What’s the longest stretch you’ve gone, away from your love of podcast creation?
For obvious reasons (in case you missed it) I’ve not been doing much in the way of podcasting this year. The last episode I published was March 28th, 2024— so about 8 months now. I’m at a point now, where I’ve enough health that it would be possible to resume . . .
I miss having the conversations, and I even miss doing the uncelebrated work (which we all know so well!) to get them published. But I don’t miss the grind… that treadmill feeling of always having some next thing that could be done.
What’s stopped you in the past? How did you get back on the bicycle? Why did you get back on the bicycle?
The driveway moment: When a report or interview really works, you can tell and we can tell. We can, because the story hits the top of the most emailed list at NPR.org. You can tell, because the story keeps you pinned in your car, in a parking lot, in your driveway, or at the side of the road—as you wait to hear how the story will end. In letters and emails, listeners named these occurrences “driveway moments,” and say they look forward to them, even when it means being late for work or dinner. So that’s your goal: make some driveway moments.
I’m finally heading into NPR’s book, Sound Reporting, and this big of context included by Kernis in the Foreword got me thinking…
What are you doing so that you even know when you’ve put out a “driveway moment?”
It doesn’t matter at all if we feel it’s a driveway moment. It matters if our listeners think so. Are you paying attention to your listeners? Do you have multiple ways for them to connect back to you?
I do think about “driveway moments” when creating episodes. It’s difficult however, given the way that I create my work; They have to simply happen. If one wants to create them, that requires planning, work and editing.
For me, when I encounter a listener (virtually or in real life) the only question I ask them is…
Has any episode grabbed you? …any particular moment or image?
People find your show because they are looking for something, or someone, very specific.
People are not just sitting around thinking, “I feel like a need a new podcast to listen to… maybe something that inspires me to move more…” And then they search for “movement inspiration” . . . and then they land on my Movers Mindset show. No that’s not at all how it works. People do not find our show.
People find ONE, SPECIFIC episode. That’s what Kleon did above.
Think of a guest, or a topic, which you did about a year ago…
Now search for that person or topic in your podcast player, or in a web search engine…
Did you find that one episode you were thinking of?
Because people do that. And only then does our show description, show title, show art, episode art, episode notes, and all our hard work gives them the chance to pick us.
It’s important we actually think about this: what you’re unaware of controls you here. We can’t talk about continuous improvement if we don’t ask ourselves, why are we here as a team? What’s our promise to the organisation? Here, I think it’s vital that we embrace the fact that our hurry to get to say number three on a scale of ten is often what blocks us from actually getting to ten.
That’s from a July podcast episode of Ric Lindberg’s Results and Relationships which you can find wherever you normally listen. His is currently the only podcast I subscribe to.
Ric is usually showing up to lead others in the context of professional organizations… but not entirely. There’s plenty in his work that applies to us as individual creatives. Every episode, I find myself thinking: “Right! I already knew that,” and “thanks, Ric, for making me think about this!”
Showing up to lead is enough. You don’t have to break new ground for your work to be helpful.
Right! I already knew that. Thanks, Ric, for making me think about this!
ɕ
PS: About my subscriptions, there are many podcasts whose RSS feeds I follow in my feed reader app (along with hundreds of other things.) My podcast player is quiet; No new episodes appear creating that fear-of-missing-out. Instead, only when I open my feed reader app, do I see all the new episodes from the many podcast shows I follow. And just like everything else, I simply skim through, and I can add a podcast episode if I wish. This is an example of calm technology.
Your intellectual appetites might include knowing the answer to a mathematics problem; the satisfaction of receiving a text from someone you have a crush on; or getting a coveted job offer. These things won’t necessarily cause physical pleasure. They might spill over into physical enjoyment, but they are not dependent on it. Rather, the pleasure is primarily intellectual.
[…] But, for most people, such joy is fleeting. There is always something else to strive for – and this keeps most of us in a constant, sometimes painful, state of never-satisfied striving. And that striving for something that we do not yet possess is called desire. Desire doesn’t bring us joy because it is, by definition, always for something we feel we lack. Understanding the mechanism by which desires take shape, though, can help us avoid living our lives in an endless merry-go-round of desire.
Although I won’t be sharing specifics, I have stellar care and support, from my family, and from a huge team of the best healthcare professionals. My prognosis is excellent. If one must get cancer, you want to have the experience I’m having.
You may have noticed that I’ve not published a podcast episode since something like May. That’s when I started working through my diagnosis, and that’s when I intentionally pressed the pause-button on some of my current projects. I’ve been a guest on a couple of podcasts this year, and that has kept alive a warm ember of my passion for this wonderful art-form.
With great power, comes great responsibility. Large language models (LLM) like Chat-GPT are powerful tools. How do I use it responsibly?
I want to find and present great quotations from guests on my podcast episodes. What happens when I try to get Chat-GPT to do it? Following is a really deep dive into exactly what happens, along with my best efforts to work with this power tool in a way which accurately represents what my guests say, while showing them in the best possible lighting.
The transcripts the LLM works from
For this to make any sense, you need to know that I start from a machine-generated transcript. I get them from the recording service, or from another service where I upload audio (for older episodes before machine-generated-from-the-service was available.)
Below is a screenshot.
In the left-margin are line numbers. Line 107 and 123 are too long to fit, so my text editor has visually, “soft” wrapped them for ease of reading.
The files have time codes in them (the format does vary somewhat too). They have silly amounts of precision: 16:51.57 is 16 minutes and 51.57 seconds. Hours appear in the front as another number with another colon.
The LLM understands which person is the guest, because it understands who introduces the show, and introduces the other person.
I break the very long transcript text file into chunks, because there’s a maximum amount of text you can paste into the LLM interface. The screenshot above is from the 2nd or three chunks from my conversation with Martin. The whole chunk is 144 lines and about 8,000 characters.
Imagine having to read through the whole transcript to find the best part to quote. That’s very hard for me to do (nevermind I don’t have the time to do it), but the LLM can do it in a blink. LLMs are tireless and patient.
The prompt
There’s much discussion about “prompt engineering.” It’s an art. The best clues I can give you are: Explain it to a 5-year-old. And, the 5-year-old does not get confused by ordered lists, even if you nest them.
I give the LLM all the transcript chunks. Then I give it this prompt:
Select 5 direct quotations (not from Craig) from the conversation. I prefer longer quotations which include more context. For each quotation you select, do three things: First, show me your selected quotation. Do not rewrite the quotations. You may remove verbal tics such as “ah”, “yeah” and “um”. You must leave the speaker’s false-starts and restarts in place, ending those with an em-dash and a space. Second, show the nearest time from before the selected quotation. Show that time exactly as it appears in the original transcript. Third, show the exact original transcript from which you selected the quotation. For context, show several lines of the original, unedited transcript before and where you selected the quotation.
Oh! Reviewing this post, I even found a problem in the prompt above. Can you see it? Below, you’ll see a complaint about the LLM response. Now I think it’s not an LLM error, but an error in my prompt above. :slight_smile:
(This entire post about quotations is actually just part 2 of a much larger prompt which starts with, “Perform the following 5 tasks. Include a numbered heading before your response for each of these tasks:”)
It spits the result out in one long stream of text. I’ll break it apart…
Quote 1
There are many things that I have to consider as I look at that:
Is it really a good quote, based on what I remember of that conversation? Meh, it’s okay. But that’s why I as it for 5 selections.
I don’t love that it refuses to give me context after the part where it selected the quote. I’ve tried, but after hours of work, I’m done prompt engineering and want to start this post. (As I mentioned above, I think this is because there’s an error, above, in my prompt.)
In this particular conversation, Martin talks a lot about “parkour”—thus “park order” (and many other variations I see a lot)—is just an error in the raw transcript. Ignore that for today.
Most importantly: Is it hallucinating?? Well, it’s easy to use that timestamp. 1 minute 22 seconds is definitely in the 1st chunk… a moment of scrolling…
Here’s the actual, original chunk I uploaded, and the LLM’s output side by side…
Okay, that’s sane. If I was going to pick this quotation, I’d have to work some form of my question into that quote, so his quote has some context…
Moving on, I’m just going to give you the screenshots for each.
Quote 2
Quote 3
Quote 4
Quote 5
Closing thoughts
I use LLMs to write my show notes. Getting a quote or two is just one part of that.
“Write show notes” is not “the work only I can do” (as Seth would say.) And, I simply do not have the time to do show notes from scratch.
Yes, I’ve spent hours today on prompt engineering, but I have 319 more podcast episodes from 2022 and earlier (!) that I want to have show notes for. Those episodes would be better with show notes. A few hours spent here, enable me to copy-and-paste… wait a few minutes (the LLM is not instantaneous) and I have a really good starting point for show notes.
But, all things considered, this became more and more obviously the right move for me, despite the headaches it would cause in execution. So to hopefully save you the same pain and give you a little look behind the scenes, I wanted to share how I came to this conclusion and executed the rebrand.
The article above is a deep dive into one person’s thinking and efforts as part of re-brand. (Although, it has nothing to do with podcasting specifically.)
There are good points in there too about what, exactly, is a brand.
There are a bunch of insights in this little conversation with Ira Glass:
I’m ambitious! I want the stories to be special and I want the interviews to be special. The nervousness is my fear that they won’t be, and my awakeness to how hard it might be to get it to work. If you have any ambition, you march into the interview with a battle plan. You have this theory about what’s going to happen with this other person but you really have not the best idea if it’s going to work. Interviewing is an art form that so depends on the soul of the other person and also on how the two of you interact. ~ Ira Glass, from Ira Glass
I particularly like that one about nervousness as a sign that we are doing something right as podcast creators. What’s the hard work? What’s the part that makes us a little nervous? Exactly.
This recent bite of news from Podnews.net reminded me of a discussion I recently had with Tracy Hazzard…
Is a new Google service flooding podcast apps with spam? Calling them “a threat to the podcasting community”, the podcast directory Listen Notes has made a NotebookLM Detector, to spot shows made by Google’s NotebookLM. So far, it’s detected more than 280 shows which have been made using the AI tool. “Notebook LM has made it easier to mass-produce low-quality, fake content”, says Listen Notes founder Wenbin Fang; though The Spectator’s Sean Thomas suggests that AI may “make the podcast bro irrelevant”.
As podcasters we’re focused on one direction; call it the “forward” direction with increasing amounts of refinement and care…
we record an episode
we do post-production
we write show notes
we write blog posts or in-depth articles based on the episode
we write based on themes we find running through several of our episodes
Each of us puts a lot of effort into that work, in that “forward” direction.
Tracy and I were talking about using AI to generate podcasts by going in the other direction. What if we took our own work, and used AI to generate new podcasts?
If it was done well, the AI could generate great podcasts, in my voice— me doing host-on-mic, from the things I have written.
The social media practice called “Throwback Thursdays” came up here a few weeks ago. At the time, I mentioned that I’ve done this in the past—but usually only very randomly. I’ve recently started being systematic about reposting my older work, on Thursdays.
I think this is a generous gift to our audiences. There are so many great podcasts out there, that we shouldn’t expect our listeners to notice our work after just one, initial “here I made this.” (Plus it’s a fun walk down memory lane.)
The hardest part is quickly picking which of our episodes to post about…
Be as open as possible to the person in front of you. Listen and observe so closely that you can follow up on a sigh, a shake of the head, a change in tone of voice. Take a chance on reflecting your observations back to them without judgment: “You looked amused just now. What’s that about?” Ask the question about feelings that occurs to you, the one you might normally suppress.
Allow silence.
And see what happens. I think you may be astonished at the result.
I don’t have a login for Substack (an intentional choice) so I cannot reply there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have changed the name of a podcast. The Movers Mindset show had a very different name in the beginning. For me, I realized I was always spending time explaining the meaning of the name— and I realized I wanted to spend that time explaining the show itself rather than the odd name I had.
So I think that’s one reason to change a name: When the name just doesn’t fit.
When people ask me this, I direct them first to Eric Nuzum’s classic question: Can you describe your show in 12 words? …10 words?
Our show titles don’t have be our one (or 2 or 3 even) word answer to that question. But I think they have to at least not detract from describing our show.
Mary Chan is a skilled hostess with a gift for great conversation. Her show is laser-focused on helping other podcasters grow and excel. She recently invited me to join her— …actually, stop reading. Go listen!
Even if we’re lucky enough to “do what we love,” work tends to have tedious aspects we don’t like. Craig Constantine is a passion podcaster who, through the creation of thousands of episodes and rigorous reflection, has built a workflow that simplifies every step of his method, from prep to publication.
Our mission, as podcasters is to say “I don’t know” when that is the case, and even more importantly, to make our guests feel delighted to say they don’t know when that’s the case.
At the end of the day there’s an awful lot of what I do as an actor that I don’t necessarily understand – nor should I. One of the necessary evils of acting is doing an awful lot of interviews, which is interesting when you’re asked good questions but it can sometimes be mind-numbing. You feel like, “Why do I have to explain myself? I have nothing to say.” You’re not allowed to say, “I don’t know,” but you don’t always know why you did what you did.
Let’s bend relationship advice to apply to podcasting: Feeling stuck in a rut with your podcasting? Go have a conversation with a guest where your entire intention is to be of service to them.
The asymmetry between wanting to know others and being known by them presents an inherent problem, because relationships require reciprocity: If I don’t do the work to know you deeply, a relationship doesn’t form in which you will know me. This vicious cycle—Poe syndrome again—is made much worse when you are lonely to begin with […] In other words, if no one knows you well and you are thus lonely, that may make you more self-focused and less interested in others, making it much less likely for others to want to get to know you well.
Question: What would happen, if your intention with a podcast episode, was to help some else’s well-being— if your intention was only to demonstrate to them that you care? What if you go into it hoping for nothing for yourself?
So not an intention of, “I want to know X, so I’ll ask good questions.”
But rather, “I think they’d enjoy talking about X, so I’ll ask good questions.”
Answer: It’s totally amazing. It alters your own life. You should go do it 500 times.
(Wether or not you turn those conversation into podcasts is irrelevant of course.)
The How Sound episode, “Getting inside someone else’s skin” (May 14, 2019 from the Sound School Podcast) contains insightful comments regarding why in-person is so great.
(Sorry, I cannot find a web-page specifically for this episode. You’ll have to find it in your favorite podcast app.)
Too long; didn’t listen? Here are my thoughts and opinions…
Listeners can tell when we have captured “humans being” and that can only be done when we humans are in our natural environment. That’s field-recording… pointing a mic at someone in the real-world.
Anything else is not the same thing. Wether that’s in a full studio, over a call even with video on, or when I carry a bunch of gear and give them a mic and great headphones sitting in their home… none of those are the same as field-recording a human being (and I intend both meanings there.)
Anything else is some degree of “disembodied and silenced” — quoted because that is a nugget taken from the podcast.
The article I’m linking to below is about AI — wait don’t run away. It made me actually think about: What is the purpose of the five-paragraph essay? How does one write such a thing—what exactly am I doing when I go through the soul-sucking process of doing it?
So you don’t have to read the short, linked article… but I recommend it.
The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It’s literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.
The five-paragraph essay is a blunt tool, sure. But it is clearly one, important but small, piece of a large puzzle called “learning to write well.” You do it very early in “learning to write well” and then you leave it behind.
What is our five-paragraph essay?
Any one of the following could be our five-paragraph essay…
Write a terrific, single, “hook sentence” from a podcast episode.
Write a paragraph of 3-5 sentences from a podcast episode.
Find at least one quotable portion from a podcast episode.
Write a list of takeaways in a specific style and with specific formatting.
Why do I say those things? Because once I understood how to do them by hand, turning to tools like AI is not cheating. The AI does a solid B+ (ref article above) job, which I can then finish to my A-level.
I’m excited to share that Jesse Danger and I have begun a new podcast show, Open + Curious. I’ve been writing up my thoughts around conversation, and this podcast is a new part of the Open + Curious project. Please consider subscribing to support our efforts.
Are you looking for ways to bring conversation alive? Then you are in the right place.
In each 15-minute episode we begin with a question, and work our way to a challenge. Some questions we explore have clear answers, and some lead to more questions and further unknowns. The challenge we seek to find, at the end of each episode, is meant to help you explore each question on your own.
I’ve now done a lot of recorded conversations for podcasts. I’ve spent a lot of money, and I’ve spent a vast amount of time. I’ve had every imaginable problem. I’ve been stressed out. I’ve literally worked myself to exhaustion and illness.
The line from Zeno was that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. That reason? To listen more than we talk.
To learn from people who can teach us. To find something that makes us better.
The rewards I’ve gotten—the things I’ve learned and the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had—have been worth every penny and every moment and every hardship.
The opportunity to speak with hundreds of people (most of whom I’d never have crossed paths with, let alone had a good conversation with) is priceless.
I recently had a conversation with someone while recording an episode of Podtalk. They mentioned the importance of naming our audience in the early moments of a podcast episode. An example they gave is: “Do you feel like a square peg trying to fit in a round hole? This podcast is for you.” (If you’re curious about this idea in the context of podcasting see, Naming our audiences.)
This idea was a quake moment for me. Because in order to name my audience—to literally say it, briefly, in a way that someone identifies with… Well, first I have to know who my audience is. I’m well aware one should know “who’s it for?” (If I just want to fiddle in my workshop, whatever-it-is can certainly just be, “it’s for me.”) It’s easy to know “who it’s for?” and to be able to talk about that when asked. It is vastly harder to name the audience, succinctly, in way a that connects with people.
Connection is precious. We can, and must, find ways to be so clear, and so vivid, that people literally feel a reaction when we name our audience. It’d be better if you heard me say this, but what happens when you read…
Are you the curious sort who leans in to find joy in learning and self-awareness? Terrific. You’re in the right place. Know anyone else who should be here too?
