Who Owns Your Theme Song?

Dave Jackson [00:00:01]:
Ask the podcast coach for January 11, 2025. Let's get ready to podcast. There it is. It's that music that means it's Saturday morning. It's time for ask the podcast coach where you get your podcast questions answered live. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com, and joining me right over there is the one and only Jim Collison from the average guy dot tv. Jim, how's it going, buddy?

Jim Collison [00:00:28]:
Greetings, Dave. Happy Saturday morning to you, and it's always good to be on Ask the Podcast Coach. Of course, thinking about our podcasting friends and all of our friends in Los Angeles this morning and the terrible things that are happening there. And hopefully, everyone is safe and has gotten out and gotten out of the way, and there'll be some rebuilding to do. We're thinking about you guys this morning.

Dave Jackson [00:00:48]:
Yeah. It's crazy when you see, like, a lot of, like, Hollywood. Like, they were worried the Hollywood sign was gonna catch on fire and just it's, I'm not sure, you know

Jim Collison [00:01:02]:
Nothing is forever, Dave. Nothing is forever. That's the thing. Nothing is forever.

Dave Jackson [00:01:07]:
Yeah. So definitely our hearts go out to those. And I had a friend of mine that couple years ago moved from California to Texas, and he is no longer regretting that. He never he didn't regret it anyway. But I texted him yesterday. I go, you're probably not missing LA right now. He's like, nope. So that's spooky.

Dave Jackson [00:01:24]:
And it's it travels so fast. So, yeah, if you if you got some bucks, I don't know. I was guy threw $20 at Red Cross yesterday. I was like, you know what? That's I'm like, that's nothing. I'm like, if everybody gave a little nothing, that would be a benefit. So Yeah. And I'm not sure, but you're probably losing sleep over this. I'm trying to do it.

Dave Jackson [00:01:43]:
How do you get a transition out of

Jim Collison [00:01:45]:
a catastrophe? Let's just let's just do it. Let's just do the work. There's no good way to transition out of it.

Dave Jackson [00:01:51]:
Yeah. So, this coffee pour, of course, is brought to you by who's in there. There probably are. If we go back to John Lee Dumas, there's some on fire jokes in here we could throw in, but no. Yeah. Not a time for humor that is brought to you by our good friend, Mark, over at, podcast branding, dotco. The beauty of Mark is the fact that not only has he been podcasting for, I think, 9 years, maybe longer than that, he's an award winning graphic artist. He's done a lot of work for me, and the fact he just offers such personalized service.

Dave Jackson [00:02:28]:
And this doesn't have to be artwork. If you're watching the video right now, I'm showing some of his work. But this could be a whole website. It could be a PDF. I know I'm getting a PDF ready for Podfest. We could use Mark for that. You can whatever it needs. He's got the marketing brain and the graphic skills, and the beauty of it is he's going to sit down with you one on one to make sure that it matches your brand.

Dave Jackson [00:02:53]:
And if you go, I don't have a brand, he'll help you make one. It's all there. It's at podcastbranding.co. And when you go over there, be sure to tell him that Dave and Jim sent you, and check out his podcast, Resourceful Designer, while you're at it.

Jim Collison [00:03:16]:
And, of course, a big thanks to our good friend Dan LeFebvre over there, based on a true story, based on a true story, podcast dot com. This week, and I mentioned it last week, Maria, if you didn't get out there to listen to it, do that today available for you out there. And a great episode you want to have a listen to it. You know, holidays are past, but maybe you still need another podcast to listen to, or you just want to listen to excellent production. Check it out today: basedonatruestorypodcast.com. And Dan, thank you for your sponsorship.

Dave Jackson [00:03:46]:
Yeah, what's interesting is this time of year is we end up I'm hoping that's gonna do now if I do this, in theory, yes. Okay. It's that time of year where people kind of freak out over things that maybe they shouldn't freak out or whatever kind of things. They overthink stuff. I had one I marked that was classic overthinking. Well, here's one speaking. It's not overthinking, but it's something that you should have thought about, And that is who owns the podcast theme I compose? Well, this should be something you figure out before. You know? And he says, hello.

Dave Jackson [00:04:26]:
I regularly make podcast themes for paying customers. One recently asked me who owns the copyright. Believe it or not, this just came up. I'm not well versed in the law and don't use contracts. It's usually just emails and kind of casual process. I know I show I I should use contracts, of course, but usually these things go smoothly. So what is the answer to this question? Does he, the one hiring me, own the theme or do I own it since I made all the music? And, of course, Jim and I will be the 1st to say we're not lawyers. We don't even play them on TV.

Dave Jackson [00:05:01]:
But this is you have to design. What are you selling? If you're selling a license to use the music, then you own it and you're more or less renting it to them. But most of the time people are looking for, you know, a royalty free kind of deal so that when they buy it, they own it. And so that's I've never I never thought about this because everything I've I think I use tune. There's so many. I'm trying to Ecamm is being a little weird this morning to where I've always that, I'm like, I can't I'm looking for the window for the chat. I realized our chat is run away, and I'm like, oh, it's not here. I've interviewed chat.

Dave Jackson [00:05:43]:
But, it's just one of the things you you might wanna think about when, you know, when you're buying music, you know, because there are places like I use Audioblocks, and I'm basically renting a bunch of music. They have a huge library, and I use that. It's like a $100 a year. It's not super cheap, but it is something that I use enough to where it's worth it. And so you kind of want to be careful with that if you're buying music to make sure that when you're buying it, you're not renting it because you might be surprised by that, because, you know, it might be all of a sudden you find out it's next year and they're like, hey, you didn't pay for your thing. You're like, wait, I already paid you. I paid you last year. That might be a problem.

Dave Jackson [00:06:25]:
And so, keep that in mind. And then the other thing you might want to keep in mind, Jim, you had a fun week this week where you had a hard drive. Take it down.

Jim Collison [00:06:36]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, just a reminder, we talk about this all the time, but I have visuals. So if you're watching on the video, you can see this 2 terabyte it's an older drive, 2 terabyte Western Digital that I've written on it bad, right? And it's bad. It's never coming back. There was data on it that I won't be able to retrieve. The good news is I was able to get it, you know, have it it wasn't a sole drive. It, you know, in other words, the data that was on it, that's not the only place it was. It was in a system that backed up the other drives.

Jim Collison [00:07:08]:
You know, I use Unraid, but there's QNAP or there's Synology or there's, you know, there's a variety of different I think even Yougreen has a NAS now that, that can protect you from those kinds of things. But I had a plan around, Okay, if this drive fails, what am I going to do? In my case, I just could pull it out. I tested it just to see if it was really bad. And then it was indeed. And then we just replaced it with a new one, and that the system rebuilt it. The key, I think, on this, and what I wanted to say, because we've talked about backups and cloud based stuff and some of those kinds of things, we haven't really spent very much time thinking about the drives themselves and being able to check the health on those. Hard drives, for a long time now have had a, oh, let's just, let's say some data on them, associated with them on their firmware called Smart, right? And a lot of the readers that are out there, a lot of the hardware readers that can read these files, they can, they'll tell you the health of those drives. One of my favorite ones is one called CrystalDisk.

Jim Collison [00:08:17]:
It's available for free. You can download it. It's been around a long time. It actually kind of looks like an old Windows program when you run it. But with Crystal Disk, you can download that on a Windows machine, run it, and it will bring back all and I mean all

Dave Jackson [00:08:33]:
I

Jim Collison [00:08:33]:
don't even know what some of it means. But all of that smart information will come back to you. It'll give you some kind of status on, Hey, is it how many hours has this drive been running? How many times has this drive been turned off and turned back on, which is kind of nice. You'll see its current temperature, and you can set some temperature they have some temperature guidelines on it. But you can see what it's currently running at. A lot of people don't think about they put their hard drive in, and then they don't, never think about how hot this thing actually gets. And does the, does where you have the drive, does it have good cooling? Is there a fan on it? Is it because they, these things get hot. I don't think a lot of people know how hot a hard drive gets inside of your computer.

Jim Collison [00:09:18]:
You're kind of insulated from it you never think about it. You're thinking about your CPU maybe getting hot, and you have maybe have a fan on that. A lot of folks don't think about cooling down their hard drives as they get pretty warm. Now they're built to run. I mean, they're tanks. These things are, you could kill somebody with this thing, right, with this hard drive. You throw it at them. It's pointy.

Jim Collison [00:09:36]:
It's got sharp corners. It's heavy, a lot of magnets in it. But you could, but getting that data again, CrystalDisk is the name of that. You can download it for free. And, and let's give you some information. It may, may be a good idea to download that today and take a look at some of the data. You know, your average drive, 5 or 6 years old, has 50 or 60000 hours of use on it, right? I had a this drive, 112, 112,000 hours. It's I've had it for a decade.

Jim Collison [00:10:07]:
I've had this for a long time. So maybe a good idea just to do a little inventory on your, on that part of your hardware and see how your drives are doing.

Dave Jackson [00:10:17]:
And of course, Crystal Disk also has that top 40 country song going up the charts.

Jim Collison [00:10:25]:
I love Crystal. I love her.

Dave Jackson [00:10:27]:
She's awesome.

Jim Collison [00:10:28]:
I love her. I love her style. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:10:31]:
I saw I think her Hailey something tiny concert. She had a song. I kept the ring, and he got the finger. And I was like, that sounds like somebody making fun of a country song, but, no, it actually was a real one. Randy says, being the IT nerd here, my

Jim Collison [00:10:48]:
I know you've done great. I use on Yep.

Dave Jackson [00:10:50]:
Unraid server has 84 terabyte drives, and they run about 28 to 32 degrees Celsius.

Jim Collison [00:10:56]:
Very it's very cool. That is very cool,

Dave Jackson [00:10:59]:
by the way. The system has 8, a 120 oh, my eyes aren't working. Uh-huh. Fans. Millimeter. Yeah. 120 millimeter. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:11:08]:
I my first house, I had all my computer stuff in the attic because it was huge, and it was somewhat finished or so I thought. But I found out quickly when summer rolled around, oh, the air conditioning doesn't come up here. And I would just I literally by the, you know, 9 I'm still in my underwear just sweating bullets. And I remember when I got around to July August, my computer would just shut off. It'd be like, okay. We're out. See you. So I bought a little, you know, air conditioning unit to put in the window, and that stopped it from from shutting down, but it was still really hot.

Jim Collison [00:11:42]:
So Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Heat listen, on the computers, heat is not your friend. Stephanie had said, Unraid? Okay, I'll check it out. Just know in the NAS, right, Network Attached Storage is what that stands for. In the NAS space, there are self-service options, and Unraid is one of those self-service. You would bring your own hardware, so to speak, and then you would add the Unraid software.

Jim Collison [00:12:06]:
They now have paid subscription options. So it used to be free. Way back in the day, it was open source, and it was free. That wasn't that great. And, and Lyme Technologies took them over and has made it a paid offering. Like, Dave, like you say all the time, if it's, if the service is free, it's probably not gonna last very long, right? So it's a paid, it's a paid kind of subscription, annual service subscription for Unraid. But you do have kind of all in one built in solutions you can go with. Today, you can, you could argue with me on this if you want, but today, Synology is probably the leader in that space.

Jim Collison [00:12:42]:
And then there's things like QNAP or YouGreen has a NAS. There's a bunch of Chinese branded NASes that are out there that are fairly cheap. I can't speak for any of them. So self-service or, you know, you kind of buy it all in 1. You're gonna spend to have a NAS and listen, the value of having a NAS and multiple drives is all that if one drive goes bad, the others will back them up. And then you can pull that drive, put a new drive in, and you're back in business. It is, it's one step in the backup process. It's not a backup in the sense that, like,

Dave Jackson [00:13:20]:
you know,

Jim Collison [00:13:21]:
in a situation like we just talked about in L. A, right, imagine I was watching a video of a YouTuber podcaster this morning who lost his house. And he said this is kind of what got me thinking about it. He said, Oh, and there's my they went, they got back into the area, and they got to his house in ashes. Right? And he's like, he was showing the studio, and then he was showing a picture of what it looked like when, you know, before the fire. And then he's like, The only thing I really regret is my laptop. And he points down his laptop's just melted. And he says, I had pictures on that of the cats and friends and stuff that I hadn't gotten off.

Jim Collison [00:13:59]:
A NAS is not a backup in the sense that you, like, in this case, if it's in your house and your house burns down, and that's the only place it is, it's not really backed up. So the, it is another place, right? So you keep it on your, you keep it locally. You could keep it on a NAS. That NAS could be replicating out to the cloud. So don't think of it as like a rock solid. There was, for a while, there was a company that was building fireproof enclosures for hard drives, which was really interesting. And, and so, you know, in that kind of case, you know, as soon as it sensed heat, the foam, you know, the, there was insulation on the inside that would expand, and then it would protect the hard drives that were inside of it for, through the fire. So fire aerated outside.

Jim Collison [00:14:43]:
Now they were fairly expensive, but kind of like buying a safe for your paperwork, you know, that paperwork that you don't want to go away in a fire. You could buy a fireproof hard drive enclosure for your house as well. So Yeah, there's not many of them that's out there, and that company that did it has, is I think they're still out there. But they're those are some of those things, Dave, to think about is, Okay, so you have to think, when you think about data loss, you have to think about it in 2 ways. Right? 1 is traditional disaster. Like we're thinking tornado or a fire or you're thinking, you know, some of those kinds of things that you can't control where the data's gone. Most people don't think about data loss from an idiot perspective when you lose the data, when you delete it automatically, when you do something dumb to it. And you have to think like, Okay, is there a good copy of that somewhere else that I could go and grab? Or am I versioning my files in a way that if I made a mistake editing the file or whatever, and I want to go back to a version of it, Is that available to me? So that's the one we almost never think about is our own self destructive tendencies to wipe stuff out.

Jim Collison [00:16:01]:
You've done this several times where you just got overzealous in your cleaning of things, and the file you needed is now gone I've so to speak. So yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:16:11]:
I did look out. There's a thing on GitHub where I was able to put in because I have all my episodes in my feed even at 900 and whatever I'm at on the school of podcasting. And I was able to put in the feed and download all my finished episodes because I deleted some somewhere. And I was like, oh, I don't really care that I have the WAV file. I'm like, I just want a copy just I don't know, for the Dave Jackson Memorial, you know, library. Yeah. Exactly. Also, QNAP and Nas, weren't they in Wutang, if I remember right?

Jim Collison [00:16:47]:
I heard that.

Dave Jackson [00:16:47]:
It was like, not after that. And for those of you that are yeah. We need one of those. And we also we totally forgot, you know. And now Oh, yeah.

Jim Collison [00:16:56]:
He's been waiting for this. It's time for Jim to get his nerd on.

Dave Jackson [00:17:03]:
I love the kids. What a lot

Jim Collison [00:17:05]:
of stuff. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:17:06]:
Yeah. You just listened to Jim getting his nerd on. So so here's some, Chris Stone from castahead.net. Turned me this is one of the benefits of the school of podcasting. You got some cool people in there, and he pointed out this microphone. It's called the Shure MV7i. When I first saw it, I was like, another MV7 something because it's like the MV7 plus, the MV7, you know, etcetera, etcetera. But the back of this microphone, you look at it like, okay.

Dave Jackson [00:17:38]:
Yeah. There's the XLR, and then you got a USB thing. But wait, it's different what it does. And it's very unique in the XLR that you see there is a combo jack, means you can plug an XLR. Or if I want to plug my guitar into it, that, my friend, on the backless microphone is an input. So you have a USB

Jim Collison [00:18:03]:
Can you hover over that? Will it make it bigger if you hover over that? There we go. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:18:07]:
Hold on. Let me get I've had

Jim Collison [00:18:08]:
That's super I did not when I was first a musician, I did not know you could do that with XLR. And and so this is a really important point that you've treated. It's a lot it's also aligned. No. You were fine there for a second.

Dave Jackson [00:18:20]:
I was. And I'm like, come on. I'm back on the page. Hop there we go.

Jim Collison [00:18:23]:
There we go. Okay.

Dave Jackson [00:18:25]:
Yeah. So what's cool about this is so you could have like the Shure Move mics. Right? The little lavs. Plug them on. They've got built in noise. And through the Shure software, this is okay. But I want a little better quality on this. So what you do is you take any mic, a Rode mic, you know, ATR2100, whatever, and you've got your MV7 going into your laptop, asterisk or your phone, going into the Shure software.

Dave Jackson [00:18:58]:
You take this mic, plug it into mic number 1, and there's your studio. That's it. Now you're like, but, Dave, you know, so if you wanted to, this is great for people. Like, I keep getting bleed. I remember when I was in my office in Cleveland. And at one point, I was in that corner, and the ex wife was in that corner. And now, of course, I was listening like this. I still hear you.

Dave Jackson [00:19:19]:
I and I'm like, no. Don't listen to podcasts smashing your headphones in your head. But I can still hear her a little bit on my channel. I just added a noise gate. We're fine to go. But, again, that is a classic example of podcasters obsessing over things that are just a little too crazy. And but this has a tool for noise removal. So if you had air conditioning or the furnace or whatever, it listens and just pops it out.

Dave Jackson [00:19:43]:
And then it has some sort of plosive popper or something. I forget what they call it. They're calling it their first smart microphone. I'm he says, I'm using it for mobile interviews. Yeah. So if you wanted something that wasn't lav mics, you want to take it on the road. 2 mics, 2 stands if you wanted to, and you're good to go. And I was like, now it's $349 so it's not the cheapest thing on the planet.

Dave Jackson [00:20:08]:
But for me, this is like a great example just for podcasters. It's like it's a totally niche podcast because it's not going to be for everybody. But those people that, like, look, I need good quality on the road, and it has to be super travel ready. I'm, like, here's your answer. And then, of course, if you wanna do video, the Shure software does video as well, so you could pop it in your phone. With the phone, there's some special cable. I mean, I know RODE has 1. If you wanna plug your mic into the RODEcaster, either 1 DUO, or you have to do this special RODE cable, and it's the same thing with Shure.

Dave Jackson [00:20:47]:
They have a special cable if you wanna plug this mic into your phone. If you've got a newer phone and it's just USB c, you still might need the cable. I'd have to double check on that. But the the fun part is I without ever seeing it, I can guarantee you they get you on the cable. Because it's like, well, you need this if you wanna do it. And you're like, well, I wanna do it. So I guess I'm paying, you know, whatever. $28 for a cable.

Dave Jackson [00:21:09]:
I think it's what I paid for the road one. I was like, well, I need that, and it won't work without it. So supply and demand says, you know, this is what I'm gonna do. So it's, it's an interesting, mic. I just was like, Not sure. Like I said, I I know people that record in the same room, and they freak out over bleed. And that's just something I think sometimes we really obsess over. Like, I can I like even now because I'm not really right on my mic? If I move this a little closer, I can hear a little room noise in my mic.

Dave Jackson [00:21:41]:
But if you put if I listen to this through earbuds, always listen the same way your audience does. If I put on my earbuds, if I went in the car, you're probably not gonna notice the little bit of room noise I have going on here. Now if it was something like I don't know. Can you hear this, Jim? Does it sound now like I'm in a tin can? Yep. Yeah. So if I sounded like this, that might be a problem. I might want to try to tune that out. But only

Jim Collison [00:22:06]:
if we heard the toilet flush, then we would work.

Dave Jackson [00:22:10]:
Yeah. And then Chris says newer iPhones. So I guess I got to go get a phone now. That's it. That's the solution. Go buy a new phone. But the newer iPhones don't need a special cable

Jim Collison [00:22:21]:
for mobile. What's newer? I wonder on that one.

Dave Jackson [00:22:23]:
Probably. What is the latest one? 16. 16. Something like that. So Andreas says it's a really nice gear upgrade, but I just got the Rode PodMic. I'll stay with this one for a while. Yeah. It never fails.

Dave Jackson [00:22:37]:
As soon as you buy something, you know, it's when I bought the Shure Move Mikes right after that, RODE came out with their little itty bitty lavs. And I was like, but the Shure Move mic has the noise reduction tool in it and things like that. So

Jim Collison [00:22:54]:
Randy says 15 or newer. 15 or newer, the ones with the USB C instead of lightning. That makes sense.

Dave Jackson [00:23:00]:
Thank you, Randy.

Jim Collison [00:23:01]:
It's got RGB on it, Dave. I mean, how can you not have a mic that has 16,000,000 or whatever it is 16,800,000 colors to choose from? How would you decide? Well, you know what it is. I mean, this is you're playing to podcasters who want the mic to match their studio backgrounds. Right? That's what they want. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:23:22]:
So because that's, that's gonna grow your audience. Forget the content. His mic matches the background. Yeah. That's not gonna work.

Jim Collison [00:23:31]:
Well, it did listen. It does it, like, especially for folks who've really tuned their studios. You know, I I think Chris Stone is one of those. His studio Oh, is very color tuned. Right? It looks awesome. Well, I mean, if you could, if you could show that in the picture, and it was perfectly tuned to the colors of the studio, that does kind of look pro. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. So Well,

Dave Jackson [00:23:55]:
and Deal Casters, Chris's show is a video show, so it's gotta look pretty. No. It doesn't have to, but his does. I mean, he can customize that thing to

Jim Collison [00:24:05]:
Well, he just said he needs 18,000,000 hues. 16.8 is not enough. It's So he's out.

Dave Jackson [00:24:11]:
Ralph says, I really tried to use the Shure Lapel mic for my show, and it was just not happy with it. Love my Road Pod mic. Yeah. But a lot of love for the Road Pod mic. That's what I'm using. The thing is they did the, I'll call it the RODE thing. I don't know who came up with the first, but you can go in and set your EQ and turn on the popper stopper and all this other stuff. And then when you save it, those settings are saved in the mic.

Dave Jackson [00:24:36]:
So when you plug it in someplace else, you're like, oh, I don't have the, you know, whatever you can actually, you know, use that. So I thought that was pretty cool because the the RODE does that as well. Says Ralph says it took me way too long to get the sticker on the end of my SM7B, so I'm not changing it. Yeah. If what you have works, don't change it. It is that time of year where we I saw it in Facebook. People like, well, it's new, so what are you going to change? And so much of it was gear. And they're like, yeah, I'm moving from an ATR 21100 to whatever.

Dave Jackson [00:25:10]:
And, Jim, let's I'm going to put you on the screen. I know you hate that. I don't see and I see a bookcase behind you. Those come in handy. Yeah. But is there any official, like, foam treatment anywhere in your basement? No. Yeah. Not any.

Jim Collison [00:25:26]:
No. But I have a lot of soft things down here. You know, curtains over here. I have curtains in the back. Everything over here. There's a few hard services. But I have a lot, I have a lot of soft stuff around me, especially in front of me. You can't see it this way.

Jim Collison [00:25:39]:
But because

Dave Jackson [00:25:39]:
I was gonna say, because, like, you're using a 21100.

Jim Collison [00:25:43]:
Mhmm.

Dave Jackson [00:25:43]:
You sound perfectly fine. Of course, you have great pipes. That helps.

Jim Collison [00:25:47]:
Thank you. Thank you.

Dave Jackson [00:25:48]:
But, you know, it's not like and I there was a guy that was he's in a closet, and he bought all this foam stuff, and he's like he gets phlegmy in there for he's like, I think it's the foam that somehow messes with his voice, and he was gonna move. And I and he's got a 21100. I'm like, I'm pretty sure you're kind of going a little overkill. I don't know that the room has to be like, I was in when I was in Nashville, I forget Danny's last name, but he has this kick butt studio and he does audio. He used to be a musician guy. Like, he, you know, he was in Nashville. And then, you know, everybody got their own studio in their bedroom, and that kind of dried up a little bit. So he started producing podcasts.

Dave Jackson [00:26:28]:
And I walked into a room that was absolutely dead. It was cool, but I'm like, you don't need that for a podcast. You don't want it to be, you know, fishbowl in a cave kind of thing, but it was weird to be in an actually a 100% dead room that I was like.

Jim Collison [00:26:43]:
It is a little eerie when you get into those, and it is it's where sounds go to die. You know? You're like, what's going on in here? Who's died? The, I think in my setup, the 2,100 punches above its, its weight for what it does for me. I think there are some other mics that, if I had, would pick up more than I have here. And so I would, I think I would, if I, you know, if I went with an SM7B or if I went with an RE20 or 3 20, if I went with some of those higher end mics, I may need to do a little sound treatment down here, just to be honest. Now I've got open ceilings. So the first thing I would do is just buy acoustic tiles, and then just put them right up into the ceilings and, and, you know, staple them in or whatever. That wouldn't be an easy sound sometimes bounces off the ceilings or bounces off the floors, carpet on the floors down here. So and, like I said, really soft surfaces around me.

Jim Collison [00:27:43]:
So that's I think the 2,100 is covering a multitude of sins for me, I guess, is what I'm saying. It's a good mic. I've used it for 10 years. It's just Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:27:53]:
And I mean, you're how far is your mic from your mouth? Like the other thing is you have great mic technique. To It's right there. And that's the key when it's when you're you know, if I move the mic away from me, and I can talk louder now, but it just you get all that kind of built in reverb. Get that bad boy. And if you're getting plosives, talk across it, which is what I kinda try to do, and, you know, you're good to go. Yeah. So

Jim Collison [00:28:15]:
Right on. Right on.

Dave Jackson [00:28:17]:
Alright. Well, the other thing that has come in is I went to perplexity dot ai, one of my favorite search tools now. I'm sorry, Google, but, you know, you suck. And I asked them about the Spotify plan because that was announced in January. And I was like, hey. What's the criteria for Spotify's video program? Because, you know, it's gonna be the best thing ever, and everyone's gonna get rich. And just all you gotta do is put your video on Spotify, and money will fall from heaven. And they said you need at least 12 episodes, but here's the one that gets me.

Dave Jackson [00:28:49]:
10,000 streamed hours, not ever, no, in the past 30 days. 10,000 streamed hours. I don't wanna do math live, but that's a lot of hours per day. And then 2,000 unique users Versus YouTube, you need 500 subscribers, 3 valid uploads, and 3,000 valid public watch hours in the last 12 months or 3,000,000 valid public short review in the last 90 days. So to me, this is really targeted towards, like, the big peeps, celebrities, you know. And then It'll

Jim Collison [00:29:26]:
come down. It'll come down. Spotify will bring this down eventually. They just don't want the unwashed masses. This has been Spotify's business plan from the very beginning. Right? They have made it harder. Everybody else is like, Bring, you know, bring me your tired and your hungry. And we want everybody, right? That's every, that's everybody else.

Jim Collison [00:29:47]:
Spotify is like, Nah, I want the 1%. I want to start with the 1%. So just know it's a different, it's a different model for them at Spotify. They're just not gonna, they don't want us all jumping in there and messing up whatever they've created, right? They want to control it.

Dave Jackson [00:30:05]:
And then the other thing, the the one that really counts is with YouTube, you get to keep, they take 45%. So you keep 55%. With Spotify, it's 5050. So they take an additional 5%. So I was like, not really. I mean, it's a stream of income, you know? I mean, but I was just like, wow. So that's, you know, we'll see. I did notice that remember the one week I'm on Rumble this week as well.

Dave Jackson [00:30:35]:
And what's cool is Rumble has now there it's beta. So if this doesn't work, I'm not going to go yell at them. But remember I said it's kind of a bummer because every time you use Rumble, you have to go over and copy and paste 2 things into, in this case, Ecamm. Well, they just today I went over and they have a, I don't know, static or a constant things that you put in. So we shall see. But I, we got a whopping 9 views over on Rumble. So, you know, that's 9 people more than I had before. So

Jim Collison [00:31:07]:
Is there chat tied into this chat? Do we are are we able to do they have a chat in Rumble, or is it just I

Dave Jackson [00:31:13]:
would say it it's very I mean, if you look at, it's just YouTube with a lot of guns. When I logged in, it was like, look, guns everywhere. Like, okay. So, yeah, Chris says I hate it when a podcaster sends me over to their YouTube channel. Yeah. Don't get restarted. Randy says, rumble just received 775,000,000 in funding. That's a lot.

Dave Jackson [00:31:40]:
That's a little bit of cabbage. Right? There's $775,000,000. Like, that's I wonder from who and why. So Ralph says, I love Rumble. Yep. And he said they do have a chat. I know. It's a freedom platform.

Dave Jackson [00:31:55]:
I know. They talk about everything over there. Just my first impression when I logged in, it was literally like like, they have, like, whatever, 8 or 12 videos on.

Jim Collison [00:32:04]:
Are you Dave Jackson over there?

Dave Jackson [00:32:06]:
I am probably School of Podcasting.

Jim Collison [00:32:09]:
School of Podcasting. That makes

Dave Jackson [00:32:11]:
sense. Maybe.

Jim Collison [00:32:12]:
K. Sorry. I interrupted you. Sorry.

Dave Jackson [00:32:14]:
No. I'm sorry.

Jim Collison [00:32:15]:
I ruined your joke. Sorry.

Dave Jackson [00:32:16]:
Yeah. Rumble says or Chris says it's RTMP. Chat doesn't integrate with third party streaming. So maybe they'll take some of that 775,000,000 and make things a little more integratable. But, yeah, it is an option. I hear a lot of people on YouTube, well, not a lot. I've heard a few that have, like, okay. Well, that's gonna do it for the show over here.

Dave Jackson [00:32:38]:
We have other topics, but we can only talk about them on Rumble. And I was like, well, that's a different thing. And I so we shall see how that goes over. Speaking of since we're kind of talking different gear and such, here's another one that I was just like, this is why you need to plan your podcast ahead of time. And this might just be a case where he just naturally outgrew it. But how is the road caster with connecting other inner audio interfaces? My friend and I have been podcasting for some time. I gotta say the road caster duo was amazing investment for both of us. I invested in RODE PodMics and RODE XLR cables, and it worked out very well.

Dave Jackson [00:33:17]:
They love RODE stuff. But here's the thing. Recently, our podcast has been catching our friends' attention, and we've asked if they wanna be in episodes. Now the duo has worked out for us. But with a 3rd person okay. 3rd I thought they had 4. But 3rd person, it gets complicated. We don't wanna invest in the RodeCaster Pro just yet, and I might have a workaround, but I need some professional opinions.

Dave Jackson [00:33:39]:
I have a Zoom PodTrak p 4 for my earliest podcasting days or from my days and a USB c to USB c cable. I noticed that the Duo has a port for USB c connections too, which normally plugs into a computer. Yep. If I if so, the follow-up question would be, you know, can I basically use this wait a minute? So I can use my Rode PodMic for a guest. So the fob question, basically, they wanna use the Zoom PodTrak p 4 to plug into the RodeCaster Duo as a third input. And if a plug in a headset onto the p four's headphone jack while whilst it's connected to the Duo, can the guest hear the sound effects? No. They would not. Because what you'd have to take you could take a headphone out.

Dave Jackson [00:34:30]:
Well, that's tricky. You'd have to take the headphone out of the RODEcaster into an input of the p 4 and take the output of the p 4 and run it into the RODEcaster, and that just sounds like a disaster for, a loop, basically. But my whole thing is you got a p 4 sitting right there because, I mean, you could here's the fun thing. You could plug 2 people into the p 4, take the output of the p 4, put it into channel 2 of the duo. So you got 1 person on channel 12 people on channel 2, and you're using the p 4 as a mixer. But I'm like, you got a p 4 sitting right there. I don't know. Maybe just use the p 4.

Dave Jackson [00:35:11]:
I'm not quite sure, You know? Yes. It doesn't have all the fun filled effects that are on the RodeCaster, but I'm like, sometimes we add so many hurdles that I'm like, I think you're just kind of again, you've got a p 4 sitting right there rather than trying to run. You know, I know, I've heard people plugging in USB mics into the Duo because it has it because I have my computer plugged into it. If I want to play sound effects from my second computer, it goes into my USB, thing. So, yeah, Andreas says, if it's all locally, the p four would make for the recording and and do the editing later. That's me. I'm like, I'm not sure. I'm I it's probably just one of those things, like, you get into your habits, and you're like, well, everything has to be recorded on the road.

Dave Jackson [00:35:58]:
I'm like, nope. But and Chris says, yeah. But, unfortunately, the generic the general public would decide what they wanna call it regardless of what is factual. And that is nothing to do, I think, what we're talking about. Oh, I think they're talking about, it's not fun when you just read it. You read a comment halfway through you like, oh, they're doing their own show with

Jim Collison [00:36:19]:
the general. Yeah. This isn't this doesn't apply.

Dave Jackson [00:36:22]:
Yeah. So it's that was just one. I was like, why is this guy making it so hard? And then the other one, again, it was kind of like road day over at Reddit. And this one, the guy asked, I don't know if this actually exists, but I'm looking for a single board that has an audio mixer for, like, 2 mics and a video switcher for, like, 4 inputs in a single board, potentially where you can have it auto select video based on what mic is getting the input. The last part is pretty hard pressed. That one I don't know, but something kind of like a black magic design, ATEM Mini Pro and a Mackie whatever ProFX V3. You can do this, not the auto switching thing, but you can do this with a Rodecaster Duo or Rodecaster Pro. And this is I'm going to say something, and I know it is accurate.

Dave Jackson [00:37:14]:
I've never done it, and I do not understand it. But I know you can take the little sound effects in the RodeCaster, so I could basically take that and via MIDI map it to a lighting gear somehow and switch no. It's not so much switch lights. Switch cameras via midi via the thing now because everybody else was like, oh, just do the Rode caster video, which would make sense. Randy's like, yeah, just do that. That thing's like, what is it? $1200? It's a lot. Whatever it is. And I was like, well, if I can if you've already got a RODECaster Duo, like, maybe just let me go over to Sweetwater.

Dave Jackson [00:37:56]:
I would try learning the midi, you know, jingle button thing. So RODE video. Let's see. RODE video caster. Yes. It is. Survey says

Jim Collison [00:38:09]:
Yeah. Twist 1200. You're right.

Dave Jackson [00:38:11]:
Bucks. I was right. Yeah.

Jim Collison [00:38:12]:
Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:38:13]:
11.99. And I don't know about you, but where I come from, that's a chunk of change. So I was like, I don't know. Just to me, as much as sometimes people try to like the one guy is trying to put the p 4, like, hey, just use the p 4. In this case, you might actually and this is one of the things where really knowing what your gear is capable of because there's nothing worse than buying gear and then coming home and, like, go, wait. What? I could have done that with, you know, Adobe has that built in. I didn't know that. Or Descript or whatever.

Dave Jackson [00:38:44]:
So, yeah, be careful with that because, you know, that's, that's no fun. Here's a fun question. Jim, can you have a successful podcast without social media? He says, I'm thinking about starting an interview style podcast in 2025 to hear about everyday people's stories and learn what really makes them unique even if they're an average show. So the audience can do what? Like, what's the benefit? I don't have social media. I know a lot of podcast success is credited to making TikToks and reels from YouTube videos. While I want also while I want also, that's what he says, do visual posts on YouTube. Do you think I can be successful without these ad forms? If there is an alternative way to get my podcast out there without social media, what would you recommend? Or is it simply if you want to get outreach, you have to get back on socials response? I am mainly doing this as an outlet to meet people. Oh, there you go.

Dave Jackson [00:39:46]:
There's his why. As it's really, something I love, but, of course, I would be a minority in saying I did wanna go somewhere and get outreach. So can you make a podcast? Can you make a successful podcast without social media? What say you, Jim Collison? Yes, you

Jim Collison [00:40:05]:
can do it. You can be successful at anything without social media. Although, are you considering if you had your own website, is that considered social media? I don't think it is. We're, we're, traditionally, we're thinking about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Dave Jackson [00:40:17]:
Right? So

Jim Collison [00:40:18]:
Yeah, I mean, you're good old school for sure in, you know, with a website and, you know, word-of-mouth, getting your listeners to listen, if you have listeners that are listening to you, chances are they're like you. That's probably why, I mean, not only do they like you, but they're probably like you. That's why they're listening to you, right? Common interests, whatever. They probably know people that are like them that they can pass that along to. Right? And I always, I think the newsletter concept, I don't, I wouldn't consider newsletters social, so to speak. You could, you know, depending on your graph, your demographic, but that's not, that's not true either. You get a good newsletter group going that just say, Hey, I'm not gonna be on those socials. This will be the way we'll communicate.

Jim Collison [00:41:05]:
I think you absolutely could, for sure.

Dave Jackson [00:41:08]:
Yeah. Larry Roberts. The red hat guy, I'm assuming I yes. Of course, I will see him at Podfest. He's the guy behind the Podfest newsletter, so I'm pretty sure he's gonna be there. Yeah. That would make sense. Speaking of newsletters.

Jim Collison [00:41:19]:
Yeah. No. I think it very, very, very effective.

Dave Jackson [00:41:22]:
Yeah. He goes, well, why limit your reach? Yeah. I look. And I'm no

Jim Collison [00:41:25]:
because they're awful. They're awful places. That's why. They're terrible.

Dave Jackson [00:41:30]:
Can I ask a really weird question? Why does everybody hate x again? Is it just because Elon and they don't like Elon? And so they think, I'm gonna show him I'm not going to pay him anymore. I'm going to not pay him anymore. I

Jim Collison [00:41:45]:
don't know. But A little bit of that going on. But overarching in general, right? I mean, some people just don't wanna be parts part and parcel to those environments. And I don't blame them. I think when I retire, I may go dark. I just may like, just get like, I've had enough.

Dave Jackson [00:42:04]:
When my dad retired, he wouldn't answer the phone. Yeah. And I'd be like to my brother. I'm like, did you have you talked to dad? And I was like, no. He goes, I keep calling him. Nobody's picking up. I'm like, we should probably go check on him. So we go over to check on him.

Dave Jackson [00:42:15]:
He's like, hey, I'm retired. I don't have to answer the phone anymore. And I'm like, well, you know, we kind of think you're dead when you don't do that. You're like,

Jim Collison [00:42:23]:
you know,

Dave Jackson [00:42:24]:
oh, okay. You know? But he was if he got a telemarketer, he would just ream them. He would get so upset. And I'm like, well, just hang up on him. Like, you don't have to, like, you know, get your dandruff up. Dan from based on a true story podcast dot com. In my honest opinion, social media platforms increasingly hurting your visibility if you think external did I say that wrong?

Jim Collison [00:42:45]:
You link. Yeah. You did. If you link internally.

Dave Jackson [00:42:48]:
If you link internally. Yes. Wow. I need you know what I've learned in the last week?

Jim Collison [00:42:54]:
You need a new prescription?

Dave Jackson [00:42:55]:
I need a new prescription. Yeah.

Jim Collison [00:42:57]:
Or maybe bigger words on your teleprompter there.

Dave Jackson [00:43:00]:
That's it. Yeah. If you link externally. I've heard this. Like, when you're on x and you say, hey, are you backed up? We talk about that this week on the show link. And I'm like, I am a person that always writes for the visitor. If it's on a website, social media, like, I don't want and they're like, no. Just write the first one and then put the link as your like, you reply to yourself.

Dave Jackson [00:43:27]:
And I'm like, doesn't that make you go blind? I don't know. But but you you're replying to yourself. And I was like, hey. I the only reason I can think of that is they don't want you using automated tools to post. Yeah.

Jim Collison [00:43:43]:
Right. Right.

Dave Jackson [00:43:44]:
And I was like, this is so I'm just like, hey. I'm gonna be a rebel. I'm putting links in my stuff. And if it downgrades me, I'm like, again, follow me. And I'm assuming that if you're following me, you'll still see my stuff. I don't know. And in the end, I kinda don't care. I'm just like, hey.

Dave Jackson [00:44:01]:
I'm you know, that that just seems dumb and counterintuitive.

Jim Collison [00:44:05]:
So Listen, listen, I wanna blame social media for negativity and hate, but and those kinds of things. But social is made up of us. And we're the problem. It's our fault that social is the way it is. Right? We need to take some ownership of that. And, you know, I hear, I hear people all the time who rail on this, and then you will see them on social railing against other people. Or, you know, feeding the beast. Stop feeding the beasts.

Jim Collison [00:44:36]:
Stop intergating stop engaging with them. Stop talking to them. Block them if you need to. I mean, if you just don't want to see it, block it, right, from that standpoint, or do what you can or leave it, right, if you can't. But I think, I still think there's a lot of good things that can be done on those platforms. I mean, I'm still on all of them. And I've they're severely limited for me on what I do. I've still, like, I've completely stopped posting personal things on Facebook, but I run giant user groups out there on, on Facebook.

Jim Collison [00:45:05]:
So I need to be on the platform, trying not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But listen, we have to the responsibility for social is you control what you see. You control what's out there and you control what you post. And I just, I am getting a little tired, even though I just said it. I am getting a little tired of the argument that it's some, it's somehow something beyond what we control and we can't. Well, you know what, be a force for good out there then. If you see it as being so negative, and you're gonna be on it, be out there and be a force for good. Try to do good things.

Jim Collison [00:45:41]:
And then just realize, there's gonna be bad people out there. And it's just gonna happen. You can't, you can't argue them away. Stop trying, people. Stop it. You can't they are fed by that. They thrive when you try to do that. Stop doing it.

Dave Jackson [00:45:58]:
Yeah. I, well, Todd the Gator has a great point. People remove their filters when they're anonymous. Yep.

Jim Collison [00:46:04]:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Well, anonymous. You just shouldn't, if, listen, if someone's posting, we have, we have a local Facebook group here for Bellevue, Nebraska, where I live, And it's fairly unmoderated for the most part. And when someone posts anonymous in that group, they just get blistered. Just get blistered. So, you know, there's a little bit of that social pressure as well. But I just think we control, Dave.

Jim Collison [00:46:28]:
I think we control a lot. You listen, you control what you're reading. You control what you see. You control what's out there. Can you still I have a really good group on, you know, people talk about Discord. I have a really good group on Discord. Why? Because it's heavily moderated. Our groups on Facebook, pretty good.

Jim Collison [00:46:46]:
Why? Because they're heavily moderated. You know, we yeah, we control this, friends.

Dave Jackson [00:46:52]:
If you wanna see an interesting documentary, I watched it. It's all about Jerry Springer and how Jerry started off like every other talk show, and a guy just came in and said, we're gonna do the direct opposite. And he ended up for a few weeks. He was more popular than Oprah. And it was all and what it showed was, like, working there was hideous because once you've got the guy that married his horse, like, where do you go? And you can't do the horse. Like, this week, we got a guy that married a pig. Okay. Well, we've like, it's not as outrageous anymore.

Dave Jackson [00:47:29]:
So you just have to keep getting more and more. And, eventually, they had that case where they some there was a a love triangle, and the guy ended up killing somebody. And the whole thing was, like, is it Jerry's fault? But the whole point was the reason they kept upping it is because the ratings went up. And they're like, so don't blame Jerry. Like and and No. Don't blame Jerry.

Jim Collison [00:47:51]:
You could still blame Jerry.

Dave Jackson [00:47:52]:
Yeah. But it was the whole thing was basically the fact that the more outrageous it got, the bigger the ratings. The bigger the ratings, the less the network cared. They're like, hey, do whatever you want. We're making bank. We'll pay Jerry 30,000,000. We got tons of that stuff. So it's an interesting just social experiment to to see that.

Dave Jackson [00:48:11]:
Yeah. We got some great comments here. Let's see. That's an old one. Yes. Coach Dave. Yes. You can make a successful podcast.

Dave Jackson [00:48:23]:
Depends on how, you know, define success. Yes. As a tool to teach yourself how to organize and speak. You don't even need an audience. That is true. Andreas says, I'm thinking about doing a newsletter for my new podcast. I got the I got a book called Newsletter Ninja. Come on.

Dave Jackson [00:48:40]:
Who doesn't want to read a book? Stephanie said that. I will read a book called Ninja. Tanner Rutledge says meeting people is is a great why. I started mine to network with people in publishing. I didn't have the funds to go back to school and wouldn't have wouldn't have the knowledge and support to get my books out. Yep. So there again, it's back in the day when I used to teach how to surf the Internet. God, I'm old.

Dave Jackson [00:49:05]:
But I used to teach a class called how to surf the Internet, and I would explain there was a big disclaimer at the beginning that if you go down Main Street, you've got the library and look it's the Akron peanut shop. It's been there since 1921. And this and it. And on this side, you've got hookers and drugs and, you know, so which side of the street? It's up to you. But, you know, focus on the good side. You know, dances, he agrees with Dave. That's why I think social is great for for the existing audience. The algorithm discoverability promotes staying on platform for ad revenue, of course, which is why growth is hard why he thinks growth is hard.

Dave Jackson [00:49:44]:
Yeah. Coach Dave says I would argue that people with bad motives have figured out how to trigger our dopamine. Oh, boy, have they? Yeah. They have. We know how to trigger people just as they've made addictive for, for greed and profit. Yep. They made the social experiment addictive. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:50:02]:
That's been proven over and over. It's in the stats on that are crazy. How many people roll out of bed and grab their phone? And it's like, oh, it's crazy. The one thing and then Jeff has a great one. Social is just another tool. Just don't be a tool on social. That's a good,

Jim Collison [00:50:23]:
that's a great line. That would make a great t shirt.

Dave Jackson [00:50:25]:
T shirt, is it? Yeah.

Jim Collison [00:50:27]:
Jeff, you should get that made. That's a good line. We won't steal it. That's your line.

Dave Jackson [00:50:31]:
Yeah. Chris says, if you don't have social media but have gas, use them to promote the episodes. Yep. Yeah. There's always use your audience. But the the one thing that Andrea said here about the newsletter thing, the beauty of the newsletter is people have purposely said I want your stuff. And to me, with search, we talked about it last week. Like, what's gonna happen to search with all this AI stuff? To me, I think a newsletter I was on a growth summit put together by Captivate and Adobe this week, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Dave Jackson [00:51:05]:
And at the end, they said, okay. We've got a lightning round. I'm like, I'm not good with lightning round. Getting to the point, not my strong suit. And the first question was, should a podcaster have a newsletter? And I just said, yes. Like, yes. Even if you don't know what it is, grab those emails because eventually there's gonna be the day it's like I need to communicate with my people, but I don't wanna do this in public. Oh, wait a minute.

Dave Jackson [00:51:25]:
I got a newsletter. So that's yeah.

Jim Collison [00:51:28]:
Well, and newsletter newsletters, and this is the way I see a lot of the YouTubers I watch. They use the newsletter as kind of the source of truth for their, for their, whatever they're doing, to say, Hey, if all else fails, you know, if YouTube unsubscribes you for some reason, or if you see something on social that doesn't look right, or if you, you know, any of those kinds of things, you can always come back to our newsletter, you know. And when I was doing newsletters for a while, I'd also post a copy of the newsletter on the site so folks could come out and say, Oh, here's the last, you know, 12 newsletters that was done. And you, if they've lost connectivity to you in some way through whatever platform, whether it's a podcast platform that unsubscribed you or unfollowed you or YouTube or whatever, you could always go back there to get like, What's the most current thing? So it is a great way a newsletter is a great way of being off of the echo chamber, so to speak, or being off of the social spaces, a place where people can come and get it, or you can communicate with them. The one drawback to it is email is still a very broken system. So you've got to make sure if you're gonna have a newsletter and you're gonna have this is my, part of my job I just got the report, you know, I just got this report on Friday before I went home of bounces, you know. And we had, you know, we sent 10,000 emails, and I think I had 12 bounces, which isn't, which is really good for what we do. But you can't just sign, you just can't have people sign up.

Jim Collison [00:53:02]:
And then if you try to send them the email and it bounces, you might want to try to track them down, if you can, and say, Hey, the email you gave me is bouncing. Do, do you, do we want to fix this? When I took over that job back during the pandemic, so 2020, summer of 2020, we were, we had 2,000 bounces. Like, because nobody had been maintaining that list. You know, we, and so you just assume, Oh, yeah, people, they'll give me their most recent email. Or the email they gave me, Oh, yeah, they definitely monitor that email box, and it never fills up Gmail. It never fills up, and it never starts blocking or they start getting blocked. You know, if something's you're, the email you're sending to them is getting blocked. Or getting

Dave Jackson [00:53:47]:
Or if they didn't get fired from their job when they laid off 1200 people at the factory, you know. That's not

Jim Collison [00:53:53]:
Yeah, we saw a lot of that in the beginning of the pandemic. We saw a lot of that. You know, there was this thing we call the Great Resignation, and a full third here in the United States, a full third of everybody changed jobs for 3 years. Like we all changed jobs. And so that, that led a little bit to the, you know, people would have given us their work email address. And of course, and they don't think, like, it's like when you how, what would be a good example of this? You know, you change email providers, and then you got to think, Oh, it's like when your credit card number changes. And you're like, Oh, who have I given you know, what services have that credit card number for annual renewals? And you try to unless you've written it down somewhere, you try to remember. It's the same thing with your email address.

Jim Collison [00:54:35]:
You change your own email address. You're like, oh, what have I signed up for under that email address that's no longer gonna work?

Dave Jackson [00:54:41]:
And that's where you figure out which of those newsletters you are actually getting something from, because those are gonna be, Right? Any newsletters that's, memorable, you will remember. And those that you didn't, you won't. And so, yeah, it's tricky. There have been times when I've tried other podcast apps, and most of them will let you export a thing called an OPML file, I think it is. And that it's just a format of a basically list of all your shows, and then you import it. And presto, all your shows are in the new app. And some of them don't have that feature. And I'm like, Oh, I'm starting from scratch.

Dave Jackson [00:55:14]:
I'm like, Okay, let's search. Okay, well, I need to know agenda. Okay, I need to this, I need that. And all of a sudden it wasn't till later that you'll see something where on social that's like, Hey, I spoke with so and so this week. That's a great episode, whatever. Check it out. I was like, oh, I totally forgot about those guys. So that's I think, to me, I think that's what social does.

Dave Jackson [00:55:32]:
I don't know that it's gonna grow your audience. I know Gary Arndt over at Everything Everywhere Daily gets a 1000000 downloads a month, And he, you know, this is a guy that writes basically a term paper every night and or basically does enough research for that and then creates about a 10 minute podcast every day. And he was just pressed for time, so he quit doing social. And he goes, and it did nothing. Nothing for my numbers. Like, he goes, no. Not even a dip. He goes, it just did.

Dave Jackson [00:56:00]:
So I always say it's a trickle. You know, don't get hung up on it. But I have seen things that, you know, I'm like, hey, I totally forgot about them. And then I saw them do something on social. I just hate the fact that I now have to go to x, and then I go to Blue Sky, and then I go to threads, and then I go to whatever, you know. So it's hard to keep up all that. So, yeah, Dan says OPML is just a playlist. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:56:24]:
It's it's handy. What what's weird, though, I forget what the app was, and you didn't know who to blame. Like, I exported it out of app a, and then I go to import it into app b, and you're like and it didn't work. And you're like, okay. Is the importer wrong or the exporter wrong? Because that's supposed to be kind of a standard. And so but speaking of being social with people, you know, my favorite people to be social with are our awesome supporters. And you could be an awesome supporter by simply going to ask the podcast coach.com slash awesome. And we like to remind you that this show is brought to you by the school of podcasting.com.

Dave Jackson [00:57:00]:
Use the coupon code coach and get a discount in either a monthly or yearly subscription. And that includes all the courses, all the coaching, and, of course, a really awesome community. And I'm clicking and the button's not doing anything. We run on PodPage. If you wanna check out PodPage, check it out at try podpage.com. And if you've never tried PodPage and just go over, you can see where you can put your RSS feed in. It's amazing. Also, I'll be at booth 32 at Podfest.

Dave Jackson [00:57:31]:
So if you wanna talk PodPage, I'll be there for that. We're using Ecamm. You can find that at ask the podcast coach.com/ecamm. That's my affiliate link. And what's going on? If you need more Jim Collison and, hey, who doesn't need more Jim Collison? Well, then you can simply go over to the average guy dot tv, check out Home Gadget Geeks. And apparently, my mouse is just dead. And we're gonna go over now and find the awesome supporter of the week. Will it be the yes.

Dave Jackson [00:58:00]:
Will it be Supporters. Supporters. Yes. Will it be Ross's book is out? I think I mentioned that last week about the he does his predictions. Well, he does. And he asks a bunch of people to do predictions. We got the girls over at Flame Alive. Craig over at AI Goes TO College.

Dave Jackson [00:58:16]:
I was listening to that this morning. He was talking about things about Google notebook that I was unaware of, but we will spin the wheel and see. We will spin the wheel. We will honestly spin the wheel. Okay. I'm gonna move this over here. Wait. Now we will hold on.

Dave Jackson [00:58:36]:
Now we will spin the wheel. There we go. What's going on? And survey says it's coming up on oh, there you go. Right where we started off with the ladies over at flamealivepod.com. If you're into the Olympics, they're amazing. They I mean, it's this is a case where, again, when you start a podcast in a niche and, you know, they cover all sorts of stuff that's just not getting any mainstream stuff. So they've interviewed Olympians and they got to go to where was it? Japan? France? Some place last year?

Jim Collison [00:59:07]:
Or Paris.

Dave Jackson [00:59:08]:
Paris. Yeah. They got to go to Paris. All sorts of fun stuff because of their podcast. So flamealivepod.com. And you know who did their website? The one on line, Mark, from branding.co. There you go.

Jim Collison [00:59:21]:
Nice.

Dave Jackson [00:59:21]:
So if you'd like to be an awesome supporter, you might be thinking, hey. You know, those guys save me time. They save me money. They save headaches. Maybe they just make us laugh. You can go over to ask the podcast coach.com/awesome and join 1, be 1, join the group. It's all there. And I'm I'm playing right now, so I can say this.

Dave Jackson [00:59:42]:
It's also ad free. I'm playing with Buzzsprout's ad tool. And somebody came across. It was another podcast kind of about podcasting, and I'm like, okay. You know? So it's you know, I get let's see. What's 14 divided by a 1000 point 0014¢ a download, something like that? 10.10th

Jim Collison [01:00:01]:
of a cent?

Dave Jackson [01:00:01]:
Yeah. It's whatever 14 divided by a 1000 is. So it's

Jim Collison [01:00:05]:
a lot. That's a very small number. Podfest is next week. So are we off next week?

Dave Jackson [01:00:10]:
Well, that is a great question. Serve I'm gonna guess. Yes. Because I remember Podfest is long. I know I'm leaving 15th. And

Jim Collison [01:00:20]:
Looks like it's a 16th through 19th is

Dave Jackson [01:00:23]:
Yes. I will be yeah. So no shows this week. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. And if you're at Podfest, I will be at booth 32. So that's the one advantage.

Dave Jackson [01:00:32]:
When I didn't have a Libsyn booth, nobody knew how to find me. And so PodPage is sponsoring Podfest. We're also sponsoring Podcast Movement and Podcast Movement Evolutions. And so that's one of the so it's kinda nice now to go, oh, just go to this booth, and that's where I'll be. So it makes it really easy to to find out here. Here's one. How? Yes. Do you get picked up by a media network? My podcast just hit a 130,000 downloads.

Dave Jackson [01:01:03]:
Nice. For 13 episodes, even nicer. And I'm completely independent. I'm also in the top 5% of video podcast on Spotify, apparently. I'm guessing that's a listen notes thing. I don't have a huge following, so I'm really grateful my podcast has taken off. But I'm under the impression I could probably insert self read ads in addition to the ads Spotify is putting on the podcast to make more money from the podcast so I can dedicate more time to it. So he's on Spotify.

Dave Jackson [01:01:32]:
There's part of the problem. However, I don't know anyone in the industry. Does anyone know how to get into contact with companies who could handle the business side? Well, if you're looking for ads, they're now called Libsyn Ads. It used to be Advertisecast. There's that if you're looking for ads. And then there's Heather Osgood at True Native Media. There's another person that can help you find ads. The problem is if you find if you're on Spotify, there is no like, on Captivate or Buzz Sprout, you can put in whatever ads you have sold or promote your own stuff, which is more profitable.

Dave Jackson [01:02:08]:
If you're on Spotify, here again, the walled garden is going to only put in ads that they get a cut of and that they bring you. So and the other thing about networks is and you're actually headed in the right direction. Networks typically people think, oh, I'll get big if I can get on a network. Networks don't make shows big. They make big shows bigger. And if by chance you're hearing things in the background now, of course, my name Snow blower? Snow blower. Yeah. Nice.

Dave Jackson [01:02:42]:
Even though we got, like, no snow and the when I pulled in last night at 9:30, the driveway was fairly clear. But for whatever reason, my neighbor, who normally mows his lawn about every other, I don't know, hour, is now switched that to snow blowing the driveway, which I appreciate.

Jim Collison [01:03:01]:
Buy them an electric one. You know, buy a battery one. Not quite so loud.

Dave Jackson [01:03:06]:
Yeah. Stephanie has a question. She says, does this you know what? I said this last week. I have to fix this thing where, I have 2 screens. And when I click on one screen, I have 2 desktops basically on my Mac. I don't know how I turned it on, and I need to turn it off. But, Stephanie Do

Jim Collison [01:03:24]:
you want me to read do you want me to read the question from Stephanie? Yeah. Or do you got it?

Dave Jackson [01:03:28]:
I got it. Okay. Do I let them know I talked about their question? I should. That would be a good question. I'd have to contact them personally. I always get worried about Reddit and Facebook about contacting people out there gonna be, like, hey, he's spamming me. I just like

Jim Collison [01:03:44]:
I'd violate the rules of the Reddit group to just post, hey, we talked about this on the show. And then put the link in Reddit. That'd violate those groups' policies. But Yeah, you could Yeah, and then it is weird. They didn't ask you to answer this question. Has anybody ever come back to you and said, Hey, I didn't give you permission to use my question

Dave Jackson [01:04:06]:
on your No. To which I would say it's on Reddit. It's in public.

Jim Collison [01:04:09]:
That's true. I mean

Dave Jackson [01:04:09]:
And you you asked for my you asked for opinions. I get and I usually always answer it there while I'm there. And I'm like, oh, it was this is something outside of the norm. So, yeah, Ray over at around the layout says to nonrelated ads, spend some time and get yourself some topic related ads that you can make a 100% of the profit of. There you go, Said the man who does, model train show. So, you know, he's got a hyper niche show. And if he can get a sponsor, somebody that does something in that space, I'm sure you can charge more than 0.00 There was one thing I looked at. It was, like, $2 CPM.

Dave Jackson [01:04:46]:
And I'm like, come on. That's almost nothing. Like, that's it just I saw that. I was, like, it's crazy. Andres says, if you'd like to get signed and and a dedicated copy of brought it from your podcast. Oh, he's doing a a platform.

Jim Collison [01:04:59]:
No, no, no. No. He says, If I'd like to get a signed copy. He's saying, Would you send a signed copy of your book to him in Costa Rica? That's what he's asking. He wants a free copy. He wants

Dave Jackson [01:05:12]:
a copy of your book. It's a You

Jim Collison [01:05:14]:
need to buy

Dave Jackson [01:05:15]:
it, of course.

Jim Collison [01:05:15]:
And then you would sign it there. Can he buy it from you? Do you have a way of him buying your book directly from you? Or does it have to go through?

Dave Jackson [01:05:23]:
Yeah. If you buy a signed copy

Jim Collison [01:05:25]:
How do you do

Dave Jackson [01:05:26]:
that? I basically I well, first of all, thanks to our good friends at Snickerdoodle, I have a branded bag that the book goes in along with a bubble wrap kind of thing.

Jim Collison [01:05:42]:
Oh, nice.

Dave Jackson [01:05:42]:
But these are cute. Right? So it's a bag that says has my School of Podcasting logo on it. And then I go to the post office, and I go, I would like to mail this media mail, which is cheaper than normal mail. And they go, does it have you it's always weird. They're like because I'll say it's a book. And then they go, does this have any hazardous? I guess they have to ask. And then they charge me whatever it is. It's usually, I don't know, 5, $6 to actually, probably not even that much.

Dave Jackson [01:06:10]:
I'd have to go look. But oh, yes. I'll ask the, you know, I'll ask the people, the post office. How much is it to ship something to Costa Rica? And then in some cases, this is where, where's Costa Rica?

Jim Collison [01:06:22]:
South America.

Dave Jackson [01:06:23]:
South America. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:06:23]:
Oh, Central America. Technically, it's Central America.

Dave Jackson [01:06:26]:
Yeah. Because I was like, I know in some cases, I did a contest once and the guy that won was in Russia, and they're like, yeah, you can't ship anything to Russia. And I was like, oh,

Jim Collison [01:06:34]:
okay. Not right now. Not Americans. You can nope. Could not do it.

Dave Jackson [01:06:38]:
But I will I'll see if I can find out what the the shipping is and if it's not insane. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Yeah. Chris says, I've been blocked from Reddit from answering questions, so no more Reddit for us. Here's the thing that's weird with me is I would go over and somebody would say, what's the best microphone under a $100? And I'd go, Samsung q 2u Audio Technica ATR 21100. And I would get a flag. And I'm like, what? And they're like, you need to disclose that you're from Libsyn, and you run the School of Podcasting.

Dave Jackson [01:07:14]:
And I'm like, but I didn't comment on media hosts. And I didn't

Jim Collison [01:07:19]:
What's best? Bangs. Yeah. God. Come on. Bangs.

Dave Jackson [01:07:22]:
So now well, Bangs and there are other moderators over there. And so now after every single if if I sneeze over there, I have a text expander. And I'm not look. I'm not complaining. It's free publicity. And I it says, I need to just moderator disclose. I'm the head of podcasting@podpage.com and the founder of the School of Podcasting.

Jim Collison [01:07:42]:
Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:07:43]:
So Yeah. I had I you know, because I asked them. I'm like, hey. I keep getting flagged for stuff. And they're like, you just need to disclose. I'm like, what does that look like? And they're like, we just need to say this. I'm like, okay. Fine by me.

Jim Collison [01:07:55]:
I understand. Listen, I was giving bangs a hard time. But I understand why I've had to do this in my own groups where every single post was just a, was just an advertisement. 1, they were just advertising to each other. And then 2, every, all the responses were, Well, you can come to my site. And, you know, I had some people contact me in the group, like, Yeah, I'm leaving, because it's just sales. All, everything is a sales pitch. And so as a moderator, you're like, Okay, how do we slow that, you know, how do we slow that down? You think you're being helpful in the beginning by posting those I mean, shoot, I mean, 10 years ago, it was awesome.

Jim Collison [01:08:36]:
You'd put all these affiliate links in, and so it's all these great kind of opportunities there. That's being shunned now. You know, putting an affiliate without disclosing it is kind of being, is kind of shunned. But it is, from a group moderator standpoint, I do understand that side of the equation. Otherwise, Dave and I know you meant well, but there's others who will just blast in. And it's not spam in the sense that it's bad. It's just, people get overwhelmed. This is like the microphone conversation.

Jim Collison [01:09:09]:
People think they're gonna go to a chat room, and they're gonna say, Hey, what's the best microphone? And they think they're gonna get a definitive answer. And it's like, Well, depends what you're doing and how much you want to spend. But here's, but here's 15 mics. They're no better off after that conversation sometimes than they were before they asked the question. Because in those kinds of groups with those kinds of questions, I don't know in some cases if they're, if our answers are actually helpful.

Dave Jackson [01:09:38]:
Yeah. It's why I just did it on my YouTube channel. Then this was an episode of The School of Podcasting where instead of saying what's the best media host, I explained what the features are because I love Captivate. But if somebody goes, well, I'm gonna do 2 episodes a month, they're gonna be about 20 minutes long. So biweekly, 20 minutes long. We don't really care about monetization. Is Captivate the best choice for that? No. Libsyn is.

Dave Jackson [01:10:04]:
$7 a month. Like, I just saved you $13 a month because you don't need some of the you know, now Captivate has all their dynamic stuff and AI tools and things like if you're just doing 2 episodes a month, Libsyn. Use the coupon code s o p free. I think that still works. Here's a fun question that I was like, is there a none of the above? They asked about a podcast name. I need an option on which podcast name out of the following would pique people's interest to listen to. So that's a good one because you want people to click on it, but you also want them to know what it is. Curated, how do you pronounce c o? Ko? Kyle? That's half the problem.

Dave Jackson [01:10:44]:
Chao? Chao? There you go. Offbeat and On Point podcast or Fashionably Late podcast. And so when I saw all of these, I was not over like, I just kinda like like, I don't I don't think that's gonna work for me because I don't know what it's about. Now, if you picked Offbeat and On Point because that is the one or Fashionably Late, You would just need a tagline. Something like fashionably late, stories of such and such, blah blah blah blah blah. You know, like, in any kind of book. Right? You know, the audience is listening. That's the name.

Dave Jackson [01:11:19]:
And then a tagline, a little guide to building a big podcast by Tom Webster. Right? So you need a tagline because these are not obvious to me. And I didn't start this off as a plug, but I didn't even know we had this until oh, doggone. Hold on. Let's go incognito. PodPage has a name planner at the at the very bottom of our page. And I never and it's actually not bad. So come on.

Dave Jackson [01:11:47]:
Did I spell it wrong? This is always fun when it's live. PodPage doesn't support a secure really? That's always fun.

Jim Collison [01:11:56]:
Put s by the p. H e d p s.

Dave Jackson [01:11:58]:
But if I go that's me. I'm like, well, what's the I thought I did that. Survey says. Anyway, at the bottom of pod page, there is an option to it's a and you put in what the show is about, etcetera, etcetera, and it will yeah. Forget that. But, anyway, there is a name creator at the bottom of the pod page. And I played with it. I was like, that's kinda cool.

Dave Jackson [01:12:20]:
So, yeah, so for that person in this see, I don't even have their name. So I couldn't even go back and say, hey. We talked about your name question on, you know, ask the podcast coach.

Jim Collison [01:12:32]:
Well, those names, you know, as we were looking at the 3 of them, they're so specific. Well, the 2 bottom ones are super general. And the top one, I think, is ultraniche. Like there's some kind of niche we, you and I don't know what that is. And so, you know, that's where, as you're picking titles, if you're gonna be a super niche podcast, just know, if you go niche with your title, it's gonna limit the, it's gonna limit it. Now, I think at some point, the title stops mattering. If you get enough people and you get enough momentum going and you get, and you're doing enough and you're out there enough, the title itself, you know, kind of, I, there's a couple podcasts that I listen to now. I'm not even sure what the title is, to be honest with you.

Jim Collison [01:13:21]:
Like, like the Wall Street Journal podcast, it's got a title, but I don't know what it is. I just like it. I subscribe to it. I listen to it every day, twice a day to get my news. But I don't know. The whiskey there's a couple of whiskey podcasts I listen to. I don't know what their titles are. So at some point, it, it kind of stops mattering.

Jim Collison [01:13:42]:
And I know you, from a discover, discoverability standpoint, you're thinking, Yeah, Jim, but it does matter. And you're right, it does in that case. But for your actual listeners, once they find you, it stops being kind of relevant in the way that people react to it. So of those 3, I mean, I think for all of us, I, you know, my original tech show is called Home Tech. Well, okay, it's pretty general, right? Then I changed it to Home Gadget Geeks because Dave McCabe and I were going to be forming this Geeks network that we were going to be putting together. And so I changed the name of my show to match the network. Now we ended up not ever doing anything with it. And I liked the change.

Jim Collison [01:14:27]:
I liked the home. I was actually surprised nobody had that to begin with. And it was a great change for me, and it works. And when I tell people, Yeah, Home Gadget Geeks, they go, Oh, yeah. Okay, that kind of makes sense. I kind of get, you know, I get an idea what we're doing there. So the title is a hard, is one of those hard decisions to make. You're gonna not, there's, you're never gonna find a title that's gonna be 100% perfect.

Jim Collison [01:14:51]:
You know, it's gonna be close.

Dave Jackson [01:14:53]:
Well and and I can also say when it comes to names, things like with the words like 4 or 2, if you decide to go with the number 2, you will want to jump off a bridge about a year into your show because you'd be like, oh, it's called, you know, faith to fun. But it's faith, the number 2, fun. And about the 4 thousandth time you do that, I'm like, I should have just paid for the you know? Because I mean, working at Libsyn, going to a conference, I would go they'd come up and they'd go, what's the difference between Blueberry and Lisbon? And I'd go and I'd go, it's Libsyn. It's short for liberated syndication. And that was it. I wasn't snarky about it. And then they'd go, but okay. So how is Lipson better than Buzzsprout? And I'm like, you know, it's Lipson.

Dave Jackson [01:15:45]:
It's short for just I'm like, I just wanna go back in time and find the founding fathers of Lipson and go, don't call it Lipson. Call it

Jim Collison [01:15:52]:
Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:15:52]:
Media hosting or something. So yeah.

Jim Collison [01:15:55]:
I'm sure it sounded really cool at the time. You know? Oh, yeah. We're Libsyn. You know? Liberated syndication or Libsyn. You know, like, Lib who? Liberace?

Dave Jackson [01:16:06]:
Yeah. And then how do you spell it? No. It's, you know and then it's is it s I n? No. We're not the devil. You know?

Jim Collison [01:16:13]:
Not the devil. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:16:16]:
Here's a fun one. Fresh off the presses. Hey, everyone. I've been a long time Riverside user, but now they slapped a paywall on all export features with 0 prior notice. That's not good. I would check your spam folder. Like, not I don't know Riverside at all, but I'd check your spam folder. Suddenly, I can't export anything without upgrading to upgrading my plan to pro.

Dave Jackson [01:16:38]:
Yes. That's how those features work. That's how they get you to pay. This feels completely unfair and predatory. If you're using the free plan, maybe they were on because I know it's for a while Spotify was working with Riverside. I reached out to their support team multiple times for an explanation on a workaround, but I'm getting nothing but silence. That might be their manager going, don't answer yet. Has anyone else experienced this? We deserve an actual notification from the company for this aggressive behavior.

Dave Jackson [01:17:05]:
But my thing is if you're on the free plan, I don't even know if Riverside has a free plan, you can't really complain. You might complain that, hey. I I would have been nice if I had a notice, but I don't remember ever getting a notice from StreamYard that the price was going up. I remember hearing They sent out some emails. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:17:24]:
They sent out some emails. Dave, this is the this is the bane on the other side of things, for my day job, this is the bane of my existence where if I, if, in some cases, if I didn't drive to the person's house and knock on their door with a registered letter or personally delivering the information to them, Yeah, write it in make sure it was on, you know. The other side of this is I, sometimes I get feedback. You talk too much. There's too many emails. I unsubscribe because I was getting too many emails from you. And you're like, Yeah, because they're important. Like, that's how we, that's how we notify you of these kinds of changes.

Jim Collison [01:18:08]:
This is a people problem, you know, in the, in the world. There are folks who and listen, if you have one email address, and you're having everything sent to it, and your name, your email address has been sold, which is I think every email address on the planet right now, chances are you're getting an enormous amount of spam. Like you say, Check your spam folders, right? But this is definitely why email is broken, Right? It's just this and people think like, No one told me. No, they probably did. Now, is changing your plans, you know, in StreamYard's case, is the price changes they made, is that predatory? That's a strong word. That's a really strong word for like, these people are, they're a business. If you, if, listen, if you started someplace on a free plan, and it's free forever, well, you won the lottery. But I think by now, most of us know the freemium model is going to be eventually to create, like, to bring it in.

Jim Collison [01:19:12]:
I mean, even PodPage was this way in a lot of ways, right? Started free, a lot of great stuff. And then as I go out there now, and more and more of those services are being paid for. Is that predatory? Probably not. Is that business? It absolutely is.

Dave Jackson [01:19:27]:
I was using an app Yeah. I was using an app called Fit for Friends. We were doing little challenges, and it's been free for years. And they now charge $5 a month per person. And so everybody's like, I'm out. And I went and looked for, like, I need a free app to do weight loss challenges on Android and iOS. And there was 1, and there are so much spammy ads that pop up in your face that I'm pretty sure that group is just gonna go, hey, it was fun while it lasted, but we're out. I do wanna get why John, I'm sorry.

Dave Jackson [01:20:02]:
I pinned this and then totally forgot about it. How can I find a podcast producer overseas recording and or editing rec place to invite?

Jim Collison [01:20:13]:
Recording recording place or place to record invites, those kinds of things.

Dave Jackson [01:20:18]:
I know I would just Google. What would you Google? You know, podcasting VA, maybe. And a lot of VAs are overseas. The good news is it'll be dirt cheap. The bad news is you will have, in some cases, a language barrier and a time difference. So, you know, they will be going to bed when you tell them I need this in 30 minutes and, you know, that whole 9 yards. But that is dirt cheap. I don't know any off top

Jim Collison [01:20:47]:
of my mind. Maybe. Not every location, I mean, is the cheapest. But Yeah. Fiverr may be a place to get started on something like this. At least if they've gone to Fiverr, they've put a few things together. You know?

Dave Jackson [01:21:01]:
I know if, right now, if you're getting somebody in the States, you're paying somewhere between $102100 an episode depending on what you want. If you're doing video, it's definitely gonna be closer to 200 than a100. But if you want show notes and transcripts and video clips and all that stuff, it takes a lot of time. But I honestly it's funny. I asked somebody yesterday in the school of podcasting because I know somebody with the VA. And I said, I need somebody to do mind numbingly kind of silly work, but it needs to be done, which is, like, take this code and copy it from this system into this system, and then do it about, I don't know, 72 times. Like, it's not hard. It is time consuming.

Dave Jackson [01:21:43]:
And it's just one of those things like, well, I have to do that later. And my I'll have to do that later. It's not that important. I'm just like, okay, I kind of would like to move these along. And I get approached probably about once a month from a VA company. Do you need anybody? And to which I always go, do you have an affiliate program? And they always say no. And that's pretty much where that stops. And not that if they did have an affiliate program, I I would promote them, but I will at least then hire them to do something for me so I could see what it was like.

Dave Jackson [01:22:13]:
But if anybody in the chat room has any ideas on that. Yeah. Coach Dave had a question about Gallup. He says Oh. Yeah.

Jim Collison [01:22:23]:
Yeah. Just worried. You know, I said just a minute ago, you know, the this customer problem of folks wanting, you know, a personal delivery of information to them, or we didn't contact them about it. You know, and I say, sometimes I say these kinds of things. And, you know, Dave is like, Hey, this, what if this gets back to your clients or your work, your place of employment? I've said it. I've said this on my Gallup podcast before. It's, you know, it's not, I'm not, this is not a blaming of who I work for or my customers. It's a struggle and an expectation of people.

Jim Collison [01:22:59]:
Right? This is in the space I talk about this inside our groups all the time of just the challenge of being able to get the bane is not the customers or the company. The bane is the problem of email. Right? This is the we think we're sending emails and clients are reading them. Clients think they're, we're not communicating to them because they're not getting them because of spam or folders that are too busy or they get too many emails. The bane is a broken problem with communication or with the assumption wait, I just had this I just talked about this in a meeting the other day. The problem is we think we have a bulletproof system of communication with email, and it's just flat out broken. You know, it is just broken. We think, Oh, no, we sent you an email.

Jim Collison [01:23:47]:
And they're like, Well, I didn't get it. And like, No, I can, I know you did? Well, I didn't. Right? And this is the, this is a, you know, a Communications problem. We talked about other ways of communicating to them, including, you know, putting it on the website and putting it in the app and some of those kinds of things. So, so, Coach Dave, don't misunderstand me or don't mishear me. And you did, obviously, as from the comment you made, The dilemma there is not who I work for or who my customers are. The problem is we are using, or we have a broken system called email. And everybody thinks, on either side and this is generally, I think, true in any service organization the organization thinks, Hey, I notified you.

Jim Collison [01:24:28]:
And the customer thinks, I didn't get it. And it's a huge, it's a huge, giant disconnect in there. It's why I created all the social channels and why I created different ways, you know, a 1000 different ways to do things so people would be notified. But no matter what I do, we just went through a pricing change ourselves here at the end of the year. Man, I blasted it everywhere. And, you know, 1st of the year, somebody comes back and says, I never heard about it. Like, where have you been? How can you not? You know? And I get complaints on the other side saying you're talking about it too much, so to speak.

Dave Jackson [01:25:02]:
Well, I know we're at time, but I wanna show

Jim Collison [01:25:04]:
Oh, sorry about that. Sorry

Dave Jackson [01:25:05]:
about that. No. This is how I check. I've not checked my email yet this morning. So I will go here. I already answered Jen's question. So I'll go here and I'll go delete. So there's whatever 20 waves.

Dave Jackson [01:25:17]:
Don't need that. Don't need yoga. Okay. So there's one I need and then a bunch of things, and I need to follow-up with a student on Volley. But, I mean, I the first 40, 50 emails I get a day are just and I know you're like, well, unsubscribe. But I'm like, yeah. It always went that easy. Jim Collison:

Jim Collison [01:25:35]:
It's a real dilemma. It's a real communications dilemma that we're in. And even with your podcast, even with your podcast listeners, you think you say it in a podcast, and you're like, Oh, yeah, I told people, you know, next week, we're off. And we've said it now twice in this podcast: There will be people next Saturday who are like, Where's Dave and Jim? How come they didn't tell you? They're not gonna say it that way, obviously. But it's just, it's always that, that, Coach Dave, don't apologize. I think it's a good topic. I think we sometimes think, Well, I told them. And our customers like, Well, I didn't hear.

Jim Collison [01:26:10]:
Who's wrong? Neither. Neither one of them are wrong.

Dave Jackson [01:26:13]:
It's hard to communicate with customers, because I know at Libsyn, we had a newsletter. We had a podcast. We had a YouTube channel. And we'd mentioned the same thing in all 3. And people like, I never got the message. And I'm like, how is that possible? So it's it's tricky. Oh, I know.

Jim Collison [01:26:28]:
I know. It's so hard. And it creates such a bad customer experience. You know, because they don't listen. You can't I try, but you can't tell them. Like, We did send it. I mean, and I can prove it, but you don't, it's, you don't want to get an approve it kind of these are your customers. You don't want to get an approve it.

Jim Collison [01:26:47]:
I end up apologizing. Very sorry we didn't get the information to you. If I can make this right in some way, we will. Right? But it is a, it definitely is the email is a problem. And there isn't a great solution for it, Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:27:01]:
But here's a way to fix it. Coach Dave says that's a software service. Follow-up is a great tool for automatically following up with people that don't respond.

Jim Collison [01:27:11]:
They'd even they'd even get more angry because that tool would send them and they'd be like, you talk to me too much. It's such a, I don't know if there's a good solution for it, just to be honest. Part of it's a human problem. Right? Part of it is a human problem.

Dave Jackson [01:27:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we can go on for hours.

Jim Collison [01:27:27]:
It was a good, it was a good conversation. And Coach Dave, thanks for clarifying that or saying that. Sometimes I'm very careful about what I say on this show in relations to my job. It does play in. It does have a piece that plays into it. But, you know, I wouldn't say, I don't think I'm secret here. But it does go out live. So I've got to be, I have to be very careful.

Dave Jackson [01:27:50]:
If I have a story, it's usually like I was working with a client. And if I have a, I was working with a client, it is typically not something that's happened in the last month. Like, I want some time from when it happened to and usually, you know, if it's something where something great happened, they'll be like, oh, ray@aroundthelayout.comaddthisamazingsurvey. But if it's something like this, like the guy a couple of weeks ago that came on my chat and his his podcast idea was I'm going to put a video on YouTube and spam everybody. And I was like, that's a strategy, not the one I would recommend, you know. But the gym, what's coming up on the average guy dot tv?

Jim Collison [01:28:28]:
Yeah. Mike Wiegler, a former co host, is back on the show. We spent a little time. A couple subjects that he's try he he may be changing my mind on, one is VR. And so we spent, I still, like to this day, I still can't figure out a great use case for VR besides a pure entertainment kind of thing. He had some different opinions on it. So we spent a little time talking about that and some home backup stuff and some other geekery as well. It's posted right now at homegadgetgeeks.com.

Dave Jackson [01:28:57]:
Did you guys talk about porn? Did you? No. No. No. Okay. Because that's the most, like, the industry that's using that. Yeah. But anyway, honest They're first they're

Jim Collison [01:29:06]:
first on everything, unfortunately. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [01:29:08]:
On the school of podcasting.com, I am talking not so much launch, but why we quit a little bit. It's kind of a 101, but it's the beginning of the year, and we thought we'd do that. But no show next week. We'll see you in 2 weeks. Take care, everybody.