Upgrade - 200: The Podcasting and Anniversary Episode

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

To welcome the Summer of Fun and to celebrate hitting episode 200, Jason and Myke take a deep dive in to the history of Upgrade, and provide the Upgradians with all their knowledge on the hows, whys, and whats of podcasting.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 200 this is our podcasting extravaganza and you know what jason snell we can now ring in we can hear the waves we can hear the oceans because it is the summer of fun summer of fun is back and it's bigger than ever boy oh boy have we got a huge summer of fun plan for you this have we measured how big the summer is versus last year and are we sure that it's going to be bigger this year i think it's going to be it is bigger in its planning and execution this is not necessarily this is true we have been planning the summer of fun for months it's also big milestone wise it is because as as many people out there may know um you're gonna get married this week yep yep but nobody wants to hear about that mike what's this nobody wants to hear about that hashtag snell talk question comes from kyle and kyle wants to know for your various projects

is there a specific time that you aim for when publishing oh this is uh this is an interesting question so i'll tell you first back in the day when we were at IDG, when we were publishing lots of stuff at IDG, we often posted things at like 11 in the morning Pacific, which is like two in the afternoon. that was when peak traffic was. Like for whatever reason, 11 a.m. Pacific to Eastern was like peak traffic time every single day of the week during the week, weekdays. And so what you wanted to do was post web stories like in the morning

or up to that point. But what you didn't want to do is post them later because what would happen is the people on the East Coast would go away and they wouldn't see your stories. So the last thing you want to do

is post a really great story at three in the afternoon Pacific on a Friday, right? No, nobody's. That's when bad things happen. You post stories then because companies release news about terrible things that they want nobody to notice because it's on a Friday evening. That's a real thing. The Friday evening news dump is a real thing that happens. So for podcasting though, it's funny. And I'm curious what you think about this too, Mike. I'm not sure that specifically when you post it is super important. The only ones that I think about it are timely shows. When I was doing Clockwise, I would hear from a couple of people that it was their regular commute home podcast on Wednesdays. And so if we were late and they kind of missed their commute home, they were sad about that.

And that was a podcast that, you know, we usually could get up. I could get up at like 10, 1030 in the morning Pacific, which means it was on everybody's podcast players in the East Coast when they were going home. But that's more about training people about when your podcast gets released than like the actual time of it so i don't know do you think that there's like um a golden time to release a podcast not like a specific time every time so like for example if we are launching a new show we tend to do that even between 10 and 12 a.m so 10 a.m to 12 p.m eastern time because that we find to be like a golden hour of time where most of the markets you're trying to get to will be awake and paying attention right so you know you'll get europe because it's still

kind of late afternoon um san francisco and like california and all the west coast are just waking up waking up and the east coast is kind of like getting on with their day so you have a chance of like getting to people that way that's our belief it's worked for us so far it's just a good time i don't want to release things at weird times for everybody so we do it at a mostly convenient time for most people but when it comes to like each individual episode like every episode of upgrade for example i don't think that there is a like specifically for any show a really good or bad time i think that you know people build these shows into their lives mostly right in a certain way i think so my feeling is just you pick your time and you stay consistent that That's the key, right?

That's all that matters. Which is funny because we are going to talk a lot about podcasting after we talk a little bit about this podcast reaching 200 episodes. But I think that is one of the keys. We'll just spoil it for later, which is consistency is the important thing. Like I said about the people who built Clockwise into their Wednesday afternoon drive home. Like the point was we released it at a certain time every time and they integrated it into their lives at that time. And, you know, you could choose what you want to do, but consistency I think is important. The only other examples I've got are for stories like on Six Colors and things like that. Sometimes you've

got an embargo. Sometimes a story has to go but 4 a.m. or 9am and you wait. Occasionally, it'll be really late in the day and I'll be working on kind of a big story like a product review or something. And I will show it to people. You get those links every now and then where I'm like, oh, here's this review that I'm going to put out tomorrow. And I decide I want to kind of sleep on it. I want to let people read it, see if they've got any issues, if they think there's something stupid that I said, or there's a mistake. And because I figure like launching again, a big story late in the day is probably a bad idea. So I do go for morning. Also my incomparable default, like my podcasting defaults in general, there are two things. I either do it in the morning, like I do it like nine often, eight or 9 a.m. Pacific is when I will,

if a show is done and I just need to put it out, I will often do it then because then I'm awake, I can promote it socially. Oftentimes with these podcasts, we have the ability to sort of set them to release later. And so you do that. And I often set 8 or 9 a.m as the time the only other timing that i usually do for podcasts is if it's a podcast we're posting same day it's literally you edit it and then you post it and it's immediate and that happens a lot like right by and large what i do with the vast majority of my shows is they are edited and published from the moment that they end. So the time varies, but it's relatively the same. If you were paying attention, I bet Upgrade is posted around the same time every week.

If you went back and looked at the timestamps, you would find, and that's a function of us recording it at the same time every week. It's not a release time. It's all based on the fact that we record it. Download is the same way. I actually give myself a little time after we record before I start editing because I mostly, it's like, I can't bear to edit this right away. I'm going to walk away for an hour or two. But I bet you that it is largely posted at the same time. Even The Incomparable, which gets recorded because it's a panel show, all sorts of different

days, all sorts of different times. But I have a specific time that I edit it every week. And that's why you usually see it on a Saturday, sort of midday Pacific. Sometimes not if I've got other stuff going on on the Saturday, but that's usually when I do it. And it's entirely a function of that I get up in the morning a little bit later on a Saturday, wander into my office and edit the podcast. And then it comes out and I can move on with the rest of my Saturday, sort of late morning or midday. So that was a fantastic question for this episode sent in by Kyle. If you would like to send in a question for a future episode,

you can just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and we'll pick it up. So yeah, as we mentioned, it is episode 200, and today's episode is all about podcasting. We decided we wanted to do a podcasting special, and considering we decided on that topic, and it's episode 200, please allow us, dear listener, to be a little bit meta and talk about our show for a few minutes.

So I figured that that you know i would expect that there are a lot of people um that have been listening since the beginning but not everyone i mean i know that's the case because of the way that our numbers have grown over time sure so i kind of figured it might be worth rehashing a little bit and almost as if we were rebooting the show with what our origin story was so like how did upgrade come to be and i want to hear it from you really because you are the impetus of why the show exists like i didn't pitch jason snell right you didn't pitch me but it came from you yeah so so when i was at idg i felt very strongly that uh the people who worked at idg who are being paid to be writers and experts on tech stuff, that they should be doing podcasts for IDG.

And the problem with that was that IDG was a company devoted to selling online, you know, selling web ads, basically. And so while we did podcasts, they were never really a priority. And they also were never really a money generator, which is why they were never a priority. So we ended up in this weird situation where, I mean, the one that everybody who was around then remembers is Lex Friedman, who ended up doing a podcast called Unprofessional with Dave Wiskus for a while. And the whole idea there was literally baked into the premise was Lex can't do a tech podcast. So this is a show that's about everything but what Lex can't talk about or he'll be fired, which was not really true. But that was the idea is, you know, we own your tech savvy and knowledge as a publishing

company. And so we wanted to keep it separate. Now, I've thought about that a lot. And I think there's a really strong argument to be made now that that was a dumb policy because the company was never going to do it. I think I was just hoping that I could drag the company into believing that podcasting was a thing. But the reality is it's a big publishing company. Even a network as successful as something like RelayFM, to them, would seem like chump

change, right? Because they want to make million-dollar deals and things like that, right? And so it's one of these cases where, even though there's a perfectly great business to be made there, that company was not ever going to focus on it. So for whatever reason, what that meant was that with Chris Breen doing the Macworld podcast, and we started, that's the origin of Clockwise is that I wanted to do another podcast. And so Dan and I just started doing Clockwise under their auspices. And we never, you know, I watched as people who are kind of like me were doing these podcasts on their own and having great success. And I kept saying to myself, well, if I leave here, I want to do that. I want to do something like Hypercritical or The Talk Show or whatever,

right? I wanted to do a show like that. And so when I realized that I would be leaving IDG, I had that moment where I thought, okay, well, I want to do a podcast. Damn it. Now is the time I'm going to do that podcast. And I thought, well, I want it to be – my initial thought was I want it to be like hypercritical and build and analyze like that model. Dan Benjamin is a person who is like representing the audience and guiding a conversation. And there's the other person who is the tech writer, media personality kind of person. It's sort of their show, but then there's another person there who makes it work. Because I really believe that that's the trick of this kind of format is that you build a relationship and you have the back and forth um and i think it's i think it's good so full credit to i mean dan and

john being a great a great inspiration with hypercritical which is a show that i absolutely loved so um and and dan and and john gruber it's two dan and john's well yeah right with with the original talk show so that idea of a show. And you guys had launched RelayFM and I had been listening to you guys do the prompt on 5x5. And, you know, I was listening, I think I was listening to an early episode while I was driving back from product briefing

at Infinite Loop and I took a picture of like the prompt on my radio on my car dashboard as I was driving on Infinite Loop, which led to the whole riff about me power sliding around Infinite Loop and across the Golden Gate Bridge and all of that. And you and I had done some podcasts together, and I talked to Stephen at least once sitting in for you, I believe, on your old podcast.

Yeah. So there was a bunch of connections there, and as somebody who appreciated the work that you guys were doing and and had just watched relay get launched i thought that's where i want to be and so i contacted you i believe although it might have been you and steven but uh at some point it was you and steven at some point it might have been just you and i and i told you something that i literally told nobody else except for my family, which was, I'm leaving IDG in a month and I want to start a podcast and I want it to be with you. And so I

brought it to you and I pitched you and said, let's do a podcast, you and me. And to my great relief, you said, yeah, let's do that. I didn't react that way. I mean, I don't remember what I said, but to put it into context a little bit i think relay fm was a week old when you got in contact with this idea probably so it well i mean part of the reason that i know this is um when you announced that you were leaving idg i was at my granddad's funeral and that was only a couple of weeks after our company had launched so like it was like a whole there was like so much going on in my life at that moment but to have i mean we were it was about if i would be surprised

if we were around for more than a week when you when you kind of reached out because of the way the timelines work and it was there was honestly that was one of the greatest things that happened to us starting out because it was a validation of what we were doing you know we had just started this thing and we were trying to make it a real deal me and steven and then you know if you imagine right you've got this this network and at the time it was it was me and federico and steven and we also had brad and we had casey lists right so we were doing analog the pan addict i was doing my interview show and we were doing uh what was the revival of the prompt which is connected and me and federico were doing um our first video game show,

Relay FM, to give a call virtual. They were our five shows. And then you came in and were like, oh, by the way, I want to bring Clockwise over and I want to start a show with you. So these were like two shows. And I mean, we were working it out and we knew how big a deal this was going to be for us. It was just like such a no brainer at the time. And we were like, it was just like such a no-brainer at the time and we were like it was amazing like that the way

the timeline of all of that worked out was just so unbelievable for us at a time that was so important and i still to this day say that one of the reasons that i'm sitting here right now is because of upgrade because in our community you know like in the mostly apple focused technology community your validation of relay fm that early on i think really helped a lot of people pay attention to us because so early on in the company it's you know you you had you could have gone anywhere and done this you could have done it on your own you have so many options right like yeah lex friedman still gives me trouble every now and then for not contacting him and saying you know hey maybe i could anchor a tech uh a tech

podcast for for mid-roll he every now and then he's like why didn't you i mean it's it's good natured but he's like you didn't even talk to me jason exactly you could have done like how uh the talk show is right like the talk show is is just on daring fireball and you are obviously starting six colors yeah but that like i mean that's part of the point is that i didn't want to i felt like i didn't want to mix the media like that right and also i didn't have six colors was going to be new so launching a podcast on a place that didn't exist before is not the same as launching it inside like daring fireball whereas launching a podcast on a place that didn't exist before is not the same as launching it inside like daring fireball whereas having a podcast network because that's to this show's credit that we got to be uh we got to launch it not out in the void but as a part of this growing

collection at relay so it yeah i hope that it helped both i i see your point though like if if i provided some validation by like well there's this new thing called RelayFM, we'll see what it's going to do. And one of the first things that it does is I exit IDG and say, I'm bringing my podcast with me and starting a new podcast at Relay. At the very least, that gave Relay a little momentum. And that's great because that was part of what I wanted to do. Because I think, you know, we had all of our launch stuff and people were excited and there

was a bit of buzz about it. And then as soon as that starts to die down, we get this get this you know so i think it really helped us out very early on the timing was kind of kind of and we've had a couple of moments like this over the history of our company and but this was the first one when you added gray and merlin and john and john syracuse that was that was a great moment and cortex in one day that was that was really fun too those test shows though mike limited run only about 10 episodes summer pilots they who knows if they're going to stick around the other weird thing i wanted to mention that people may not remember which is how the show started which is we all agreed in email and stuff to like start this sort of mid

mid-month um and then what happened was there was an Apple event, which was literally my last full day on the job, September 9th, when they announced the new iPhone and the Apple watch. Right. And I was doing, uh, that was a, that was, there was that day, the next day, everybody got laid off and I left. And the day after that, I flew to Portland for XOXO, uh, which was super weird. And then, and then I came back and launched six colors. like the day I came back, which was the 16th. We have the timeline now, right?

And we launched up right now. September 9th. We launched RelayFM on August 18th. So it was just three weeks after our company that upgrade began. Right. And I was emailing with you in August about it, too. So, yeah, that was the, it happened really fast, but it happened faster than we expected because at some point I said to you after I had gotten my product briefing, because that's one of the funny moments about

that is that I knew that I was leaving the next day and I got, for the first time in a couple of years, I got the advanced briefing for the iPhone. I got handed an iPhone and said, this is under embargo until next Tuesday. And I actually said to the PR person who I worked with for a very long time, who is no longer at Apple, I said to her, I got something to tell you. She's like, no, no, no, no, no. And I'm like, yeah, this is, I said, I said, tomorrow's my last day, but we'll, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll take care of this. So I ended up in this really weird situation where Apple doesn't give products to companies. They give products to people. And so I had this moment of like, well, you gave this to me to review for Macworld, but

I don't work at Macworld anymore. So what am I going to do? And I ended up making a deal with the people who stayed at IDG. And I said, I'll tell you what i'm going to give you this review for free in exchange for plugging my site and they said sure that's great and it turns out because i was i was barred for several months from from being paid by them we had to we had you know i had a severance agreement uh and i had to truly be severed for a while and then my column that i write every week started the the day that i was

out of that severance agreement like because i i talked to john always wanted to be in the snail zone yeah i talked to john phillips he's like yeah we want you to do a weekly column and you can start it on february 18th or whatever it was i'm like all right let's do it and then and we've done it ever since so that was the horse trading for that one but then i then i email you and i say okay i got the iphone um we should do an episode of upgrade about the iphone um to drop as episode one which we weren't intending to do originally was just going to be we'd do an intro episode when i was back and you were back and we were going to all make it work and then i was going to italy yeah and i was in portland right i was headed to portland and also trying to launch my new website in this whole,

it was bananas. So I believe we recorded it like before I went to Portland after I'd had the phone for part of a day or a day. And we talked about the iPhone and then we timed that to drop at the embargo time so that all of a sudden my review dropped six colors is launched because i launched six colors with a link to my review on mac world and a reporter's notebook with like more iphone stuff because i figured you gotta this is why i didn't take a break after leaving my job

it's like it's iphone it's the most important and most talked about product of the year there's never going to be a better time to launch my site, even though it's ridiculous because I'm launching it several days after I leave my old job. And then upgrade number one also launched at the same time. So it was this kind of triple whammy of stuff that happened, which is, it was, you know, in hindsight, I told people this, it was not anything I would choose to do, but given the circumstances, they were all exactly the right things to do. There was nothing better than saying, hey, not only do I have a new podcast, but I have my, you know, I will talk exclusively about my review that was under embargo where I'm

one of a handful of people or, you know, a dozen people or whatever to get one. And it's on that podcast. Like that was too, too good good to pass up but it was just bananas because of our travel schedules and all the other timing and that so that's how so upgrade number one is really weird because it's like a pre-taped episode um and we don't really know what it's going to be i think i edited it i think you did um oh yeah it's a whole thing and yet it's got the theme music and everything so obviously i had Chris Breen working in the background on getting me a theme song. Right, but I'd never heard the music.

Right, you heard it on the finished episode. Yeah, so anyway, it's not... The first time I ever heard the theme music for our show was when the episode was published. We usually launch a podcast, but we had to do it. There were extenuating circumstances, and it started a tradition that we have on this show, which has happened a number

of times that i don't know of any other podcast in our space that does this which is embargoed product release episodes right you know we did it with connected one time when federico got the 12.9 inch ipad yep um but we do that Upgrade. You have access to products from time to time. And if you do, we will record an episode in secret and publish it. And that's one of the things that I remain very proud about this show is that we do that and we're able to do that because for reasons I'm kind of unsure about, nobody else does it. I mean, everybody has podcasts now but they never make they make youtube videos they write articles but they never have uh the they never have these like embargo things i wouldn't say never but it's much more rare than you would think um and the other aspect of it too is even

outside of embargo we have with the show tried to make it a little bit more about um seeing if we can hit a an Apple product event, especially right after it happens, which is something that we strive to do, even if we have to move the recording date a little bit. And that leads to a little inconsistency in our recording time sometimes. But I would much rather tell people about the Apple event that I just attended on a Tuesday evening,

rather than wait until Monday rolled around again to do it because- We like to be first. It's something that we consider to be important. And while consistency in podcasting is important, I think the great advantage of podcasting is you can drop an episode whenever you want. And so we make that effort.

So I don't think that was all part of our, I mean, we didn't really have a game plan when we got started. We had this idea that it would be kind of, we'd have some topics and we'd chat and then all of a sudden it was it's a product review embargo and all this other stuff going on so uh we've kind of made our way and and 200 episodes later um it's uh it's it's different from what we originally intended but that's going to happen anytime you do something is that it's going to evolve over time and in this case over almost four. I did want to talk just before we take

a break, I did want to talk about just touch on the way the show has changed from my like, from the way that I approach it, from my opinion of how the show is. I saw somebody described this recently, about a lot of the shows that I do do and it also applies to the shows that you were mentioning before like the five by five shows of having an expert and an enthusiast and i always play the enthusiast role in these types of shows you know like with you uh with gray and you know like on remaster with shahid who is like an expert right like he's a developer like and i've always enjoyed playing that role as kind of being the voice of the audience and mostly because i tend not to have as much experience as the other person you know the pen addict is another great example as my co-host and when

this show started it was 100 that it was uh i am gonna get the opinions out of jason right like jason's gonna have the opinions and I'm going to talk about them. And part of it for me and why I felt pretty comfortable doing that is I didn't feel comfortable enough to be able to stand toe to toe with Jason Snell and give my opinions about what Apple's doing. Because I just didn't really feel like

I had the credibility to be able to do that. To be like, no, Jason, I think you're wrong. I think they're going to do this, right? And it's like, how can I argue with that experience? But over the multiple, the many years that we've been doing this show together, my opinions have changed. And now, like, I feel like the show still has a lot of that, but it's different in that i will debate with you and give my own i agree we might even draft things from time to time yeah exactly but the draft is a great is a great one but i just feel like now i am much more confident in my own opinions than

than i was previously and that again it's come with experience because i've been doing this doing this for like eight years i mean and i've been doing this show for like four years like i feel like at this point i kind of have something to say well exactly and we also build a rapport over time right like at the beginning where it was it was the that model i mean we all remember who listened to hypercritical that there were episodes where john would go start going on a rant and it was unclear whether dan was still in the room like he may have gone to the bathroom maybe making himself a sandwich you know and that was part of the format and it was it was fine because dan's role there was not to um share the spotlight with john so much as to as to kind of prod john and and and steer the show like where it needed to

go and that's a logical starting point but over time think with any show, it's going to evolve and the relationship between the people. And so you're right. Like your experience grows, your confidence grows, our rapport grows, and the show becomes something different. And I think it absolutely has evolved. And I think that's good. We should also say one of the rules that we decided at some point along the way is that I was going to be on every episode so we do have these guest episodes we're gonna have another one in a couple of weeks um so that that is one thing like like yeah it is still it it you know hashtag snell talk right so that there's that aspect the show is the show remains anchored around you and i'm always happy to do that like we we serve our own roles

so like for example i put the document together but you're generating a lot of the content that i'm building from right like and you know and and as well like this it's just a difference in our styles which we're going to get to in a little bit about the way that we put shows together but and i'm always and i'm always happy to have that the upgrade is anchored around you because i have other places you do that's that's exactly it and that, that upgrade is anchored around you because I have other places I talk about technology. That's exactly it. And that's one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that some people, it's tricky, right? Some people listen to the show and listen to Connected and listen to other stuff we do.

And other people don't. And so you don't want to not cover something. But at the same time, I mean, this is why we do follow out. And at the same time, you also want to give the, let the show be the show when you edit the show. When I just sit and talk for six minutes on about some topic and you're like, again, you may be making a sandwich, the old Dan Benjamin sandwich. So that happens sometimes, but other times it doesn't. And over time, I think it's evolved that way. And I think it's good, but that's natural because one of the things I wanted from the beginning was I wanted to have a show that had that kind of rapport. And it takes a little bit of time.

But I really like those shows. And to be honest, because the Mackerel podcast was very much an anthology, and even The Incomparable is very much an anthology. I'm on almost every episode, but the panel circulates. And I really wanted to do a show with follow-up, a show where from week to week, it was the same people and they had that shared experience because I always felt like those were the strongest bonds you could make with a podcast is if you had the people who were the same every week and the format was the same more or less every week. And ironically, even though I believed

that, none of the podcasts I did were that. So I wanted to do that. And that's what it is. It is kind of funny. If you remember way back in the beginning, so much of our show was follow-up. You were wild for it. You were so excited about it. We did way too much. And now, you may or may not have noticed, listener, we barely do it.

I mean, there has to be a really good reason for us to do follow-up now we have to we have to say something spectacularly dumb for that to happen but it does it's all it happens story must have had to have changed significantly yeah and the reason for that is because again you obviously have noticed this upgrade has kind of moved into a different format which is segment based we are a very segment-heavy show. And that's just because over time, that has kind of been the path that we have fallen into. And I think that we both really enjoy that because it allows us to talk about

a bunch of different things. And the Advent stuff like chapters and things like that has really helped make that kind of a better format for us. But we've done more than enough navel-gazing. Nobody wants to hear any more about this, Mike. I don't think so. I mean, I could continue talking about it all day, but we should actually go on

and do what people have been asking for, which is to actually give them some tips and some advice about how we produce podcasts and how they can learn from them. But before we do, let's take a break and thank our first sponsor of this week's episode, and that is the fine folk over at Pingdom.

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So start monitoring today and get that peace of mind. Go to Pingdom.com slash RelayFM to get a 14 day free trial. And with no credit card required, you can sign up right now. Then use the code upgrade at checkout to save yourself 30% off your first invoice and to show your support for this show. Our thanks to Pingdom for their continued support of Upgrade and Really FM. So let's start out when we're going to give our little podcasting masterclass here today

by talking about the thing everybody wants to know because everybody needs it. Let's talk about our gear. Now, it is worth noting that we are going to talk about what we use, then we're going to talk about what we recommend. If you don't have a podcast or you're just starting out, you've been doing it for a little while, pay no attention to what we're saying about what we use, other than the fact that we're telling you what we think about these products. Because these are products that me and Jason now own after having done this for multiple years. And they are significant steps up from what we're going to talk about in a few minutes which is going to be what we recommend for somebody who's starting out or is pretty early on

in their in their process honestly personally i would say that you probably shouldn't really own basically any of the stuff that we're going to talk about unless your podcast is making you some money of some kind from somehow the fact is there is something and i think partially it's aspirational and i think partially it's people who are enthusiastic about technology like to hear about gear and what people are using like every time i take a picture of my desk right everybody's like oh what's that everyone wants to know what i can't tell you how many people have asked me how many how many people have asked me about the arm that my iMac is on like oh what's that and it's like literally the answer is it came with the desk but I have figured out what model it is and I I send that to people so people want to know even if they're not uh

actually going to buy that stuff and that's fine so we'll do it so let's start with the most important thing which is the microphone so I use a microphone called the neumann kms 105 this microphone was recommended to me um by the microphone angel slash devil that is marco armand to the point that i arrived in marco's house at one time and he sat me down in front of his computer and he put headphones on my head and he said, speak into this. 20 minutes later, I had ordered all new equipment because the Neumann KMS-105 is... The one thing I don't like about this microphone is it looks like a singer's microphone

and it doesn't look like a podcasting microphone because it just looks like a regular microphone and I wished it looked slightly different. I don't know why, but that really bothered me initially it looks like it's look looks like you should be on stage singing because that's kind of what it's made for instead of it being like you're in a in a radio booth somewhere right and the two things i don't know enough about this microphone to explain what's good about it i will put in the show notes a link to marco's microphone mega review guide so you can get an idea of from somebody who knows what they're talking about with this stuff,

because I don't know any of the terms for this stuff. But I can tell you the two reasons I love this microphone and the two reasons that I use it. One is it does a very, very good job of not picking up background noise. I have to be really in front of this microphone to talk into it. Like, what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to move my head slightly to the left. I'm not going to move it, take it further away.

I'm just going to move it to the left. So now I'm talking like this. The only difference is I've just moved my head slightly. And you can hear a huge difference in the microphone because it does a very, very good job of picking up just what's in front of it and does a good job of not hearing the rest. And there are terms for this,

but I'm not going to bore you with those terms because also I get them confused and I'll get them wrong. The other thing, and the main reason that I love this microphone and the reason that as soon as I used it, I wanted to buy it, it does a better job

than any microphone I've ever used of giving me what I consider to be an accurate representation of my voice. When I use the Neumann and I hear it in my head and I'm listening to it later, it sounds to me like the voice that I know. And that's why I like it. I spend so much time listening to my own voice. I want it to sound normal. And with with this neumann microphone it does so i get the the experience and the feeling of oh that's my voice which is important to me it's good i i know you i know you love it it is it is number two in marco's rankings mostly because even though it sounds better than the number one pick it's

many more expensive times expensive than the number one pick, it's many more times expensive than the number one pick. And I completely understand why Marco ranked it where he did, because like him, I believe it is better, but the amount of money more than the Shure Beta 78A, it is not that amount of money more for most people. It's only worth that money if you're in the situation that we are, where it's like, I have a business that is this,

I can spend money on equipment and I get a marginal, like better difference. Right. And, and that's what I feel like. So I feel like it gives me just enough. It gives me just what I'm looking for. And I'm,

because I spend so much time talking into it and this microphone will, if i take care of it lasts me probably 10 years it was worth the investment for me so mine is the shure sm7b which is also a pricey mic although not as pricey as yours um and ranks 16th in marco's survey which i find funny i the bottom line is i think it sounds good with my voice and I don't have my, Marco says it unforgivingly picks up any room echo or background noise. I haven't really found that to be the case. That said, my office does not have a whole lot of echo. It is sort of accidentally pretty well soundproofed and pretty well echo proofed. Just again, I don't have any

foam up there, but I've got curtains and I've got insulation in the ceiling that's actually stapled in these sheets. So it's a really not very reflective thing. And I've got a bunch of stuff on the walls and carpet on the floor and it's just, it's not. But I find it, my favorite thing about the SM7B is that it is, unlike yours, a studio microphone. It comes with its own mount. So it mounts on a boom arm. It's got its own mount. It's got its own, including the hardware of where you plug in the XLR cable.

It has built-in internal kind of bump protection, shock mounting. is built-in internal kind of bump protection, shock mounting. And it's got like a windscreen internally plus the external windscreen that you can put on. And I like it a lot. And I've gotten really used to having it. And I can get very close to the microphone. And that's usually what I do when I'm speaking on it is my nose is often touching the microphone, or at least the foam outside of it when I'm talking. I'm that close to it. And yeah, so it's good. If I had to do it all over again, I might just buy one of the Shure Betas because they're cheaper and they do sound very good. The reason that I don't, and I have a Shure Beta 58. I don't have the one that

Marco likes a little bit better, but I have the 58A and it's a good microphone, but like yours, it's a handheld microphone, which means if I do that, I've got to put a shock mount and a wind screen. And I have to add all these other things to turn an onstage singer microphone into a studio microphone. And the thing I like about the SM7B is it's already got all that. And it's a very clean kind of thing. It's right here. And since I bought it, I use it and I like it. So I have no desire to change it, even though I think that, sure, I could probably have saved money by buying some other kind of a setup. But I'm okay with it because I think it sounds good. And I like how it looks and that I don't have to fiddle.

I always was like having like the shock mount is weird or the windscreen falls off or things like that that I was messing with. And with this thing, there's nothing to mess with. It's just right here on the end of the arm and I can slide it away and it's super convenient. So we both use the same USB interface. So this is, so both microphones that we own are XLR microphones. So they need a box in between the microphone and the computer to plug it in. They are analog signals that need to be converted into a digital signal. So we both have a product called the USB Pre-2 by a company called Sound Devices as our chosen USB interface. Can you explain why we both use this?

Marco? Yeah. It's the same deal. He had done the research for us. No, it's, I mean, there are reasons. It's built like a tank. It doesn't require any special software. It's got like dip switches and buttons on it.

So there's this feeling like it's probably going to last a long time it's a hard like metal shell um it's made so that you can take it on the road as a musician or or uh or any you know anything like that and have it be in a case and moved around and bashed and things like that and it'll still work well also it is going to for microphones that don't output as much gain, like the one that I use, you need one that's more powerful and that is not going to just make everything kind of hissy. And so that's actually one of the knocks against the mic I'm using is that it really requires a more expensive audio interface like that. I did a story on Six Colors about cheap audio interfaces. I feel like, and we'll get to this in a minute, but I feel like if you start with podcasting,

you should buy a USB microphone. If you decide to get a little deeper, there's a much greater selection of these XLR microphones. But at that point, the USB is not in the microphone anymore, which means you need a box that connects the microphone via the microphone plug, the XLR, and then connects the computer via a USB cable. And it's the one that's medi microphone via the microphone plug, the XLR, and then connects the computer via a USB cable, and it's the one that's mediating between the two. And there are a bunch of boxes for under $100 that are fine, or that are under $200 for sure, but a lot of them are around $100. And those are the ones that you should buy, probably probably if you go into an XLR microphone, not the $800 box that we bought. But that said, it's great.

But, you know, it is great and it knows it. And that's why it's so expensive. Yeah. I have a recommendation and a little bit for one that I actually think is better for most people. But we'll get to that in a moment. We talk about our headphones. I use the Beyerdynamic DT70 pro why do i use those because marco armand put them on my head i mean i told you this was going to be a thing oh boy i my entire what from what i'm speaking to to what goes into my computer i bought it all at the same time because i basically sat down in front of

marco's setup and i was like, this is perfect. Like, this is exactly what I need. And I'd been kind of like flirting with buying some new stuff for a while. And then this was it. And I like over-the-ear headphones. That is my, that's what I feel more comfortable with when I'm recording. I like the kind of, not like, it's not sound, you know, it's not like sound isolation and like it's it's not doing any noise canceling or anything, but I like that it, it just keeps things close. And what I hear the most very clearly is my, uh, is my own voice. I don't like earphones that go

in my ears. I find that to be very uncomfortable. Uh, me and Jason are in the exact reverse with this. Um, so I like over the ears and the Beyerdynamic are, for me, I find them to be extremely comfortable over long periods of time, which is important to me. I was using the Sony MDR-750s before this, which I know a lot of people use and like, but over multiple hours, they would start to actually hurt my ears

because they kind of rested on them a little bit. But these Beyerdynamic ones, the cups are very large and they go all the way around my ear. So it's actually resting on my head. And I find that to be way more comfortable. Yeah. I hate headphones. That's the bottom line is it makes my ears all sweaty. And I feel that like the pressure on my head and I don't like them. I don't like them. I've tried different kinds. I've never liked them. I've used them from time to time. I don't like them. Just let's just be clear. I first tried canal phones, basically in ear monitors and was ruined forever, essentially. And for many years now, I've had custom,

they're like silicone. Instead of the little rubber tips that go on that you pop on and off of a lot of these kind of headphones that go in your ears, mine are silicone and they're from a mold of my ears. So they're the exact shape of my ears. And so I put that on and then I put that in and it's completely isolating

to the point where it's completely isolating, uh, to the point where it's dangerous if you're walking around outside, cause you literally can't hear anything and, uh, except what's going through your headphones. So right now at my, uh, at my desk here, I have ultimate ears, super five, five pro in-ear monitors. These have been discontinued, but I still have them and they still work so that's what i'm using the best equivalent now is probably the ultimate ears 900s which they still sell ultimate ears is one of these companies that got bought out by logitech and logitech hollowed it out from the inside to create a consumer product brand just like they

did with the squeeze box that i loved back in the day. So Ultimate... Man, Logitech just, they break everything you like. They do. So Ultimate Ears, if you go to ultimateears.com, you'll get a flashy ad for a bunch of little Bluetooth speakers that they are calling Ultimate Ears. That's the branding. Fortunately, they apparently recognized that they were also making a lot of money selling headphones to musicians

because that's the primary audience. Ultimate Ears had sort of a consumer brand brand but also had a high end for musicians brand and if you go to pro.ultimateears.com it'll actually show you the headphones they do still exist logitech hasn't killed them yet and the 900s there are kind of like it where they want to make they want to take your your ear molds and make like make custom monitors where the whole shape of the product is actually custom. I don't like those as much because they're almost like a hard plastic. And for me, they're not nearly as comfortable as the silicone ones that I've got, which have more flex in them. But it works for them, and that's great. But the 900s are kind of like that and if these die i

might get those i also have a separate set of these custom earphone sleeves that are that work with edemotic headphones and i i have a set of those attached to my my other set of because the the shape of the opening is different right so they not interchangeable, but I got a set that matched this, the size of edemotic headphones. And those are the ones that I use as wired headphones on an airplane or something like that, or mowing the lawn. Um, and they're really great at blocking out all the noise. And, uh, so yeah, and those are from ACS and we'll put a link in the show notes. There's ACS custom.com actually has a whole custom earphone sleeves thing where you go again, you have to go to like an audiologist basically, and have them make molds of your ears, which is a weird process. They put foam in your ears and then you have to sit there and it sounds really weird for a few minutes and then they pull them out and they send

them out. And then they, I think they 3d scan them and then they can generate. Because when I bought my second set, they just had a file of the scan of my ears. And they just made a new set for me with a different opening shape for the edemotics. So I love them. They're pricey. They're not for everybody. Although I will say that I like them so much more than I liked it when I was using the little kind of one size fits all or two sizes fits all in-ear. And I get when people say they don't like in-ear headphones because they're uncomfortable, because they can be uncomfortable over a long period of time. It's

absolutely true. And if you're not using customs like I am, they're totally more uncomfortable because they're not the right shape. So I get it. But for me, I would never, ever, ever use anything else. I love them. I use a headphone amp. Not everybody needs one of these with the USB pre-2, but for some reason for me, when I try and plug headphones in, I get a lot of interference no matter what headphones i use i don't know what the situation is there i know it's not just a me thing though i know some other people that have it but i know a bunch of people like you who just use the usb pre 2 yeah and i use uh by the unfortunately named sheet company is how i will say it i use their magni product which is just like a very simple headphone amp, but it does a really good job of cleaning up the audio signal

that comes from the USB Pre-2 for me. And I use a boom arm, so my microphone is connected to an arm, which can be articulated, so I can move it up and down and around, and it's connected to my desk. It keeps the desk free as well, so I don't have a stand on the desk. And mine is made by a company called K&M. The actual product is just a name is a list of numbers so you'll find a link in the show notes because it won't help you yeah so mine is the heil pl2t very exciting in that it is a boom arm that you

can stick a microphone on and it's clamped to the side of my desk which means that when i'm done with a podcast i can push the microphone away and it goes away and then it's not in my face. What I like about my boom arm, which I didn't have for my previous one, it actually has an integrated XLR cable in it. So I don't need to do any kind of cable wrapping or anything like that. The XLR cable is built into the boom arm itself. I really like that. Yeah, that's nice. Mine is not like that, but mine is um it's got a little uh little trench in the in the middle of the arm where you run the cable and then you snap a little i used to have this one plastic thing on top and so this is what i upgraded from yeah so it's it's

fine it does it and the cable doesn't get in the way yeah mine broke though right so like my my higher one broke and so i needed to change it and then i went with the knm one because i'm with a little upgrade so jason what do we actually recommend that people buy you mentioned usb as a good starting point yeah there are lots of good usb microphones out there i wrote a piece that was on six colors called a podcast studio for a hundred under a hundred dollars because i was trying to figure out a way to get podcast recommendations out there That was on Six Colors called a podcast studio for under $100. I was trying to figure out a way to get podcast recommendations out there and have it be a reasonable price. And the microphone that I've been recommending to people lately is the Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB.

For ages, I was recommending the Blue Yeti. And I used a Blue yeti for a long time so did i many years yeah but i what i've been convinced of now because many of the people who's you know i edit podcasts that they're on the problem is that the yeti is not great at uh rejecting room noise and echo. It's not. It's neat looking. It's sturdy. But it's actually very heavy and very large. Those are not necessarily assets. And they do break, too. I wouldn't say that they're super reliable. But they have a hardware mute button, which is their best feature. I love that about it. But they're not really great if you're in an echoey environment. And the fact is that I could use one for a long time because I wasn't in echoey environments with lots of background noise. And so I got away with it in a way that I think a lot of people can't. So I'm generally recommending the Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB,

which is a weird microphone. It looks like a handheld microphone. As we record this, it's actually down to $64. Sometimes, I think the list is $79. It varies on places like Amazon. In the US, I think in the UK, it's more expensive. There's some weird distributor thing where they crank up the price on it. So it sounds good. It's much better keeping out echo and background noise. It's got some unique features that I like about it. It is a USB microphone that is shaped like a handheld microphone. So there's a headphone port on the bottom and a volume slider and a USB mini, I think, mini USB port on the bottom of the microphone. So you can plug it in to your computer directly. It also has an XLR port on it. So if you're in a situation where you actually need to use a USB

interface box with a microphone, you can plug it in to the USB interface box. It makes it versatile. It's one of the ways that I can get away with recording a podcast on an iPad or an iPhone is that both of them work at the same time. So if I bring an audio recorder attached via XLR, I can record my microphone while it's attached to an iOS device, which is a neat trick. It is an edge case, but it is a neat trick. And it's a pretty good deal. So that's the one that I'm recommending right now is the ATR2100 USB. There are other options. There are a lot of good options, but I think given the price and the versatility and the size that this is probably the best option. And while it doesn't have a mute button, it has an on-off switch that works as a mute button, basically, when you're using it.

If you flip the switch off, then nobody can hear you. And then you flip the switch on and you come back. So that is a really great recommendation for if you're starting out. It's a really great recommendation for if you're looking for a USB microphone, which you should be when you're starting out. But when you're ready to make a jump up, I want to make a recommendation for a microphone that I really like a lot. It is the Shure Beta 58A. It's like the baby cousin of the 87A,

which is an excellent microphone, but it's more expensive. The 58A, these are what we use whenever we do live stuff because they're about $150, so they're not cheap, but they're nowhere near the price of our typical microphones. So if one got broken or something like that, it wouldn't be the end of the world. And it also makes it easier for us to own like four of them or whatever that Stephen will bring around in a lovely Pelican case. I think I've got four. There's also a knockoff that's the pile and um those cost like 20 bucks and i've got two of those and they sound really good they they they're knockoffs which

means i don't know they might you they might be of variable quality and they might break my expectation is those those microphones are made in the same factory where the... I think, yeah. I suspect that they're the same product and that there is a company that when at night, when they're not making Shure betas, they're making the Pile PDM, whatever it is. We'll put a link in the show notes. But I have those too. And those are super cheap.

And I have four real Shure Beta 58As. And then I have a couple of those Pile mics. But honestly, they all work, and they're all really good. And it's not as expensive as the better Shure Beta mic that Marco likes, but they're very good. They're a little bit pricey, but it is a good microphone. And if I was doing- It's a really good step-up. Yeah, it is the step-up pick. Now, with the Shure Beta 58A, which you and I own, and Relay owns, we have many of these in our collections, you do need a USB interface.

And I will point out another story that I wrote on Six Colors, which is a review I did of low-cost USB audio interfaces. I actually went on Amazon and ordered like eight USB audio interfaces or something and reviewed them all and kept some and sent some back. And there are a few that I can recommend. You may want to recommend one too. I don't know. But the ones that I like the best, Tascam makes one. It's called the 2x2. It's got inputs for two. I use that. I have one of those. I use it and it's great. Yeah. And most microphones will work with it just fine. It is often available for 120 bucks.

Right now, as we record, it's 150 bucks, but you can watch the prices there. Right now, as we record, it's $150, but you can watch the prices there. They also make a 1x2, which is $99 generally. And I didn't review it, but it's probably quite similar. My only issue there is you lose some flexibility. One of the nice things about XLR is if you get a two-microphone box, it means you can get two microphones and do two-person podcasts or interviews or things. And that's awfully nice, but you could get a one microphone box if you wanted. I also liked the Presonus audio box, which is usually more expensive than the other options,

which kind of knocks it down. Although it's $140 right now when I look at it. And the Machionix Blackjack 2x2, which is often cheaper. When I reviewed it, it was a hundred bucks, but now it's 200 bucks. So these all go kind of up and down and they're all pretty good. They all have different like hardware layouts. Like a couple of them are very sort of all the controls are on the front. The Macionics Blackjack is more like a mixer. So it's got a bunch of knobs. You plug the microphones into the back and then it's got a bunch of knobs kind of at an angle. It's just a different kind of thing. So people can look at that article.

Those three were all pretty good. The Focusrite Scarletts, I've heard people like. I tested them and I thought they were really bad and had like interference problems and stuff. But anyway, there are microphones. interference problems and stuff. But, um, but, uh, anyway, there are microphones you can, if you shop around and maybe you wait a little bit, you can probably find a microphone for, or a USB box for around a hundred bucks, maybe a little bit more. And then that's what you plug the, uh, sure beta into. So I want to make a recommendation for a product, which is again, it's up on that scale a little bit, you'd be going a little bit higher. It's kind of around the $300 to $400 range,

which is the Zoom H6, which is a field recorder. The reason I recommend the Zoom, the Zoom's versatility is what makes it so amazing. You can use this thing. I mean, with a H6, you can get... How many XLR inputs do you get on the H6? Four, right? You get four plus that you can buy an adapter that makes it six. So you get on the h6 four right you get four plus that

you can buy an adapter that makes it six so that's kind of why it's called the six yeah well it's weird though because the way they do it is you can record six tracks but by default it's sort of like um you can have four xlr's and then there's a little microphone attachment on the front that has like a left and right microphone and the idea there is that that's your six tracks but you can pop that off and they sell a 2xlr add-on and then you've got six they also make a an h4 which is is the same deal it's it's it's fewer inputs but it does which might be a good idea and it's a great product and i i was going to mention this it's funny that you put it in here because it is one of those things where it is a weird product and it gets overlooked when you're talking about usb interfaces because it's a portable recorder right which i i want to recommend as a portable recorder

like if you go around and you're recording podcasts getting one of these zoom recorders they record on an sd card and they have xlr input so you just plug in or a microphone so they also come with their own microphone that you can just put in somebody's face. And this is what radio reporters use and all of that. But if you're doing live shows or if you're just interviewing people out in the world, you bring your microphones, your XLR microphone that you use for podcasting, you bring it with you and maybe you've got a spare as well. And you can do an interview anywhere. And the battery life is really good.

And you can store a whole lot of audio on one of those little SD cards. But I think the reason you mentioned it, Mike, is that if you plug it in to your computer via USB, guess what? It becomes a USB audio interface. Yep. So you can record to it via SD card. You can record with it via USB. You can record with it via usb you can record with it on battery power you can record with it plugged in yep um it is its versatility is incredible and you know this might be if you're buying an xlr microphone i really recommend taking a serious look at this because the zoom's versatility means you only need to buy one product and that product might last you in any situation you want to be in like i own a zoom and and we own i own one and steven owns one as well because if i'm

traveling anywhere to do any type of show it's always recorded on the zoom because i know the zoom is going to get it right every single time those things are amazing laptop running software that's recording and all that like the software could record wrong the inputs could be wrong when you when you have a dedicated recorder um all of the fear really goes away as long as it's got power or battery it just it's it's not a problem and the only thing is i will say it is it's a little bit weird in that like when you plug it in uh to use it as an interface you kind of you still have to like turn it on and say please put this in usb audio

mode and all of that so it's more fiddly than a regular setup every time yeah but it is super versatile the h6 again is one of those things that like i bought an h4 which is which is a lot cheaper it's 200 um and i really liked it and then i realized i was doing podcasts with six people or more and that they made one that i could record six microphones and i bought more microphones and i bought the h6 and i sold off the h4 because the h6 is about 350 bucks it's not cheap but it is so versatile and if you ever expect to leave your room and record podcasts out in the world, or go on trips and talk to people, like it is, it is a spectacular piece of technology. And I remember I was telling Stephen Hackett this not too long ago, I remember the first compact flash

based recorder that we got at Macworld. It took like, I want to say I don't think it was maybe it was four double A's, four double A batteries, and you could record for about 40 minutes and then the batteries were dead. And the compact flash card could hold, you know, a couple hours. And that was it. Today, with these Zoom recorders, if you put four double A batteries in these things, they'll go for like 12, 15, 20 hours. I don't know. It's a long time, a very long time. And those SD cards will hold days of audio. So you could literally just keep recording things

and never erase it. And it would be a long time before the card filled up. So it's pretty amazing how the tech has advanced on audio recording stuff. And it's worth keeping in mind, especially if you're not recording podcasts on Skype, but you're just doing things in person with people. You don't even need a computer setup then.

You need microphones and a recorder and do it that way. All right, let's quickly blast through the software because I feel like I have less to say on the software because it's too complicated to get into in detail. We both use Logic Pro 10 for our editing. I think we have both used GarageBand. That's what you should start with. But it gets to a certain point

if you're dealing with lots of tracks so you've got lots of little clips that you want to put in that you need something that has a bit more versatility, a little bit more reliability, and that's when Logic steps in. But there is a huge learning curve for Logic. I recommend finding a company that has a course on it and taking a look at those courses to try and help understand how to use it, because it is difficult, because it's not made for podcasting. It's made for music creation.

So you kind of have to bend it to your will a little bit but it is great um we both use audio hijack from rogamiber as a way to record our audio coming in right now both me and jason will be doing this where we are recording our local track and recording the skype track independently so we have those for backups and we have them in case we need them. And I think I know I do. I believe that you do. I use two different pieces of software to record my voice whenever I'm recording. So I have another backup. And for me, Audio Hijack is my backup.

But the recording that I will use is comes from Ecamm Core Recorder for Skype. This is like the software that's been around forever. It will just record skype calls for you it has some little tools to help you export the audio into loads of different formats and it's rock solid for me yeah and i love ecam for me call recorder is basically my backup because a lot of times yeah we do it in reverse i'm recording in like call recorder records lossy and it's generally doesn't matter but i have a i or i have it set to lossy but i i'm recording like a wave uh just a completely lossless file on audio hijack but either way i have two and the reason is

that you know one is none and two is one basically that i've been bitten by a hard crash where even though it was recording my audio to disk the whole time the file was still unrecoverable that's a quick time format problem that i that call recorder has whereas if you're writing out a wave or an AIFF to disk, it's just the raw audio data and it can be recovered after a hard crash. So we do, and we record each other on the Skype, coming from Skype as well on a separate track, because what if one of us forgot to press record or loses their file in some way? You've got to back up. And backups are really important to podcasting because mistakes happen. You only get the audio the one time.

We just recently did a Total Party Kill episode where one of the most experienced podcasters and podcast editors, Erica Ensign, her computer crashed or her audacity, because she uses a PC. She was recording in audacity and it crashed. And they've got a crash recovery feature. So she opens it up and said, would you like to recover the file? And she says, yes. And nothing happened. And so she lost her entire audio track. So that episode, those series of episodes um she's cut in from the backup because we had a backup of her over the internet and that's what we used so you know belt and suspenders yep and also as the audio editor um you use the skype track to help line up right with the track from the other person as well it's very important so you use that to line up uh when everybody's

talking especially if you've got many people talking i also use very frequently another application from rogami but called fission um fission i use it for two different things one it is an incredibly fast and efficient uh file format converter so sometimes someone might send me an mp4 and i need a wave so i could do the editing that i want to do in the way that i want to do it and fission does a very good job of that it also is um it will also allow you to edit mp3 files without re-encoding them typically if you want to edit an mp3 file an application will encode it into something else and then encode it back into mp3 so it's like a lossless mp3 editing application so sometimes i've had this where like maybe there was a bit of silence at the end of a file and i don't want to open up logic and edit it and bounce it again or something like that so i can just open up fission chop it out save it and it's done and

so i really like it for those two features that fission is how mike at the movies uh over on the incomparable happens is i literally i take the mp3 of upgrade or analog and strip out the rest of the show and leave the mic of the movie segment and that way i'm not re-encoding the mp3 or anything like that i'm just pulling out the stuff that is not the mic of the movies and then i re-save it with new art which it supports mp3 art and all of that and uh yeah yeah rogue amoeba has got a lot of great stuff um and uh they do have a bundle too if you want to get a bunch of this stuff including farago which is their soundboard app that's new and loopback which is a uh a great utility yeah that lets you create sort of like virtual inputs and outputs and route software route sound between

different apps in different ways it's kind of hard to describe it. It's a feature that probably should be built into the OS, but it's not. And so Rogamiba built it and it's great. Yeah, it's wild that you can't do a better job with this stuff on macOS. I don't, yeah. So Rogamiba had to come in and fix it. I use Adobe Audition.

I use Adobe Audition for sound, like volume level matching. It has a great tool for this to match loudness is what it's called. So I will just drop all my tracks in there and I match it to the same level. So everybody's audio is the same. I use this feature instead of compressors. This is just a thing that I do and it works fantastically. It's an extremely expensive audio processing

and leveling utility that you're using because most people will just edit their entire podcast in Audition. I know a bunch of people who do that. It's also very good for that. I don't because I've optimized myself I feel like with Logic to the point where I can't imagine that I would become faster. I can't bend my brain. I cannot bend my brain around compressors. I've never really understood them. And it doesn't matter how many times I try and learn. I just can't seem to get what I want. This allows me to do it very quickly.

It saves me time every single time I'm editing a show. I have a hard time with compressors too. And if there's a podcasting expert out there who wants to send in a great resource that simplifies how compressors work, I'd love to hear it because I have struggled with them a lot. I will say the compressor that I'm using now is not, I think, a particularly good piece of software in that it seems really inefficient. It crashes on iOS for me, but I am using it a lot. And it's called Corvpressor,

which is a super weird name for a product from Clevgrand, which is a company in Sweden. What's good about it is that its interface is like a tube. It's really simple. Basically, you have an input, compression, and an output level, and you make those bigger or smaller, and that's it. an output level and you just you make those bigger or smaller and that's it and that has been very useful to me in being like getting the sound i want which because a compressor basically is another way to make it makes um it can make loud sounds and and quiet sounds sound closer to each other it reduces the dynamic range and that's that's a way to match levels from people that is different from using Audition, which is what Mike uses. So I'm using Corvpressor a little bit now to do it.

But that's one thing that I want to be better at and do better kind of audio matching. Because the last thing you want is for a loud person and a quiet person in a podcast. You want them all to sound the same level. Oh, and I should mention Forecast by Marco Arment, who started a lot of these things here. He built Forecast, and it's actually publicly available. And I think we both use that to encode MP3s and tag them and do our chapter markers. We mark in Logic. We actually set markers, and then you export the file as a wave, which I like to do anyway,

because that gives me an uncompressed master file that I can save of like, this is the master of the podcast. And then I can encode MP3s off of that. And I use Forecast to do that. It picks up those markers, makes them into MP3 chapter markers, automatically knows that this file is called the incomparable

and puts the incomparable name on it and puts the art in it and all of that, which is very convenient. So that's a great app. And it uses the eight cores on my iMac Pro to crank that thing out in no time. I also use Marco's command line utility sidetrack to line up all my files. It's not available publicly. I hope one day he releases it publicly. I'd like a UI on it too. But we've talked about

like getting another developer to just secretly write a ui to the secret product i hope it gets released sometime but um and i and the other thing that i use is a bunch of things a lot of them started with the stuff that marco handed me actually but it's a lot of shell scripts um which seems super nerdy and i'm going to make it nerdier by saying that i actually wrap them shell scripts or apple scripts around an automator plugin. So now it's super nerdy. But here's the end result is that when I want to convert a file into a wave, I just select it in the finder and do like command shift W, or command option W, and it makes a wave of that file. And what it's doing is these are automator, their services plugins, so their

plugins for the finder that run a script. And I've got a bunch of them. I've got one that does sidetrack. I've got one that generates waves. I've got one that extracts track one from a call recorder.mov file and outputs it as a wave so that you're getting, because call recorder will have two tracks, the person talking and the other side of the call. I only want the first track usually. So I've got a script that does that. And it's generally using FFmpeg in the command line to do that. And FFmpeg will talk to Lame if it needs to encode it as an MP3. Also, when I'm sending files off to a third party editor to somebody like Jim Metzendorf or Erica Ensign or Steven Schepansky, who are people who edit podcasts for me, I don't want to send them giant WAV files files so I have a finder script that basically uses ffmpeg

and lame to generate a high bitrate mp3 which is a much smaller file and then I just instead of encoding them manually I just use that script and it does it in the background in the finder and then I drag those files into dropbox and they get the file so there's a bunch of stuff that is you know it's super nerdy, but at the same time, it's incredibly useful. I just had to set it up myself because fortunately the Finder lets you do that, lets you have these kind of like automation plugins that in the end just feel like features of the Finder that I wrote, I guess, but that was, it was worth the, a little bit of effort to figure out what the

command should be in order to get the result which is that it saves me a lot of time in processing files and in the finder and speaking of which before we go um i wanted to talk this wasn't even in our outline originally but i think it's worth at least talking about briefly how we do our workflow like how does how does the show get made when two shows love each other very much how does a show get made um and it has to do with like um like files especially this big audio file so for me um i i'll go first here for me you know i get the recordings from whoever i'm i'm doing and then i will uh convert them all to to wave i will use sidetrack on them to get them to align. I'll use isotope RX six, which is a product we didn't mention, which is like magic audio processor. There are a bunch of versions, some of which are very expensive, and some of which are cheap. I use

their spectral denoise plugin to remove background noise from everybody's tracks. If people are in loud environments with air conditioners or heaters or water heaters or whatever removes hums i can actually remove room echo with their d reverb plugin which is amazing and so i use that to process those files too and then i get them all into logic and the other thing i'll say is i i have a full i have a zip file for each of my podcasts that i edit this is the one that cgp gray discovered that i did this and he's like that's a great idea and i think he does this now i I basically made a generic project for each of my podcasts that's got like the files where they need to be, the music, the music's in the logic project. And then I just quit out of that generic file template and I zip that folder and I keep it

as a template zip on my desktop. So I'll double-click on Incomparable, and it'll open an Incomparable folder, and then I'll drag the files in there, sync them, denoise them, and all of that. And if I'm editing it right away, I'll edit it right away and then file it on my Drobo in a folder for whatever podcast it is. If I'm not editing it right away, I have a different folder that's called Works in progress and, and it goes in there so that I, and that gets backed up and,

and all of that so that I've got access to, um, that stuff. And it's also kind of like a reminder to me that these are still in process. These are still not, these are still pending. And then for my really timely podcasts, I have a, on my server server i have a hazel script that fires that will delete projects after um some period of time so like if i if i'm doing uh like download i edit um after two months the download projects get thrown away because i i don't need all the master tracks for a timely news-based podcast whereas the incomparable i keep forever yeah i don't really have a ton to say on this i don't have anything smart going on right like i have a similar thing of you where i have hazel dumping out the projects how long do you keep your projects like a couple of months

i don't remember the exact amount of time but not even that you know um the only uh logic files that i keep are cortex and they're just stored in dropbox all right um because we we actually pass the show backwards and forwards in dropbox during our product project editing so they're already there so it's just a case of selective syncing them away from our machines which we do i actually have a folder that i put past projects into on the dropbox website and then they just disappear from both mine and grace machines machines because we selective synced that folder away. And because I have a terabyte of Dropbox space, which I'm never going to use,

it will just serve as a place to store our files for the time being. And then I have Backblaze pointed at that, so it's backing that up. But for basically every single one of my shows that I'm editing, I don't really need to keep the Logic files for them

um honestly like you never need re-editing or anything like that because they're by and large weekly um news-based shows if i ever need a clip from them i'll just grab a clip from the from the mp3 like it's going to be absolutely fine makes sense so i don't really have anything like i don't have like a server i haven't got all this stuff because by and large every show that i edit is published as soon as it can possibly be so like there there isn't a case of like banking stuff or whatever but if i ever do have to bank anything for a trip i just put it in dropbox so it's accessible everywhere and it's backed up and it's versioned on dropbox and all that kind of stuff it works well for me sounds good all right let's take our second break and thank Simple Contacts for their support of this show.

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Our thanks to Simple Contacts for their support of this show. Should we talk about money? Money, money, money. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, baby, let's talk. Yeah, sure. Why not? We should.

Because this is something I think we have to talk about the practicalities of monetization. I think that that is an important thing to talk about. And as we know, monetization is what happens when a wizard appears and taps his magic wand and turns a person into a bag of money yeah so there are many ways there are a handful of ways uh that you can make money doing a podcast but before i talk about any of my opinions on any of these things let me let me talk to you about the realness of this for a second. If you are starting out a show or you're early on in a show, please don't do that podcast just for the idea that you're going to make money or that you want to make money. Because the thing is, this might

feel like a small industry, but it's not. It wasn't five years ago and it's certainly not now. There is and there will always be more people looking to get sponsors on their shows than there will be sponsors because those things just grow at the same time. Yes, there are more companies sponsoring now, but there are more shows with vaster audiences with larger requirements for budgets and stuff. So the economy of our industry has remained mostly the same, even though things are boosting. You're seeing numbers like, oh, this amount of hundreds of millions spent every year. But it's working in scale as it has been for the last few years. So all of this is to say it's really hard to get a sponsor on your show.

And it's really hard to get those relationships, keep those relationships and make it something that's worthwhile for you. So please don't assume that just by starting a podcast, you'll make it big and you're going to make money. One thing we're not going to talk about today is how to grow audiences. And the reason for that is, who knows? Yeah. It's really hard. No, and I have no real tips for you. You know, the tip that I'll give, which is the same that I'll always give,

which no one ever wants to hear, is keep doing it. Keep showing up and keep doing it because you'll learn and you'll get better over time. And the better you get, the more likely you'll be. And honestly, one of the things is most people give up. So if you keep going, you have a better chance. Your odds increase because most people give up.

So if you just don't give up, that's how I did it. I was recording shows for many years and no one cared. I just didn people give up so if you just don't give up that's how i you know that's how i did it i was recording shows for many years and no one cared i just didn't give up and it's not a guarantee that not giving up will will make you able to to make a living doing podcasting there's no guarantee there but make any but if you don't give up up you at least you know you can't win if you don't play right and and it's so true that so many times you know we see these announcements about like i'm doing this podcast i'm doing this podcast and the fact is most of the time it doesn't it doesn't stick like this it just doesn't stick so being consistent part of being consistent we always say be consistent is to keep doing it like every week same time keep going so when when

shall i get sponsors this is the thing that people ask me all the time when when shall i get sponsors this is the thing that people ask me all the time when when shall i get sponsors like first question you know how long should your show be around for i think that you should have a show have a little bit of a history before you try and grab some sponsors in even if you've got lots of downloads you know because how many downloads should you have i mean this number changes a lot i, I find that to try and go in cold to a company now of any kind of size, you're probably looking at the 15,000 to 20,000 downloads per episode. You can get sponsorship on shows that are smaller than that, but if you're going in on your own and you just have this one show

and it has that amount of money, those amounts of downloads you know that that's going to make people turn their head if you go in and say i have 8 000 downloads which is an incredible number to have but it's hard for a sponsor to just to commit the time required for the return that they would get on that one you need to have a larger audience to go in and do this kind of thing on your own even if you have those numbers and again those numbers are not hard and fast. That's just from my personal experience of doing this stuff for the last five years or whatever at a serious scale.

In regards to how long your show should be around, I think that it's important that it is likely that you will have established a relationship with your listeners. And this can take a little bit of time. That time varies from show to show. And the reason I say this is because my personal theory is that people only support shows with coupon codes and stuff like that,

support the sponsors of shows, of shows that they like, of shows that they think fondly about. And that comes with having a relationship with the listener. And that usually comes with a thing over time. You know, you'll know this as a podcast listener, you hear similar sponsors on many shows. So you have to when it comes to you buying your product from Acme sponsor, you will probably enter the promo code of the show that you feel most fondly for. So i think it's important that you have given time for your show to really build a relationship with the audience before you try and

pursue this route um but yeah the downloads thing it's difficult it changes a lot it can be less it can be more it really depends on the companies that you're going to it can be difficult well and the scale as podcasting has grown, the scale has changed too. Like there was a podcast ad company that I worked with for a long time. And when I started with them, like they were saying, you know, they wanted shows in the 20,000 and up range

or 25,000 and up range for listeners. And, you know, now I feel like they're only really focused on shows that are 75, 100,000 and up from there because there's money to be made there. And there are now podcasts that are that large. And so because I hear this from people who are like, oh, you know, my podcast, I'm going to start it. And when can I make money? And first off, like you said, it's probably not the right approach to make something about something you love and be excited about it is probably the way you should start.

And then beyond that, it is a challenge. You do it for a few months and you think, well, look, I've got 3,000 downloads, so now I should be able to bring in the money. And it's like, probably not. It takes time

and it takes a lot of audience growth unless you've got a super niche topic where there are audit there are you know advertisers falling over themselves to reach those people you know those plumbers or whatever it is very specific unless it's that then then um that's not going to be good enough either so it's it's it's hard so this is you know then people say to, should I be part of a network? And being part of a network can help because networks have an overall larger reach than single shows, right?

So you can take 10 shows that have 10,000 downloads and you have 100,000 and you can spread it across. And that can help kind of the buying power or the selling power. But it's not 100% necessary. Networks cannot guarantee you any growth. They mostly will not guarantee you any money, right? Like you're mostly still in the same situation.

And being part of a network, you will gain some things and you'll lose some things. And depending on who you're working with, depending on how you are as a person, this is not a hard and fast rule. Also, being a part of a network, an established network, is not an easy thing. I can guarantee to you every single podcast network that exists gets more pitches than they can process. And a lot of these are just people that are, I believe, straight up just Googling the term podcast network and sending an email to all of them. Because I get those pitches. I get pitches from people that I know

of that have no idea who RelayFM is. We also get a lot of pitches. If you're ever going to pitch a podcast network, have a show that already exists first. Prove that you can do this without the requirement of being part of the network. That is my advice to you aspiring podcasters. Don't pitch and just be like, I want to make this show. Can you help me make this show? Because I don't think really, unless you have a very large existing audience

of your own in some other avenue, I don't think any podcast network can necessarily find that to be appealing. What you need to do is to show, I have an idea, I can execute on that idea and I'm reliable. And then also, you know, we always ask for demos as well. That's the thing that I always ask for, because I want to know what the show is going to be like before we would ever even begin to consider adding a show to our roster. And we ask for demos from friends.

Like if Jason came to me tomorrow and said said i have an idea for a new show i would ask him to make a demo of it because that's just how we work now because we want to make sure that the show has the right sound to it we did that with download and download had one of the co-founders of the network yeah we did that with liftoff too liftoff was uh yep was a a b-side that was basically the pilot for liftoff and And that's, that's how that happened too. But yeah, there isn't, there is an unaired episode of download that was done about three months

before download launched. That's got like, I think Yasmin and, and Christina Warren on it. And that was, that was our proof of concept to not only to show that here's what the show would be to relay. But also for us to have that moment of like what do we you

know what do we want to do here is this is this right and it was very useful to do that clockwise we did two it also helped you combat episode one disease which is a thing that many podcasts suffer from which is where the first 45 minutes of the first episode of your show is introducing what the show is and there's like all that awkwardness and stuff like that and so trying to iron some of that out before episode one is also a good thing as a tip for you um so the other way to make money is crowdfunding i don't really have a lot of experience with this um i know patreon can be successful but honestly seems like it is as hard as it is with podcast sponsorship um to successful. But the difference is you can make a little money on Patreon way easier than you can make a little money with sponsorship.

Because a show that has 500 listeners could get 10 of those people to kick in $5 every month and you've made a little bit of money. So that can be a good thing to do. We roll our own of a membership system with Memberful. The Incomparable does the same. I only recommend rolling your own when you're at a scale already that exists.

You may as well just use something like Patreon. And of course, Kickstarter is an option, but that kind of only really works if you're coming from something first, where you can have an audience of people that you can point to the Kickstarter campaign. So I've got a little experience with this, which is to say, I think for small podcasts that have small but fervent audiences that crowdfunding

or member you know direct support in some form is the way to go because when you look at what in the ad business they call cpms which is the cost per thousand so So if you've got a 5,000 person podcast, then it's like how many dollars for that 5,000. So if you've got a $10 CPM per thousand, that's a $50 ad that you're running on your podcast. Woo, we're making $50 a week now. That's not nothing. It's also not a lot. That's beer money, basically. And what I realized with a lot of the incomparable podcasts, like Total Party Kill and Game Show are good examples of that. We don't have huge audiences, but they're really enthusiastic.

And so we did a membership system. And I will tell you, those podcasts make way more money from direct support from people who listen than they were ever going to make from ads. Plus, it allowed me to sort of like get us phased out of the ad business because occasionally we'd have our schedules get all messed up because, oh, an ad came in this week. We have to drop an episode this week and I've got to insert this ad into it and it's for 70 bucks or something like that. It was totally not worth it. It made the show worse. And there was an audience that was really enthusiastic about it who was willing to give money to support it. So I do think that that is if you

again don't jump the gun here but if you build up an enthusiastic audience and it doesn't turn into a huge hit this stuff i think is a way better source than kind of like holding out for a very cheap crappy ad because you know ads ads and podcasting are great. We have them here. It's what pays our salaries. But for small podcasts, it's not always the right approach. No, and you're completely right. Don't launch episode one with your Patreon campaign. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if it's a Kickstarter, it's the same idea, right?

Have something established already that you've proven and have a proven audience for if it's a new season of your podcast via kickstarter have something to go first that that people can uh can bank on and they trust you and they're enthusiastic about what you're doing and then they're going to give you money let's go to our hashtag ask upgrade questions uh we have got lots of these we've been getting lots of these uh for quite some time since we started talking about this stuff um so let's start trying to knock through some of these first question comes from steve I'd love to hear about how you structure your

podcast and share notes as you're recording. Can I take this one? Yep. Because this is something I care about a lot, a lot. Preparation, I believe, is one of, if not the most important thing into making a good podcast. No matter what type of show you do, I believe some form of preparation is imperative to it. So for all the shows that I do, by and large, I have outlines. And these outlines detail all of the topics we're going to talk about. And I also write a lot of my notes in. Some of them are written as I'm going to say them. Like that line, and I also write a lot of my notes in. I just read that from the outline because I wrote it earlier today. Because there are some things where it's like,

I know I want to say something in a specific way, and it will help me talk about it, and it will give me prompts to then kind of talk a bit more extemporaneously. I put all of that stuff in because I believe that the show, then the shows that I do, are more than just the time I'm sitting in front of them. It's like all of the time that I spend thinking about the show, I want to have all of my thoughts and notes detailed out so I'm able to go over them in my head before the show. So I'm writing them all out. It means I'm more likely to remember them. And it also means I can refer to them when I need to, and I can keep track of what we're doing.

I can keep track of where we are in the show, what we have left. I can estimate time. It helps me make sure that I can cover everything that I need, and that kind of heavy outlining, I think, is important for the types of shows that I mostly do, which are information-based and news-informed in a lot of instances, topic-based, that kind of thing. You know, which are information-based and news-informed in a lot of instances, topic-based, that kind of thing. You know, there are some shows where, like, you want to have the entire thing written out beforehand because it's a performance more than a conversation. And there are some shows where you might just want to have five bullet points of things you want to talk about. But preparing for a show, making sure that you know kind of what are the things you want to talk about, leaving some room to go off into the weeds

where you need to and to allow you to think on your feet where you want to. But I believe that preparation is so important because people are giving you their time. They are saying, I'm going to press play on this thing and I want to be entertained.

Respect them by having done some work beforehand to make sure that you feel that before you sit down in front of the microphone that you've done everything you beforehand to make sure that you feel that before you sit down in front of the microphone that you've done everything you can to make sure that your show is going to be as good as it can be so for this show and for many shows we have a google doc that is completed before the show begins and we're both in there changing and amending things on the fly i've been moving stuff around and we do that quite a lot jason's writing me little messages in the google doc right now.

Google Docs is the best for this because their collaboration features, nobody is even close to them in being able to do this. I cannot record without a doc now. I love it. It works for me so well. I think it's very important to have something like this. Yeah. And with download, we have a rundown that we actually share with our guests, which is a Google sheet that's got links to the stories we're going to talk about, which is cribbed from how Lee Laporte does all of his shows where there's a giant document.

The difference is that we will trim it down to like three stories, whereas the Twitch sheet has like 80 stories in it. And then they just sort of feel their way. We pick beforehand and we limit it to three or four stories. And then we actually have a script that we work on that is more of what I'm going to say to introduce each of the segments. And that changes from week to week. And we go back and forth with that. Steven and I, we're both working on that. So there's prep. I mean, I don't prep for the incomparable this way, because with the incomparable, a lot of the prep is literally watching the movie or reading the book. And I

will take notes sometimes when I'm watching a movie, and I'll think in advance about sort of like the ways I want it to go, but I kind of want it to be a free-flowing conversation. But for something like Liftoff or Free Agents or any of the other podcasts that I've done, there's a document. It's generally a shared Google Doc that has everything in it that we're going to discuss. And again, it's not a script. We're not reading words off a script when we do it, but we are making sure that there are points we want to hit

and that we cover them and then we know when to move along to the next thing. So Chris asked about podcast hosting services, which we use, any tips that we have, preferably without a huge investment. I'll tell you, podcast hosting is cheaper than you think it is. This was one of the things that was really surprising to me. Podcast hosting, I mean, you can get it for dollars a month, like very small amounts of money and still get pretty good services, pretty good bang for your buck. And there are a few different companies out there. And I kind of wanted to just give a real brief overview of the ones that exist.

So, like, for example, Libsyn is the company that I mostly use for all of our show hosting. They have a plan that starts at $5 a month, and then they go all the way up to $75. They have a bunch of different plans. I would say their $20 a month plan is the best plan. It gets you lots of statistics. And for a show that's publishing weekly, you get 400 megabytes a month that you can upload,

and that does a really good job for us. Libsyn are rock solid. They have been around for as long as podcasting has existed. Their statistics are industry acknowledged. They've gone through some changes recently. So they could have been a little bit better communicated, but that's just an ax I have to grind. But they're making their system even more accurate to a standard that's been created. There's like a body that's come together to try and help companies align their statistics because statistics measuring is very difficult in podcasts because it's one of the things that makes the industry great, that there's no data that is widely available.

It's just kind of like measuring pings to a file in a feed, right? It can be really difficult to accurately measure. And now a bunch of companies are coming together to try and create an industry accepted standard. Libsyn's design of their system is very bad. Their visual design and their UI is not nice to look at. I know lots of people, including Jason, who uses Libsyn's ftp uploading so he does

not have to deal with this system it could do with some love in a lot of areas i think yeah it's it's not it's not perfect but it's a good it's a good deal and the other thing is they provide a uh blog style interface at libsyn which means if you don't want to set up your own website for your podcast, you don't have to. You can use their blog and point people at that, and it'll have a list of your episodes with show notes and all of that. But you can also not use their blog system and have your own site somewhere. And like Relay and The Incomparable, we have shows at Libsyn, but we have Relay.fm and the incomparable.com and so you can do that too i have a friend who does a libsyn hosted podcast and they have a

wordpress site for it and that works fine they can do it that way too and you can use you can use their rss feed or you cannot use their rss feed if you want so you can kind of pick and choose but they do offer it is full service like they have they will give you a website and an rss feed for your podcast that will go to itunes and all of that and uh and hosting the files all in one package for a pretty good deal so yeah that's why we use them my recommendation is if you have a website of your own and you need someone to host the file for you and you're going to generate your own rss feed that people subscribe to then libsyn should be who you use if you want to have a company also provide the website and RSS for you,

I recommend using Simplecast because their design overall is way better looking. It's way more modern. They have really good looking web pages and the websites that it generates are much, much nicer. They do a great job here.

Their system is simpler, hence the name, but has most of what you want. It has good statistics and stuff like that, but it's not as powerful and as tried and true as Libsyn, but their overall design chops are way better. So they're also fairly priced. I will recommend or I will suggest, I will highlight Anker here. Anker have been a sponsor of RelayFM, so I'm going to mention that up front, but we put our money where our mouth is. We host Subnet, which is Stephen Hackett's daily tech news show that's hosted with Anchor.

They have free unlimited storage right now. I don't really know completely what their monetization scheme will end up being, but right now they are free. They have storage, they have analytics, they have free tools. Their iPhone apps are very good, and they have great distribution. They will distribute you to Spotify and smart speakers and stuff like that. But Anchor are more new in this space, and they're kind of building out tools, and the podcast hosting goes along with that.

As I say, I have used all of these, and I think that they all have their merits, and that they all have areas where they could improve. I think that really it just comes down to your preferences, what you're looking for. Do you want nice design? Do you want to pay nothing? Do you want people with a lot of experience? I think we've stacked up how these companies work, and you should choose what you want based upon your priorities.

And I should say there are, if you've got a server, which a lot of people do have, I mean, it's not like everybody's got a server, but people listening to this show, you may have a server with, again, a sometimes sponsor, Linode is a good example, but there are a bunch out there where you may be paying to have a Linux server somewhere in the cloud. You may have a lot of network transfer that you get every month that you're not using. And yes, you could host your files yourself. If your podcast becomes wildly popular, that will become a problem quickly. exactly but uh for small podcasts if you've got that space that disk space and network transfer space free on an existing server that you control you could do that that's actually what a lot of the shows on the incomparable are doing and that's actually kind of how the incomparable started is that my friend greg nos had uh had a linode server with a bunch of extra transfer and and we were for a little while able to serve everything off of that eventually we moved and now a bunch of extra transfer. And we were for a little while able to serve everything off of that.

Eventually we moved and now a bunch of shows, the bigger shows are on Libsyn, but the smaller stuff is still on the Linode. You have to build your own RSS feed, but if you use WordPress, you can set up a WordPress blog with like the Podpress plugin, I think. And then you just kind of put in where the file is

and it generates RSS. So there are lots of ways to do it. You can, but I wanted to throw that out there that you may not even have to pay anybody to serve your files for you if you're somebody who's already got a file server on the internet that's got enough bandwidth and transfer time in order to serve those files. So something out there for people who might be nerdy enough to have their own server. All right. So next up, we have a question from Jonathan. Jonathan wants to know, how, we have a question from Jonathan. Jonathan wants to know,

how do you optimize a podcast for different podcast apps? Like show notes, links are supported in Overcast, but not in Apple Podcasts, for example. I don't see this as our responsibility. We publish things to the accepted standards of the RSS feeds for podcasts. And then it's up to the podcast apps to how they want to interpret that yeah you know we have an rss feed of all of our links in um and all third-party

players show it well but it seems like some apps from large companies they don't want to do that i don't understand why i think it's because most large shows don't have detailed show notes like we do that this is show notes are a very like the ye olde podcast mentality right um so you'll get a lot of third-party apps using them because they're made by wonderful tech nerds who've been around for a long time um but a lot of larger apps larger companies this is not just that this isn't a thing on their radar because a lot of the the shows that they're looking to target mostly just don't really do this other than just like a description so i don't do anything specific we make sure that they that they look good and that they work after that we set it and forget it yep um and that we you know we publish our

shows in the same way with the notes as we will always do in our RSS feeds. And then how they're displayed is kind of up to the app developer. Yeah, I mean, it's literally HTML. So we're literally putting hyperlinks in there. And Apple Podcasts chooses not to render them. They discard them. Used to. I don't know.

But it's not, you know, I'll put it this way. If somebody came to me and said, oh, actually, I figured it out. If you change your feed here and then they will also show up in Apple Podcasts, of course, we would do that. But there is a limit to what we're able to support technically, and it's up to the app developer. And so they made a change, and that's just how it is. But you do react. I mean, chapters is a good example where more apps had chapter support and we were more motivated to put chapters in. You can go back to the upgrade archive and find the episodes where we say we're never going to do chapters. And now the episodes have chapters and that's because the

tools have improved and the coverage among our listenership has improved in terms of who's using apps with chapters in them. But at the same time, you know, like Apple podcast doesn't support it. So, oh, well, like it's just not in there. And we move on. There's only so much we can do. Rob wants to know if we have opinions of services like Cast or Zencaster. Rob's starting a podcast with a couple of friends and wanted to sound better than Skype. What do you think?

I've got two things here. First off, Skype is in large part just a transport medium. You could literally record a podcast with your friends on a conference call on your iPhones because ideally what the people are going to hear at the end is a recording from everybody's microphone locally that's how we make these podcasts is that it's everybody it sounds like everybody's in the same room because we're literally recording ourselves in our rooms and then putting those together. And the use of technology so that we can hear each other and react to one another is just ideally just like a phone call.

And you don't use that audio at all. Now, sometimes that happens, and that's why you've got a backup recording, like we said earlier. So Skype is not really ideally relevant here. You just need to pick something that works why you've got a backup recording, like we said earlier. So Skype is not really ideally relevant here. You just need to pick something that works for you. And it could be the phone. It could be Skype. It could be Discord. It could be Slack.

It could be FaceTime. It could be whatever you want it to be, a Google Hangout. But ideally, you'd record your own microphone locally and use those as the source and then just record your kind of conversation as a backup, ideally. Cast and Zencaster are apps that work in Chrome. They don't work in Safari for various reasons involving standards that Safari still doesn't support, even though they sort of do, but they sort of don't. Not enough for these apps to use them. But you can download Chrome and use them. And what they do is they provide an audio so you can have that conversation.

And they use the browser to record your local audio for you and automatically upload it to the server. So I use Cast every week for TV Talk Machine because Tim Goodman is never going to record his own microphone successfully and save it and send me the file in a timely fashion. It's never going to happen. Like I know what he's, he knows it. It's just, it's never going to happen. So for the first few episodes, um, it was just a Skype recording. And then I started using cast and like, it works great. It records him locally on his computer and uploads the file in the background to me. And Zencaster does the same thing. I'd actually say, if you want to try this and you've only got one or two people, I think there's a free tier for Zencastr where you can have two or three people on a conversation. It's worth doing. Above that, you got to pay. And on Cast, you've got to pay. So you can look into it. But I think they're great

if everybody's got a computer with Chrome on it. I will say, the more people you get, the worse it gets. Because as much as we complain about Skype, the thing about Skype is Skype is a service that's built to be resilient. It does a lot of things. You send your files up and then Skype is sending a mixed down version of the audio of the whole call just to you. Whereas something that's using a browser, everybody's downloading a bunch of different audio streams separately, which is more bandwidth intensive. So if you've got five or six people on a call, things start to fall apart really fast, especially if somebody's got a bad connection.

Also, Skype does a lot of processing. They take out background noise. They level the audio volumes of everybody. So when I talk to Tim on cast, I can hear he's quiet and I can hear a lot of background noise that I never hear when I talk to him on Skype. Now it's there on the recording and I have to take care of it,

but Skype can actually be a more pleasant conversation if you've got a large group of people because it's trying very hard to make it audible behind the scenes. So the short version is- Please try your best to not use the skype call exactly right like as to what you released the world you should you should never do that it's it should be a backup but sometimes it happens sometimes i have somebody who has to call in on

an iphone or something it's like they can't record on their iphone so we'll we'll make it work but it's not ideal so i would say if you've got people who are tech savvy enough to record their own microphone and put it in a drawbox file or something like that afterward. You don't have to use Cast or Zencaster. You can just use Skype because the end result is not going to be, or Discord or whatever, because you're not going to use that audio. You're going to use the audio that you record yourself. If they're less technical and you're worried about it, I would say, yeah, use Cast or Zencaster because you're going to get their audio file without them doing anything, which is brilliant, right? With these limitations that doesn't sound as good. And you can't have a lot of people on the call. I would say you should still probably use something

like audio hijack to record both yourself and them just in case something happens. Cause that's happened to me with TVTM where I've had a browser crash and the file got lost but i was using audio hijack as my backup and so i still had it so that is you should always do the belt and suspenders thing but i think those apps are great and i especially think they're great if you've got guests or co-hosts who are less technical and and you know they're just not going to do all the steps that you need um if you've got guests a lot, I think it's totally worth it. Like, that's the best thing ever. You've got a new guest every week.

Rather than trying to walk them through how to record, you can do that. I recommend podcastguestguide.com, which Anthony Johnston put together. It's got step-by-step instructions about how to get your guest to record their audio and then send it to you. It's great. But if you have a low confidence in your guest being able to do that, in these browsers, they literally just click a link

and suddenly you're talking and you press a button and suddenly everything is getting recorded and uploaded to the server of the service that you're using. It's brilliant. So those are your options. You got lots of options. All right, final break. We're going into the home stretch.

Jason, Corey asked that you have spoken about using Ferrite a bunch for portable podcasting on iOS, but it seems that it's still impossible to podcast using iOS only. Are you still using Ferrite and do you have any tips on portable podcasting? I'm still using Ferrite. I love Ferrite.

It is the best deal. It is the best deal. It is the best value in audio editing, especially podcast editing that exists. I actually had a friend say, all right, I'm getting frustrated with Audacity or GarageBand. I've had a few people say this. What do you think about where I go from here? And it's like, wow, there's Logic, which costs a lot of money and Audition costs a lot of money. And I said, well, do you have a recent iPad? And do you like your iPad? Because you could get Fairride for 20 bucks, and it does it all. It's a great deal. You've got to have a relatively recent iPad, although it'll work on the iPhone too. So I love

it. I think it's a fantastic piece of software. I would love to have it on the Mac because it does everything I need it to do. Whereas Logic does everything I need it to do and like 10,000 other things that I don't need it to do that sometimes I press the wrong key and it does that and I don't know what to do because I don't know what mode I'm in now and it's really weird. So I love it. Impossible to podcast using iOS only? It's not impossible, but it's hard. That's the problem because Apple has not put a lot of sound stuff. We talk about audio hijack and loopback bringing features to the Mac that it probably should have. iOS has got nothing. You can't, Rogamiba can't write an app to bridge the gap on iOS because apps aren't allowed access to the audio stuff. And so until that changes, which maybe,

I don't know if it'll ever happen. At this point, I'm kind of beaten down about whether they're ever going to add more sound access to apps in iOS. But until then, you got to jump through hoops. So there are a bunch of different ways to do it. Like the most common way to do podcasting on iOS is, and you risk, if everybody's on iOS, you really risk not having a backup. But if you've got some people on the Mac and some people on iOS or Mac or PC, you can have somebody record the whole call. That's your backup. That's your emergency backup. And like, if you're on iOS, well, you just need to record your microphone using a device. It could use that Zoom recorder. You could use an iPad. When we do upgrade, when I'm traveling, I'm doing that on iOS. And what I'm doing is I'm recording my microphone

proper with a Zoom recorder or with my iPad. And then I'm on Skype on my iPhone. And then I send Mike the file that I recorded on my iPad or the Zoom recorder. And he uses that. And I've done podcasts entirely on iOS where we've recorded using the Zoom recorder, and he uses that. And I've done podcasts entirely on iOS, where we've recorded using a Zoom recorder, or people have sent me their files and I've recorded locally on one while talking on the other. Or with that Audio-Technica microphone, I actually have had it where I'm recording via the XLR cable onto a Zoom recorder while talking via USB on my iPhone. And that works too.

So there's file transfer issues with getting things off of a card. I wrote a piece at Six Colors about this. I have this box that you basically plug the card into, the SD card, and then it's a Wi-Fi hotspot. And then you connect your iPad to it and download the file. That's annoying, but it works because Apple won't let you plug that card into an iPad or iPhone and see audio files on it, only pictures and movies. So it's great. I recommend it

and iOS podcasting is doable, but it's a pain. It's totally doable, but I wish it was better. So, you know, if you've got a portable recorder, you're a long way there. And just remember, like I said, the last time, you don't, the transfer medium, the medium you use to have the conversation is there as a backup. And so you can hear each other, but that doesn't have to be where you're recording locally. I just did a podcast last month where one of my guests was talking, was traveling, and he was talking on earbuds. And he sounded terrible on the podcast. But he had a microphone there, and he was recording that separately. And then he sends me the file from the microphone.

And the final podcast sounds fine. Because it didn't matter that he sounded bad on the call. Because he sounded good in the file he was recording. So that's something to keep in mind too. And with iOS, that's kind of important because sometimes that's the trick is that you can't record your audio and be on a Skype call on the same microphone,

on the same device, because Apple just doesn't let apps share an input device and doesn't let apps record in the background while you're talking on the phone unfortunately this question comes from glenn when doing a live recording with two or more mics what methods do you employ to isolate each guest's voice to their individual track aka how do you get good source isolation good is a strong word for it doesn't doesn't exist you can't edit live recordings like everybody's in an isolation booth right like you basically have to record to have to edit everything just across all the tracks but if you get if you get one of

those microphones like we talked about that is pretty directional so that unless you're right in front of it you're not going to sound you're just going to sound very faint. And spread people out so that the microphones are just facing individual people. That's the best you can do, right? And if your mics are good and they're good at suppressing room sound and background noise, including the other people talking, and then you kind of lay it all over each other. And then sometimes I'll do a noise gate which basically mutes really quiet sounds um it will sound okay um i'd say it comes down to the microphones more than anything else you can take a lot of it out you can take a lot of it out but it's never going to be like when people are recording uh away from each other right right you'll always hear something yeah and

and i i would say i think microphones is this is the best solution is if you can get good microphones that that will suppress other people like if you look on tv right there are a bunch of people sitting in a room together talking and it doesn't sound echoey and weird even though they're all sitting at a desk next to each other because they've got really good, really expensive microphones that suppress all the audio that isn't coming right in front of them. And so that works. And the other way is, if that fails, then it's just going to be a lot of work because you could literally step through a document with a bunch of different tracks and delete the spots where everybody is waiting while

one person is talking. And you can manually do that. I will tell you, we almost never do that with any of our live recordings because it is an enormous amount of work. And it's always better to get your stuff right technically than when you're recording, than to have to go back and sort of trim everything out. But like when we did the Summer of Fun last year and I had that thing from the Masters of Automation conference, like that was not, the mics were okay, but it was not the mics were okay but it was going through a soundboard and i was recording it too and there was some room echo and all that and i did some trimming of when you know one person was talking i i cut out other people's mics and the

end result i think sounded really good but it was a lot of extra work to do yeah if you're using decent microphones and then you just line up the tracks properly, it's going to be fine. But trying to edit out, so if Jason speaks over me, just cutting Jason out on his track will not get rid of Jason. You'll still hear him on mine. Exactly. But the thing that you have when you're live recording, at least I've found this whenever I do it, is people talk over each other less because you can see people. You know when they want to talk because they're looking at you so that's one thing that can actually help reduce it is just the physical location that you're in Neil has asked do you ever listen to your podcast

theme at faster than 1x or consider how it will sound at various speeds when you commission them the upgrade theme sounds great in overcast at 1.4 but has a very different energy than when it's at 1x yes and no um i listen to how the themes sound but i don't necessarily make my decisions on it uh my shows are made to be listened at 1x whatever happens when they're faster than that i can't control that yep like that that that is on you as the listener to choose if that's how you want it to sound like there are like so the the pen addict music i really think it's fun and we love it but it sounds terrible sped up like with smart speed it sounds really bad because it's like it's like some beats and the beats get sped up and it

sounds very strange um but that's just kind of that's just how it is right and but i'm not going to change the music just because some people that might use a faster speed in one application find it to be a bit strange everybody everybody's using different apps they're using different settings in those apps so the only answer is what i've always said to these kinds of questions which which is, um, my podcasts are only supported at one X playback. Any other playback speeds are unsupported. You can do it. They do do it. Everybody does it. That's fine. I don't listen to my podcast when I'm making it at anything but one X and that's all I can do. I got to pick one and that's the one I pick.

And that's all I can do. I got to pick one and that's the one I pick. So everything else, like if our podcast came apart in a very common overcast setting and sounded disastrous, I suppose we might try to do something to fix that. If it was broken, right? Like if there was something that was broken and I've had this where like, I might have screwed something up in a compressor

and like all of the smart speeds and all of the different applications or like the sound trimming whatever was just chewing them to pieces well I've got to fix that but like if it's just something like the theme music and it still sounds okay it's like it's not broken I'm not going to fix it but if there's like a persistent issue that's occurring in a popular app then I'll try and sort it out and you're listening at 1.4x i also think that you end up just thinking that 1.4x is how the podcast sounds and then when people listen to our live stream they're like wow you guys talk really slow you're drunk yeah and the answer is no that's how we talk and then you're just listening to it faster so it's kind of on you like i hope it sounds good and if if something is

broken fair enough but like i think of the atp theme song as being a little a little faster than it actually is, right? Because I listened to that at slightly increased speed. And that's just- Yeah, I'm always unhappy about the final drum part in the song. I know. Because it's not the speed that I want

because I'm listening in smart speed. So it's speeding up a little bit. Ashel has written in to say, I want to start a podcast with a format that's more like a reportage. Is that the word? Reportage. Reportage?

I wouldn't say a reportage, but reportage. It's a reported thing more than a recorded conversation. Something like, welcome to Macintosh. What mic would you recommend that's flexible for studio and field recording? I'm thinking about the Zoom H2n, but I'm not sure. I'm not really familiar with the Zoom H2n. What is that? It's a little portable field recorder that is, like all the Zooms, comes with a microphone in it.

And it's got like an X, I think it has maybe an XLR. Does it have one XLR? Maybe it has nothing. Maybe it's just a portable field recorder. So what I would say is um i haven't used the h2 and it might be fine um for flexibility what i would recommend is what we said which is get a h4 at least get an h4 if you can afford that and a and a handheld mic like those sure betas or the cheap pile knockoff um that's an xlr mic um especially with the h4 you

can get two mics two xlr cables and the and the h4 and you can record i mean you can use the little thing that you stick in the top right to do the field recording you can and when you're doing your like narration later you can use it as an but if you're doing a sit-down interview you can also just hand them a microphone and hand yourself a microphone and then sit there and have that conversation, which is also really useful when you're in the field, depending on if you're talking to somebody on the street or whether you're going out and doing an interview with somebody at their house or their office or something like that, where you might, the flexibility of having the second microphone is really nice. So if you can do that, and then as we've said, those can work as studio microphones back at your house or wherever you're working.

And you can even use the H4 as the USB audio interface. So it's super flexible. If you want something, as this question says, flexible for studio and field recording, I think it's worth thinking about a Zoom recorder with an XLR microphone on the outside. With an XLR microphone. On the outside. Corey would like to produce. A series of podcasts. That are related to.

Their local area San Diego. Talking about things like the art. Music scene and stuff like that. So Corey has asked. Is it counterintuitive to produce a podcast. For a limited geographical audience. So. I will answer this question. With a question. What are your goals cory yeah like what do you want to achieve if you want to make something because you care about it

then do it like if it's just a thing that you really want to make because you have the creative itch to do it then yes do it if you want to make something to get experience to maybe make something else in the future then do it if you want to make something to reach experience to maybe make something else in the future then do it if you want to make something to reach a large audience or maybe to make money at some point in the future this will probably not get you there because it's limited in scope from the beginning you have to find people who care about san diego specifically i mean this is the same for literally any show and please don't just like try and make shows that are popular but like you need to understand what you're making.

You need to understand your goals. And as we said earlier, right at the very top, it shouldn't be your goal to try and make money, in my opinion, because it's really, really hard to do that. It's like, you know, this isn't the same, but the only way I can really try and equate this is if you just sit down one day and you're like, I want to be in an Academy Award winning movie. Right?

Because podcasting is an entertainment field and it's hard to break into it there's more people that want to do it than there's space for it and to be successful it's really hard work and some luck and you have to be the right person for the right time and find it's really really hard to do so but i think because people just make this stuff on their own and there are kind of no real gatekeepers for success, I think it feels more approachable. And it is more approachable, right? Like this is a field where I can be successful in but probably couldn't in any other type of entertainment field. But it doesn't mean that it is inherently easier to do. So I would just say that, Corey, think about what you want to do and how you want to achieve it and then go from there. Yeah, I'm a fan of the idea of doing local content because

the people in the local, I mean, that's the problem with a lot of stuff is that it's all national. It's all making a play for the big national reach, worldwide reach, whatever. So doing something that's more geographically limited, I think could be great. I think because the people are going to know that you're talking about their place and that's good. I think, yes, it limits the size of your audience, but they are going to be a really connected audience. It might end up being a place where they will be able to support you ultimately. And like I said earlier, you might not get a lot of CPM advertising in that scenario that was worth anything, but you might get support. It's also possible with a local podcast that you could get local advertising support. Now that's complicated

and you're going to need to establish yourself well before you get Jerome's, that's a San Diego reference, to sponsor your podcast, but it's possible. Also, you could establish yourself as a local podcaster in San Diego and then go to another local media outlet that maybe doesn't do as much in podcasting, or maybe you've got a special take and see if you can work with them somehow in terms of cross promotion, in terms of kind of going under their auspices, because they may have either direct support or advertising or both that, and they also have an audience that you might be able to work with, get friendly with. And so I know San Diego well enough to say, you know, maybe you do this and then you start talking to the people at Voice of San Diego,

or you start talking to people at The Reader. You probably aren't going to talk to the people at the Union Tribune newspaper, but you never know. But I think that that is a, you know, there's opportunity there too, to sort of like cross with other people's audiences, but you got to get it set up and going first and prove that you care and you're into it and you want it to be a good podcast. And then ideally you'll be noticed. Like then you may even hear from somebody who's like, we want to write about you at the Union Tribune, or we want to write about you at the Voice of San Diego, or we want to link to your podcast in our daily newsletter or whatever it is. And that would go the same way for any other city.

I think that there may be opportunities there, but you got to start with the content and go from there. But I'm kind of bullish on local content. content. I think in the end, that's going to be one of the new frontiers of this sort of content where you've got a more, you know, we're local, Mike, in a way we're a local podcast, right? Because we're a local podcast for, you know, tech people and Apple people, right? So it's global, but it's very topic specific. And so our potential audience is also actually quite small, relatively speaking, because it's people who are interested in this subject matter. It's in the kind of Apple world and a little bit outside of that, but mostly in that world. San Diego is a big city. There are a lot of big cities like that. It's limited, but if you can serve that audience really well,

and that's the trick, then I think there are opportunities there. It's just going to be a different kind of game. But I'd encourage it. I think it's really exciting. I think local stuff, my local, you know, the Chronicle here in San Francisco is experimenting again with doing more podcasting. And I think it's a good thing to try that because no people in London are probably not going to be listening to San Francisco Chronicle podcasts, but that's okay. If the Bay Area really loves them, then that's all they really are going for. Our last question today comes from Rick. Rick wants to know, what retains listeners, audio quality, host camaraderie, or content? My answer is yes. And then Rick wants to know,

what is the order of those things? I don't know. I believe that all of those three things are what's important to keep listeners, that the sound is good, that the show sounds good, that the hosts have a good rapport with each other and that they either get on or they don't get on or whatever it is like the reason, you know, but like they work well together for the type of show that you're listening to and that the content is good, that it is like the reason you know but like they work they work well together for for the type of show that you're listening to and that the content is good that it is engaging that it is interesting that it is thought through i don't know what the order of those things are because

genuinely i think it depends yeah and so and it's audio quality is less important on the pen addict for example people if something goes wrong like if we have a guest and that guest on skype or if something happens and brad is like we're using skype well nobody even mentions it where like people would mention it if it was this show right like it's just different it it varies by show it's totally true i immediately go when it's audio quality i think about the flop house right because the audio quality there is variable and historically has been really bad it's better now than it was back in the early days but um the hosts and the camaraderie between them is incredibly important it attaches you i think over the long haul the people are what attach you to the show so that that's i think the the glue i

think that i think these are all important, but they all react differently. They all have like different kinds of powers. So the people, I think, creates an emotional attachment. I think the content is probably what gets you there. And then ultimately, if the content drives you away, so be it. I think you need to provide content, but content without the personality and camaraderie, it's going to be less sticky um and then you're judging the content much more strongly and then audio quality i feel like is almost just a you know either it works or it repels you and i'm not sure there's a lot of in between there where um there are podcasts that i've heard from people that i like that they sounded so bad that i never

listened to another episode there are also a couple of podcasts that don't sound very good that I still listen to because I like the people. So I guess it's, hello. So I guess it's, there's no formula here. Ideally, all of them are good, but I do think that they all like, if two of them are good,

the other one you're willing to maybe give a pass to, but I do think in a long-term relationship, this is a good way for us to wrap up this thing about podcasts. I worked in magazines for a long time. I, I went there from building websites and digital stuff in college, but the only place to get a job was at a magazine. So I got a job at a magazine. The amazing thing about the magazine is a magazine is a subscription relationship. I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. It's a relationship. It's a long-term relationship. You're renewing a year at a time.

And then there's this connection between the creators and the receivers, which is we promise to give you a new magazine every month or week or whatever, right? Podcasts are just the same. magazine every month or week or whatever, right? Podcasts are just the same. You subscribe to a podcast and there is a connection there and we are going to promise to give you this thing every week, every fortnight, every month, whatever it is. And you know what it's going to be and you expect that and there's a connection there. And that has power and it does create that kind of emotional bond between the hosts and the listeners. I know that sounds kind of corny, but I think there's some truth. Like you hear the voices, you get used to them, you get to know those people. And that is the power of podcasting. So, you know, that's the

kind of the glue of it. And I think that if you get that wrong, then people will still listen to your podcast, but they're going to be way less passionate about it. If you've just got kind of no connection or it's random people every time from some kind of brand, it's the Bloomberg podcast where there's different Bloomberg people on all the time, but you never recognize any of them, that's going to be, they might have great content and they might sound great, but I do think that it's going to miss the secret sauce of podcasting, which is having that direct connection with the human beings on the other side of the broadcast medium. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

And of course, to any of these many episodes that we have produced, we are celebrating our 200th today, which is a wild number to be at. And we would only be here, well, we can only be here because you listen so we will take the time to thank you so much for whatever is the reason that you listen to this show that you choose to tune in every week um upgrade is has become and and is continuing to become a more and more important part of of my career um I'm very, very proud of what me and Jason have done together. I love this show. I think that it is a good show. And it is the show that I always wanted it to be from when we started out. And I think that we have adapted it into something which is quite special, I think. And I'm very proud of the work that we do. And we work very hard for it. I agree. It's a very important part of my week.

It is how I define my week because I usually am here on Monday morning doing these podcasts with you. And it wouldn't be possible without the Upgradians as we, as they named themselves with our help. And yeah, I really appreciate anybody out there who has supported us over the previous 200 episodes. And we go on. The summer of fun continues. Later this week, you're going to get married. And here's how that works. Your commitment to upgrade is so great that join us next week.

Probably like a day late, but no more than that. It's going to like a day late but no more than that probably gonna be a day next tuesday where post wedding mike will join me because his commitment to upgrade and episode 201 is that great don't tell don't tell any of my other podcasts no but this is the only show that i will be doing post wedding until i get back from my honeymoon and i'll be back in august so if you want to hear whatever it is the married Mike sounds like, then tune in next week, I guess. Tune in next week and you'll hear that a day late.

And then we'll follow that up while you're on your honeymoon. I'm going to have a special guest episode. Those are always fun. We have an episode banked that, so Mike will reappear via the magic magic of recording and that'll be a special episode part of the summer of fun because the summer of fun is only getting started yes we're just beginning um so if you want to send in your ask upgrade questions always do that your snell

talk questions always do that and uh we'll be back next week thanks so much to our sponsors for this episode thank you for listening and for indulging us over this bumper podcast episode. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as we have enjoyed making it for you. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell. Yay!