallup talking about this. We haven't done it yet, but it might. For you, it might be worth it. So take a look at it, think that through, instead of you know again just giving you would. You could just deliver the podcast through it, but I think you'd want to deliver other things as well to keep the audience engaged in what they're listening to. So just another option. Yeah, rich Graham says can Pocket Cast do playlists? What they do is you make folders and then what's cool is you can say this podcast is in my marketing folder and then I can go into the marketing folder and easily see what shows have new episodes.

15:07 I don't know, that's because I liked Castmatic and the other one that's always number three that I can't remember Overcast. I like their playlist ability. But folders kind of work like that, the thing I like, because I wasn't. There seems to be two schools of thought. Either you have playlists or you have a queue, and so with Pocket Cash you kind of have folders and I believe if I'm in the marketing folder and I click on a marketing episode, I think the next thing that come up will be another. You know something from that folder, so that acts like a playlist. I need to double check on that, but I have. You can go into a folder and say, hey, when this one comes out, download it. And then there's a next level that says add it to the queue, basically add it to up next.

15:50 And so if you're kind of my top string like I must listen to this episode, it goes into the up next queue and then, if that ever runs dry, and it does occasionally, but not very often. I will go into, like, what am I in the mood for? Oh, let's go listen to politics. I'll go listen to Jen Briney Actually, jen Briney's in the up next one, but you get the idea. So it's a little bit of both. But I just you know, for me I'm really picky about apps and I liked Overcast for the longest time. I went back after they rebranded well, not rebranded, but redid their interface and I was kind of like and the fact that Marco is kind of a weird dude, he won't, he had the link for the funding tag, so there's a little dollar sign, you could have people go to your PayPal, and then he took it out because he was afraid of Apple.

16:37 And then the whole Apple thing went through, where now you know, different courts have kind of stopped them from taking, being so aggressive on things, and I'm like, good, so Marco's probably going to put the funding tag back and he hasn't, and he's just he's, it's his app, he can do what he wants. But it was just a guy who was like you know what. And then I went to Castomatic, which is so close to Overcast, that I thought Marco had a lawsuit ready and that one was fine, except occasionally it would just pause. You'd be in the shower and you're like listening to you know Pod News Week of Review, and all of a sudden it just stopped and you'd be like and finally I learned I could say hey, woman on the iPhone, resume Pocket Cast, and that would do it.

17:28 But it was just weird. It would just stop for no reason. And this is after I like all my episodes are downloaded. I'm like I don't want to have to stream anything. Put it on my phone. I got plenty of room. Daniel says Marco never actually supported the real funding tag. He had a custom thing that would figure it out before the funding tag even existed. Yeah, that's why I always thought it was weird that he had this thing. He loved the idea and I'm like well, now that there's something built into the namespace, you know. Yeah, dan says you can create a filter in PocketCast that function basically like a playlist. There you go. So it is the best of both worlds. So hope that helps, kim.

18:10 I wanted to share something I got to hang out with awesome supporter Shane Whaley. I was at the Content Creator Expo in Cleveland this week, which was interesting because I just got home from Podcast Movement, spent a couple nights in my bed and then last year I did the thing where I would drive home at the end of the night and then wake up really early to drive back and then you'd stay for the party and then I was like that killed me. So I stayed in Cleveland but Shane was telling me about readwiseio and what this is. If you're a big Kindle reader, which I am, it will take your highlights and email them to you. In fact I have one on my screen here and so it's. And this is free, they have a free, they have a paid version, but like from Pat Flynn's book Superfans with your audience and make them feel special.

18:59 So these are just things I've highlighted. Alone in the desert then with a quarrelsome complaining wife that's from the one in your Bible, the Christian atheist. So stop worrying and taking advantage of what he's offering. Do what you can. It's a bunch of Jesus stuff and that'll turn people off like nobody's business. But it's basically saying but here something from our buddy David Hooper from the Big Podcast book. If you're concerned about keeping up a release schedule, but not sure there are enough quality guests to interview on your podcast, either change your release schedule to something you can deliver on or learn how to do solo or co-hosted episodes that don't require guests. And so it's kind of a I don't know what's.

19:40 At the bottom. You have 27 days left of your ReadWise trial, so I'm not sure what happens when the free version is over. But Shane was just saying it's so cool because you're like oh, I totally forgot about that book, or it keeps it, basically reinforces what you've learned, because you kind of forget about it. And there was some guy at the very end that is a major SEO player. He had some interesting, he had an interesting take. He said and this is kind of I saw this work in real life, which is the more people that know you the better. And he said because Google already has lost a lot of its integrity right, because there's so many ads on the top, I'm just looking for some Because Google became popular, because Netscape and Hotbot and all these other ones Google just gave you.

20:37 I didn't have to search this month. They gave me great answers, and that is not the case anymore with Google. So less people are using it. They give me great answers, and that is not the case anymore with Google, so less people are using it. And he said AI, he goes. What's interesting about it is it gives you decent answers, it's giving you links. He goes. But the fun thing is like he goes some of this stuff. They don't know how it came up with the answer. He goes with Google. If people start gaming the system, they can change the algorithm and it makes everybody mad. But it does again with the goal of having the good stuff come to the top. He goes. You can't tweak AI. He goes because they don't know how it's coming up with the answer and he goes.

21:18 So eventually people will get tired of and this one I'm not sure of. But he was basically saying AI doesn't give good enough answers and I'm like I don't know about that. He goes and we're going to go back to what we used to do, which is just ask your friend. And I was like maybe that's why when I go to Reddit, that everybody's asking the same five questions because they don't trust it. But I was like I'm not sure I'm buying that, but it was maybe some truth in all of that, right? I mean, there may be little bits of truth, I think. Sometimes, when we talk about those topics, we're like it's always going to be this way or it's going, you know, and it's never 100 percent anything, right, it's always kind of you've got folks.

21:59 I love the. We ask the same five questions because we want to get some validation from humans. But you know, like we talk about host providers, right? That question used to be kind of relevant who's the best host provider? Well, they're all pretty similar now, like, they have variations and you should check them out to make sure you're getting the one that's best for you, right? But so we ask each other because if you ask the ai's, you get a bunch of garbage, that's. I just went to one of these today, as we were talking about podcast players, I was like I wonder what you know, I wonder what the, what the internet is saying about podcast players today. So, of course, you do a search on it and you get the top 25 podcast players for 2025, right, you know it's an ad machine right, you get there and then you look at the, you look at the, the, the, the print, and you're like, oh, this is obviously written by the person who's number one, or you know right, or whatever.

22:57 So then you know, you go to the, you can ask the AIs that I think. Think today, right now, is maybe the best time to ever get the best answer from AI that it's ever going to be, because you may be saying it's not honest now, and there's probably some truth to that too, but it's only going to get worse. It never gets better, it's only going to get worse. From those, dave, we're always going to need a combination of all of them.

23:37 Listen, certainly there's times when Google search is helpful. Still, there's times when the AI is super helpful, and then there's times when people are actually helpful. Yeah, still there's times when the ai is super helpful and then there's times when people are actually helpful, yeah. So I don't think it's not like your friend's gonna have any bias and like, well, that's it. We'd ask you, and you, at the time you worked for lipson, right, and you say, well, I don't, you know, I don't, you know, this is me. Well, is it you? I mean, yes, you could say that dave, but is it now? I know you, so I know it always be an honest answer. But the the, you know, but we do, even when we want to give what we think is unbiased answers, we're biased and you just can't. You can't, can't get away from it. Anybody who says I'm reviewing this unit and I bought it, so I'm not biased, okay, all those things are true.

24:23 It and I bought it, so I'm not biased, okay, all those things are true, but you're, you're still terribly biased. So we all, we all come with biases, right, it's just part of the gig. So, yes, we can say it and we can try and all those other kinds of things, but at the end of the day, there's certain things we like, there's certain things we don't like. Yeah, jody says, yeah, jody says. So much AI slop on the internet. Right now, youtube is becoming an AI ad dumping ground. Yeah. At the event, this one guy said that AWS, so Amazon, who hosts a lot of websites, and I don't know what else they monitor, who knows but they said that 57% of new content is generated by AI, and so that was the big takeaway and you'll hear me talk about this in two weeks on the School of Podcasting is lean into your humanness.

25:15 We've said this before Stories be yourself, because that's what sets you apart, because everybody else, it's going to be weird. That's what sets you apart, because everybody else, it's going to be weird. If you're in the, you know, if you're in the business of selling information, getting the information is not going to be hard. I mean it's. You know we can always say, just go to Google, but it's going to be interesting to see. Just you know if, again, is the information you're getting from Claude going to be something? Because everybody's in the chat room has been saying, yeah, those things hallucinate all the time and you know they, they kind of just make stuff up. In fact, craig, another awesome supporter and member of the School of Podcasting, dr Craig Van Slyke, does AI Goes to College and he was talking about how, in some cases, the longer AI goes on, it just starts making up stuff and it was a really interesting article.

26:11 It's on his sub stack. I'll put a link in the show notes after I find it later. But it was a really interesting read where you're like, oh okay, that's not good. You know what I mean when it just starts making stuff up. Well, just remember, right, ai is's. We'll go back to the old tool analogy, right, and ai is a hammer and if you're trying to use it as a screwdriver, it's not going to work for you. And I think some folks are approaching ai today or like they're trying to make it do things that are best for a screwdriver and not a hammer, and then they're like, well, this thing doesn, this thing doesn't work. So just remember, I mean it's a language model, right, they're really really, really good at writing, for sure.

26:52 They're really good at editing. They're great at I should say better at translations, things that have to do with words. Some of the models have been tuned for math and code, and so when you go into those models, you know you can give it specific problems associated with code. Let's just say some of those. And then there's a whole new brand of relational models that they're building. Microsoft's a part of this. Grok actually has a little bit of this kind of built into it where they're kind of tuning them to be relational right in the way they speak to you and the way they engage with you. Those are fairly interesting.

27:33 In the early days you mentioned Craig in the. You know the longer you would go In the early days. That was a very big problem, like three or four years ago. They would go off the rails. I've had Dave, I've had long, long sessions with these things and have gotten really good results so far, so I think that part is getting better. They have figured out how to extend these conversations in some regard to make sure they don't get a little wacky on you, whether they're resetting them in the background or I. You know, I don't know, I don't know what the magic is on that one, but they are getting, interestingly, I think, better. So, for information and some of those kinds of things. Listen, they are definitely holding them back, right.

28:16 I mean, I think they learned from the first round of AI that we did, where they had some social problems with them. I think they've learned that you got to put some guardrails on them. So there's certain things you can't do with them, certain queries they can't send, they keep them from, like if you said, go search the entire internet. No, they're not, that's not going to be allowed. That would consume more bandwidth, right, some of those kinds of things. So certainly some of them have limitations. And then here's what I'm finding too the prompts matter, right, some of those kinds of things. So certainly some of them have limitations. And then here's what I'm finding too the prompts matter, right, and prompt engineering matters. And I get lazy sometimes in my prompt engineering and I'm like well, why can't you bring back the Magna Carta from the?

29:00 two words I gave you. It's like well okay, no, I probably need to be a little bit smarter about my prompting. I did a query this week where I dropped two Excel spreadsheets in there and I wanted to compare them, and not just a simple comparison. But we wanted to go across multiple fields in the spreadsheet and not all of them were named the same and some of them required some fuzzy logic. Now, this would have been if I would have had to write code to do this. Should have been a good afternoon of code writing to get all for me anyways, to get maybe other, maybe you guys listening could do it in five minutes, but for me that was going to take a while. So what was interesting, dave, is I put it in, put the two in. I told it what things were and then I told it where the joins were.

29:43 I said, hey, this column should equal this column and some of these kinds of things. And then, as I started writing the query, it was like yeah, no, you don't let's. Do you want me to do it this way? I'm like yeah, so it did it. And then it came back and it told me what it did and it said you know, we, here's the results. We might want to think through this. As far as the way this is constructed and it took me I don't know 45 minutes probably to work through that to where I got all the results boiled down to the way I wanted to, but the prompts on the backside of me helping me build the prompt were what's most important. I think I said this on the show If you get a chance in your bot to, or whatever you're using to say, make sure you're prompting me at the end of this, giving me ideas of how to write better prompts.

30:27 That can be sometimes can be really really helpful to you. It will give you clues on how you could have written that prompt better to get better results out of it, so make sure you're using it, too, to help you. It will give you clues on how you could have written that prompt better to get better results out of it, so make sure you're using it, too, to help you. It'll give you clues to how to code with it so that you can give it the proper prompt, because, as Stephanie said, prompts do matter in this case and it can't read your mind. I sometimes get frustrated with it because I'm like can't you just understand what I'm trying to do? It's like no, it's like an intern. You got to tell it exactly what to do, otherwise it's not going to be able to get it done. Yeah, one of the things I like Magi about besides the fact that it gives me access to chat GPT and it's got a built-in bunch of custom GPTs is I can write in a prompt and then click a button and it will look at my prompt and then say, oh, let me rewrite this for you so that you're giving you know the tool the best kind of thing.

31:24 Yeah, that's really really cool. It is. It's all about the prompts. Where did Ralph had a comment? He said getting info is easy, but putting it together is why you need to hire someone like me with 30 years of experience. That's why I'm going to do a live show and that actually that is true, because just because you read, it doesn't, sometimes you need somebody to explain it in a way that makes sense, not just the facts and also what I used to love about dummy books back when they were new. Right, I'd get the book about you know Microsoft Word 6, and it would tell you all the features, like here's what it does. Here's what it does.

32:05 The dummy books would explain why I would use this, like what's the benefit and where I would use it. So that's what made dummy books so great. They're like oh, and here's an example of when you might want to try this. Here's another example of when you might use this feature, not just here's the feature. So yeah, making the info easy to digest, you know, but the problem's going to be now, when AI tells us something, we can simply say can you use that in a sentence, please, or can you? give me an example, or you know so. Well, listen you still. This is not a time to disengage your brain. This did not make this, did not make us thinking any different.

32:47 It takes away. It's like when we created calculators right, we could do math before. We just created a device that made us that allowed us to do math faster and quicker. We still do math before we just created a device that allowed us to do math faster and quicker. We still do math. We still have scientists out there doing math. The calculator didn't replace, even though your high school math teacher told you that you were never going to learn math again. People know math. Right, these language calculators. So these AI? Right, they're just that for language. Right, they just make the language faster. And to Ralph's point a little bit listen just because a person's a human doesn't make them true either. In some regards, you have to engage your brain, right? How much bad advice is out there in podcasts? Oh right, it was funny.

33:29 I heard somebody at an event explain how you should put keywords in your description for Apple. explain how you should put keywords in your description for Apple and I'm like I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't look at the description. And I was like, well, that's interesting. And then I looked up and I'm like, oh look, it's Ted from Apple. And I go does Apple search the description? He's like no, and he's like, well, at least not now. And I was like, hmm, they do search the transcript, that's new. But so that's why we should just be saying you know, naked people, naked people, naked people. So now, when people are searching for naked people, they'll find this show and then be horribly disappointed that you know we're not naked. Well, both with AI, though, and people and humans, we do need to do the same tests right, right, which is, in other words, test the advice.

34:14 If it's good advice, take it again. If it continues to be good advice, trust it Right, and that's the same. It can be the same thing for both people and AI, and then you've got to constantly be checking. I mean, sometimes I've listen, I've known folks for a long time, and then, all of a sudden, these are humans that go off the rails and you're like, oh well, you know. So I think we still have to live in a world of trust and verify on everything. So listen, I'm preaching to the choir here. You guys all know this, but I think it's just really, really important we trust and verify at all times, for both people and for AI, to make sure, and then, at the end of the day, listen, the decision you make is yours, not theirs.

34:55 So make sure you're making decisions you're good with, and I'm not saying don't get advice. I'm just saying, at the end of the day, continue to engage your brain. Humans are still needed for a long time to make sure we're engaging our brains, so make sure you're using that. They've been doing a thing on the no Agenda Show where they're getting feedback from teachers. Show where they're getting feedback from teachers. Like, kids in the 10th grade can't recite the months. They don't know what half a dozen is. There are a bunch of things that you're like wait. Well, it just makes it sound like our kids are morons. I'm like. So read to your children, get them interested in books. Well, okay, but let me defend that for just a second here. Things have shifted that kids today know things that are important to the world they live in and listen.

35:40 You can come up with a thousand places where this goes wrong, but there's still. I worked with a lot of smart students here over the last 20 years in the internships I've done. There's a lot of smart students out here. They know things, Dave. They may not know what half a dozen is, but they may know how to code, Like they may know how to write software code to be able to. To get to that point, why does a dozen matter? That's such an antiquated I know it's 12, but it's such an antiquated number. Like we do very little with that anymore for the most part. Yeah, we can buy eggs and dozen. Most cases it's 18 now, and so you know, like nobody buys.

36:22 Yeah, sure, you buy donuts in a dozen, but nobody cares that like. So what? Right, but could they? Could there? Are there certain things that they could do way more advanced? Yeah, and so I think I think there's things sometimes on this, in this area, we take things, we take old ideas and they're like oh yeah, you don't know how to put mortar on on you know stones, build a house, and it's like well, we don't build houses that way anymore. Why would we? Why do we need that skill? Can I, can I pour concrete? that might be, uh yeah or cement, depending on what area you're in. My favorite is when it's a dollar six and you give them a penny.

37:07 I think I got this. Right now I'm gonna make fun of my own self. Oh boy, here we go. Yeah, I'm doing math live. Yeah, so you know, and you give them like a penny, so they give you back a nickel instead of four pennies or whatever it is you know, and you just wait. They're like but I already rang it up. It says I owe you, you know, a dollar four. And you're like yeah, here's a, here's a penny, just give me a nickel and you can just see them like what I don't understand this is a super great example like we we're using so little cash. These days so the old timers are like you can't even count, can't change anymore. You're like, why would you need to? Like, yeah, I swipe a card and I'm out and, by the way, the old timers could never do it anyways, right they?

37:50 They say this and then throw, you know, tell, okay, give me change for 34 cents. And they're like you're like, okay, settle down, old timer. I'm going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Monday because it's a holiday and they have things all over their website. This is a cashless operation. Don't come in here with your change purse, old man, Because they're like we don't take cash. And I was like that's interesting. And John Domingo says yes, give us a five-star review to help our podcast rankings. Yep, People are still saying that because they've heard it so many times. John also had a question. Go ahead, you took a deep breath.

38:32 Before we moved on. I was just going to wrap up that segment. I think the podcasting advice is a great way to emphasize this. I mean, even in the last 10 years our podcasting advice has changed in some regards into some of the things we say, and so just make sure you're always getting the best information that's for you right from that standpoint, and then you know. To go back to the cash list cash versus cash list, I mean, we, we don't live in a world anymore in podcasting a lot. Remember when we were hand coding RSS feeds. You need to be able to code your RSS feed, you know, and you're like no, we don't need to do that anymore To say someone's not a good podcaster because they can't plan, code an RSS feed.

39:23 Would we say that today? Some people might, I don't know, we wouldn't, no, so yeah, I love it, Craig. Long live the Fortnite. Because already my brain's going is that weekly, biweekly, Wait what fortnight? because already my brain's going is that weekly, bi-weekly wait. What's that mean? again every other week, I think, is what that means or something. Yeah, craig. Craig, who again teaches english in spain, friend of mine, gets essays from his students that have been written by ai. He uses ai to mark them, you bet guys. This is the Like. We can't. This is good in business today, we're all everybody's using AI to write their copy. At this point, what we need to do is figure out how to get students to write copy better and faster using the AI and then cause.

40:06 At the end of the day, the goal is just really good copy. Doesn't matter if it's original or not. Right, it needs to be great. No, when, when you put an ad out, nobody cares. It just needs to be good copy. So we're we're gonna make this switch over. I mean, we did this for the calculator. Nobody's gonna be able to figure out math. Right, we got comfortable with a calculator. We'll get comfortable with this. You know, can someone write a whole paper? Those days are over, friends. That's yeah, the cat. The cat is out of the bag, the horse is out of the barn, like it's. Those days are over, like it or not. Time to embrace it, friends. Yeah, I'm trying to find John Haddock. Here we go. Can you move your RSS feed too many times?

40:49 Oh, I move. I move from Lipson to Captivate. Now I want to try Podhome. Do you see any issues? And how would that interfere with Podpage? Podpage follows the redirect. So the key to this is when you move, after you've imported into the new home of your show. So if you're moving from wherever Captivate to Podhome, so you do the import, then you go into Captivate and you redirect to Podhome and then in theory everything should follow that, because that redirect behind the scenes the nerdy phrase, it's a you know 301 redirect is basically saying John doesn't live here anymore, he lives over there, and so the apps then go oh, john doesn't live there.

41:31 So the next time they go he's you know. So in Apple Podcasts it's looking at the Captivate feed and now it says, oh, wait a minute, and it looks at the Podhome feed and it updates. So the next time you start Apple Podcasts it goes to Podhome, and so I wouldn't move it too quick and I would just make sure that I would hit like the top five and just make sure that it's still updating after you've put out an episode. So if I've moved to, you know host number two and I put out a new episode, I want to go to all the apps and make sure that it's not in. You know, whoever your first host was, it's only in. You know the new host. And when I see that that new episode show up everywhere, I know that everything is looking at your new feed.

42:17 And so from there you're like okay, good, everybody knows it's like moving from one, two, three main street to you know 507 Johnson street. Great, everybody. You know here's my new phone number. Everybody's calling me on my new home phone. I know everybody's got it. And once you're there, then you're like great. And now if you want to move again, I know everybody's got it. And once you're there, then you're like great, and now if you want to move again, you know, do that. Just anytime you update a feed is the thing I say. Just don't multitask. When you do that, make sure that the links you're putting in have no spaces before the link and definitely not any after the link, because that's where, you know, I had a guy at Libsyn that had a typo in his feed and he just redirected his entire audience to nothing and he was like how do I get that back?

43:00 I go well, you could buy that domain and set up a feed. It was nasty, but I was like I would just go back and change it and realize that anybody over the last three days that has checked your show is no longer a subscriber. They're gone. And then Chris asked well, what is the best host provider? And the answer is of course it's a podcast question. It depends. If I'm all about WordPress, blueberry, if I'm on a budget and I'm only going to put out an episode, maybe twice a month and I don't need dynamic stuff, libsyn, all day long. My two favorites well, three really are Captivate, which has a bunch of new stuff coming down the pike, buzzsprout both of those because they have dynamic content down the pike.

43:50 Buzzsprout, both of those because they have dynamic content. Buzzsprout would be, if somebody wants easy. Their interface is a little better, but not by much. But Captivate has a much better business model where you can have multiple shows and in 99% of the time your bill will not go up. You have to get 30,000 downloads on Captivate for your bill to go up and if you're getting 30,000 downloads, I'm pretty sure you can monetize that stuff. And then my third would now be Transistor, because it's basically Captivate Lite Same business model, multiple shows, things like that. They have dynamic tools, things like that. So it depends. Now, if I want all the podcasting 2.0 stuff because I'm doing a show about Bitcoin, then boy, that's a good question.

44:33 I might still stick with Captivate, because Captivate has a lot, blueberry has a lot, buzzsprout has a lot. If I want all the bells and whistles, then I'd probably go with Podhome, but that whole streaming Satoshi thing is kind of limping along right now. Now, if you're in the crypto space it's not limping along and it's going gangbusters, but for the average Joe person. So I always say it depends. I have a, I think, if you go to podcastmediahostingcom. I have a post on this on the school of podcasting that just explains here's what this dynamic thing does, here's what this does, here's what this does. And then it says here's who has that feature.

45:17 And then there are people like Podbean. Podbean fired their entire American staff and replaced them with marketing people. I've always found Podbean's interface clunky and if you're on their lowest plan, they will upgrade you prompt to death, where it just seems like every button you click on is like you need to upgrade and I get that. That's how they get people to upgrade, but I don't hate them. I'm just like they're not for me. They're less annoying options. And Podbean's website I do see where they've updated this. It used to be really hard to put a button on their website to point to Apple and I'm like wait what? Because they wanted people to listen to your show in the Podbean app and I was like no, so let's say yeah.

46:05 Randy says I walked away from the streaming payments and closed down my value for value music show. Yeah it's just. They made it too hard. And I asked Adam at Podcast Movement. I got to talk to him for two minutes and I go if I don't want to use Albie, I go how do I tell people to set up value for value? And he talked about Fountain and some of these other ones, but it just I don't want to say it's dead because it's not. But I would only recommend that now to people that are doing a show about crypto and I'm really sad about that. I'm hoping that when they come out with some I'm surprised Apple hasn't come up with some sort of digital coin or I know they're coming out with a stable coin in the US, but I'm like.

46:50 So I don't think that idea is dead. I'm hoping it will come back because I really like that. And I also think, like Captivate and Buzzsprout, both have the ability to sell your back catalog. You can just say this is a premium one and Mark Maron was making 200K a month doing that. Now he had really good back episodes. But I think subscriptions are the better way now for the indie podcaster to make that, or if you're just going to ask for donations, like I know, daniel now at the end has the audacity to podcastcom slash, give back. And so you know, there are still. I have, I think, two shows Like I listened to Podcasting 2.0 last night and I have that in Cast Magic which is tied to my Albie wallet, but I'm very close to just waving the white flag on that.

47:40 Yeah, danny says, looking at the stats on Podcast Index, it shows how many podcasts receive stats and it's pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, it's, you know it's pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, it's, you know it's. It's such a bummer. I I was, so that's why I started. The future of podcasting was to I. I thought this was going to take off and we could give that, and now it's like the future of podcasting is. so you know what the future of podcasting is tomorrow, right, yeah, I mean, it's out there. Listen, I think we'll make another run at this digital currency for podcast and podcast support Just wasn't. I don't know if we were ready yet. No, I don't think the technology's there, I don't think enough people were there.

48:25 I don't think it's an average guy solution. I don't. You know, there was a lot of things that needed to happen, but you got to try it a couple times before it starts, before it really works well, and I think we may be in a. You know, we may be in a situation coming up here. You know, unfortunately, if anybody got into the value for value, and you had Satoshi's that you were getting, if you had been early and just held onto them, they'd be worth four times what they're worth now I mean what they were worth then. So you, if you did nothing with your Bitcoin stuff, it would be now four times more value than it was before. So hopefully you didn't sell those things off because they're Bitcoin's doing really well right now.

49:08 I think we're going to need a. We're going to need a blockchain, so someone's going to need to dedicate a blockchain to this, and then we're going to need tie-ins to the various onboard fiat onboarding right. So, like here in the United States, like a Coinbase would need, we're going to need to be able to come in through an easy thing like coinbase then then move things from to and from that. As easy this was the hard part is they were. Everybody was trying to set up a decentralized or or whatever something along those lines of getting that done and it just was. Like you said, if you have a user that has to set up something and it's probably not going to work, you guys, it has to be easy. So I think I think somebody will be smart enough to make us another run at this what we call value for value, and it could work.

49:57 I just don't think we're ready. I don't think the technology was was. It was there for sure, it's just it was. It was fairly complicated, too hard. Yeah, when I was very hard when I talked to ted from when that was really taking off, he's like I know we can do it, he's like, but for Apple to embrace it it has to be easy. Like easy John says, I was thinking Podhome to create an RSS for live streaming directly to podcast apps like Fountain, and, yeah, I had Daniel explain how to set up a live tag and my brain exploded. I was like you lost me about seven steps ago and I was like because I've got to.

50:39 Oh man, radiocom, I have some live streaming channel that's just playing loops of your podcast consultant and I know, if I wanted to, I could like I could add that as a live stream, because back in the day, back in the day, internet radio used to be a big thing. You could. I remember I had an internet radio station. I could go in and see where you know hundreds of people listen. And now I look at it and it's like tens of people have listened. But it's, it's another way to live stream. Before I get to some other questions, I wanted to share one other thing that I learned while I was on the road. And man, did this come in handy? It is, and this is not unless you think everything I do has an affiliate program.

51:24 This does not. Spotherocom saved me a chunk of change because when I was at the event in Cleveland, the parking at the Hilton was 50 bucks a night and I was there for three nights, I think, and it was 43 bucks for all three nights at Spot Hero. And so you basically type in an address and it says let me see if I can find a parking spot for you. And it did, and it was I don't know three blocks away. I was like I'll walk three blocks to save 150 bucks. And so I did the same thing. I'm going to the Rock Hall on Monday.

52:04 I was like I don't know what the parking is up there and I found one like I think it was 40 something bucks to park at the closest one. I was like hold on. So I pull up my Spot Hero. I found some place that's like six bucks a day and it's like four blocks away and I'm like it's supposed to be nice on Monday. I'm saving myself 40 bucks. So I was surprised. So it's spotherocom. If you're going to any, you know live events or you know anything where you're going to be parking. I know, man, I forget where we're at Chicago. I think it was Podcast Movement in Chicago and Daniel had found a parking place adjacent to a hospital that was cheaper.

52:47 And so this is kind of that idea Let me find a hotel adjacent that isn't going to charge me, because hotels, just like you know, brought to you by the same people that charge you $9 for a bottle of water. You know, and I remember I'm so old I remember when parking was a thing that you know was provided so that you could actually come to the hotel and I was like no, no, if you're going to be on our property, we're going to charge you because we can. So that. Uh, I will say on spot hero, be really careful that you see the distance. You were talking three blocks right. Make sure you're looking at the distance, cause I was doing, I was just doing some searches here in Omaha and the only place, the only place you have paid a park, is downtown.

53:33 But if you're not from Omaha, you don't know that. So I went. If I was going to the exorbitant area which is another shopping area, all that, all that parking's free, but it's spot hero tries to give me suggestions downtown. It doesn't say, hey, that area is free, like you know. So if you were from out of town you might think, oh, I can't get any. I where am I going to park? How's this going to work? So just remember, as you're looking around on that, that you you know there may be some areas where you're thinking paid parking might be appropriate and it's not. You can just park for free. Yeah, jeff C says so glad the Gaylord is done for podcast movement, but who knows how expensive New York is going to be.

54:15 That was me I was like when I heard James Cridland announced that podcast movement is moving from you know the Gaylord, I was like, yes, and it's like, and they're moving, and from what I understand, new York is the permanent home, like it's not like New York next year, it's New York from going forward. And I was like, well, the winner in that equation, in my opinion, is one, chris Kermitsos in PodFest. Because I, you know, I've been to New York once, it was fun and I did some touristy things. But I don't know, I'll be interested to see. I mean, I'll go next year to New York, I believe, unless it's just absolutely ridiculous.

54:58 But you know, that's an industry event. Whether they and I talked to Brian personally, he said no, no, we're still all about the creator. And I'm like, okay, and I, he's not lying, but I I think he thinks the creator makes more money than they do, cause you know, and they, I, james Cridland, had a great idea. They should do what podcasts show in London does, which is they have different types of days and so they can have like injury industry days, maybe Wednesday and Thursday or on Thursday, and then have the kind of independent days on Friday and Saturday, so that A they don't have to burn a vacation day, and then you know, I don't know.

55:41 Then everybody could go on that day see their friends, not have to have three nights of hotels. Let's just make a day for indies and everybody can fly in on that day. High five each other, pat ourselves on the back and then go back home. I don't know. So Steph says do we know where? New York? No, because New York's a big place, although I do love the Bronx. The Bronx was fun. I went to the something air radio, some event there, and they had some really good brisket in this place. That was amazing. And I also found out, I'm pretty sure, like if you're a parent and you put your kid on the sidewalk waiting for the bus, if you leave them there longer than 10 seconds, somebody will come by and spray them with graffiti.

56:25 There's just graffiti everywhere in the Bronx and what I heard cause, that makes me nervous. And and Akron, if you're in, if you've got graffiti on the walls it hasn't been cleaned, it's like you're not in a great neighborhood. And in the Bronx they're like, no, that's just what we do here. Everywhere is that so. So it'd be interesting to see what happens with with podcast movement. Chris says I bet the Indies at these events is less than 5%, and we'll see there was. You know, the people I met at Podcast Movement that were really new to podcasting were from Dallas. They were local, so they probably weren't staying at the Gaylord, they were just coming in. So let's we have Ralph has a question.

57:07 But before we do that, talking about awesome people like Ralph, we're going to talk about these awesome people. You can be an awesome supporter. My Ecamm is doing really you know what it is. I think Is that it Very interesting. You can be an awesome supporter by going to askthepodcastcoachcom slash awesome. The show is brought to you by the school of podcastingcom, where you get courses, coaching and community all in one place. Use the coupon code coach to sign up for either a monthly, quarterly or yearly subscription and when you go to ask the podcast coach. You're looking at pod page, and pod page is an amazing thing, and I don't say that because I work there. I say that because it's an amazing thing.

57:48 I have video from 2020 where Brendan hired me as a consultant to go. Do you think anybody would buy this? And I'm like, yeah, like 30,000 podcasts have been through our system. Check it out at tripodpagecom. If you need more Jim Cullison and hey, who doesn't you know, just go over to theaverageguytv and check out his show. Home Gadget Geeks and my mouse is not working. I am going to learn vidIQ. That's one of the things. Now that all these sessions are over, I dip my toe in it, but that's what's coming and it's time to go to not that, but this. Also, I should say, if you tried to join earlier by going to askthepodcastcoachcom slash question, I had not started Zoom yet and Zoom is now up and running.

58:35 So if you want to jump in on the call, you can. But who's it going to be? Is it going to be Ralph from the Financially Confident Christian, or Greg from Indie Drop-In, or Craig? I can't talk as fast as this thing spins. There's Jody, the audio branding show, and so who will it be? Well, we're going to click on spin and find out and the answer is it's, I'm going to guess. Is it Chris? Is it going to stay on, chris? It is Chris from castaheadnet. If you need a producer, slash editor, slash video, slash, audio guy, you cannot go wrong with you. Know, it's so funny when I get distracted. Did you leave and come back? Wait a minute, we're having technical difficulties.

59:15 You can go to castaheadnet. Where is my? Oh wait, hold on, I got to go back to this. Okay, you're back. Did you leave? No, you put me in the green room for some reason, I don't know why. Because I was sitting there talking about Chris and all of a sudden, and then you left again. That's weird. And all of a sudden I heard bring, bring, bring and I was like, wait, what's going on? Jim has left me. So the joys of live. So, ralph, when you want to do a live show, remember moments like this Andy's back. I got moments like this and he's back, so I got an interesting error message. It said this stream is destroyed. It kicked me out for a second. I had to rejoin and said this stream is destroyed.

59:58 I was like oh, that's that's a little uh. Yeah, I mean, that's all you know, I don't know what's going, you can fun, I don't know it's fine, it's fine fine. It's all fine. Anyway, to go back to this, if you'd like to be an awesome supporter, you can do that, like these awesome people. If you're watching the video, thank you to all of our awesome supporters, and you can do that by going over to askthepodcastcoachcom. Slash awesome and become an awesome supporter today. And so Ralph had a question. He said I would like the group's opinion on the best day and time for a weekly small business live show where I'll be answering small business questions and providing coaching.

1:00:43 So live coaching can be really cool. I know Natalia Ekdahl from BizChicks and that's B-I-Z-C-H-I-X did interview shows. Because back in the day, that's what you did. You interviewed entrepreneurs and a million dollars fell from the ceiling. Well, when that didn't work and she kept offering coaching, and then she finally brought on somebody that she gave them a discount on coaching. The discount was because it was live and it was going to be used on a podcast. It wasn't so much live as it was going to be used on the podcast. And so she did a couple coaching calls with people and she said it was like her whole audience went oh, that's what coaching is. And she said and then, you know, people started knocking on the door.

1:01:25 So for a small business see part of me, right you're like well, if you go during the day, I don't know about you, jim, you don't work from home. But I work from home and I have a problem where people think well, dave's home, I'll just call him and I'm like I'm at work. It is between 8 and 5. I'm at a place called Podpage. That happens to be my spare bedroom, but, like you know, and I remember once the power went out and I went over to my brother's house and it was still between eight and five and I'm type type typing at the keyboard and he did not get the hint that I'm like I'm doing my job, like, leave me alone.

1:02:07 So during the day might work, because they're busy during the day, which means family time is at night, if they're doing that correctly. But a lot of times small businesses don't adhere to the eight to five rule and they work whenever they can. They work all the time. I would. For me, the key to live, and there are many hurdles. The beautiful thing alive is you get instant feedback. But and that's us, after doing this over 10 years, and we've done it the same time for 10 plus years Saturday at 1030.

1:02:47 So I would pick. And now, why did I pick Saturday at 1030? Because at the time I was married and my ex-wife was still asleep. So I'm like, oh, I can do this show now and it won't take away from you were still married when we started this. Yeah, yeah, I was in Cleveland. Yeah, I was in Cleveland when we started this. Yeah, and because I remember I had that big hunking board with two mixed minuses going and yeah and yeah, so that's why, that's why I picked this time and I just never moved. And every anytime I ever hint to move, people are like no, oh, and I was editing my podcast this Saturday morning or when I edit my podcast and you went live and I saw you go live and you were wanting somebody, so I jumped, I jumped in to join you.

1:03:31 So that time we kind of picked it by accident. But to your point, dave, like because we've been so consistent, we gain. Like people know they can count on it, like the, like the, uh, you know, like the trains, they, they, it's going to show up and and so I think there's some consistency. I think I don't know if the time matters as much as the consistency matters. If you're going to do it with people, they need to know you're going to be there and then, no matter what you do live, it's just never going to be as popular as as the recorded version right. Never going to be. Yeah, not even close. Close, I mean, jeff c does a live show on fridays.

1:04:12 I rarely, if ever, watch it live because I'm busy doing my own stuff on friday day, right for you and me both. It's in the middle of the workday. I see it pop up on linkedin all the time and I'm like, oh, we'll have a great show, jeff. That's usually what I say when I see it pops up jeff, have a great show. But usually, you know, fridays at 11 or whatever, 10 or 11, I'm usually it for a long time. My own podcast was going on in that slot for Gallup. So, right, yeah, you just. But there will be people who will come and join you at that time and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for that, consistency is key, just beyond the shadow of a doubt. Listen, we did a live podcast every Friday this year at 11 am.

1:04:53 As soon as we finished the season and stopped doing it, I had people emailing me Where's the podcast? Aren't you going to keep going? Like, no, we finished the season, I know, but aren't you going to keep going? I need something to listen to. So the key is get those people to build it into their habits. It's the same reason you all show up live folks at 10.30 Eastern, 9.30 Central. So if we switch to Thursday nights which wouldn't work for you because that's when you do your show but if we switch to a different time let's say we started doing this Wednesday at 7, we would lose this audience. Some of them would follow, but eventually we would get more people the Wednesday night, people like, oh, I was going to.

1:05:36 The tough part is especially for live. I remember Jeff, not Jeff Jay Moore the comedian. He did a show I forget the name of it, but it was about Hollywood and agents and actors and it was about and so the media loved it because it was about them and it had all sorts of star power. Jay was a pretty popular comedian at the time and it should have taken off. It should have gone crazy, and the problem was it was on Thursday nights against this little show called Friends, and so I think it did maybe one and a half seasons. So that's the thing.

1:06:18 It's just, you know, I would say, try it if this is something you want to do, because Ralph is really good at answering questions. You know, if you just get him to talk about something, he's got 30 years of experience, and so I like that strategy of just answer questions versus do the whole script thing and that whole nine yards. I would try it. I'd give it at least a month, probably two, and just realize live is not a magic bullet Like this. Show hasn't grown crazy because it's live and again, we probably get nine to 10 times more people listening to it later than we do here. Yeah, and Stephanie says hey, it took 10 years to build and engage audience for this live show.

1:07:00 I never see y'all advertise it. It's like a secret I mentioned in my newsletter. Every week that goes out it's. I'm trying to figure out when we got when we got our audience. It's posted on LinkedIn and it's it's a part of I mean I talk about it on my show. Yeah, by the way, we're not, we're not trying to explain this away. It is a good, it's a great point. I mean we could do, we could do more advertising for it, although I think we're, I think we're comfortable with the audience that we have and if it's, if it's as good as we think it is, you word of mouth should do some things. It has done some stuff. Dave's out in the community. I mean he's speaking at conferences all the time.

1:07:40 So, and you know, you mentioned it, it's on all your stuff, it's in my bio and all my stuff yeah. So anytime I have somebody go and I'll be like, oh well, you should join the school of podcasting, like, oh, it's just not in the budget, I will say, oh, I have something that's free. You just have to wake up at 1030 on Saturday mornings. And what's interesting is very seldom does that person get up to get free consulting, get free consulting, and I'm like then you're not real, I don't know, I don't know, I, I, my, my thought goes maybe, again maybe they're busy people and they want to sleep in. But I'm like I sleep into eight 30,. You know, crazy on Saturday. Yeah, don't get crazy now.

1:08:20 Dave, I'm always surprised at how many people we get at this hour on a Saturday morning. You guys come back consistently. It always surprises me. So I always like, wow, it's 35 or 40 people who are very committed to it and enjoy it in a way to be a part of this group and it's kind of fun. I don't think anything we say you don't for the live folks you already know. I mean, I think there's a few nuggets in there, but you come out to be a part of the community and we appreciate that. Yeah, jeff says I love doing a live show, but keeping the time consistent, that is the key Because I mean, if you think about any time a show is not doing the way they want it to you know, or in some cases, networks just do stupid stuff on TV.

1:09:13 They'll take one of their best shows and they have this other show that's not doing great and they're like, oh I know, We'll move this to another night right before the show that's not doing well, and then this great show will be the lead in and if people don't change the channel, they'll start watching the show after it. But as soon as you start moving shows around and people can't find it, you've doomed it. Yeah, Dan says this is basically Saturday morning cartoons. I need to bring in some cartoon sound effects and I don't know, Later Jim will drop an anvil on my head. Podno says I've listened to the show for two years. This is only the second time I've watched the live experience. There you go. It's always just to see how different Jim looks, how he is in my head.

1:09:56 Oh yeah, how did he look in his head More handsome or less handsome? Yeah, that's me. I'm like I thought Jim was an ogre and man, that guy's handsome, yeah it is funny, the faces you make up when you're only when it's audio only you have to put a face in there, right? You that's your brain does that when you're listening to audio, it's putting a face in there. And when you haven't seen the person before, you don't know what they look like, you just make it up. And then the first time you meet him you're like that's nothing, like I thought it was. Yeah, yeah. Here's a fun question that we're going to dangerously tiptoe around a subject. Let's be careful.

1:10:40 I was like all right, here we go. It says hey guys, the title of this on Reddit was advice on low ratings from people in the community. I wanted a little advice. I've been podcasting for two years. I started out recapping reality TV shows for the first year and nine months, but this summer I decided to start a new channel and began podcasting about religion, with my sister as the co-host, with a modern take, so that even non-religious girls, specifically, could feel included on their path to finding God. Just a simple podcast where we open up various topics every two weeks, discussing topics related to the religion, but also adding a modern take to it to help girls who are still on their religious journey, so they don't feel alone and see that we also are on the path, although we're not perfect.

1:11:23 Unfortunately, this past week, a group of people in my community continue to spam my podcast ratings with one stars Dun dun dun and I'm not sure how to remove those. Well, you can't, or put a stop to it and you can't. And as I don't know who it is exactly, it's JimMom37. It says right there on their review, but, with this being about religion, and checking the analytics verifies me that it's people I knew or know of. I assume they don't consider me that religious, but everyone is on their own path. As I do keep it to myself a lot, so maybe it came as a surprise to many, but I don't want the continuous bad ratings to stop me from doing what I love.

1:12:06 Then quit reading them. And any advice on dealing with personal attacks on your own podcast? Jim, I've not prepped you. What are the three things you don't talk about in a podcast? Religion, politics and sex. I don't know what's the third one religion, politics and sex. I don't know what's the third one, sex or abortion? Either one. And so you're in the religious space, and the reason you don't talk about those three things is it triggers people. Now, if you want to, you can. Jen Briney does a show about politics and guess what? 50% of the time her audience hates her because she'll be like and the Republicans did this really stupid thing. And then in the next episode she'll be like and the Democrats did this really nasty thing.

1:12:46 And every time she does that, you know, and I remember she's much better at it now, but in the early days she'd come on the mic crying because people were just brutal, because it's politics and those are things. That and that's the thing, all those things people have, they are passionate about them, and so not only will they fight back with an answer, but they will, you know, they just go crazy. So that's true. Now Ralph says I talk religion all the time, and so you know your time's coming. Somebody's going to throw in there, that you know, or maybe not I mean listen, for for folks who have, you know, have a uh, they're in a lane, let's just call it.

1:13:27 They're in a lane and they're going. Sometimes you don't invite that other side to come in or they they don't see the value in making it work. And this particular case it sounds like sometimes we start off more general and we attract, to attract this big audience, Then we make a statement, right, Whatever that is, and we make that statement that divides our audience and that's generally when these things kind of happen. I think, if you start your podcast and you're in a lane and you're hard in that lane, the people who, who don't agree with you, they just don't listen, right, they're not going to show up and listen and unless you go after them in some particular way, they're probably not going to feel it's worth their time to go out and leave a one star and whatever that is true.

1:14:12 That's something to think about. Somebody had to sign up for an Apple account. Go to your site, click on a button, write the review. You know you move somebody to do that. You have to go after them. You have to go after them, I mean so so generally kind of happens in these two camps. Right, you started more general and then you said something that divided the audience or you made a comment. Maybe you're in a, you're in a lane and you made a comment about the other lane and you went, you it, it, it got out, or you went, went after him, you went after him hard, or it came out on social or whatever some of those kinds of things, and they come back. They come back after you. I think in a lot of cases, if you're just true, if you start to your podcast and stay in your lane, I think for the most part you're yeah, you're gonna be okay yeah, well, craig says, aren't religious podcasts a hugely success?

1:15:00 I don't know that they're hugely successful, yeah they can be, but it is a huge chunk of podcasts, are religions of all sorts, not just Christianity, and then dances. Those topics can easily become, can become quickly an echo chamber and then I love. Craig says maybe it's just a bad show, maybe the one-star review has nothing to do. But I'm not saying that you shouldn't do a religious or a political show or whatever. If you want to talk about sex and pronouns and all that other fun stuff, I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just saying realize that you're in in highly.

1:15:43 You're in areas that people are highly passionate about and you're likely to get some people that are like you don't know, like I saw someone yesterday oh you know what, I'm not going to go there, but there was. They said one fact and I know for a fact. There are five other facts that you know and the problem is facts are a little squirrely these days. So DR says is writing a review or is it just clicking on a single star? That I don't know. But here's my thing I don't look at reviews. If Jim said hey, you got to check out this show. It's called the Gern Goes to College Show. I'm going to go over, I'm going to type in Gern.

1:16:23 I'm going to find it and I'm going to click on follow and then I'm going to listen and I'm going to decide I won't even look at reviews and if I did and it said this is the dumbest show hosted by a guy named Gern, I'd be like, well, I'll be the decider of that and I would click follow and listen, because not everybody, you know. I remember when I was doing the podcast rodeo show and I would say, yeah, this show is, you know, and I'd have people like you're you, you don't get it. These guys are hilarious. I'm like, well, that's why I, that's why you should have your show on that show. Oh, my God, not everybody agrees with Dave. Yeah, podno says I used to have a mantra love your haters. Oh, I had a troll that I had a lot of fun with, usually because they want the attention.

1:17:06 Yes, I have a clip of Marc Maron talking about trolls, but it is definitely not safe for work. But at the end he basically says ignore, ignore the trolls, but he explains how they. You know, daddy didn't get enough, daddy didn't give enough hugs, so you come to annoy me, blah, blah, blah. Randy says I was harassed by an individual on Facebook and Instagram because of an episode of my show, bible Bites, when I discussed Pride Month and sin. Yeah, that's again. So now you've got two. You've got religion and pronouns, and those two clubs don't typically get along. Even Craig said could be terrible audio. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

1:17:50 Yeah, I love this. There's a pizza place somewhere that gives away pizza to people that leave one-star reviews on Yelp. Nice, well, that's a nice way to make friends. When I got into the whole fiasco podcast movement and their Ben Shapiro thing, it was really interesting because I woke up, I commented on it and just said, hey, I don't get it. Why can't that guy come to a podcast movement? There's a person I hate in my high school and he came to our reunion Like he has a right to be there. He's in my class and Ben Shapiro is a podcaster, so he has a right to be there. And I woke up the next day with a bunch of arrows in my back on Twitter and I just said hey, I even said at the beginning of this like I don't understand this space.

1:18:33 I'm not in this space. I'm a middle-aged white guy, so you know like I'm going to say something stupid here. And then they all said you said something stupid. And I'm like, yeah, can we get on Zoom and talk about this? And people lost their mind. They're like, wait, what do you mean? I go, can we get on Zoom and have a conversation? And three people took me up on it and I was like, oh yeah, ok, I get your point, so, yeah. So just when I saw that, I was like, well, you know, if you're going to talk about I mean just talking about podcasting, some people are like you have old curmudgeons like me going YouTube is not a podcast, right? So every time somebody brings up videos like, oh, no, don't talk the bear, but what if it is?

1:19:13 What if it is, mike? Yeah, and Danny says one of the things I enjoy about being a Gen X Scotsman is thick skin. Don't give a crap what other people think about me, except for those who matter. That is a big one, yeah, just I mean. Or one thing I learned from the Taylor Swift thing, which is kind of obvious but she turned off her comments on her Instagram like 10 years ago and she goes. I don't miss it. So, john Jemango, my show is about news and politics. I get hate mail all the time. It's none of my business what people think about me. There you go. So you know you're going to have that.

1:19:53 It's it's. The problem is you can't get. Well, you could complain to Apple. I've heard of people, if it's along the lines of hate, like a hate crime or whatever it is. I've heard of people getting one-star reviews removed. But I just to me, I just don't put that much weight on reviews. I know we love a little pat on the back and I love good reviews, but you know, I can. my one-star review was a really bad, was a really bad ad for a really bad show, or something like that, you know so I can quote that one like scripture, you know so our, our negative reviews do impact us, but in theory I usually try to just brush it off or shake it off to, to quote the, the lovely Taylor Swift Billionaire, the billionaire.

1:20:40 Taylor Swift. It's easy to shake it off when you got a couple. You know a couple billion, yeah, a couple of billion, just to throw on this. It's fine, we're going to get some hate mail on this one. Oh, I just realized I've been. I've been answering questions in chat from my live account on YouTube. It's not even me, shoot, sorry guys. I'm sure everybody knew who it was, but I just you know YouTube's got that thing right where you log in. I mean, is it a podcast or isn't it? But they've got this thing. I'm logged in with the wrong account, so I'm sorry about that Now I see your little glasses there, the Average Guy TV. Is that after? Did you log in and log back in? Yeah, usually I'm in my personal brand here for that.

1:21:20 This is personal brand here for that. This is the life. That's my live channel, that I must have been doing some work in there, so, anyways, doesn't matter. Not to not to distract that was. That was stupid. I even mentioned it, as meta should have never mentioned it on the live show. Dr, thanks for that super chat that you holy cow, wait, what super chat. That means we got to do that, yay, so thank you very much for that. That's a beautiful thing, and I always have to wait. Well, and she did say the empowered podcasting event in charlotte right now oh, yeah, at the end of the month. 26, 27, 28 it is on the weekend. So if you were complaining yes, if you were complaining about podcast movement being during the week, this is one on the weekend. The code epPCLD50 will get you 50% off.

1:22:03 Epcld50 gets you 50% off until it's a Labor Day weekend sale. So most of our live folks, and maybe will you publish this by the 5th. Yes, this will be out today and it went out yesterday in the PodPage newsletter. I'm really looking forward to this event and so I promoted it on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on blue, even on blue sky. I never log into blue, but there's blue sky and threads and Mark is a great guy, mark Roenick, and I'm looking forward to me. I kind of go this. This smells like early pod fest, yeah, and that was the best, and so this is is a great sale.

1:22:43 If you're thinking of going bucks off basically right, it's 200 bucks off and the hotel isn't super. It's not. It's not the gay lord, but what is? It's not a red roof in, but that's kind of a good thing most of the red roof fins I've ever even seen. Yeah, it's a super eight yeah don't, yeah, I'm what. What's your go-to hotel? a holiday inn express. Yeah, that's me, even though we joke about that. Yeah, it's the one. I stay at all the time it's not you stay in a holiday express. Yeah, it's usually a little over 100 bucks yeah, you know hampton inn is another one, but those can get kind of pricey. But holiday inn express is. It's the one I'm like, okay, and and then I use my Expedia account. It used to be a solid 99.

1:23:25 That was back in the day. Oh yeah 99, 900 bucks for a room. You could. You could do it pretty solidly now. Not so much, but it sounds like it's going to be a good event. Yeah, if you, it's in Charlotte, north Carolina. So if you're near them, check it out, but it's going to. For me it just. You know, we've got a lot of indie podcasters there. You can connect, you can learn and grow, you can collaborate. I mean, I here's the thing in terms of what happens when you go to these events. So I went to the one in Cleveland. Well, first I went to Podcast Movement. I met a bunch of our customers, but I also my favorite thing of Podcast Movement was Deidre from not Cap Show, no Cap Show, that's where she's from.

1:24:11 I had a baby and it was like a baby, like three-month-old baby, which is the best because they can hold up their own head, but they're still and she's just like Wait a minute, was it three months old when she had it or was it three months after she had the unusual? Yeah, yeah. So the baby was three months and she just goes, do you do cuddles? And I go what? And she hands me a baby and I was like, oh, it's got that new baby smell, like. And she just went, you're making all those baby noises. And and then, because she was a female, she cried and wanted nothing to do with me and I was like that is the typical. Guys can cry too. Dave, Guys can cry too. I would have cried too. I'm just going to say it.

1:24:51 That was awesome, but at the content creator expo. This keynote speaker got up there's a local thing in Ohio called signal and they're trying to bring back local news and I said hey, I've reached out to the local Akron chapter. I can't get anybody to return my email. I said I do a podcast about Akron Ohio. I go, I need content. And I go you guys need exposure. I'm thinking peanut butter and jelly. And she goes that sounds like a great idea. I go yeah, I've emailed your editor. I can't get anybody in Akron to even say no. And she goes oh, here's my card. And I said here's my card, I go because I do podcasting. She goes oh, she goes. Well, I'm from Columbus. She goes I know a senator that's getting ready to launch a podcast, but he needs some help.

1:25:35 And I go please give him these things that happen when you go to a live event if you make sure to get out of your shell. You know I got to hang out with Shane Whaley for pretty much the whole conference. We sat next to each other most of the sessions and the beautiful thing is when I went to if I go back to Chicago, that was the podcast event for higher education and Greg from rsscom said you're not a podcast, you're a brand and he goes. You have to figure out what you want to be known for and I thought that was amazing. It sounds silly but I really thought about it. But I met Katie Brinkley, I believe, at Podcast Movement.

1:26:19 I eventually had her on my show and I know this guy named Jay Acunzo. I've read his book, he's a big shot, smarty pants guy and he's a great speaker. He was there to talk about presenting and at the end of it I kind of wanted to meet him and I saw him walking by and I just said, hey, jay, that was a great presentation. And he came over and shook my hand. We had like this little baby conversation but he started off with like hey, I met somebody last night that said I should meet you. So here again, knowing having people know what you're known for. And then it was Katie Brinkley. And so then she walked by and she goes oh, you two are, she's like it's happening, it's happening, so it's, it's the.

1:27:03 And I don't know that you get that from Zoom meetings and those types of things. I think when you go to an empowered, you know this is their second one. Stephanie wants to know. Is it always in Charlotte. I don't know where the first one was, to be honest with you, but yeah, so yeah, if you haven't been to a conference. Also, if you go into the PodFest group, they're doing a lot of local meetups. Like I know, they're going to be in Los Angeles next week, so you know, keep that in mind. Did you see the PodNose? I did not. Holy cow, do I have to hit this again? And somewhere I have this. There we go, the full effect of that.

1:27:45 Thank you very much. Thank you for two years of entertaining every Monday morning on the treadmill. Thank you, I'd give you more, but Cridlin and Sethi swallowed the other 50% of my thank you money. That Cridlin guy, that Cridlin First of all who? And then second of all man. He's high maintenance he. And then second of all man, he's high maintenance. He's talking all the time writing all the time. Come on, Cridlin. Flying all over the world giving us information. No stuff, jeez, yeah, that's it, andy. That's it Giving us information. We can't find other places. What are you thinking? about Emails Cridlin, you send me too many emails. That's it. Well, Jim, what is coming up on Home Gadget Geeks? Yeah, I almost never do this. A couple weeks ago I was talking about this Lutron plug that you can put outside.

1:28:31 You know I do gadget reviews. I didn't do a podcast this week so I thought I'll indulge me for a second. I'll throw the link to the review that I did in the chat. I don't do a lot of reviews. Love some feedback on it. If you would, I threw the link in the chat. If you want to head out there and just give me some feedback on the review, that would be awesome. But yeah, you can take a week off and I did that. I had a buddy get married this weekend, long wedding weekend. We had ceremonies Wednesday, thursday, friday and then lunch today. So you can get it now at theaverageguytv. There we go, and on the School of Podcasting, it's question of the month time, and so the question of the month was have you ever hired somebody to work on your podcast?

1:29:12 If so, what? For what did they do and how did it work out? And that was a question from the one and only Mark Ducote from podcastbrandingco. So that'll be coming up on the show along with probably some of the stuff I just talked about. I really it's one of those things where I didn't realize how much live events can help until COVID, and that's when I just saw a lot of my show go. So, wow, we've got hot takes in the chat room. Holy cow. It's time to refer to my political choice. Well, you know again, political choices. I remember when people could just like oh, you're a Democrat, yeah, I'm a Republican.

1:29:55 No, no, no, no, Dave, that's never existed. That's a fantasy. We have always been getting after each other about stuff since the beginning. Cain and Abel friends. Cain and Abel. That's right, we've always been getting after each other. So don't think the old days were great. They weren't any better than they are today. So thanks, guys, for all the kind words. We will see you next week with another episode of Ask the Podcast Coach.