There’s no getting ahead with your podcast. There’s only adjusting your calendar and developing the discipline to keep separation between your production schedule and your publishing calendar.
Terra is laying out the eternal struggle which everyone who takes up podcasting soon discovers: You are beholden to the publication schedule. I mean, sure, you get to set your own schedule, right? …but then you…
Wait, why is that again? You know you can just publish whenever you feel like it. That’s what I do and hundreds of published conversations later across multiple different shows… literally no one ever has asked me when the next episode will be out. Nor why I don’t publish on a schedule. Maybe they’re all just ignoring me, or think I’m a weird podcaster. But know what I definitely am not? …beholden to a schedule.
Instead I can do what I want to do (have great conversations) when I am able to arrange that. And then I publish them. *mic drop*
To me, quality means doing the best you can with what you have to work with. Your environment. Your equipment. Your voice. Your experience. Your level of comfort. All of those things are part of your overall “working with” toolset.
This is something I often struggle with. Terra is writing about podcasting specifically—something I spend a lot of time doing—but I have this problem more generally. It would serve me well to be thinking: Is this the best I can do now, with the tools, knowledge, situation, and skills I have now? If so, terrific! That’s great enough.
there are enough users who understand how it is supposed to work. They expect to be able to listen to any podcast anywhere they want. Most probably don’t understand why they have this ability, about the history and technology design that made it possible, but they understand that they have the ability. And it doesn’t have to be all of them or even most of them, just enough of them, whatever that means. And for right now, at the end of 2021, there are enough. Podcasting has always been and remains an open platform. I can’t say it will be for the future, but so far so good.
I like Winer’s point that the web (websites, web browser, blogs—not asocial media platforms) and podcasting are not dominated by any one large company. He’s pointing out that we’ve two examples of things not centrally controlled—two examples of success (so far, things could always change.) And therefore it’s quite possible that we could build something else, another new media format, which is also free, open, and not centrally controlled.
But I don’t like that Winer has glossed over the fact that podcasting only appears to be open, (in the way that the web is open.) Podcasting appears to be open, and isn’t yet dominated by one large company, because the podcast creators individually go to great lengths to make their shows available everywhere. There are multiple large companies trying to leverage the listeners against the creators. I’ve given up on trying to lead podcasting to be open, the way the web is open; I simply hope that someone else sees what I see and that I live to see podcasting grow to be a first-class, truly open, platform, (the way the web is.)
I spend a lot of time trying to imagine people’s experiences of things I create. Partly that happens as a direct result of my having empathy and being compassionate—once you start, you can’t stop. (“My mission is creating better conversations to spread understanding and compassion.”) Sometimes my efforts pay off big with a blinding flash of clarity.
I’m regularly doing outreach to people who know me well, a little, or often not-at-all. I’m inviting someone to join me, for a recording of a conversation… which I’m going to immediately publish, without editing. It turns out that scares the crap out of most people. (Are your palms sweating just thinking about it?)
Well, I solved that problem a while ago: When we’re chatting, before we start recording, I explain there’s a safety net. They get the option to veto. I explain that after we stop recording, I will ask them if they’re okay with what we recorded. If they’re not happy, it just gets deleted. And I’ll still be happy because the conversation we had becomes that much more special because I got to experience something that no one else will ever hear.
Today it occurred to me that I should explain that even farther up front. Like right up front on the invitation page that I send people to. If your palms were sweating up there, thinking about being recorded, consider this…
Safety net After we stop recording, you decide if I publish it. Seriously. You get a big, safe, veto option. Published or vetoed, I’ll still be glad we had a chance to have a cool conversation.
But this moment cannot come without the days of frustration at the blackboard. “You can’t really blame the storytellers,” Rockmore writes, “It’s not so exciting to read ‘and then she studied some more.’ But this arduous, mundane work is a key part of the process.”
And Niels Bohr said something similar about Painful experience. And I bet your experience agrees. I know mine does.
Nobody sees how much time I spend working on podcasting. Every facet is complicated. I’m regularly noticing new things, picking up interesting skills and ideas from nearby areas of expertise. Structural wisdom from the field of authors. Empathic skills from the field of therapists. New kinds of questions from the field of hosts. New vocal skills from the field of speakers. And teachers and mechanics and on and on.
The eureka moments get the attention but they’re very few and very far between.
What would be a good question to ask? How do I evaluate a potential question, in real time during a conversation, to decide if it’s good? What can I do to make this guest enjoy this conversation? In the same vein: What should I do? And what, if anything, must I do? What does this person really want to talk about? What don’t they want to talk about? And if I figured that out, is the right thing to, to honor their desire to avoid it, or to help them face it? Can I help them more by letting them find their own energy level, or by trying to help them change their energy level? Would calming down enable them to communicate more effectively? Would riling them up help them work through their feelings? Should we explore how they are feeling, or how this event we’re discussing made them feel? Should I be more open, and share more with them? Or would my consuming our time doing that, block them from doing what they need to do, or from saying what they need to say? Should we be having more fun? Should we be more serious? Should we instead do the opposite, (make light of a serious subject, or vice versa,) of that society would normally expect? Should I ask them a deep question? Should I ask a question on the same line-of-thought and take us even deeper? Deeper a third time? Or should I pivot to indicate that I want to follow them, not drive them into a corner?
What’s that? …oh, you thought I was going to be talking about the actual questions one might ask another person. Yeah no that’s another question altogether. :)
As I mentioned last week, I was recently on a rather long road trip doing some recording for the Movers Mindset project. I took a lot of stuff on the trip, but here’s the two bags which comprised the complete podcast setup—everything I need to press record is in these two bags. The rectangular bag is a proper, no-cheating, most-stingy-airline carry-on size.
And here’s what’s inside: Two full-size (albeit lightweight) mic stands, 2 sets of full-size headphones, and 3 containers of all the podcast recording and listening electronics. (And it’s all battery powered to boot.)
I’ve been on a road trip this week recording podcasts for Movers Mindset. One thing I wanted to experiment with was trying to record “short” form podcasts for Movers Mindset while on the road. Adrienne Toumayan joined me for a recording titled, Balance.
To create anything of beauty, daring, and substance that makes the world see itself afresh — be it a revolutionary law of planetary motion or the Starry Night — is the work of lonely persistence against the tides of convention and conformity, often at the cost of the visionary’s aching ostracism from the status quo they are challenging with their vision.
To be clear, I don’t feel I’m out to make the world see itself afresh. I am out to create better conversations to spread understanding and compassion. And while I understand, now having read a bit more about John Coltrane, how a certain type of genius might need a certain type of loneliness to do their work. That’s not me and my work.
I’m finding that I’m thriving on podcasting. It is a stupid amount of work; Yes, I’ve chosen to set things up, and to set challenges and goals, to create that amount of work. It’s even physically challenging, for example, I’m on a road-trip this week with multiple +4-hour driving days. But I know what I’m in for, and I know what’s going to happen once I press record. Magic. Obviously, a big part of that comes from me, but a critical part of it comes from the other people. I’ve always heard talk of how “creative types” can get lonely. I’ve come around to accepting the label of “creative type.” I recharge in alone time. But I think I thrive when creating in concert with others.
7. Consistent and repeatable results come from a process. “True style does not come from a conscious effort to create a particular look. It results obliquely—even accidentally—out of a holistic process.”
That articlette is about a book, 101 Things Things I Learned in Architecture School. The 7th point, in bold, is the penultimate of a best-of-the-best selection from the book. The inner-quoted part is Matthew Frederick, the book’s author.
This point about a holistic process—the idea that mastery isn’t some higgledy-piggledy mish-mash of throwing things together—is an idea I’ve held dearly for a long time. Every time I see it, like in this articlette, I want leap up, flipping my desk over and scream, “Hear! Hear! …and again, louder, for those in the back staring at their handheld devices.”
Every single time that I’ve decided to take a process, and repeat it in search of understanding, (for example, my 10,000 rep’s project,) the learning and personal growth has paid off beyond my wildest dreams. At this point, I’ve done nearly 200 recorded conversations—I’m not stretching the truth, it’s actually hard to figure out exactly how many I’ve done. I’ve started another show recently as part of the Podcaster Community (25+ episodes and counting) and I’ve set up all the moving parts for yet another show as part of Movers Mindset “shorts”. And I keep wondering…
What would happen if I did 500, 1000? …what about 10,000? Not because I want to be famous and whine, “but I did 1,000 episodes why doesn’t anyone love me?!” But because I can see, in myself, how much I’ve learned and grown after 200. What would happen if I did a lot more?
these nine principles for interviewing people about tender, personal, tough subjects are tactics that are helpful in any hard conversation. You want to be clear about your objectives for the conversation, to be prepared to listen closely and actively, to prepare the person you are talking to for a different, deeper sort of exchange. You need to respect the dignity of the person you’re talking with, and respect yourself enough to speak up when you disagree.
Whether or not you’re doing recorded conversations with guests, there’s a bunch of great advice in that article. I’m particularly drawn to Sale’s point about how her interviews are enabled by the fact that she is creating a relationship with the guest. In any conversation, everything we do either builds up, or tears down, a relationship bit by bit.
In any conversation, it’s my experience that the more intentional I am, the better it goes. Part of that is intentional listening; listening primarily to understand. Another part is being mindful of the other person; deploying empathy and compassion. Another part is keeping sight of where you are headed, and also where it is not possible to get to; knowing what to stretch for and what to let pass is critical.
If you create podcasts — whether you’re thinking about it, just starting out, or are publishing your 100th episode — we’d love for you to join us. It’s free to create an account. Logging in enables the platform features and you can immediately begin posting/replying in the public categories.
I don’t idle well. I get an idea in my head, and I start thinking about all the ways it could be realized. Recently, I’ve had a few separate conversations with podcasters who were looking for something—what they each wanted was different. And so I set off to build it.
Exciting times! Facebook is getting into the game of making Yet Another ™ place that podcast creators will have to jump through hoops to get their podcast shows heard.
Isn’t this all so strange? I mean, shouldn’t the content creators have the power? Shouldn’t entities looking to create a business model have to deal fairly with the creators? It’s as if we, the podcast creators, are doing something fundamentally wrong…
To serve relevant ads and, in return, increase its CPM for advertisers, Spotify needs to know its users intimately. This means that Spotify needs its users to spend as much of their digital lives as possible in its walled garden. The quickest way for Spotify to enable this is to build a podcast streaming capability and stream all available podcasts through its music app.
In the end, Spotify has managed to create a large garden and they’ve enclosed a large portion of the revenue.
The beauty of the Internet—for as long as this remains true—is that it is open. Open technology, open connectivity, open space. That means no wall garden can ever completely contol the thing it encloses. And that’s not even what Spotify wants to do. They’re simply trying to run a business.
And anyone who wants to be an independent podcaster, that too simply goes on.
This is a well written article about the human voice, and how microphones really work in terms of capturing it. Even if you read this and plan to forget everything—you’ll come out *way* ahead when recording your and your guests’ voices.
It’s full of insightful information, about the human voice:
…the voice changes spectrum in almost any other position than when we approach the speaking person with our ear – or microphone. Each position on the head or the chest has its’ own sound color – or timbre. For instance, the spectrum of speech recorded on the chest of a person normally lacks frequencies in the important range of 2-4 kHz. This results in reduced speech intelligibility. If the microphone does not compensate for this you should make corrections with an equalizer.
Important frequencies:
The important frequencies in non-tonal (Western) languages are illustrated by the diagram below. Here, the frequency band around 2 kHz is the most important frequency range regarding perceived intelligibility. Most consonants are found in this frequency band.
…and about what affects intelligibility in a reproduction of the voice:
A lot of research has been carried out in this area. In general, the results demonstrate that:
1. Optimum speech level is constant when background noise level is lower than 40 dB(A) 2. Optimum speech level appears to be the level that maintains around 15 dB(A) of S/N ratio when the background noise level is more than 40 dB(A) 3. Listening difficulty increases as speech level increases under the condition where S/N ratio is good enough to keep intelligibility near perfect
Furthermore, the 1-4 kHz frequency range should be “kept clear”. When, for instance, adding music as background for narration, a parametric equalizer cutting the music 5-10 dB in this frequency range will improve intelligibility.
When recording conversations for the Movers Mindset podcast the guests know I’m not going to edit what they say to change their meaning. They know I’m bringing journalistic integrity to the conversation. (I’m not doing strict journalism, but that feature of journalism is present.) I do my best to set up the correct space (physical, emotional and mental,) so that we can co-create the best conversation possible. I’m not digging for dirt, creating tension, nor trying to create any other saccharine artifice. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are performing for an audience. The final necessary piece to facilitating a great conversation is a safety net.
Each conversation… each performance is better if we can reach just a bit farther than we might normally be comfortable doing. That’s why I bring a safety net. I very clearly give the guest a safe word which they can incant at any time to take back what they’ve said.
I don’t include the guest in the post-production process. They’re not invited to review the material, or to give additional thoughts about what to keep or what to cut. In fact, the only people who have time to do that, are wanna-be cooks, who will only mess up the soup if I let them in my kitchen. Instead, I and my team do all the post-production difficult work which is in fact our responsibility. The guest already did the really hard work of being themselves on-mic.
I do also say, “take your time— silence is free and we can easily trim out 30 seconds of you thinking before you speak.” I’ve also a few other little coaching tidbits I share to prep them for being recorded. But it’s the safety net which makes them feel comfortable trying something they might otherwise hesitate about. Part of the magic of a great conversation is how it develops organically, and without the safety net most people dial their caution up a few notches to be safe. With a safety net, most people are delighted to take a leap to see what they can do.
Within the team that creates the Movers Mindset podcast, we assign numbers to our projects. We use “R42” for our 42nd recording project, then R43, and so on. This enables us to start naming things from day one, in a way that we don’t have to change later. If you’re putting your files in a folder, what would you name it, that you could be sure wouldn’t change?
We also use our podcast’s initials on file names, “MM.” When we see files whose name contains, MM-R42… we know what it belongs too. It’s part of the Recording-42 project for Movers Mindset.
We also exclusively use people’s family names on files. So a raw WAV file from an interview is 20200423-MM-SMITH-TR1.wav … April 23, 2020 recording for Movers Mindset, of someone named “Smith”, and this is track one [a recording from one microphone.] 20200423-MM-SMITH-TR2.wav is track two, and so on. No matter where you toss that file, it’s going to make sense.
Eventually, a recording project might lead to one (or more!) episodes of our podcast. They get assigned episode numbers, EP56, EP57, etc. Then we have filenames like MM-EP57… and it’s always clear what that is.
Sometimes we have a dozen files to keep track of in a podcast episode and we end up with 20200423-MM-SMITH-TR1.wav 20200423-MM-SMITH-TR2.wav MM-EP56-INTRO.wav (introduction recorded after interview) MM-EP56-OUTRO.wav (outro recorded in post production) MM-GCORD.wav (a little music ‘button’ used when joining bits of interview) …the final episode is then MM-EP56-SMITH.mp3
Since I’ve typed this much, here’s another thing we do: We use consistently numbered folders to store the files. Every project has a folder, 2020.04.23 Bob Smith R42/EP56 — we create 2020.04.23 Bob Smith R42 in our archives when we do the raw recording, and at the very end we add the /EP56 to make it easier to find things. In side each project we create five folders 1 assets, 2 recording, 3 episode, 4 publication, and 5 social — the leading number ensure they sort in nice order in various displays. 1 contains anything the guest gives us (photos, writing) or any photos we take during recording. 2 is the raw original recordings, 3 is everything to make a podcast episode (intro, outro, whatever we have to assemble, AND the finished MP3), 4 is anything we create as part of publishing the episode (transcript, articles, highlights ) and 5 is anything that’s ok for social media and sharing. And then we have a multi-terabyte file server with a “few” files on it:
Today, two thoughts popped into my head in rapid suggestion: “Self-esteem box,” and “I’ve never pull-quoted Movers Mindset.”
Brandee Laird
Craig: So for me it’s I know if I go for a walk that’s almost, not always, almost always enough to make it so I can go back into the cave of ugliness and get back to work kind of thing. So what are some things that will help you turn that corner, brighten you up or energize you?
Brandee: Yeah, that’s a great question, because I do get very dark moods pretty often actually, because with compassion comes the pain of caring so much about all these people and all this situation, it feels very futile a lot of times, like what can I do to change this. Yeah, I get there and I have a few tactics, I basically build protocols for myself for when I get in those moods. So one of the first things I go to is my self-esteem box.
Craig: This sounds like a good idea.
Brandee: And my self-esteem box is digital, it’s a digital self-esteem box and what I have done, is I have taken screenshots and copy/pasted and just dumped in all kinds of nice things that people have said, either to me or about me over the years.
So I have this file that is just full of gratitude and compliments and just stuff that I have had to read over and over and over in order to actually believe it. So that’s actually more like last resort is the self-esteem box. If nothing else works, open the self-esteem box, look through here.
Craig: In case of emergency, break glass, right?
Brandee: Totally. Totally. So that’s something I think everyone could and should do that. I guess I’ve never really told anyone about that. But it’s a nice thing.
Craig: I think that’s a really good tactic. People talk about doing gratitude journaling, but the gratitude journaling. I mean, I know that you know what it is, but gratitude journaling is a process which you have to execute on the spot when you feel like you’re having a bad mood. But the idea of having a self-esteem box is a clever one.
I think these two thoughts popped into my head as the photo-frame on my wall changed. One of the smartest things I’ve ever done is set up a digital photo-frame. I email it photos of things—you know, all those digital photos you never do anything with. :)
Anyway. I love love LOVE my photo-frame. It’s chock full of hundreds of great photos. It’s not quite a self-esteem box. But it generally has the same effect. Every single time I glance at it it makes me smile.
Meanwhile, ever since I had that conversation with Brandee, (in September 2019,) I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a self-esteem box. I’m not quite sure where to put it [digitally] though; Also, I really do not need to make up yet another system for myself for organizing and storing things.
