Evo Terra discusses the changes he's seen in the podcasting industry over the last 17 years, advice for independent podcasters, whether or not your mic makes a difference, and why you should totally go to a podcast conference.
Listen to Evo's show, "Podcast Pontifications"
Subscribe to Buzzsprout Conversations on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Do you know somebody we should interview on Buzzzsprout Conversations? Reach out on Twitter.
Evo Terra discusses the changes he's seen in the podcasting industry over the last 17 years, advice for independent podcasters, whether or not your mic makes a difference, and why you should totally go to a podcast conference.
Listen to Evo's show, "Podcast Pontifications"
Subscribe to Buzzsprout Conversations on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Do you know somebody we should interview on Buzzzsprout Conversations? Reach out on Twitter.
Do you have the ability to be interesting for four and a half hours? No, I don't know that you do?
Speaker 1:I mean most people don't, right, like? I'm a hockey fan and I love nothing more than to sit in a stadium and watch an NHL game, for the three hours it takes from puck drop until the final whistle blows. I don't want to watch a three hour little league game or a mites game or anything else, right, because there it's not entertaining. So, yes, by all means dig deep into a topic, but make sure that you can be interesting for the entire length of that topic.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Evo Terra. Evo, if you haven't heard of him before, is one of the first, I believe, 50 podcasters in the world. He's been podcasting since 2004. And it was so. It was really interesting conversation. We were able to talk about how podcasting has changed in the last 17 years, what has changed, what stayed the same, gave me a ton of actionable advice for independent creators and what should we should be doing when we're creating our shows. We talked about the importance of things like transcripts and accessibility in podcasting. We talked about things like why your mic doesn't matter and why you shouldn't be podcasting If your whole goal is to get rich and famous. Super interesting interview. I hope you enjoy it. So here we go. Here's my interview with Evo Terra. All right, well, evo, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. What was it like to interview Arthur C Clark and Ray Bradbury?
Speaker 1:Oh, a dream come true, a dream that I didn't know that I had. At the same time, you know I'm typically not intimidated by very many people and that's probably just more egotistic than anything else really, but when you truly are having conversations with people who are legends in the field and true masters, it's just, it's just mind blowing. Now also, let's not forget that both of these men, when I interviewed them, were very, very old and very, very on a different plane than the rest of us. Just some, yeah, just just really really, you know, again, old men, crazy ideas, who have kind of gotten a little bit more crazy in their old age. So it's fun. You want to let the conversation run and just kind of see where it goes, because you realize that you're not in control. These converse, the things you thought you were going to ask these two legends of science fiction. No, they want to take the conversation in a different way, and that's what you do. You just go along with them. But it was, it was really really fantastic.
Speaker 2:Rondevru with Ramo was one of the books I grew up with and when I first sci-fi, they really loved. Obviously, most people have read Fahrenheit 451 or the Marching Chronicles or 2001. So definitely powerhouses of sci-fi. How did you get connected to Arthur C Clark? Can you tell us that story?
Speaker 1:So the very first podcast I ever did was a science fiction podcast. My partner and I were interviewing science fiction authors pre-podcasting. We were doing this for an internet radio show and that's how we got into podcasting. When podcasting came along, we already had like 80 episodes in the can. So we kind of cheated and we're one of the first podcasts that had a giant bat catalog, which was which was lovely.
Speaker 1:The way we got connected with these is I have to owe all that to my partner who, of the skills he had, one of them was tenacity and the other one was not realizing and not having a good understanding of where he really is set in the universe.
Speaker 1:So we kind of felt, kind of felt pretty good about the show and really had no qualms picking up the phone and, you know, calling Arthur C Clark's publicist and saying can I have his phone number in Sri Lanka, which is where he was living at the time, and the same for Ray Bradbury just dogged determination.
Speaker 1:And I'm fortunate I didn't have to do that, because I hate cold calling for any reason whatsoever. But Mike didn't care and would happily just chase down leads and continue to dog people until they said yes, now also, granted, we've been doing it for several years, and this is back in the day where we were getting I don't know a dozen books in the mail every week from publishing houses all over. I mean, our catalog, our library was huge of all these books, so they really wanted us to interview people, and the reality was both. Well, I think Arthur C Clark had a new series coming out. He was writing a conjunction with someone else, and for Bradbury it was just simply all right, he's still talking about his own stuff, so let's get him on as well.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. You've been podcasting since October 14th 2004, which is weird to me because that's a few years before Apple invented podcasting. How did that happen?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're exactly right. It's a little before the summer of 2005 when they dropped it into iTunes. And, yeah, you know, as I mentioned, we had been doing the show and we already had an RSS feed because we were blogging, we had an article written for every one of our episodes and we were even embedding a real audio player in the code. Yeah, because we were really, really fancy in 2002. And so when my partner said a couple of days before that hey, there's this thing called podcasting, I took a look at it and said I think the only thing I have to do is figure out what this enclosure tag means. And while I'm not a developer, I'm a pretty decent hack at a lot of things.
Speaker 1:So I hacked apart the blogging platform we were using, which was pre-wordpress. It was called Moveable Type was the name of this. I remember Moveable Type. Yeah, yeah, the CMS we were using, but it seemed pretty simple to well, if I just drop, you know, dollar sign and then enclosure equals, and I just I figured out how to get the URL of the MP3 file that we had stored up on Bluehost or somewhere before. There were podcast hosting companies that we knew about and there's a link in there. I'm guessing that's the number of bytes that it is. So I haven't copied and pasted that in there, and so I had to hand code it every single time. I had to go in and edit the raw RSS feed each time we published. But boom, we had a podcast.
Speaker 2:So how has it changed? I mean, you've now been podcasting for 17 years. What have you seen change in the industry and what's changed for you?
Speaker 1:I think almost everything has changed from a technical perspective, you know, but at the same time, so much of it has remained the same. You know, it's still largely made up of people who have something to say and have a platform they can say it on. We people are under the impression that podcasting wasn't very diverse as far as the types of content you could listen to back then, but that's not true. We had radio shows who were just repurposing their content In fact, that's what we were doing originally. Plus, there were NPR types that were already podcasting as well, but a huge swath of people whose only distribution point was this and they weren't just doing interviews. There were really cool variety shows. There were audio dramas back in 2004. There was everything you can think of that was up. That is podcasting today. We were doing it way back then. Someone was doing it way back then. There just wasn't four million of us doing it way back then. There were like four of us doing it way back then.
Speaker 1:So all the things that have changed is, you know, technology has gotten easier. The barrier to entry from a technology stage whether you're buying equipment or whether you're using software has come down significantly. People are spoiled for choice when it comes to where to host podcast episodes. There's a lot less guesswork in that and, from the listener perspective, that's really where most of the big changes have happened, because it as much as we complain about the hurdle of getting people to listen to a podcast in 2021. I implore you to just think what it was like when there were no podcatchers on mobile phones. When podcasting started, it all happened on a computer and then someone had to transfer their files from their computer to a mobile device to listen. And it's still attracted listeners Weird.
Speaker 2:There is an old interview that you have where you were talking about like moving audio files to. It wasn't a zoom, it was whatever.
Speaker 1:It was like a Rio or something I River was probably what I talked about using.
Speaker 2:And I remember those days like downloading episodes into iTunes, trying to hook up to an iPod. It's not working. Oh, I forgot to do it before my long car ride and there was no way to get another podcast episode unless you preloaded everything well in advance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and preloaded means you could probably fit around three hours worth of content, because their memory was on, these things were really, really small. So, yeah, all sorts of barriers that don't exist today, which is wild.
Speaker 2:One of the barriers that is still there is on the creator side. We all would like to be the big podcaster. We still have to do the work. Yeah, what advice would you give to new podcasters people thinking about starting a podcast and just trying to find their journey?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it depends on what path you're on. If you so. There really isn't the only thing stopping people from podcasting today and I recognize that I'm saying this from a position of privilege, so I want to make sure that I check myself but most people who have the means can start a podcast. It is relatively inexpensive. You can do it for almost free as far as a cost perspective goes, if that's what you want. So the reality is that anybody who wants to pursue their passion in podcasting probably can those costs continue to approach free more and more all the time. But the one thing that's not free is your time, and so people have to decide whether they're trading time or money to do things.
Speaker 1:Now I really encourage individuals who just want to try and play with the podcasting space, to see what they can make out of it, to do that the same way that we did back in the day. You have to define what this looks like for you. So go and explore and do that. But for businesses or people who are professional, who have a goal at the end, who I really want to do something rather than just see where this takes me. There's something I want to do Recognize that your path is different, because the paths have been well-blazed, if you will, over the last 17 years and while there's always room for new paths because this is digital we can have an unlimited number of shows or an unlimited number of ways to do things there have been a lot of lessons learned along the way and people listeners have come to expect certain levels of quality from the certain types of shows they listen to.
Speaker 1:They're willing to forgive a lot for someone who's exploring and having fun as a hobby, but for businesses who are really trying to do something with their show and have a business outcome, you need to really up your game. So you might need to elicit the services of someone who's a pro at this and it's not a pitch for working with me, but working with anybody out there.
Speaker 2:I was about to say if you're looking for a pro to help you look right behind Evo over his left shoulder.
Speaker 1:simpler media this is true, we certainly can do that, but it really doesn't matter to me what you do. But there's just so much that you don't have to struggle and learn on your own because it's been done, and I would say everything's been done. Everything can take a new twist on it, but you may need to bring someone on who knows exactly what they're doing and help you execute against your goals.
Speaker 2:There's definitely a sense that if you are a brand or your business and you are starting a podcast, the quality of that show is going to reflect on the brand that you are representing and so, while it may be a totally new initiative for you, but if it's a big brand, you want to make sure that it comes out looking professional, sounding great, that things that podcast listeners have grown accustomed to, that we know. Oh, this is decent quality. There's actually links in the show notes, they have good cover, art and those things actually being taken care of help reflect positively on the brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, they do. And also I think we're getting a lot less forgiving from an accessibility point of view. There are a great level, there's expectations that have been set and we need to meet, because now we can meet them and so think it's not just dumping audio out there. Whether you're a hobbyist or whether you're a business doing it, it's not just audio, it's the episode details that you mentioned, it's having a transcript and a corrected transcript on the site, all of the things that are very important so that everybody can enjoy your content.
Speaker 1:Yes, I get it, I understand it's a hobby, but there is a certain level of things you need to do, and hats off to the hosting companies, like, I don't know, buzzsprout that help you make sure that you're doing things in the right way. I mean, honestly, I wish that podcast hosting companies all of them, by the way would push more for some of those standards. I get there's a relationship they have to worry about with the customers, but I would like to see people make much less mistakes or at least, when they are making mistakes by missing things, understand and be told what you're doing is not at the level of acceptability. Okay, you can hit go if you want to, but really you should consider doing these things better, and that's just going to happen more and more as we continue. As the podcast basically gets more evolved and more streamlined, it'll be less chance of people making mistakes because they don't know that things have to be done.
Speaker 2:I remember probably the first time I met you in person, we had a long conversation about podcast accessibility, specifically transcripts, for anybody that is hard of hearing or deaf. There is a large, much larger segment of the world that is actually hard of hearing than we really appreciate and it's a lot of people that podcasts can become totally inaccessible if the audio quality isn't near perfect and there's not a transcript. If you have great transcripts, it really forgives even a lot of that. Audio quality issues as well, because people can read along with it and it gets a lot easier to find stuff later on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're exactly right. Transcripts serve a lot of purposes. I think a lot of podcasters have the mistaken assumption that transcripts are only for people who are completely deaf, and that's not true. They're just like most things. Deafness is on a spectrum Hearing loss. When I have mild hearing loss, mine is luckily correctable, so it doesn't cause me too much of an issue.
Speaker 1:But that's what not only transcripts are for, but all the other things that you do to your audio to make sure it's accessible, like ensuring that the voices are audible, which is weird, I have to say this, but I say it all the time Make sure that the dialogue is able to be heard. I know that you spend a lot of time on those background effects and that car crash sound, but if someone's speaking during it, I probably need to know what they say and if it's missed, it's missed and that's a problem. A transcript can help with that, obviously, but also so it can normalizing your tracks. So can understanding that not everyone listens to your really well-crafted, sound-designed audio drama in a quiet room with headphones. Many people listen in their car with road noise, or they listen on a commute when we can commute once again. So just making sure that the content that you put out there everyone can enjoy. I think is so important.
Speaker 2:There's also just a great ability for people to go back and find old content. It's so much easier when there are transcripts. So in preparation for this interview, I read a handful of your interviews from I mean some as early as I think like 2006,. They were still saved online only as transcripts. I found a few episodes of podcast pontifications, one of which I was on and was able to review our transcript. It would have been much more difficult to one some of those episodes. I could not find audio files and so one they would have been totally lost. But then two there's a very different experience for me listening to a podcast at 3X, so that I can get a lot quickly, versus reading, which is probably faster than 3X speed. Anyway, I retain so much more when reading.
Speaker 1:Well, we can't scan audio content yet Our brains aren't designed to do that. It has to be consumed in a linear fashion. I mean, as great as podcasting is, it's not like watching a video, where that's literally the only thing you can do. At least with listening to a podcast, you can walk around the house, you know, clean the kitchen, those various things unlike video.
Speaker 1:But still, when you really are searching for information and you want to dive deep into it, having a transcript or, in some cases, having a rewritten article, as someone's taken their raw audio, the words they put out and then reformatted them, having the ability to go back through that is super important for a lot of reasons. Some people don't have the time to listen to your show, so that transcript or article that you can create will help that person stay connected to you. They don't feel like, oh man, I missed what they talked about yesterday. I can just go back to yesterday's episode and do a quick scan and get what I need, or make the decision to listen and get all of it that I needed. But you know, it's a matter of choice and that's an important thing in today.
Speaker 2:So part of why I mean why I know you and why you have so much to say about the podcast industries because you have been here since the very beginning and part of that was that you were invited to write multiple books on podcasting Could you talk to us about some of the books that you've written, that experience and maybe what you wrote in those books?
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, well, I'll do what I can because it's been a while. But early on in the process, back in 2005, I got a phone call from a guest who had been on that science fiction radio show I mentioned previously. It's no longer available, by the way, you call the Dragon page. It's been dead for a number of years. But one of the authors I had become friends with called me up. I've been.
Speaker 1:He says in his voice I have been asked to write a book about podcasting. And my reply to him is why did they ask you to write a book about podcasting? I mean, he was podcasting at the time but I was doing all the work. And so he said well, that's why I'm calling you, I need a co-author. I said OK, how long is the book supposed to be? Now, all this happened when I'm driving 90-minute commute home at the time, so I'm probably half through that commute. So I asked him the question how long is the book? Because I'm thinking pamphlet, maybe a blog post about how to podcast. I can't remember.
Speaker 1:This was 2005. There was an FTP file up somewhere making RSS feed and boom, it's done. I totally understood the project. So I said find out how long this book needs to be. And he writes. He calls back five minutes later. He says 266 pages which two things were. I thought that's long and also oddly specific. I mean not a rough number, that's what I said. So I don't know about this T can you call who are writing this book for? And he said I'll find out. Like these are questions you should have done. So hang up, calls back a minute later and he says it's Wiley's, it's a for dummies book. And my response is tell him we'll do it. I mean, we didn't even discuss price. We hadn't discussed anything. It was like okay, done, because I knew that the For Dummies titles will attract people. There are people who read For Dummies books. There are people who say, oh, I'm not a dummy, I don't want this kind of stuff. But there are way more people who say, as a matter of fact, I am a dummy and I will take that $20 book off the shelf. They sell themselves Zero.
Speaker 1:I worked in marketing at the time, so new, I didn't have to do any marketing of that title. But I also had no idea what I was doing. I'd never written a book before. I'd done a lot of writing before, but never in a book form. So I was a total newbie to this. But unfortunately I had my co-author who'd done a lot of this stuff in the past, so I basically let him deal with all of the hassles of getting it done.
Speaker 1:So it finally came time to write the book, and Wiley has an extremely specific way you are supposed to write Like. You are trained to write a For Dummies book. It's not just you know, eva Otero writes a book and they put a slap to For Dummies. I don't know. I had to write it in that particular style. So one of the things you have to do is write a sample chapter, not a sample chapter. You write the first. You write a chapter from the book and it can't be the first chapter. It's got to be somewhere inside. So I had to.
Speaker 1:I'm going to write a book on, I think, ftp, and I forget what T was writing his chapter on. But all I know is one of the things I'm really good at is procrastinating, and so I waited and I waited, and I waited and finally T got his done about two weeks before they would do, which is odd for him because he procrastinates more than me. He writes his chapter, sends it in, and I'm copied on the email. A day later they return the email and said we have some edits. I open up the Word document and it's a sea of red. It has just more corrections and crossed out and rewrite request. I mean, this is, this is in a chapter of a book and, like every page, there's most of the things are wrong, something. Oh my God, this guy knows how to write a book. I don't. What's going to happen to me.
Speaker 1:So I went to the bookstore and I bought, I think, xml for dummies the closest thing I could find at the time to podcasting for dummies and I read that book from cover to cover twice. No one ever reads a dummies book from cover to cover, but I did. I read that thing from cover to cover. And then I opened up the giant Bible of how to write a book that they did and read those things. I went oh, here this makes sense. Okay, that on a Sunday night, hammer out my chapter. Just hammer it out. Outline is already done. Just hammer the chapter, send it in. On a Sunday night. They returned it. Three changes Whoa. Now, that's not because I'm so much smarter than T. I didn't have to unlearn any bad habits, I just had to learn all of these habits. So it basically taught me how to write the way for dummies books are written and that's how I do everything from now on Super short sentences, super short paragraphs, all of these things done together. So that's kind of the how to story.
Speaker 1:As far as what went in it, you know again, we wrote this book in 2005. We knew podcasting was going to change drastically. So how do we make it not out of date as soon as it's in print? So we really kept it to much more high level concepts. So, yeah, we talked about audacity, but audacity is still around, luckily, and we didn't do a push this button and do this button. We tried to resist that as much as we possibly could, you know. Instead, we talked about you know the value of writing, you know episode details and how to. Back then it was how to do an FTP. No one FTP is their episodes any longer to various services. A lot of things that don't matter today.
Speaker 1:But the other good thing about the for dummies titles is they refresh them all the time. So we got a chance to write the second edition a couple of years later and I have since stepped back from writing the books T is still writing him. Another friend of mine, chuck Tomasi, who has also been writing for podcasting for a very long time. They just came out with the fourth edition. I think in November of last year was the new version. Oh, and in the middle of that there's also expert podcasting practices for dummies, which they asked for us to write, which I said that's the dumbest book name ever. So I'll write it, but at double the the payment, to which they said yes, which was good news, and I'm glad they gave me double the money, because that book came nowhere near earning out its advance, because that's a dumb title expert for dummies. Yeah, well then you find. But anyhow, those are the books that I've written in the podcasting space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have to ask you this because you have written some other books. Is it healthy to eat only sausage and beer for an entire month?
Speaker 1:Very healthy. I am living proof of how healthy that can be. Yes, you were speaking of the beer diet, a brew story which I wrote what a decade ago, because I had this crazy idea of what would happen if the only food I put in my mouth, the only calories that I put in my mouth for an entire month, would be beer and sausage. What would happen? I did all this because a very good friend of mine is a surgeon and we were lamenting one day about diets and how there's just not a lot of good data. There's a lot of survey data where they send researchers and they ask people what they eat, but there's not a lot of real activity. Let's track the real food that goes inside of someone's mouth. So I decided to do that for a month with a beer and sausage to see what would happen. In spoiler alert, it was actually very good for me.
Speaker 1:I lost, I think, 15 pounds that first year. I went to see that same doctor every single week with blood work and full evaluation before and after and during. My liver enzymes never rose above baseline, so I wasn't getting that drunk. And my triglycerides, the bad cholesterol, cut in half on my overall cholesterol and down by a third. I lost 15 pounds. So yeah, do it Now. I don't know how sustainable it is long term to eat nothing but sausage and drink beer. Probably not very sustainable, but it proved a point that diets are pretty much garbage. If you control your caloric intake, you'll probably lose weight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you eat less, you might lose some weight. Surprise, that's a good advice.
Speaker 1:Like I tell people, I lost weight on that diet because of math. I burn around 2,200 calories just sitting here all day long. But if I only put in 1,500 calories that's in that deficit of 700 calories and it has to come from somewhere and it comes from the extra mass that my body had been carrying for a number of years.
Speaker 2:One thing that you're pretty passionate about between your history podcasting and also your history writing books is independent creators, and you have a lot of thoughts about how people who are creating content can and should remain independent. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Speaker 1:Well, listen, independence is what most people have as their only option. There are a lot of people out there offering exclusive deals. I remember back when Amazon launched the Kindle and then very quickly they started doing this Amazon exclusive, where authors could publish just with Amazon and get a much higher royalty rate, but that means you couldn't publish to Barnes and Noble and all the other places like that, and that was great, but that wasn't offered to everyone. And we're seeing something similar now in podcasting today where some companies OK, one company, spotify is throwing piles of cash at people to make them exclusive and exclusive means only on Spotify. We're listening to that deal and I totally understand why they do this. Did I mention giant piles of cash? Right, when you can get a lot more money doing it that way? But that path isn't open to most people. In fact, it's not even open to a small percentage who get that deal.
Speaker 1:So there's always a strong independent movement in everything. It's easy to be independent in, like podcasting, like writing those two things specifically Some things that's a lot harder to be an independent in like if you're an independent musician. You know I was an independent musician back at the turn of the century and that's a hard gig. Unless a label picks you up, you're not going to be played on the radio or picked up in bookstores. But that's changed. You know, even in the radio world now, or the music world now, that's changed.
Speaker 1:Any artist can have their own stuff on Spotify, for example, and other platforms that let that listen to. So I think the world's becoming a bit more accommodating towards independent people, independent creators, which is good news because, again, the bulk of creation of almost everything is independent creators, with exclusively exclusivity only offered to the elite class, and there's always going to be a clash with that. But I think that's OK and I mean I don't think we're ever going to see a world where exclusivity goes away and everything's in a nice level playing field. I don't live in that fantasy world, but you know there's a lot more people who are independent and I think there always will be. So let's just find ways to be independent and successful, because it's doable.
Speaker 2:What should somebody be doing if they know that the path for them is independent? So maybe that's actually what's attractive about creating content, whether it be written or podcasting. They want to be their own boss, run their own media empire, however big or small that they end up being. How should they think about it? What should they do to remain independent and also, at least hopefully, be successful along the way?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean well, not everyone, but some people are going to face a choice in that path, because we may start out thinking I want to be independent and I want to be in control of my future, and these are all very, very good things, and I'm not even worried about exclusivity, I'm not even looking for exclusivity. But at some point time it might happen, you might get that offer. Someone will maybe maybe send you an email and says, hey, we like your stuff, can we talk about our relationship? And maybe that deal of exclusivity is float out there to you. So you're gonna have to make a decision. What do you wanna do? Is it really important for you to stay truly independent or do you think, for whatever reason, this opportunity is better for you to create the content that you make?
Speaker 1:There's that old adage about you know people who you know they sell out. The record label come along and now I'm gonna sell out because I took all the money to do this stuff. And my argument to that has always been this I don't believe there's a chance of selling out. I believe there's only a chance of selling out too cheaply. If you do, you know, if you get the right kind of money. What can you do with that?
Speaker 1:If Spotify offers you $60 million for your independent podcast, sure you can put the $60 million in your pocket, or can you use that $60 million to launch something even bigger than you had previously? Can you empower other people who have similar voices to yours, who maybe have underserved voices than yours? Can you have them do different things? So I understand that if independence is the most important thing, then just stay independent, right, do the things that you wanna do. But I would counsel anyone to don't automatically say, oh, never's a very long time, right, so the right opportunity comes around. I think it should all be evaluated and make sure that what you're gonna do it makes it good for you, but also that spread the wealth around the rest of the world too.
Speaker 2:I've heard you described I'm not sure if you were the person who originated this, but as podcasts philosopher, the person who's trying to make podcasting better. You had a little hint of it right there. What should we be doing to make podcasting better? Wow?
Speaker 1:there's so many things we can do to make podcasting better. I think I'll answer that question by dealing into why I chose that particular path of making podcasting better. Through the 17 years, as I mentioned previously, it's gotten a lot easier to podcast. It's gotten a lot easier to listen to podcasts. It's even gotten easier to make money from podcasting, and there are all sorts of tools out there that are based on ease, ease, ease and all the tutorials you hear. Here's 10 easy ways to start this, whatever.
Speaker 1:And I felt that there wasn't enough emphasis on making things actually better, because just because something's easy doesn't mean it's better. I was involved in a project for several years that helped independent authors put their audio books that they would self-record out into the world, and I gotta tell you, most of them were garbage and so, sturgeon's Law, 95% of anything is crap and they were. I didn't feel like I was really helping make things better through that service. I mean I did it. It was important. People had their own passion and skill and what out there, so that's fine. I didn't feel bad about it. I was definitely cutting people off with the knees that wanted to put really terrible things out there like offensive things. No, no, thank you, we don't need that out there.
Speaker 1:But I really wanted to focus more about what things are better, and I also wanted to take a look at some of the more important questions or importance is the wrong way to say that deeper questions Like why there's a lot of how stuff out there but not a lot of conversation around why we do things and how the changing world whether that's technology or geopolitical landscaping has changed. How will that impact podcasting? Who's thinking about that? And there are people who think about that and a lot of my friends think about that that have been it for the longest time.
Speaker 1:No one really had a show about thinking about those sort of deep thoughts in the podcasting space, and so that's why I launched podcast pontifications to do that, to have a platform to where I could come up with these ideas and thoughts that are around ways to not only make podcasting better and what the future of podcasting is going to look like, but also have tackle some of those more complicated questions and see what other forces macro and micro might impact the podcasting world, because that's happening every day. The pandemic had a huge impact in podcasting. It wasn't the impact any of us thought it was going to be? I don't think, but it certainly had an indelible impact on what podcasting is today, and it's not like that change is ever going to go away. So that's important for me personally to think about ways to make things better, talk about the future and think about those deep thoughts around podcasting.
Speaker 2:One of the things I talk about a lot.
Speaker 2:What I truly love about podcasting is it's a different medium than YouTube.
Speaker 2:It's a different medium than blogs or Twitter or anywhere else, because it's prioritizing this really long form content.
Speaker 2:We're often checking into it. I mean there's podcasts that go three, four hours. Any podcasts are 45 minutes long and we can get into a little bit more depth, a little bit more nuance and understand people's opinions a little bit better. And there's a lot more bringing people together over a podcast and sharing ideas than maybe we get over on Twitter sometimes, where it's mostly us all just taking hot takes, the other people's hot takes. And it's what I recommend podcasts, not just as a listener, but also as a creator and also to brands, because we have to engage with the medium that we want to improve and the medium we think is the best chance of improving people's lives. And I think that podcasting, by virtue of being in your ears and your attention's often you're doing the dishes, you're mowing the lawn, you're driving or something else you're willing to stick with it a little bit longer. You're not just there on a Saturday, hungover, thinking I guess I'll watch a few dozen YouTube videos, right?
Speaker 1:right, right, right, I think you're right in all of that. It certainly does allow for I think I don't know that a board longer, but I'm gonna go with deeper, deeper conversation. I mean, I know that and you know this, and anybody who listens to podcasts knows that there is a deeper connection made when you hear someone say something than when you read someone who's written things, because we have to put our own inflection in text and I can only do so much with italics and bold, right, I mean, it only conveys so much, but I can convey a lot more as I'm speaking. Anybody can convey a lot more as you're speaking. So just the audio medium itself enables a much deeper connection, if you will.
Speaker 1:When it comes to how much the length issue, how long you take things, absolutely, there are some of the most popular podcasts in the world go for four and a half hours. What I like to recommend to people when they're thinking about that is do you have the ability to be interesting for four and a half hours? No, I don't know that you do. I mean, most people don't, right, like? I'm a hockey fan and I'm loving it right now when we're recording this, it's semi-finals for hockey go-habs. I don't find that if we're losing on Thursday or night. But I've also used to coach youth hockey because my kid played hockey all growing up and I love nothing more than to sit in a stadium and watch an NHL game for the three hours it takes from puck drop until the final whistle blows. I don't want to watch a three-hour little league game or a mites game or anything else, right, because it's not entertaining. I'm good for watching kids play for about 30 minutes and that's it Because it's not interesting. Right, after seven point times like, oh, you're not going to see the skill and whatever. So yes, by all means, dig deep into a topic, but make sure that you can be interesting for the entire length of that topic.
Speaker 1:One of the smartest things to do is, if you can't, you'd be interesting for four hours. Maybe you can be interesting. 30 minutes of time for eight episodes, that'll give you the same number. You'll still get the four hours out of the day, if that's how long it takes to cover something. But you're also going to think about where your audience is in their headspace and what they're doing. And do they have four hours extra in their week to fit another podcast? You know all those questions are out there Because we can make them as long as we want. We can also make them as short as we want. We get our own rules with this and we're not beholden to anybody else's schedule or a clock or something else. It's up to us and our audience what we want. So find a way to be interesting for the right amount of time. That is my suggestion.
Speaker 2:Some advice I've seen run across a few times that you've given is for people to kind of do their research, and I always take this back to. If you want to be the expert, if you want to be the person who has the Dungeons and Dragons podcast, then you've got to know about Dungeons and Dragons and you need to be playing it and you need to be. I don't know anything, so I'm now pulling this out. We've got to have been a Dungeon Master and you need to have read the books. And it's pretty apparent when people are doing a podcast and they are more excited about being the personality on the podcast versus being the actual person who's putting the work into creating the show.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing I mean. To do a podcast, you can. Most podcasts are a mix of entertaining and informational, and if you're just there to be entertaining, you're just there to tell jokes, fine, then tell jokes really well, or tell stories really well if that's what your skill set is. But if you're trying to impart knowledge, even of something as mundane as a D&D podcast or any of the role playing game podcasts, in order for you to convey information you have to be at least as informed as the people who are listening to your show, and probably even more so of doing that. And so I have a lot of interests that I will never podcast about. I'm an avid disc golf player. I love disc golf, but I'm not going to make a podcast about disc golf because I don't play it that often and I'm certainly not any good. And so what am I going to do? Say, well, I went out and threw some plastic in the woods today. The end, that would be the full show, right, it wouldn't be all that interesting. I've lived through this.
Speaker 1:When I was interviewing science fiction authors back in the day, I got to the point where I didn't want to do it anymore, at least not until I'd read the book and it takes me, you know, a couple of weeks to read through a science fiction novel and we're putting out a show every single week. So that's tough, you know. And if I didn't read the book, then I'm asking dumb questions like where do you get your ideas and what's the book about? You know, these are just dumb questions that you don't get a good interviewers either read the book or here's the trick they have their staff read the book and then they give them questions to ask so that they can have a longer conversation, to have the illusion, if you will, of knowledge about that. But somebody else on the team actually did so. Yeah, you got to do your research, you got to know what you're talking about, and that's don't forget that. It's yes, I get it. It's fun to have a podcast. It's a blast.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a charge you get by talking to the microphone, but you don't want to come off sounding like a moron if you can avoid it and you can Just do your research and it's going to be hard to keep up with podcasting because you know and I know and lots of our viewers and listeners know, it's really hard to grow a show and if you aren't enjoying the front end work, the research, the putting the show together, the recording, it's going to be tough to stick with it on the timescale that you will need to if you want your show to be successful. It really is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're exactly right. You know I help a variety of clients, some of which I help do the research on, but most I don't. But I'm fortunate enough to be plugged in to the the conversations they're having with their. They're usually it's a team of people that are actually doing the research and it's just amazing how much effort really goes into a show. It is rarely do my clients just sit down and talk with the guests.
Speaker 1:You know they are, have done research, they've got good questions. They've taken the time to listen to what that person has said on other shows and try and not ask them the same questions over and over again. They figured out what their own unique angle is, which I talk about quite a lot. You got to have an angle. The topic is not enough. So why is this person going to be on the show? What is your show about and what do you want to bring out from them? All that is so important and it can take well, it will take hours. If you're lucky, single-digit hours, but it's not uncommon for it to be double-digit hours to really really do your homework. So yeah, that's a lot of work to make a show worthy of growth.
Speaker 2:What do you tell your clients If they say all right, I need to have a unique angle that makes sense. What's my unique angle? People watching this, what's their unique angle? How do people figure it out?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, it is so hard to do, but unfortunately it's not something that someone else can give you. That's the problem. It really becomes a true process. You know of what it is you want to, what you want to get to, and everybody's got a different process about it. What I like to do, the way I figure it out and the way I counsel my clients to do that is figure out what your topic you're going to talk about.
Speaker 1:Let's do we'll go stick with D&D podcasts for just a moment. Right, you're going to talk about D&D. Maybe you're not a D&D podcast, but you're going to bring on a guest and you're going to bring on Gary Giax who I think might be dead, to start a D&D back in the day Not that I know, I know and you want to talk about something, right. So you've got to figure out what your angle is going to be. So I start writing out questions, right, and then figuring out where the theme is. Is there a commonality, is there a thread to this? And then, once I've got a few questions down, the second thing to think about is what is what perspective works for your show.
Speaker 1:So, if you're doing, you want to interview one of the creators of D&D for your show and it's about oh, let's just say that it's it's a music podcast, but whatever it's got, it's a pop culture and you got music and you want to talk about that? Great, then you might want to lead the conversation into something around the themes of music. You know fan creative music or you know renfair music or weird violins and stuff, and you can ask questions that are about that. But you've just got to figure out and I know I'm kind of giving a non-answer here but what is your show's secret sauce, what is your secret sauce and what's the guest bring? And somewhere there's a Venn diagram where those overlap and that's where you want to be. You know, kind of in the middle of that. So it actually all makes sense to take the conversation and then ask questions that way. As long as you're not interviewing Arthur C Clark and Ray Bradbury, then your angle means nothing. You're just going to talk with these guys and see where it goes.
Speaker 2:You're along for the ride, yeah exactly right. One of the big red flags I see is when people say oh, I want to start a podcast, I've got all the gear, I'm ready to go. What are the most popular categories? Yeah, because what does that tell you? So it asks that.
Speaker 1:Man, it tells me that show's not going to live for very long, because you know, you and I both know that it's the rare show that comes out of the gate that gets you know a hundred listeners, let alone tens of thousands, to make it some sort of a going concern, right? So you got to be in this thing for the long haul. So if your decision of what to podcast about was predicated on what the most popular things are and it's not something you're particularly interested in, probably going to burn out real quickly on that you might need to make it to seven episodes, let alone two or three episodes. Yeah, it has to be something where you really want to do this, or you've got piles and piles of cash behind you to pay someone to do it and also to pay someone to market it, to get it out there. You know, one of those two things has to happen.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I see it all the time. You know, hey, I've got all this equipment. You know, what should I? What should I podcast about? And it's like I just bought this typewriter. What kind of book should I write?
Speaker 1:You know, said no author ever right, you know, no one thinks about that this way. So yeah, I get that you want to chase a trend, but you might want to just learn the craft first. You know, podcast, whatever is interesting to you, and if it takes you a month or a year or 10 years to figure it out, great, do that, and then you can start going. Ok, now let's be more opportunistic and let's look at where the opportunities really lie.
Speaker 2:I'm now reminded. This, I think, is advice from Stephen King, and he said whenever he has a writing workshop, the first question in Q&A is do you use a typewriter or do you use a word processor? Is everything done by pen? And he goes this has nothing to do with the writing process, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you are recording on a MV7 and SM7B or or just directly into your phone. Yeah, they're.
Speaker 2:They're slightly different, they're different tools and some are going to give you a little bit better sound quality. But the thing that you've got to learn on your own really is going to be the craft of actually thinking through a story, kind of putting together an outline, actually recording it if it's getting guests on the right way to craft a pitch, or getting a good chemistry with your co-host or whoever you're podcasting with, or, in the case of audio dramas, actually going through the real hard work of writing out a story. That's the craft. The craft is not being like, oh the OK, so this cable plugs in here, that plugs into the computer and now we're set Exactly right.
Speaker 1:One of the shows that I'd love listening to, and I'll give an unsolicited plug for a podcast called how Sound. And how Sound is amazing because it is all about the craft of audio storytelling, and you heard a little bit of talk about gear in there, but it's more of a wow. This was recorded on a eight-bit recorder because that's what someone had at the time, and this one is done on an iPhone because that's what they had at the time, when the inspiration struck, when the opportunity was there. Now, what do you do with the sound? It's all about how do you craft that sound and but yeah, oftentimes in the podcasting world, it's all about what microphone do you use? What DAW do you use? What podcast hosting company do you use? What social media sites do you use?
Speaker 1:And none of it's important. It's all important, but none of it's important, right? Not at this level. Not at this level. When you get further up, then you can start having you know companies that go, oh, mv7 or SM7B. I wonder which one I should. Okay, that's a valid conversation eventually, but right now, just learn how to do the thing and you can wind up changing your tool sets out later on, but you got to have the craft first, right, you know, buy your very first hammer and say should I build a house or should I build a boat? What do you think I'm going to do? No, you can learn how to work with wood.
Speaker 2:Step one I have recently started playing golf and I hit some ball into the woods and someone goes oh, let me look at your driver, why don't you try this driver? And I went well, I know that the problem is not the driver and they're like oh, what is it? And I was like the problem is that I'm not good at golf. Yeah, like I know, this is the limiting factor and, at least at the beginning. It's why we always recommend the Samsung Q2U as a mic, because it's a great mic.
Speaker 2:It's not going to hold you back. It's 60 bucks. You get it and then we get you as quickly as we can to the real process, which is okay. We put the golf club in your hands Right Now. You've got to start taking swings at it and it's going to be frustrating and it's often. You know it's the limiting factor and golf is me the limiting factor and almost everything is me. And podcasting at the beginning, it's getting comfortable with the sound of your voice, figuring out how to craft an episode and how to pull that together in the editing process to make it something people want to listen to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's rare that a podcast that is floundering is made better because of a bad microphone. That certainly happens. There are certainly podcasts out there who've got to figure it out, who upgrade their equipment and things sound better, but it's kind of not going to matter for the longest time. As you said, it's not the driver, it's the person driving the driver. That is really the challenge here.
Speaker 2:We've kind of touched on this a few different times with the opportunities that have come kind of towards you through podcasting. Can you kind of just talk a bit about what is the value of podcasting? If we take off the table for a second, you're not gonna get famous, you're not gonna make a lot of money. You're creating a show that you love and maybe there aren't a ton of people listening. Give us the pitch for that person to keep podcasting, or well.
Speaker 1:I think there is. I think there is and I'm gonna take it back to a Friend of mine who's another long-time podcasters name is Dave slusher. Dave has been doing the evil genius Chronicles since the beginning of time. He's actually doing this a longer than I have, and the same show, by the way. So I remember years ago Dave was having a conversation on his show Because I a lot of us had said you know, it's something pretty magical, even if you have a small number. And the story I always give to people is you know, let's just imagine that Every day excuse me, every week you went to your local library and you had a regular time. You're gonna get 10 o'clock every Sunday. You're showing up at this library and every time you did that, you walked in their room and there were 30 people in that room Eager to listen to the things you had to say. You will probably Keep going to that 10 o'clock appointment on Sunday forever. Because what a charge is that? To fill a room? 30 people listen what you have to say? Pretty awesome, listen.
Speaker 1:I've been on big keynote stages when they've not been 30 people in the room, so that's it's pretty powerful when you can fill something up like that, and so we'd all feel good about that. Yet when we listen to our look at our podcast stats, we go oh, I'm only getting, you know, a couple dozen downloads. You know I'm less than a hundred. You know it's nowhere near the average of 120 or whatever else. I'm not. And again, I just remember these people are showing up all the time to do that. So that's the story I've been pitching.
Speaker 1:What I heard Dave say one time is he said you need to figure out what the minimum Viable number is for you, the minimum size of the audience that makes sense for you as a podcaster. Is it a thousand, okay, is it a hundred? Okay? Dave said his number is one and he is that one. So as long as he likes making the podcast, as long as it's a creative outlet for him, that's good enough. It doesn't matter what the numbers drop down to. He won't abandon that.
Speaker 1:So I'm not suggesting that your number needs to be one, although I would say the minute you're no longer interested in your podcast You're probably not you should probably recognize that as a warning sign. It's probably not going to be good for the for a real length of time. So you know, I think the advice is You're probably, statistically speaking, you're not gonna get rich, you're not gonna get famous, you're gonna make a dime. In fact, you're gonna spend money To podcast, like most of us do. It's going to cost you money to podcast, but so does everything else that you do with it you enjoy. You just bought a thousand dollar carbon fiber bicycle. Tell me when you win the Tour de France. It's never gonna happen, right? I mean, statistically speaking, that's not going to happen. Nor are you going to enter any contest or various things. We, we spend money on things that make us feel good all the time, and I don't know about you, but I think I know about you. Podcasting makes you feel good, it makes me feel good, so it's worth it to me.
Speaker 2:Pat Flynn talks a lot about the value of entrepreneurship, even if you never make a ton of money off of it, even if you're actually an employee for your entire career. Yeah, that kind of building some of these skills and working this entrepreneurial muscle is actually healthy for you. And Kind of what I hear you saying is sometimes the art creation and the exploration and just enjoying the hobby are valuable, even if the likely thing that happens is that your podcast ends up in the you know low hundred downloads eventually. And if you could reframe that from a number on a dashboard as Well. These are the people who are consistently on Wednesday mornings when they drive to work. They pull up my show Three times a week. They listen to me Pontificate about podcasting. You know that people can. Actually, if you know that there's real people behind those numbers who are actually interested in the content, it Really changes At least you're the way your relationship with your podcasting, your craft.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah it does. And it doesn't have to be entrepreneurial In nature. You know, for a lot of people that have no Interest in in trying to ever earn money with this, it's not even something they would consider because it's more just a creative expression. And then there are a lot of people who are in the middle. Can I make some money and and ply my craft at the same time and get better at things, possibly? Or there's others on the other, and so it's a wide spectrum, once again, of what people want to get out of a show. But you're right, we, you need to go beyond. If you're fancy yourself checking your downloads every other day, I would counsel you to stop doing that, you know, and and maybe think about more things like how do I get my audience to actually just Send me an email to say thank you? Can I get my audience to tell somebody else about my show? Maybe I'll get another listener that will email me. Well, what else can I do? How can I foster some sense of community so I can get something back from the audience? If I want something back from the audience, not everybody does.
Speaker 1:Podcasting is very much a one-way medium. We you've heard her to talk to bad. Is it some way you having a competition people? But we're not. You know I'm talking to a microphone. If I'm talking to you, you and I are having a conversation here, alvin, but the rest of the people they're just listening to us and you know it's, it's effort. People can shout back at their phones, I guess if they wanted to say, if they want to comment, but that's harder to get to us. So recognize that not everybody's going to get right back at you. This isn't Twitter. This isn't a thing where you put something out there and expect a whole bunch of hearts, right? I mean, the reality is you're not going to get a lot of feedback, because it's hard to push that feedback out there, but it's nice to know people listening. So just you know, occasionally ask people, send me a note, say something to me. I don't mind people asking for that on occasion for some sort of feedback and because sometimes just a simple email is enough to keep someone going.
Speaker 2:I actually got somebody DM me on Twitter who I did not know listened to one of our shows and it was more poking fun at us than anything. Say, hey, you keep talking about how word of mouth Is so important for growing a podcast. You had a podcaster on your show and you went 50 minutes without mentioning the name of her, but the thing that I actually walked away with it was wow, I really got it out my game if this person is listening, because I was so excited to hear that. So what I had a lot of respect for was listening to our show. It's fantastic and it really is important to get that feedback. Do you have any ways for people to do that, to foster a community around their podcast, especially if it's a smaller one?
Speaker 1:Oh man, it is so hard. I mean, it is insanely difficult to do. I think the best thing to do is try not to bifurcate your audience. Don't break it up for no apparent reason.
Speaker 1:There's a natural inclination to when you start podcasting, like well, I guess I need to get a Twitter account, because Twitter's big in podcasting and true Twitter is really big in podcasting. Many podcasters, many podcasters have them in Twitter accounts. Oh, I need to get an Instagram page. Sure, yeah, you do that, and I bet we're gonna. Facebook and TikTok's big, and then I'll have to get LinkedIn and all these things. Well, and maybe you should do all of those things.
Speaker 1:I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't do any of those things, but that's a lot you know, and you give people too many choices to communicate with you and they don't know which one you prefer to do. So I like to just keep things simple. You know I rarely mention my Twitter account on my show, which is about the only social media network I pay any attention to at all. But I'm very consistent well, not necessarily very. I'm usually pretty consistent about telling people just to email me evo, at simplermedia, because everybody, everybody has emailed, even the kids who say they don't email. Yeah, when they're teenagers maybe they don't quite as much, but that's going to happen eventually. You're gonna switch over and send someone an email at some point in time.
Speaker 1:But just make it simple and repeat it. You know one time is not enough. Oh, I mentioned this in my show last week and no one responded. Well, look, people need to hear things several times. It's the oh what, okay, that mentality. I think they hear like three different times before they're gonna make take a move about that. I got some really good advice from Drew from Sleep With Me podcast, right, and he said don't. If you ask your people to do one thing, and one thing only for a year, you'll be amazed what the results are. But you got to do it for a year, right? Whether that's tell a friend about your show or send an email to or whatever else, do that same thing for a year and you'll be amazed what the results would be. So that's it If you want that's. What you really want out of it is communication and feedback from your listeners Great, pick something and repeat it again and again and again and again and again, and after a year you'll be amazed at the results.
Speaker 2:I definitely see this. I know we both. I mean, you have a marketing background, I have. That is my day-to-day job all the time. If you ask people to do five things or four things, or three or two, they do zero. Yeah, if you ask people to do one thing, they might do one thing. And I see a lot of times people will sign off a show or they will at the end of it say tell a friend, leave me a review, do this, send me an email and subscribe on Patreon. And I'm like, oh well, no one's doing any of that, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were good for a while, and then suddenly, oh and and, because everyone, what people hear in their head is and not, or they hear, and, and so it's like, well, I'm not doing any of those things. That seems like a silly thing to do. Yeah, keep it really simple, and repetition is so terribly important.
Speaker 2:One last question because I want to be conscious of your time and thank you for being with us for so long. Sure, you were, I think, the headliner of 2014, the first podcast movement, yeah, which probably was the first podcast conference ever, and we met at a I think it might have been at PodFest. Podcast conferences, I know, mean a lot to you. They mean a lot to me. Once this COVID thing, we start wrapping it up, yeah, what's the pitch for podcast conferences?
Speaker 1:Oh man, I love in-person meetings with other podcasters. It's, it is such a such a great thing and I it's difficult to communicate the real value that you get from a, from a solid podcast conference. You mentioned a podcast movement in 2014. Well, actually, the very first podcast conferences were in Ontario, california, back in 2005, called the Portable and New Media Expo, and then they changed the name, like for every year for the next three years. The dumbest thing ever.
Speaker 1:But that's where I met that's where I met Gary Leland, who was one of the original guys who started the podcast movement. Gary and I have been friends since that time and the great thing about these conferences is there are really multiple ways you can connect. There's there's the obvious way, which means you can go to the sessions, you can listen to the keynotes and you can go to the breakouts and you can get a lot of information just and just soak it all in and just. You're like a podcast listener, that you're a podcast conference attendee and you're just soaking in the information. And there are people who get a lot of value out of that and I love being on stages and providing that value out to people when I get a chance to go to those. But then there's the other value where I get most of my value, and that's just the conversations that happen. It's being surrounded by other people who we all have at least one thing in common at least one thing in common as podcasting, and you never know where the conversations are going to go. So I find myself having hallway conversations, lots of conversations in the expo hall where the vendors are meeting up with speakers. Afterwards, seeing someone asked a really great question in a session, I'll seek that person out afterwards and talk to them. I do that so much I often forget to go to the session I had booked and occasionally forget to go to the session I'm supposed to be speaking at. I try not to do that. I get on my mind now having Lawrence set up my calendar. I did that once and I won't make that mistake again.
Speaker 1:But that's the value of these podcast conferences is you're finally meeting your tribe. They're there in abundance and they have some of them have the same opinions as you. Some have very different opinions than you. They got different ways of doing things. So it is the best possible way to get an immediate. This is for me, but also this isn't for me.
Speaker 1:I know some people who've gone to a podcast conference and went oh yeah, that's too much, I don't really want. I thought I was doing this and that was it. But now I recognize there's all this too. I don't want to do this anymore and that's fine too. I mean I'd rather you know that ahead of time than not. But just going and being and experience online that I mean it's expensive, I get it. It makes it very. It's out of the price range for a lot of people because everything's gotten more expensive. I mean, hotel rooms are 300 bucks a night now I get it. So get creative, find people, share rooms. A lot of these places will have a room sharing service or get a rent something local and do it. Whatever you've got to do, if it's possible for you to go to a conference, just go and enjoy yourself, because they are a blast.
Speaker 2:It really is awesome because as podcasters, it can feel a little lonely.
Speaker 2:We talk one way through a mic and we're often the thing we share with our listeners is our love of the content. If it's the Dungeons and Dragons podcast, we all love role playing games together, but you're still a little bit like yeah, but no one understands what it's like when you lose a file halfway through an interview or something crashes, or I've been doing this editing technique for a long time and I just don't feel like I'm getting it. Then podcast movement and podcast and Black Podfest and she Podcasts that's probably the four that I enjoy. I'm biggest fans of you go and then you start realizing there's so many people just like me going through these exact same questions, having the same doubts, having the same struggles, some of whom have accomplished the things that we're trying to figure out how to do. It's so much fun to sit down and have a beer, have a conversation with somebody who's doing the same things as you and you really just make a ton of good friends every time I go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, then you meet those people who are very successful at what they do and you realize they're making it up as they go along too. There are so many things that go wrong for them, that go wrong for you. They feel every bit as anxious about things. It's just to me. It's such a good centering event. For anyone who's a little nervous, welcome. You're right. Everybody's going to be out there and we all can talk about the craft. You can talk about mics, if that's what you want to get off on, and you can talk about what bitrate you should use if that's where you want to go. Whatever, someone's there who wants to have that conversation with you, and unlike your spouse who just sits there and goes, aha, honey, that's nice yeah.
Speaker 2:There was one time I sat, I was sitting with one of the designers for Buzzsprout, the lead designer of Buzzsprout and a team for a very well-known podcast, who I won't name it, but they were pretty large podcast. They said one thing we're struggling with is how to sell ads. And we have these ads and we have these ads and they're talking about it. Our designer who just chimes in and goes well, what if you sold them as a bundle and then you bundled a newsletter and you bundled that with this thing, and then you did an interview and you also. He goes, and then you're not selling on CPM, you're selling. Just what if you this was the number that you charged and they look each other and go oh my gosh, that's so smart, we've got to be doing that. I tapped it later and I was like whoa, so we're all figuring this out together? Because they were the people who I thought we're going to say we tested that 10 years ago. That would never work. Here's the exact way to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And instead I realized even people who are getting millions of downloads per episode a lot of them they're still figuring things out, just maybe at a different level, but everyone's figuring things out themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we are. You mentioned Sheep Podcasts, which is going to be in Scottsdale, arizona, in October, and I live in Phoenix, arizona. Are you coming to Sheep Podcasts?
Speaker 2:I will be there. I believe I will be there. Sweet, I'm definitely going to be in podcast movement in August. I'll probably be at Sheep Podcasts and probably quite a few more in 2022.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 2022 is my big breakout, but I can't say no to Sheep Podcasts Coming to my town. Elsie and Jessica have told me under no uncertain terms I'm forced to go, since I'm fully vaccinated. I have to go now, since that was my excuse last year. So I said, fine, I will be there. So I look forward to seeing you there too, my friend.
Speaker 2:That'll be great, eva. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. Share so much that you've learned over the years of podcasting and over, I think, like 2200 podcasting credits on PodChaser. You shared a lot of wisdom with us today. If people want to follow you or learn more about you or ask you a question, how should they reach out?
Speaker 1:I'll give you some simple ways to do that. So, as I mentioned previously, evosimplermedia is my email account. If you're a podcaster and I can't believe you're watching slash listening to this show and you're not a podcaster, so you should be listening to podcastpontificationspodcastpontificationscom. You can even just read it. That's what you want to do. It's perfectly fine. And if you're the kind of person who wants to go nuts on Twitter, great At evoterra.
Speaker 2:Well, great, thank you so much, evo, and hope to see you soon. Thanks, buddy, bye.