 Podcasters round table, round 161, the monies in the reruns. Apparently 50% of monthly podcast downloads according to one podcast host comes from older episodes. So we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about dynamic insertion, which is from the same story. We're gonna talk maybe about Twitter spaces, what's that have to do with podcasting and some actually really cool stats from another study with some actionable highlights that is just like the stuff that people are always asking about podcasting, about how to podcast, how to grow your show. So that'll be interesting. Let's meet today's round table co-host Dave Jackson. Welcome back. Yes, nice to be back first round of the year and ready to kick back and talk some podcasting. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. You've optimized, your video looks good today, Dave. Wait a minute. Is that, let me go full screen, is that an SM7B? It is an SM7B. Dave, what's going on, man? It was on sale. I mean, that's really, if somebody said, why did you do that, it was on sale. I mean, it looks good and you sound great. Yeah, I had to switch to the big giant thing. Yeah, you had the heavy plosives? Heavy plosives, yeah, I was like, I didn't realize I talked that hard or whatever, but. Interesting. Yeah, so I switched to the big giant one and it's weird. It's, if I were to switch back to my RE320, I would sound super clear compared to this now. And I've had people say, I really like your mic on that voice. And I was like, okay. Your mic on that voice? Your voice on that mic? Yeah, either one. You can put your mic on your voice. You're saying that people prefer the RE, I mean, they're so used to it, change. People don't like change, Dave, you're finding that out today because. Holy cow. You don't have to go into it, it does not go into it, but. Okay, well, we can get into that. I just caught that. I mean, we've been in the pre-show and I just saw that I was introducing you. I've got the SM7B. I think our first time round table or guest might also have the same. It's just a plethora of SM7Bs. Lewis, welcome to the round table. Hey, thanks Ray. Thanks so much for having me. Lewis Goodman from the Love Thy Lawyer podcast, like Love Thy Neighbor, but Love Thy Lawyer. And yes, I have an SM7B and like Dave, I have mine plugged into a cloud lifter, which I find really helps with the gain on it. Yeah, so if you're listening to this, whether you're watching, you should watch at youtube.com slash podcasters round table or podcasters round table.com. The video will be embedded there. Embedded there when I actually get locked, not locked out on my own website, which we talked about, but you can hear three different voices on the SM7B in this case. We probably all have them set up differently, but so if you're curious, it's a nice little test. And then I think Daniel's gonna be joining us and he's probably still on the RE320, which is brighter, but you can make the SM7B brighter. Yeah. But... I always say it kind of, I think it really boils down to whatever you feel comfortable, because you don't sound like you do when you talk, you hear through headphones and that whole nine yards. So I think it's a matter of when the person just feels confident, that's the microphone they go with, because I could go in later and boost the high end on this and boost the low end on the RE320. It's like, it can kind of make anything sound like anything, but... You have a nice blend there. My complaint about the SM7B and it's become, we've derailed, but that's what we do here, is that people buy it, right? It's the number one microphone in podcasting. It just is. You're gonna see it in front of more podcasters than probably anything else. And it's often too muddy. People, it does have a deep end, I don't know, some people call it broadcast sound. It's too muddy, especially if someone's listening through speakers that don't produce low end, it doesn't sound, I mean, in theory, then it's not as muddy, but anyways, careful with it. I think it's best when it has a more natural tone. And you sound pretty natural, David. I can hear that hint of that lower mid, which just gives you that sort of growl, but it's not muddy where it's just, whoa, whoa, whoa, like you're through a door, right? Well, right now I'm going through a Tascam Mixcast 4, and I've cut some of the low end and boosted some of the high end. So without going too crazy. Yeah, the SM7B, you can cut low and boost high, but it can be extreme. It can be a little sizzly, or if you have Ss, Lewis, are you doing any, are you flat on the EQ there, the frequency response little gauges they give you? I could look at it and tell you. You don't remember? You've been using it that long. He's like, I don't know. No, you know, here's the thing. Well, first of all, in my kind of home studio, Dave and I have talked from also my office studio where I have another SM7B hooked into a Roadcaster Pro, and then at home, I'm just hooked into a Scarlet, and I'm thinking about getting a, what's that four thing I'm supposed to get, Dave? The, oh, the PodTrack, the P4, yeah. Yeah, the P4, right, yeah. So I'm thinking about getting one of those for home, but really I have a friend who is, has a very serious studio set up for recording, and he just said, this is the microphone you want. You want to put it into a Cloudlifter and put it into a Scarlet, and you can just go right into your computer. So that's where I got the SM7B from. I have not really done a lot of research on it. And then he told me where I should put the little switches on the back. And so I just did that, and that's where I am. Fantastic. All right, well, can I ask Lewis what kind of lawyer? Yes, I do criminal defense. I started out as a criminal prosecutor, and I was in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office for almost 10 years. And then I came out, opened my own practice, and I do nothing but criminal defense in Alameda County. Yeah, I asked because it sounds like your podcast is fairly niche, so we're gonna get into that, because I'm curious about sort of catering to a local audience, while also having a podcast means you can be heard anywhere in the world. So we will get into that. I think there's some crossover into one of our stories. So let's actually grab one of these stories, Lewis. Why don't you start off? You can pick either one of the two stories that you have here in the doc. Well, I was very interested in the dynamic insertion story, mainly because it was talking about how people listen to your podcasts from your backlog. And I have certainly found that to be true. People find my podcast, local attorneys find my podcast, and then they realize to go, oh, he's interviewed this person and this person and this person, and I know these people, so I'd like to listen to that individual's interview. And so they do because I'll look back and I'll realize that in the first week I've extra downloads, but as maybe a month or two goes by, there's a lot more downloads, and sometimes even the very early podcasts, all of a sudden there's an increase in the number of downloads and the number of people who've listened. So that aspect of it was very interesting. And then the dynamic insertion, I certainly understand that in terms of advertising. Now, I don't really do any advertising on my podcast, but, and let me just quickly say what my understanding of dynamic insertion is, which is that you could do a little pre-roll or post-roll as an introduction or a summary of the podcast, and you can change it for all of your podcasts so that that bit of audio comes in and it doesn't change anything else in the podcast. So what's really neat about it is if, for example, you have some advertising that is topical, let's say you're doing, okay, we're doing this as a Christmas promotion. Well, if someone then listens to that same podcast in May, they're not really interested in the Christmas promotion, but they may be interested in the upcoming 4th of July promotion, and so that dynamic insertion can change for that specific need. And what it does is it makes it so that your backlog is kind of evergreen, so that it doesn't seem like it's really dated material. That's one version of it. True dynamic insertion, if you're gonna go like Cadillac style, not only we'll do what Louis said, so your pre-roll and post-roll, but you can actually go in and set as many as you want slots for ads, and that's where mid-rolls come into play and things of that nature. And then if you have, there are systems that will also allow you to target. So you could say, look, don't run this ad for stamps.com in the UK, this makes no sense, make this US only. And this is where if I'm a comedian and I'm gonna be playing Poughkeepsie, I can say, look, only play this ad about me coming to the chuckle hut within like a 60 mile radius of this particular area. So you can get super crazy with dynamic ad insertion and different companies have different levels of this. I know Buzzsprout has the pre and post-roll. I know Captivate has pre and post-roll plus mid-roll. And then Libsyn has an enterprise solution called Libsyn Pro that does everything that I just mentioned. And I'm not sure. I know Blueberry has some sort of dynamic ad insertion. I've never used theirs. Red Circle has dynamic ad. The thing that's interesting about it, when I did the research for my book, some of these places will, you'll go and you can have a company that will fill your slots. But the problem was, if they weren't host-red, they were, in my case, it was 0.0017 cents per download. And so I did a little math here before we came to talk tonight. And I was really like, holy cow, 80% of my downloads for the school of podcasting are my back catalog. Now that's because I have a huge back catalog where like ask the podcast coach was like 35%. Your podcast consultant was like 60%. But I looked at it because I get, at least in December, I got 21,000 downloads and some change in December. 4,000 of that was from December, which means 17,000 downloads were from not December. And when I multiplied that by 0.0017 cents, and that's from like a year and a half ago, I came out to a whopping 28 bucks. Now granted, that will, you go, well, that'll pay for your hosting. Well, in many cases, depending on the situation, if you're paying for the Super Jumbo Deluxe version of Dynamic Ads, it's gonna be some money because every time you swap out an ad, your server's kind of kicking the gear. So- It tends to be a premium feature. We're on Lips and Pro at work and we use it. And it's mostly how we use it is not. Well, we advertise for ourselves, right? So kind of Lewis, what you're saying, we have events. We're about to do one. We launched a new sort of member website. We're gonna put Dynamic Ad Inserting because my director said, hey, maybe we should put some language in the podcast about this new website. And I said, this is a perfect case for, I basically just told her an ad because it'll go across the entire back catalog, right? And monthly downloads can be deceptive, right? Some people will give you this number as their metric of success maybe or wanna base that number on their advertisers now. We're seeing that if your back catalog is that active, which I'm real curious, because Todd always talks, Blueberry, Rob always how there's not a lot of long tail in most podcasts. So I don't know, you have to look at your own podcast and see how your back catalog does. But it doesn't matter, 10 extra episodes every month for episode four and you're on episode 24, that's new people every time. So, yeah, we use it to promote our own stuff, but you can use it for anything really, right? You could put a new jingle in if you wanted, like the beauty is that you're not baking it into the content whereas it's host read, it could still be host read. I think people get confused like it, it could still be, we use our own host to record and then it's played, we do pre-roll because when you get into the mid-roll, then you actually have to have like a marker, you actually have to know exactly where it's gonna go, otherwise it's just gonna cut you off, right? So that gets kind of messy unless you plan for it. So, I was kind of thinking about this and so what does this mean to you if you have a podcast and maybe you're not realizing, maybe you don't look at your stats, although I don't know what podcaster doesn't, at least in the beginning, look at their stats a lot and then later on you don't. So you might not realize, wow, that catalog or especially this one episode is getting a ton of reach, right? A lot of people are listening to this one which should also be a signal that you should probably do more of whatever's in that episode. But to reach those people, you can do dynamic ad insertion but it does typically cost money. So I know there may be that red circle or something is free, but you always toss something. Well, you have a red circle and then Captivate has it built in. So if you pay for it, so if you host on Captivate, you get. Yeah, yeah, red circle is the only person I know of that has dynamic ads that's actually free. Now Spotify will say you can add ads, but so far you can't do your own ads and I'm with you Ray, I think that's the best use, that's the best, that's the most profitable thing is to promote your own service and the only thing I've ever seen promoted on Spotify or on Spotify on Anchor is Anchor and that was a penny a download. So I'll give them credit. It was more than 0.007 cents, but that was the only sponsor was Anchor, but yeah. I'm pretty sure that on Buzzsprout, as long as you have a paid service at any level that you can use their dynamic insertion, but it's not as sophisticated as Libsyn. No, but it's, and you Ray hit it on the head, you have to really pay attention to your recording levels when you do that, cause you don't want your pre-roll and post-roll to be either too loud or too quiet. And then the mid-roll thing, cause I just started using this on the school of podcasting and you plan it, but you still only leave a little tiny blip because if I leave like a second and then I go in and put my spot, I'll be like right after this and then there's a half a second of nothing and then the ad comes on, the ads over and then there's another half a second of nothing before you kick back in. So you have to kind of leave this blue. I wonder if there's a way to hack that where like as you know, you're going into that spot, you do a little music bed underneath what you're saying and then that music bed exists in the, so if the music bed runs and it sort of picks, I don't know, so maybe there's no blank spot? I don't know. We're gonna talk about music anyways, so it's probably a bad idea. Brian Barletta from Sounds Profitable does that where he will fade out with music and but this would take so much effort to where he's got a loop and then he makes sure that wherever he stopped in his, we'll be right back after this, he starts his music with that. So it sounds like the music never stopped, but it's actually a loop. It's pretty creative how he did it, but I was like, that gives me a headache just figuring out where to start and stop the music. It's a lot of work. This show is bare bones, so we're probably not gonna do that. But to me, I could definitely see it using it for more promoting my own stuff. I don't think the remnant sale of ads that are available are not gonna be helpful. And I've heard people on the other side of the planet say we really are tired of hearing about stamps.com where we're just not gonna be using the US Postal Service in Australia. So when you can target them, it makes them a little more effective. Yeah, that's a huge, another huge use case, is you can say only play this here, which is important when you're paying for it especially because every one that runs is a little bit of money, at least through how it works for us on Lips and Pro. The rates are great, like every time I tell, I'm like, we could reach 100,000 people for like 50 bucks and in a corporation, it's almost laughable. I almost don't bring it up because the money they're spending on Facebook and Google ad, like it's ridiculous. And I'm saying we can actually reach 100,000 of the people you're trying to reach generically on the web. So the rates are good. But again, that requires a budget of some type. If you're an independent podcaster, if you're just doing it, like we're doing it here, it's a different story. You're gonna have to come with that money. Well, you also brought up a good point though that a lot of people love to use the, I know we need applause. Hold on. Ladies and gentlemen, you're knowing me love him. He's back. It's the one and only Daniel J. Lewis. How's it going, buddy? Gosh, I've missed you guys. Daniel was just dynamically inserted into the podcast. See, we're using it already. We're using it with special AI. It's amazing. I'm going to be painted out in a few months. Yeah, we're gonna take you back out of this episode later, yeah, yeah. When it's the fest, the Daniel season is over. The other thing that's here, if you didn't notice it, oh my gosh, Daniel has hair. Oh, he likes to go back and forth. You did not have hair the last time I saw you. Welcome back, Daniel. It's been a long time. No, I had hair back then. We can check the record. It's like a blockchain here, okay? But I know I just jumped in late, so I'll let you guys finish your conversation and join in where I can. Daniel, what is your podcast? Co-host Daniel J. Lewis, welcome. It is The Audacity to Podcast, which has had more of its episodes downloaded from before 2022 than anything I've released this year. Same with the roundtable. And yeah, exactly. But just like the roundtable, The Audacity to Podcast, we'll be coming back very soon. Nice. We're not sure, actually. Ray had brought up the back catalog. That is, you said how it's kind of, people love to quote that number. If you looked at my... Monthly downloads. Yeah, monthly downloads. If you looked at that, and I said that's my December number, and you go, oh, there's four weeks in December, you divide that by four, that's literally like double what my downloads are. And so your monthly downloads can be as racist. They go all over the place. And what happens is you'll have somebody, you'll have three people from an event or a newsletter or something that you got mentioned in. And I just was listening to a podcast and some podcaster just found out that they'd been mentioned in Forbes. And they're like, nobody told them. They just were in some list. So that happens. And all of a sudden you have three people come over, they listen to your podcast, you've got 80 episodes, and somebody clicks the download all button and presto, your monthly downloads go through the roof. So it's one of those things that, on one hand, that's great. On the other hand, that means the next month, if that doesn't happen, your numbers are gonna tank. And that's when you get all nervous. Just realize your monthly downloads go up and down all over the time. So it's not that... What's the best stat to quote? Daniel, if you're gonna quote, you know, you're like, you know what that's that? The Audacity podcast, we get X downloads per what? Like how do you, what, what would you quote for that? I like using downloads per episode. So I actually tried to start abbreviating that DPE downloads per episode after 30 days. That's actually more than, most of the people who follow your podcast or subscribe to it will receive those downloads automatically within the first, really within the first three days, probably most likely in the first 24 to 48 hours. So that's your most telling, most engaged number. But there is, I think like the residual downloads, the SEO, the people who stream and then might not get to play the episode until later. So really, I think 30 is that magic number that we mostly talk about as well as that's most interesting to sponsors. Yeah, and that's kind of how I pitch it is, and that's why I use it because, you know, it's how many downloads for the episode within the first four weeks, which you typically find an advertiser's gonna wanna know, right, and so it's a good metric. It gives you an idea also, like how do you, do you gauge, cause we don't know, we're not a walled garden, we're not YouTube, we don't know our subscriber numbers. How do you gauge your subscriber numbers on those type of numbers? You know what I mean? You know, I used to use Feedburner just for the sake of kind of getting an estimate, but then with the way technology has gone, it's been even less reliable. And I used to just look at it for direction, like as my, how fast is the number of subscriptions going up or down. Now it's not even helpful for that. So for me, it's really just that 30 day number gives me an idea of this is my audience. I wouldn't say this is how many subscribers I have. I would say this is how big my audience is. Because especially like if you've worked into SEO work on your site and you could have people coming to your site on a regular basis because of the search engine optimization you've put in. So they might be coming to your website and listening. So they are an audience and you might even be showing up for multiple searches, but they might not be set up to automatically receive every one of your episodes. So they're not technically a subscriber, but they are part of your audience. And that seems to average out across episodes too, that. So there is, yes, there is the occasional big hit, but usually a big hit that I find is a spike is usually the result of being featured somewhere, not because I've made some episode that has better SEO than another episode. That happens very little. Daniel, haven't you heard there hasn't, there are no more big hits in podcasting. That would be a transition if we wanted. There is a story here. Daniel, actually, sure. Why don't we go right into that? Yeah, obviously I don't. Well, okay, sure. Has there been something that's been talked about? So the title, the title of this is podcasting hasn't produced a new hit in years, right? Yeah, well, you, I think our audience is smart enough to question how do you define a hit? Because certainly there have been great podcasts, fantastic podcasts launched in the last couple of years. I've started listening to a couple of new ones that I think are within the last couple of years, very, very well done podcast, very entertaining, very informative. There are plenty of shows like that. Are they major hits? Maybe not. Does this article define what a hit is? If they're saying it's. They're a way of defining it. It's just like compared to other shows, cereal. They are basically saying, looking at the Apple podcast charts, and I'll shout out to James Cridlin from Pod News. He says, it's not technically a chart. Well, it is a chart, but you just have to know what it's a chart of, which is primarily based on new subscriptions. So they're saying looking at the chart, there haven't been, of what's in the chart, the top 10, none of them are new within the last couple of years. So no new shows have broken through the top 10 in a couple of years? At least when they looked at the chart. Sure. So in that sense, being that the chart, it's a weird way to draw a conclusion. Because they're looking at a chart that changes hourly multiple times per day. Based on. New subscriptions, really, when a show pops up. So let's say a show pops up today, and it's hugely popular, and it's mentioned everywhere. It gets lots of subscriptions. It'll pop up to number one. Now, if for some reason, the world forgets about the show, like Sputnik launches tomorrow, or something major happens tomorrow, the world will quickly forget about whatever was breaking today, and that podcast will fall down in the charts. But as long as people are talking about it, it will get new subscribers, and therefore stay higher in the charts. But the thing is, it's not, you really can't have a chart that illustrates or that lists the absolute most popular podcast. It's a very difficult thing to measure because of the way podcasts are so different. But what I would think, the first thing when I saw the article saying there have been no big hits, well, can you tell me, and I could be wrong on this, but I couldn't come up with an answer, can you tell me a major hit television, a new television series, or new movie series that's come out in the last couple of years? Well, are you talking about broadcast TV because I can name it just one after another on streaming, right? That's it. The first thing in my head was Tiger King. I mean, Mandalorian, you name it. I mean, there's this hit after hits. Even those are kind of niche when you think about it. It moved away from TV, but they're huge. What about movies? Squid Game was huge. Any new series or any non-series movie that was a huge hit in the last few years? I didn't have the word Marvel in it. Yeah, right. Well, I think to some extent, that's a bit of a COVID problem. But let me just kind of... That's the other point. Yeah, but I mean, let me ask, well, Dave, let me ask you on this because I think that there's an analogy, at least, to the music industry. That we had the billboard charts and it's kind of, you know, you don't just talk about a music being a big hit. You have to define, is it in the jazz genre? Is it country? Is it rock and roll? Is it classical music? I mean, there's a... The billboard chart is really divided up into certain sectors. And I think that if... That when podcasting really becomes sophisticated enough to really look at itself clearly, that there's going to be those kinds of columns that podcasts will be put into. Because I don't think you can really... You can really compare a podcast, for example, like, Who's Your Daddy to the Wall Street Journal's afternoon regular show. I mean, these are just... They're podcasts, but you know, they're just completely different genres. I think that this article is really just using hit as like a podcast that enters the zeitgeist, right? So like serial, everyone just talked about serial, didn't matter if you knew what a podcast was. Most people said, have you heard serial? They didn't even know the listening to a podcast maybe. Something like that, right? Where just it goes across, it's just broad. And the only thing, the only problem with that is that podcasts don't tend to do best broadly, right? So like... And besides serial, what other podcast has gotten nearly that much attention? I think Bad Blood got a lot of attention. Yeah, that's funny because I've never heard of that podcast. Have you guys heard of that one? It's about, it was produced by the Wall Street Journal. By the guy that broke the Theranos story. Ray, I'm sure you're familiar with the Theranos story about the woman, Elizabeth Holmes, who wanted to develop a machine that could do diagnosis on a single drop of blood. And of course it was all fraudulent. She just got convicted in federal court in San Jose. And that's one of the reasons, you know, high profile case, right? It is really good exposure for your podcasts. It's like doing a TV fan podcast. Jump on the back of something that's really popular and people are talking about it or they're searching it at least. But you know, even like something like The Daily, the shows like that have been big across, across, you'll hear it or you'll read about it. I mean, part of it is what is the media gonna cover, right? So anyways, there's no big hits. Probably not accurate. Yeah, I know for me, I use the analogy, the last couple of Christmases have been getting sucked in thanks to my sister-in-law into the Hallmark channel. And that's, you know, I always say podcasting is more like cable TV than it is radio because you've got animal planets and all these kind of niche channels. And when my sister-in-law and my cousin-in-law got in the same room and started talking Hallmark movies, it was like a completely different language but they both knew exactly what they were talking about and I had no idea. So to them, they were talking about the latest movie and to them it was a hit. It was like one of the best movies ever and I was like, I've never even heard of it. So I think there've been hits, but like Louis was saying, it's in the, you know, acoustic jazz, whatever genre that it's been niche down and niche down and niche down. So. Like look at The Office Ladies podcast where it's two of the actresses from the TV series The Office, the American series have this podcast. I forget when it started but I've been listening since the beginning. It's a really fun podcast. I really like it and it's a great demonstration of how you can do a rewatch podcast. But it's younger than two years. I think it's between one and two years. They won an award in the Academy of Podcasters. I'm sorry, the podcast Academy, they won an award last year and I think very well deserved. And I would say that was a big hit podcast. Now was that serial level attention? No, but among those who are familiar with The Office, it's huge. And in fact, probably among those who only are somewhat familiar with The Office, they probably heard about it as well. Yeah, it was a great podcast. It was the epitome of information you can't get anyplace else. Because they had all the behind the scenes stuff. It was great. And extremely entertaining. Yeah. And entertaining show too. I am so picky with my TV fan podcast, which I never, never was a thing for me but until I started watching, I believe, I don't know if it was Westworld, basically a show that was so complicated that I needed someone to explain it to me, right? So, and then I've done this with a few shows recently. I started watching, it's the Book of Boba, right? And so like, I need some Star Wars nerds to like really give me in all the backstory. And man, I just press play, nope, press play, nope. Like just so picky. If you do a show, we talk about it as like, oh, here's the easy way to get popular in podcast and get a following. I'm telling you probably, I mean, I think people are either really into the show, so you really have to just hit the right chord with that person too. And then you have to do that across a lot of people before you're popular. So I found myself being very picky. Now, why did you say no? Like what was it? I mean, it could be anything. Like I could press play and it's like, it's clearly unorganized. The audio is terrible. The audio could just be bad for the guest or just overall audio and that's skewed because I listened to audio, but it could be anything. A lot of it has to be, like you kind of, with that type of show, I felt like you really have to hit all the points. I have to kind of groove with the hosts, just feel like they speak my language. They have to be very organized because I'm coming here for a very specific reason. I'm not necessarily here to nerd out with you. I mean, you're here to walk me through these episodes, right? So I don't know. It's just the first time I've felt myself being very picky and we've spent years talking about how, oh, the TV fan podcast is the easy route to massive growth, right? But Daniel knows very well about running that type of show. It's tough. Well, now there's the other thing and Gregory is bringing this up in the chat too, the Dr. Death podcast, which was a very popular podcast. I would say that was a hit podcast as well. That's being turned into a TV series. And also I just heard that the We Crash podcast is also being turned into a TV, or I think it's been Apple TV Plus is releasing a new series called We Crash about the We Work failure and that it has the same name as the podcast that was about the We Work failure makes me think it's a TV production of the podcast or something like that. Although in what I saw, they didn't actually reference the podcast. Then again, I think I saw only a headline. So I didn't do enough of my research there. But anyway, that's it. And we've seen this too. We've seen it done unsuccessfully with a few several shows, but that seems to be the new direction is taking a podcast to a TV show, which is a very interesting path. They always talk about podcasting as the minor leagues for big media, right? And big media has a great opportunity to farm Spotify in theory is kind of one of the things they're doing there. They're kind of looking for their next hit show by bringing on all these podcasts and saying, who can we pick from this group? And when a year ago, when all these platforms were signing just picking off podcasters left and right to these big deals to be exclusive podcast, they were doing that. And it was interesting to see. Well, I know I was in an event in New York City and I forget the name, but she works for Pineapple, something, something. There's one of those. Street media. Yeah. And she was saying how you can do an entire season of a podcast for the price of one pilot. Right. And so what they're doing is they'll do a whole season, see if it gets any legs. And if it does, now you've got another piece of evidence to go, we should green light this as a TV show because we've already got people interested in it. Well, I mean, to some extent, I think that the podcast world where you have independent podcasters, people like myself, it's kind of like people who are playing high school ball. And some of those are going to be good enough to get to the college level. And then a few of those are going to be good enough to get to the pros. But it has created this enormous pyramid of a farm team for ideas and production and people who were involved in the genre. Yeah. And I was... Yeah. Any other takeaways from this? I mean, for me, really, it's like, don't... Yeah. This is... Well, I'd written an article on this and I said, you know what? I kind of feel bad because I just realized I've now been fished in. This was basically podcasting is dead with a different title. Right. Exactly. Because every time somebody writes something negative about podcasting, all the podcasters come out of the woodwork and we're all linking back to that article going, look how dumb he is. And he's like, yeah, thanks for the SEO juice. Thank you so much. Hey, I have a... Not to change the subject too much, but I have a question for the three of you guys. Because it seems to me that you are very much in the same kind of business and in a sense that you're competitors with each other. And I'm kind of interested in that dynamic because in my podcast, I interview my competitors all the time and in a very positive and friendly kind of way. And I find it interesting that the three of you are so collaborative with each other even though you're sort of fishing in the same hole, so to speak. I mean, I really dislike both of them, so I just do this for the cash. But no, we've talked about that a lot on this show. To me in podcasting, you're just, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you look at people as competitors, right? And so we're an example of, hey, we're all in the same genre and sometimes, okay, I have Dave on the show and he's a co-host and they find out that he has a podcast about podcasting and some of my audience leaves. But then someone in his audience listens to me talk and it's kind of what I was saying with the TV fan podcast. You find the person that fits you. There are three shows here. They cover podcasts, right? But the person listening is going to fit with one of the hosts better than the other. Or what I find even more is if you're into listening to podcasts about podcasting, you'll listen to them all, right? So like I certainly did for years and I just took notes for every single one of them because you are into it, man. So we grow exponentially by, and we're just friends. Like you gotta just make friends. YouTube knows this so well, right? Like collaborations on YouTube is like the number one way to grow. It's like one YouTuber has another YouTuber on their show. Yeah, and the other thing to keep in mind, it's not radio. We're not all on at 7.30 in the morning where you can only listen to one of us. You can listen to me on Monday, Daniel on Tuesday, Ray on Wednesday, and anybody else or whoever. And when somebody signs up from my membership site, one of the first things I asked them is how did you find me? Because I wanna go do more of that. And lots of people have said, oh, I heard you on the round table and decided to come over and check out your show. And as Ray was saying, if you listen to the school of podcasting, there are times when I get super silly on that and I'm sure there are people like, I can't take this guy seriously. Then they go over and listen to Daniel who does this insane deep dive and gets his geek on it. And they're like, now we're talking. This is what I was looking for. So, different strokes for different folks, but hopefully they just listen to all of us. And then the other thing you're missing out, if you don't embrace your fellow, I think we even came up with a word, it was a co-opertation or something like that, but who else are you gonna geek out with? I can't talk like this amongst my other friends. They're like, wait, what's a feed? Like what? And they're like, so you've got people that it's one of the greatest things about going to a podcast event. Is everybody there already knows what a podcast is? I don't know, Daniel, you got any other final thoughts? Yeah, I think that there's a sort of a, a maturing process in this as well. Because you might find that when you start out, you and someone else are like neck and neck doing the same things, competing for the same audience, trying to go for the same customers, that kind of stuff. But eventually, as you grow up about it and also as whatever you're doing grows up and matures and you get a better vision of where you want to go with things, you might start to then start to bridge off and discover that, well, this is the thing I really like to do, that's the thing they really like to do. Like for example, while I no longer do podcast or society, it's closed at the moment, but while there are multiple memberships like Dave's School of Podcasting membership site is one of them that really helps people get started podcasting and get going on the right path and flatten that learning curve and I'm forgetting the rest of Dave's little sayings. I've changed a bit. Yeah, yeah, that's why I'm forgetting it. You need to work on your branding there. I do. But so. It's right there. See, it says right on, it just looks at my clan start. So like that is very starting focused and whereas with what the membership site that I used to do focused on what's after starting. So like I think earlier on, we might have both been competing for like we both want to help people start, but since then we've bridged off and Dave really likes to help people get that first episode out and make it not suck. And I like helping people take what they've already got and make it better. And I know there's crossover between that, but it's that kind of thing or like even just what you want to do. Like I just, I don't have the time for one-on-one consulting anymore. So almost every request that I get for consulting, I send over to Dave. And so if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I want to hire Daniel to consult with me, go ahead and still ask. And I'll just send you over to Dave and get a small commission from that. But, and that's another thing is that like for me, I like making services and products that people can buy. Dave likes teaching and consulting with people and making a whole series of courses overnight. I really don't know how he does that. So we've started to bridge apart in what we do. And that kind of thing, when you get past that first awkward stage of the feelings of competition and then you start to recognize your differences, appreciate them, expand out from them, I think that's when things really start to strengthen for your relationship, as well as for yourself too, making yourself unique. The other thing I- In this case, no, I'm sorry. When I created this show, I mean, it was quite obvious. Like co-host, I never did a co-hosted show. It is an obvious thing. To make this show the best for the user, to the listener, having the three, like the two people that I know that know the most about podcasting, this podcast was roundtable, man like, and then we bring in people of all other varying experiences. And we mix that up and do that every couple of weeks. I mean, it's just, it's for the listeners. And if you make something that is like amazing to the listener, not saying that we're amazing, but if it's good, then it's going to grow. And then, you know, like Gregory saying, he found us in all kinds of ways. He found me through YouTube, Daniel and Dave, and now he doesn't miss a single episode of school podcasting. So I just, it's all about discovery. We're helping each other discover. You just grow together, man. It's just so much better. The other thing too, if we, I hate to, if I lose a listener or a customer, I want them to go to somebody who's going to tell them the right stuff. Not somebody who's like, hey, you can make money from day one. I'll, you know, we'll get you, you're gonna escape the cubicle in four weeks and quit your day job and you'll be on Jimmy Fallon. And it's just only three easy payments of seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, whatever it is. I'm not making this up today. I had someone contact me and I was talking about their feed and the consultant said, I'm not sure what you mean when you say feed. And I just, my brain just went, gush, because this is a podcast consultant that a podcast, you know, that uses a feed and they didn't know what a feed was. And I went, yeah, this is the person I don't want to send my friends to. So. Well, you know, and this kind of brings up the second article that I took a look at, Ray. Nice job. And that's the headline is one in 10 Brits will launch their own podcast in 2022. And, you know, I have to assume that that means that there's an awful lot of people in the United States and in other countries that are interested in creating content and releasing it as a podcast. So it seems like a lot of people are really interested in starting up a podcast. And I'm wondering what your comment is on that since it's a lot of people. There's like an insane number of podcasts per month, week, day. I don't know, Daniel, you track this kind of thing or what's the best reference, like day, week? I like to look at last 30 days or you could even look at last 90 days. The last 30 days kind of takes into consideration some of the seasonal shifts, which I think is beneficial to know, whereas 90 days kind of evens that out. So now that Anchor has stopped flooding Apple podcasts with all of their pod flashes, that's as of late June, 2021, that Anchor stopped doing that. The new industry week. What do you mean by that? Some people won't know what that means. Yeah, so a pod flash is a flash in the pan. It's the, you get one or two episodes out there. Daniel likes to make up his terms for, he's already two, he's introduced you to tonight. So. So they get one or two episodes out there and it's abandoned. Like a pod fade, I would describe a pod fade as something that slowly unintentionally fades from existence because someone just gets busy on other things. They, yeah. Studio, studio. I was thinking of doing that, but I didn't want to throw you under your bus. It's fine. I'm happy to. I have, I'm proudly pod faded two shows. Whereas a pod flash is they don't even really get started. They, I'm even questioning if it was an intentional launch based on the way that Anchor worked. But anyway, so in the last 30 days, we've had 20,750 podcasts added to Apple podcasts. And in the last 90 days, so almost three times that is 60,163 podcasts. And that is significantly down from springtime of 2020 where we were seeing a hundred thousand podcasts launched into Apple podcasts every month, which was insane. Most of them were pod flashes abandoned after an episode or two. But I mean, this idea that one in 10 Brits, I think that's just some kind of math that they did to come up with that that sounds impressive. But I don't think anyone actually expects that, but I didn't get a chance to read the article beyond the headline. So what else, what was your takeaway from that, Lewis? Well, I mean, the takeaway was just a lot of people are interested in podcasting and a lot of people are interested in trying to start a podcast. They think they have something to say. And I suppose on some level, everybody has something to say, but I think that it leads into the question of pod fade which is that your term? Did you create that, Daniel? Scott Fletcher many, many moves ago. Okay. And I guess what got me thinking about it is again, I have a small community, you know, Alameda County attorneys. And there's one other attorney who does a substantial amount of podcasting in Alameda County. He's an immigration lawyer and he has a podcast that is specifically speaks to immigration issues. And it's kind of a, I don't know, almost sort of a cheerleading kind of podcast. It's almost like, I don't know, sort of a preacher or a coach. You can do this kind of podcast that he speaks to people who are here in the United States on perhaps less than really solid visas. And there's another attorney who was really talking to me about starting a podcast and he wanted to have a podcast where he talked to attorneys about how to practice in certain areas. And I really encouraged him. I told him, I'd give him whatever help I could explain, you know, some of the process of doing the podcast. And he actually got a podcast up and going and he put out a trailer and the trailer came out and I listened to it and it was, you know, maybe four or five minutes long. And then I subscribed on Apple and nothing has ever come through since. And so he did everything that was necessary in order to actually get ready to do a podcast. But nothing ever came of it. Yeah, ready, fire, aim. I saw somebody in Facebook this week, they said, okay, I got my first episode out, now what? And it was like, well, you know, I always say, you need to be able to answer why, why are you starting this podcast? Is this a passion project? Is it a hobby or a business? Who's your audience? What do they want to hear? Or in other words, why should they listen to your show? And then how are you going to gauge your success? Because you're going to be putting in time or money or both and you're going to have to get something out of it, whether it's fun and relaxation and new friends or if it's, you know, whatever all the benefits of that, but if you just like, well, this seems cool. And then you do it and you go, yeah, all right. You know, I went, I worked on a hot air balloon team once and it was cool and I got to go up in it and it was tied to a van or a car so I didn't go floating away. But I checked it off. I'm like, okay, I've done hot air balloon stuff. I'm good, I don't need to do that again. And I'm just wondering if people are doing the same thing with podcasting, like, yeah, I did it. And you can go to Apple and hear me go, test, test, just working, test, test. I mean, podcasting is hard and it's one of the filters, right? It's going to be hard. It's never going to get easy. And sometimes the further you get along, you think, oh, I'm going to be better at editing. I'm going to be better at writing. And you just get better so like a production can increase and it doesn't always necessarily mean it's going to speed up. Sure, you will edit faster, but there are other things happen like you put more value into the podcast. You do more research. So it doesn't always well down. The point is it's always hard. And so you've got these two things, right? You've got podcasting is hard. It can be hard to start up properly, right? If you want to set up a great podcast, launch a few episodes, have a website, do the marketing round. All that stuff is a ton of work. You get there and you're like, it's kind of like going to med school and being like, you know what? That was rough. I don't want to be a doctor anymore, right? Which I've had friends do. You got a law school, right? It's like, that was a lot of prep. And now I have to actually do the thing. But then you have the other side of it where you had anchor, which let you talk into a phone and say, hey, I'm a podcaster, man. What's up? Publish and it's so easy, right? So the barrier of hard is down. It's so easy that you put junk out there. And so you've got the two ends. And I think it really boils down to the fact that it is hard. The way being a good artist, a good author, a good musician, takes practice, takes repetition, it's hard. And so people find out, they find that out through the process, right? So that person who says, oh, I got episode one out. Now what? I'm like, great, how was it? Can you do another one? Like you're going to learn the answer to that question real fast, right? There's the infamous 50%, don't make it to episode seven. Like it's hard. And like, so even at work, man, if I can get a host that is good and sticks around for a year, that's like gold. Anyone sticks around longer than that, man. I have a real podcaster, right? But it is hard. So that's what people find out. And you can only find that out by doing it because you're so pumped when you start. You're so pumped. It's so easy to think about 20 episodes here. I'm gonna live stream it with video. I mean, it's so easy, but then you find out it's a lot of work and it sucks up a lot of your time. So, you know. Yeah, Greg LeMonde used to say that riding a bicycle up a hill doesn't get easier, but you do get faster. Right. So I think that the analogy being that podcasting doesn't necessarily get easier, but maybe as you do it after a while, you're putting out a better product. Yeah, that's it. Because I know in my own, you know, just from my own podcast, you know, I'm afraid to listen to the really early ones that I put out, but I do know that my editing process has gotten better and I really enjoy the editing part of it. I know some people don't, but I do because I kind of look at that audio file as like kind of like a raw piece of granite. And then my job is to sculpt that into a podcast. And so take, you know, a 55 minute interview and sculpt it down to 23 minutes of something that is interesting. I mean, if you go back and listen to the very first Metallica album, it sounds like it was recorded on a boombox in a garage somewhere. I mean, I don't know. Killemall's a really good day. But here's the thing, it's a great album. It was completely unique and you either loved it or hated it and you're like, holy cow, this is great. And then by the time they get to the black album, now you've got these great songs and great production and it was crazy. And it's over. Too soft, Dave. I want my metal in a garage. Well, there was a talking about editing. I was listening to an interview of Steve Martin on Howard Stern and Howard asked him about his master class. And on the master class commercial, Steve says, you know, people are asking me, how do I get a agent? How do I get a manager? He goes, nobody's asking, how do I get good? And so when Howard asked him about that class, he said, you know, really what it was. He said, I just had all these thoughts. And he said they interviewed me for three days. And he goes, it was all just this mishmash of stuff. He goes, it was good stuff, but it needed organized. And he goes, in the end, that whole thing, even though he's like, Steve Martin teaches comedy, what I was really teaching is how to edit. Because if you think about it with comedy, that's all you're gonna do. You're gonna throw one joke out, it doesn't land, and one does, all right, edit. Don't do this one anymore or go back and change the words or whatever. Editing is huge. Again, I listened to too much Howard Stern, apparently. He interviewed Ben Affleck. And he was talking about how he loves to edit because he said, I've done too many movies that was a great movie. And the editor like left in all the bad parts. And he's like, I edit my own stuff. So I think that's why I'll probably never hire an editor. I have an idea in my head what I want the episode to sound like. And by the, if I have to go through and tell them what to cut out, I'm already there. I'll just cut it out. A lot of YouTubers have that problem and they reach a point and they still have to edit their own stuff because that's their style, right? Yeah. Well, that's the art of it, isn't it? I mean, isn't that? It can be. Yeah. And that's other article I have in here with all these 12. It's a survey of successful podcasters I think or like a study. And there's a lot of good points I'd like to cover in here but one of them sort of is about this. And I guess they're defining successful as podcasters who make over $50,000 a year and those who do not who make something underneath that. And then this one status successful podcasters are 7.7 times more likely to have published over 100 episodes and 16 times more likely to have published over 200 episodes which they're just saying confirms that podcasting is, it's a long game just like the nature of content marketing which requires patience and dedication. It really does and that is a hard thing. Like you're just not gonna find that. How many people out of 10 are gonna start anything and keep it going weekly for a year? Two years, four years, it's tough. And people find that out. You gotta try though. Well, I've heard Dave say, I think you said this Dave, somebody said it. I think it was you. How many years did the Beatles work in obscurity before anybody really listened to them? Let alone becoming the mega stars of the last 100 years. There are no overnight successes as they say. What's that? There are no actual overnight successes. Someone has been toiling away for years at their craft to be an overnight success, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, they spent years. And if you hear about what they did in Hamburg, Germany they were playing like in some cases two gigs a day and they were like four hour concerts. It was nuts. They just never stopped playing. And you then, and that's in front of a live audience. So number, you have two things going on there. Number one, you've played the same song eight million times. So you're gonna come up with something creative because if I have to play that same G-Court again, I'm gonna go nuts. So there's that, it spurs your creativity and also you've got a live audience. So you can see what's working and what's not. And that's, I think really probably what helped them a lot. This stats from this survey, successful 50,000 and under. What article was this one that we're talking about? This is the top, I don't know what I called it in the doc. Let me see. All right, we're transitioning here. Top 12 action highlights. Top 12 actionable highlights and I just have to see. This is the podcasting statistics. Data from a study of 1076 podcasters from improvepodcast.com, which apparently is a podcast host of some type. So take them with a grain of salt. But I find these to be true, even if these numbers are not exact or accurate and you find these to be true over time. Publishing one episode per week is the sweet spot formula for the vast majority of podcasters and 63% of successful podcasters choose this consistent publishing schedule. Which I find, you know, I think if we're giving advice we tend to, I think a lot of us fall in that. I even podcast you listen to. I mean, one a week seems to be a sweet spot because again, it is hard. That week will catch up with you real fast. It's like Indiana Jones and the big ball that's rolling down and it's about to smash him. That's what it feels like constantly when you're a podcaster, especially, you know, again, if you're making 50,000, some families depending on where you live. But for most people, that's probably their job. And that's the only, that's one of the, you know, it's hard to do it if it's not your job, like your actual job. You actually have to go to your job and then do your podcast thing once a week and do it really well every week, right? Well, that's one thing that I really like about my podcast is I'm not really trying to make money directly from my podcast, but it's related to my business. So I don't really need to like make money from the podcast, but my law practice supports the podcast. So if I need to buy a microphone, if I need to, you know, sign up for some software program, my business takes care of that. And I'm able to do it with a certain amount of financial freedom, which I really like. I'm kind of the other way around where my business exists because of the podcast and is hugely supported by the podcast itself. Yeah, but you're really good at it. And we talked about, I mean, that's kind of what breaks through, right? You have to be, you're either, you're probably good at it, but you're also delivering the thing that people need, right? They come to Dave's show, they want to learn how to start a podcast, school of podcast, I came here to learn, right? And so he does that, he teaches you, but he also is very personable. So he gets you there in a fun way. So it works and putting all those things together can be really tricky. That's not an easy thing to do. I always said that I didn't even on the podcast or studio, I was somewhere around episode 70 where I finished the recording and I went, whoa, okay, that's what I've been trying to do for 70 episodes. That's it, that's me, that's me on a microphone. Cause I listened back and I'm like, who's that robot? Like you sound terrible, like be you. And it took 70 episodes for me to find me on a microphone. So man, and you're just getting started at that point, right? Most podcasters I work with have been doing it for a decade now. And, you know, monetization is a completely different thing. Dave, we talked about, we kind of brought this up in the beginning, how a podcast with dynamic ad insertion, the best thing to throw in there is probably something, you know, tangential to your podcast, right? It's Daniel might, you know, throw in my podcast reviews or Dave's gonna put in his book, right? Something else where the money comes from somewhere else. The podcast is proof of concept, right? Lewis, like for you, if you've got someone who needs your services, they could listen to your podcast and be like, you know, this guy's pretty competent. Seems like he knows what he's talking about. I'm gonna hire him, right? So the podcast served as that proof of concept, that sort of brochure, that's a modern brochure for your business, right? So, and you're ahead of someone else in town who might have the same business, but you're not able to, like, get an idea of who that person is, so. Well, I think that a podcast for just about anybody serves, and again, I think I'm quoting Dave here, is a resume of sorts in that you can, somebody says, well, what do you really do? And you can say, well, you know, here's my podcast. I've got a hundred episodes here. You know, you can really listen to me, get a sense of who I am, get a sense of who my friends are, get a sense of how I talk, and, you know, maybe that appeals to you, maybe it doesn't, but here it is. It's not a secret. I've said for a while that I can't imagine anyone growing up in the past 10 years. Any kid coming into wants to be an entertainment or a radio, you name it, right? It's a portfolio, right? I mean, I have my job today because of a podcast was my portfolio, was proof of concept that I could speak the language, produce the stuff. I didn't even realize this was the thing. I was trying to tell people how to podcast, and then someone hired me to do the podcast because they're like, you know what you're talking about, right, so, and that's always been my message through my podcast, like, if I could get one other person to who can then take podcasting and make it their job, that's a dream job, right? It was a dream job for me, so it is proof of concept, but I can't imagine that a kid coming up today, you know, YouTube channel, podcast, probably both, or, you know, Instagram stories or Twitter spaces, like, you gotta have something that shows that you can do the thing, you know? And that's where they're gonna pick talent from anyways, if that's something you're trying to break into, but it really is that proof of concept, and this could be anything. This could be you wanna be an author, but it's there, it's there for people to find. Jim Collison is the guy that helps me do Ask the Podcast coach and his daughter's in journalism, and you bet she started a podcast because when you fill out that resume or whatever you're doing, and you can say, if you'd like to hear my work, boom, not everybody's gonna be able to have, you know, the whole point is you're trying to get your real if you're doing some sort of a video thing or whatever, but when you've got an example, and they can hear you and you sound professional and things of that nature, it's definitely a, it's got me, I got hired at Chancellor University, this was years ago, and I was trying to get a teaching job, and they said, what do you do for fun? I said, podcasting, and they're like, oh, this is like 2008, something like that. And they're like, oh, tell us about that. And I said, oh yeah, and I said, I could see making a podcast for the college about how to be a better student and updates on events that are going on around in the city and the college, and it was like, I'm pretty sure that's what got me hired. Well, another aspect of it is not just that general demonstration of skill, but also the possibility of how you can connect with a particular niche. So you can be, and this kind of goes back to that conversation a little bit about no hit podcast, is there are hits within certain niches, and you as a podcaster can be that hit where you can be known as the guy or the girl to go to for this particular thing. And it doesn't have to be like, oh, they are the person who is good at speaking on anything in the world. No, it's, they are known for this. They've built their reputation on this thing. Like, there aren't many YouTubers that I watch very consistently that focus on particular niches, but there is this video game that I've played for a little while and a YouTuber who is all passionate, all in on that video game, and they are known among that video game community as they are the YouTuber or the Twitch streamer for that game. And there are a few others in that same industry and they collab together as well. And so that when the company that makes that game wants certain feedback, they go to those people first because they know they are experts on this. They love this game more than anyone else and they have a lot of authority and influence too. And so they are a big hit in their particular niche instead of simply trying to get a job because they're a podcaster. Yeah. Ray, I was just hoping that you could state specifically a little bit about what your business does as it is differentiated from that of Daniel or Dave. Yeah, I think a lot of people, I mean, you'd have to probably dig into the interviews probably on Dave's show to find out what it is that I actually do. I'm not in business for myself, right? I call myself a professional podcast producer because someone else pays me to do production of podcasts. So I work for a nonprofit science organization and we do a whole host of programming. So as I said, I was doing podcasts and they needed help. So I got that as a full-time job and it's been amazing. I've been doing that for over a decade. So I produce for someone else. And so that's what I think a lot of podcasters don't even realize. We talk about like becoming an expert or proof of concept that you know something. But what you're also building at the same time, which I didn't realize I was doing is all these monetizable skills that these organizations, as they come into podcasting, they need the people who are doing it already. Like, oh, you know how to do that. We want someone to do that. Boom, you have a job, which you may not even realize you were trying to get, right? Because you're proving time and again, you know how to produce content, market content, be on air if that's something that your organization wants you to do, edit all of that stuff. So yeah, so a little bit different. I've done consulting in the past and stuff, but I work for someone else. So I punch the clock, get a paycheck, except that it's signed podcast production or something. Well, Ray, on your article about improving the podcast here, what was your main takeaway from it? The improve, oh, just 12? Yeah, the 12-step things. Because it's kind of like, people that are successful do this, people that aren't do this. And I was like, huh, okay. I mean, I think that you can get a look at these sort of 12 different things that are people who are successful or like 8.1 times more likely to have more than 1,000 listeners per episode. And 1,000, it's funny that they mentioned that because 1,000 is kind of a metric. I always use it when we're starting the show. It's kind of this weird metric where it's like, if we can get 1,000 regular listeners to an episode, we've really kind of tapped into a niche. And it's very, we can do a lot with that. So it doesn't take what I think a lot of people going in think it might take. Oh, we need 100,000 listeners, right? 1,000 people who come back regularly focused on one topic are, that's, you know, you could advertise or really you have an audience. It could be a hundred people. So the takeaway for me is all of these things are things that I think we have seen over the years about, you know, being there once a week about kind of how hard it is, the different types of marketing you need to do that you can't just sit back and do nothing, right? So it's a lot of great points. And it kind of says, the people who are making money in podcasting, it's not easy. Like it's not magic. Like they didn't just like, not just handed to them. Like there's a lot of things that go into making a successful podcast. And a lot of these things ring true as things we've been saying for years. So take a look at those 12 and you're starting a podcast. You're like, I need to do all of this. No, you don't, but you're probably gonna do a lot of this. And it gives you some real kind of baseline because people don't know. They're like, how many subscribers, you know, is successful or what should I be measuring? And of course that's different based on your niche, but just a lot of times you don't see these numbers. And so I think that it can be really helpful to look at this and sort of get a baseline for, you know, at least give yourself direction where you're headed. Like, oh, maybe I need to do like, you know, two social channels and put something out every episode. And then write a blog post, whatever. It's hard work. That's what I take away from it. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I was laughing because the one was like, people that promote their show, get more listeners. And I was like, that's genius right there. But I mean, you know, we always, the build it and they'll come thing, right? I think a lot of people think, people think I'm gonna launch a podcast. Everyone wants to hear four dudes talk about this comic book and you know what? Not all comic books. We talk about all comic books and people are just gonna show up. They're just gonna show up. I know it's gonna be big. I have amazing conversations. It's gonna be big, right? My friends say I'm hilarious. Yeah, everyone says, my family loves me. Have you guys ever seen the episode of friends where Joey's on TV and the friends have to say something nice about it? And somebody says like, man, that was great lighting. And they're like, hey, you had good lighting last time. I get it this time. And they're arguing over it. And they always love when somebody will hire me to kind of audit their show. And they're like, yeah, my mom said I sounded professional. And then somebody else was like, wow, you're really in iTunes. It's like, nobody's commenting on your content. They're saying things, but they're not really saying, man, I really love the thing at the, like here's what really stuck out or here's what hit me in the chest or whatever. And I was like, so pay attention to those compliments. He said in quotation marks when somebody says, you sound so professional. It's like, yeah, they're not really commenting on the content. It's, that's an easy, it could be. Yeah. We opened up talking about microphones. You can show up with the best audio. So on that TV fan podcast that I mentioned that I'm very picky about, it opens up, ooh, nice music. Ooh, nice audio. Everyone's balanced. It sounds great. But to get a foothold, an audience, build a community, you gotta be, your content has to be good, right? You have to deliver. And that's, that's a tricky thing to do to find a hundred or a thousand people who want to show up every week to like listen to what you have to say for an hour. And now to hook it back around to the other story, when it starts off with a pre-roll, is that a good thing? Is that gonna hook you in? It's, that's, it goes back to the whole podcasting is hard conversation. You can, you had that balance of am I gonna scare away my audience when you 30 seconds skip? But yeah, but once you've built, I mean, you know, and maybe, maybe if your takeaway was, oh my gosh. Well, I just, I have three episodes and I should probably get that dynamic insertion going. Maybe, maybe people are used to that. Maybe you should build a community, an audience first that you can speak to and you are not gonna go away when you actually haven't had it. There's always that trick, like build the space for an ad so people aren't shocked when you have ads, right? There's so many things, you gotta try. Your audience is gonna be different. Everyone's audience is gonna be very different. You have to work with your audience, talk to your audience, have them talk back to you. That's it. Yeah, I think that's hard. Another hard thing in podcasting. It's all hard. That's the, I'm just like Debbie Downer because I'm just like, this is hard, but it is hard. But I think that that's good because hard makes for a good result. Like you get a good result. Well, for sure it does. I mean, it's like, I mean, it's not easy going to law school. It's not easy going to medical school. It's not easy to become an architect. It's not easy to become a teacher. Life is hard. And if something is really worth doing, there's gonna be some hard work involved. And I think that that's just something that everybody needs to acknowledge in their own life. I mean, if something's worth listening to, right? If you're an audience member, something's worth listening to, the person on the other side making it, probably put a lot of work into it. Yeah, absolutely. And they're making it look really easy. That's the tricky part. And that's what gets you into it. They can switch into anything. I want to play guitar. I'm gonna shred. I need or not. Not without a lot of practice or not. Yeah, like using that guitar analogy where I am with the guitar and I haven't practiced as much as I wanted to. But I'm still at that point, like just switching between a couple of the chords is so difficult for me to do in a timely manner, even though they're easy chords, like E and A are easy chords, right? And F and B are F. Yes, I cannot do that, that thing where you have to drape your- It's the two strings. And rip your finger across all of the strings at the same time. Try the bass. Try the bass, it's better. I see other people, and as I've learned more about the guitar, I watch more closely these other people. And I'm just amazed, it's like, you did that F chord without even looking. I bow down to you, you are amazing. How do you, I can never do that. And that's where I am with the guitar right now where I'm just thinking, I could never, well, I mean, I don't think never, but I just know I'm quite a ways from that. It's going to take me a lot of practice to get to that point. Careful with imposter syndrome too, because I look at bass players, because I play bass for a company, and I'm like, I'm just never going to do that. Like I just, I can see where they're at that I'm really don't think I'm ever going to get to. Same thing with podcasting, right? Don't look at any of us and be like, man, I'm just not going to be able to do that. Like do your, in podcasting and probably music, being you is the thing. And we talked about like, why would you guys podcast together? You all have the same shows. It comes back to someone's going to, someone's going to latch on to Dave more than they are me and vice versa, right? That's that thing you have, the uniqueness that you have to deliver. Like you got to be you. And it can be hard because you see other people doing it even in your niche and you're like, ooh, yeah, I'm not as technically savvy as Dave or Daniel. And right, go into what you are good at. Lou, where do lawyers go to watch other lawyers? Like, is there anybody like, man, someday? Court TV. Well, I know, but aren't you, I guess that's it, court TV. Going back to court. Court. Yeah. Did you just hang out in court? I got nothing to do. I'm gonna go hang out in court and watch somebody else do their thing. Watch on TV now, so. You know, there's a surprisingly large amount of that Dave is, I mean, right now, you know, with the courts are, you know, kind of COVID closed. There's not nearly as much of it, but lawyers, you know, like they'll go to court and you have your case and it'll take a few minutes to do in the morning. And then if you know that there's a trial going on, you know, in department 14 down the hall, so you go in there, it's an open and public courtroom. You just kind of walk in, you sit down in the back and you watch your colleagues, you know, put on a witness or cross-examine a witness or, you know, put on a certain kind of hearing and, you know, all of us do that and all of us watch each other and it's very educational. There you go. It's like podcasters, like, oh, that was cool. I like the way he did that intro and the, you know. Right. I watched, I've told, here's the fun thing. I've told no less than seven people about this guy. If you have HBO Max this weekend, watch Moses Storm because it's a standup comedian, but here's the fun thing. When you think standup comedian, you think the guy's gonna come out, walk up to a microphone, grab the microphone and tell jokes. There's no microphone. He's got, I guess, a lapel on. And then what's interesting is his stage, if you could think of your phone, only it's about, I don't know, 10 by six. He's basically standing on a big LED and then every now and then he will have something come on the LED that he's standing on and they film him from above this big camera and I was like, here's somebody that took standup comedy. This is like an augmented reality thing because I think I saw like stuff comes in. I saw a comedian where some animation came in and stuff too, so it felt like an augmented reality thing. Yeah, it's almost like a cross between a TED Talk and a comedy show because he's also super vulnerable. He explains when he was a kid, he has four brothers and sisters, so there's five kids and they had a dumpster die for food. But I was just watching it and this is, I think, one of the things that's it's weird when you get into podcasting. When you watch things, you watch things differently because I got done and I was like, I really enjoyed that and I was like, why? And I was like, super creative, super vulnerable, funny. He's the king of callbacks where you go back to an old punchline. So I think we all learn from whatever you're watching or listening to, you're like, huh, that's pretty cool. How can I weave that into what I'm doing? I've been playing the bass for two years and I don't hear music the same anymore. In fact, I like more music because I'm here at the bassline and it's a double-edged sort because songs I used to enjoy just for the song, I almost can't even hear it the same anymore, right? Listen to it differently. So I don't know what the point is, but pay attention to your craft, right? Like other podcasters, you know, and we all listened to each other in the beginning, right? I think over time, we probably, all of us probably listened to like all the podcasts about podcasting and I think when we broke in, there were, you know, through the years we'd see them come and go. I mean, we got to, we had like a beta test, right? Right during while we were creating our shows, a new podcast about podcasting would come in, seven episodes and it'd be gone, right? And for whatever reason, but a few people would stick around and you just learn from each other and we go to conferences. The reason we speak at conferences is because we do a podcast, that conference is a podcast conference they know of us, especially in the early days, like when you start a new conference, which podcasting was new not that long ago, you had to fill it with the people could already proof of concept and it was us, right? Doing podcasts is not us anymore. It's like the big names, marketer stuff, but we were there in the early days and then we always just talk to each other, you know? It's like, where do you go to watch Lawyers to Your Craft? I'm sure they have a conference too and you got to talk to your peers. It's the bar, right? The water cooler, like talk to your peers. There you go. I played poker with a bunch of friends and it was always about the cash we were winning in the moment. And back in like 2005 when poker was huge, you'd see these group of like young, you know, young people go into a tournament and they dominate like the whole group. You're like, why is this happening? It's because all of their poker games at home, they were working together like, oh, why did you do that? How did you fake me out? Like, what are you looking for? And they were using those as a testing ground, as a training ground to be better poker players. My friends, they just wanted to take each other's money. So we sucked when we got together, right? We learned nothing from each other, but same with podcasters, right? We come here, we do this and the beauty, that is really the reason why this show exists is for like Lewis to bring, to come on here and share your experience so that the listener learns so that we learn because, you know, we are very jaded and come from one sector of podcasting, but like everyone has something to learn from someone at every level who's done a podcast cause we're all just figuring it out. And Lewis may have figured out the magic intro is like, people love my intro. They share my podcast like crazy cause of the intro. It's got this crazy VO, you're like, do that thing, right? So it's just learning from the other people in your space. Well said. Well, speaking of being here, you know, I really appreciate you guys having me and it's really been fun talking to you. I've learned a lot from talking to the three of you. I, you know, had heard your name Ray before and I'd heard your name Daniel before and it was, it's just such an interesting experience to be here and actually seeing your faces and listening to your voices on the podcast and being part of making it. It's just, you know, such a great experience. I've really just enjoyed this hour and a half that just flew by. Thanks Lewis. Dave, did you? I had one question for Lewis. It's like, let's just pause this for a second while I ask him a consulting question. You only practice law in that one township, right? Do you? County. County, okay. Is there anything hyper local about that county that you could talk about in your show to really plant the flag that I am local? You can hire me, I'm in this county kind of thing. Kind of. I guess the thing is this is that I'm not really Trying to get business from it. Promoting my practice as such with the podcast. I'm more doing the kind of thing where, like if, like when lawyers go to court, okay, you have, they're all sitting in the jury box and they're all waiting for their case to get called because most of the time you're not really trying cases but you have calendar courts that have, you know, 75, 80 cases a morning on there and the judge is going through them. And so you're sitting there in the jury box with your colleagues. And it's like sitting in the back of the room in high school, you know, everybody's kind of like, oh yeah, and you know about this and you heard you hear about that and that kind of thing. And so what my podcast is, is kind of that sitting in the jury box waiting for your case to get called to a conversation rather than, you know, saying hey, yeah, you should hire me because I can keep you out of jail kind of thing. Right. You should do lawyers round table because that's all we're doing here. This is, I always talk, it's campfire conversations. Like this is literally what we used to do on Skype, which I don't open anymore ever. But, and it's like, why aren't we recording this? Because if I jump on Skype, now I don't know where we'd jump on Riverside or Streamyard. Thank you Streamyard. Lewis is the winner of the Mallard today with the Skype headset, ironically. The Mallard took over Skype. All right, anyways. If you're not watching, you should be watching youtube.com slash podcasters round table. If I jump on to any VoIP with Daniel, I'm gonna be there for an hour. Like, even if it's like, hey Daniel, can you jump on? I need to test this remote record. Forget it, dude. Like, and some people, you know, I feel bad because people will reach out. They'll hear the list of the podcast or they'll watch something on YouTube. Can I just jump on a call for like five minutes? I'm like, we can't because I can't because it'll be an hour. You ask one question, I have five more. And we will be, and it'll be a consulting call. And it's just, I can't because I'll just be on the phone all day. I have a real job. So yeah, that's what this is, man. It's like, let's record it. Let's record it, so. Well, that gives me an idea. I mean, that gives me an idea. Maybe I should get, you know, three or four other attorneys to get on a call like this and record it and see what we can do. That's it, man. That's it. And you know, over time, this wasn't originally not even supposed to be organized, but you realize, you know, probably needs a little organization to make it useful to the audience. And we've changed it over the years, but yeah. Anyways, it's a good time. You should try it. I'm gonna get this audience out of here. We're gonna move on. I wanna thank everyone for joining. As always, Lewis, your first round table, once a round table, always a round table, and welcome back. So thanks for joining us and make sure, what is that podcast again, so we can find it? Love Thy Lawyer, like Love Thy Neighbor, but Love Thy Lawyer. Very cool, all right. And co-host Dave Jackson, thanks, man. First of 2022. Yeah, this has been fun. It's always cool hanging out with everybody and now I get to hang out with Lewis, which is great. So yeah, you can find me over at schoolofpodcasting.com. All right, I'll be curious to see if that SM7B makes a return. I like it. I like it. I think so. And Daniel, man, welcome back. I don't know if you'd be here next time, but Daniel gets, you know, the door is open. He gets to come and go as he pleases. So we enjoy it when you show up. Life is busy, but we love you. So thanks for coming back, man. Thank you. And I will be bringing back the Audacity to Podcast very soon. The next episode will be about podcasting 2.0, which I'm very involved in. So I've got a lot I want to say about that. And that's part of what's preventing an episode from coming out is just trying to figure out their minimum, their minimum. I need to make this episode smaller, but you can look for that and my other episodes at theaudacitytopodcast.com. Cool, yeah. See, I'll be listening because there's a lot I don't know. In fact, I didn't even know you were that closely related to it. So looking forward to that. All right, well, if you are still enjoying this, then you're definitely the person who probably wants to be on a roundtable, podcastersroundtable.com slash guest sign up. Get you on here. Eventually to, yeah, it eventually is nice because then it's like, I will check if you're still podcasting once I get to your name on the list. And so stay podcasting just so you can be on here. But yeah, check us out. YouTube, podcastersroundtable.com, it's all there. We'll see you for the next one, which would be like 162. So keep going, 2022. Happy New Year, everyone. See ya. Wave goodbye.