Dave, Fix My Podcast (with Dave Jackson)

This week we talk with podcasting legend Dave Jackson. In the midst of hosting four (yes, 4) podcasts at once, Dave makes time to tell us everything we're doing wrong when it comes to giving y'all the (semi-)weekly content you deserve.
Check out his powerhouse of tools and resources for podcasting hopefuls like us over at School of Podcasting to learn more.

Special Thanks to Our Incredible Guest:
Dave Jackson: School of Podcasting

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Transcript

0:47

Oh, right. Well, hey, there they are. Hey, Dave. How are you? Very nice to meet you. What's going on? So what advice do you have for us? For Intro and our podcast? Yeah. What do you mean? It's. It's something we've been figuring out for, like, a year and a half. But what really what really sells the audience at the top of the show. How are they going to benefit? Oh, who doesn't want to benefit? Yeah. It's a good question, guys, because usually it's welcome to the blah blah show where we blah, blah, blah. So you can yada, yada, yada All right, all right. I'll show you. I'll show you what we usually do. And then I'd love any pointers in action. I'm Brandon Fox. You're listening to another episode of Grampa and Chill. I'm here with my co-host, Finesse, our amazing producers, Sarah. And as always, my old, beautiful grandfather. Today we have our own Dave Jackson. Dave, how was that intro? Any tips? Well, first things first. Always let your guests know when you're recording. Oh, I didn't realize that that intro was phenomenal, my friend. Cool. Cool. But if we weren't recording, what would you have said? Yeah, it sucks. I don't know that I would have done. Yeah, I would. Would be like, Okay, we're going to start, you know, blah, blah, blah. And because I'm like, I don't know if I would have been imitating my cat so much. I know now what mean anything you want. I can I filter cat? Yeah. Okay, good. I was already thinking. Yeah. So I would love if you could tell our audience just a little bit about yourself before we dove in. Sure. How far back do you want me to go in beginning? In the beginning. Born and raised in Akron, Ohio. Was a paper boy when I was 13. I was fired from my first job as a grocery bagger because I was too shy And let's see what else. Then I my original degree was in electronic engineering where I learned that the last thing I wanted to be was an electronic engineer. But that got me in the world of of copier technician, which I also was this is before GPS because hence the gray hair and it was not my favorite thing, but luckily I fell into the training department. And so I did training in all sorts of different places for about ten years. And then what the the joy of being in a company for a long time, I kept being they had about six different divisions and by the time I was there, I hit all six. But unfortunately, I got into a bad game of musical chairs where they're like, Hey, now we're going to move you over here. And the thing they moved me into like, just quit. Like, they're like, Oh, we're not doing that program anymore. And I'm like, Oh, okay, well, then what am I going to do? And they went, Oh, yeah, what are we going to do with Dave? So I went back to school to get a teaching degree because I went to get a job as a teacher because that's what I've been doing. I've been doing all this training stuff, and they went, Yeah, we can't hire you without a teaching degree. So I went and got a teaching degree and went back into the corporate training world, which is horrible in most cases, because they're really focused on how many students can we cram into your class to make the most money. And you go, Yeah, but it's it's kind of hard to do education that way. Yeah, it's profitable, but like nobody's learning because we've got 30 people in a classroom and they were like, Yeah, but look, all the money. So I was kind of tired of that. And the good news is, is when you're in the training department, it's kind of weird because often especially in corporate training, you're not really they don't see you as a money generator. You're like, Yeah, but if there's no teachers, who's going to teach the class? And so when that job went down the tubes, I'd been podcasting for ten years and I thought, you know, I'm kind of tired of this teaching thing, especially in the corporate world. I was like, It'd be cool to get a job in podcasting. So I'd been podcasting at that point for about ten years. And the the company I used is called Lipson. It's short for liberated syndication. And I knew the vice president over there, and I had done a podcast with him, and I called him up. I said, This could be a really awkward conversation. He's like, Oh, what's what's going on? I go, I got good news and bad news. And he said, Oh, I'll play. What's the bad news? And I said, I just lost my job. And he said, And the good news is and I said, I'm available to work for you, buddy. And he said, Well, I would say, I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm not. He's like, What are you doing? The rest of the day? And I go, I'm walking to my car as we speak. Probably laundry, you know, at this point. And he said, Let me see if I can get the president to call you back. So as I'm driving home from from losing my job, I got a call from the president with like probably a half hour, a kind of phone interview. And they're based out of Pittsburgh. I'm in Ohio. So it took him a few weeks to figure out the Ohio to Pennsylvania tax differences. But I've been there now six years. And so I work at Libs and that's kind of like my, hey, I need health benefits job, but I love work there. It's a great company. And then my super serious side hustle is the school of podcasting, which is basically how I put myself through school. The second time was I was like, I need phone in gas money. And at the time, this is 2005. The the word on the street was membership sites are going to be big, and this thing called podcasting is going to be huge. And so I had finally pieces parted together. A podcast and I was like, Well, I've seen a lot of kind of I don't know, you hear about things that are going to be big, and you go and then they come and they're huge. And you go, Oh, I should have jumped on that. You know, I saw that opportunity. And so I saw this and I was like, Look, I need something to bring in some income. So I started a membership site about podcasting because those are the two things that are supposed to be, you know, hot and ready to take off. And they it was fun. It generated income, but that's also why I was a guitar teacher. I was in a band. I was doing anything to generate income because in 2005, you'd asked somebody, you know, do you listen to podcasts? And they'd go, Do I need an iPod for that? And you're like, Now it's like, and then by the time you explained what it was, they, they would go, No, I don't listen to podcasts. So the early days of podcasting were brutal. So that's my background. I'm. And for me, podcasting is kind of geeky, so that scratches my technical itch. I get to help people still. So that scratches my teacher's itch. And then it's as creative as you want to get. There kind of aren't any rules so you can do whatever you want. So once I finally started podcasting, I was like, Yeah, I'm going to plant my flag here. This is way too cool. And you get to reach a global audience. So that's even better. Yeah, you were right on the money. I mean, now it's the biggest thing ever, probably. So, yeah, and it's I mean, we still got a way to go You know, I think it's, I think up to 60% of people in the U.S. now listen to podcasts. So that means 40% haven't. So and then if you throw in the world like right now, podcasting is just blowing up in Brazil, you know, and previously it was places like India and things of that nature. So by the time you think, wow, it can't get any bigger you know, some other country will discover it and here we go. So I'm sure everybody here has a lot of questions because we talk about how to do this the best we can. A lot, I think. But Dave, that looks like either way it looks like a Sure. FM XM seven that you're using. It's the they don't make those anymore. But this is a little brother. It's the SM seven B, okay. And it's not a bad my it's expensive. I normally would not have bought it, but it never goes on sale. And last December it went on sale because previously I had an electric voice, our A-320 and the microphone, it really doesn't matter. Like I have somewhere around here. I thought I had one in front of me. A Samson. Q To you, that's a $70 microphone. This is a $400 microphone. There is not $330 where the difference between the two. I always tell people your goal is to be listenable. Now, I know a lot of people love to fire up a laptop and talking to that microphone that is not listenable. That is horrible and sounds like you're in a, I don't know, a tunnel. And I, I was just out of town and I actually drove to Nashville. It's not that far from Ohio. And you know, there are times when you're listening in earbuds that okay, the gas doesn't have that great an audio, but that's okay. I can still kind of hear them if you're in a car and you're doing, you know, 85 miles an hour, you got a little tire action going, a little road noise. I can't hear your gas if they sound like crap. And that's always tough because you don't people say, yeah, but you don't have any control over the guest. And I go, It's your show. You have absolute control over your guest. And if somebody tries to bring crappy audio to your podcast, you go, No, thank you. And they go, Oh yeah, but I used this. I was interviewed last week on this guy's show and he just let me talking to the laptop. Well, that's that guy show. This is my show. And here's the thing. If you have a guest, that sounds bad. Explain to them how you're trying to make them sound great, professional, smart, any other kind of word you're saying. And it's like anybody that wants to be a guest on a podcast should spend 70 bucks on a microphone because the difference between that laptop mic and that $70 microphone is huge. You go from sounding like a hack to a pro, and, you know, if you're doing any kind, if you have any kind of service that you're promoting or whatever. So, you know, and if they it's just one of those things people think, Well, no one there, everybody wants to be on a podcast now. So it's not like if you have to say, Hey, mister, Mrs. Guest, we'll have to reschedule this when we can figure out your technical issues. Because if I gathered, I don't have a I need that gas the mike. Okay, we'll just open up the door. There's probably five people outside dying to get on your show. What do you think are best? I love the Samson. Q to you. That's the one I recommend the most. The Audio-Technica atr 2100. You're using a I sure as I'm 57. That's cool. You have to be careful with that one because you can have a lot of plosives with it without some sort of windscreen on it. The ESA. Yeah. The some 50 eights and other great one that every rock star uses in some 58. And the beautiful thing about the SM 58 is you can like run that over with your car and it will still work. It's an amazing Mike. But the Q two you I recommend a lot because it works with, you know, something like the, the zoom pad track before then if we get all techie it's got an Excel R input but it also has a USB input. So if you have the person that's just doing the solo show, you just plug that badboy in via USB, fire up audacity and you're off to the races. I had a S.M. seven and I found four different use and I found it had a very low output. I actually got rid of it. So you must be going through some sort of a pre patching to stop this. Yeah, I'm going, yeah, I'm going into the road caster pro, which has enough to drive it without a preamp, but I had one laying around so I'm using a cloud lifter but there's a cloud lifter which the, the downside of the cloud lifter is you have to have another cable because there's a cable goes from the road caster to the cloud lifter, then the cloud lift or you have another cable goes from that to the microphone So you end up with a little more, you know, debris on the floor or whatever's going on where another one is called the FET head. It's just this little stick that a lot of people will put right here on the microphone. And so it doesn't add that additional cord and takes up less room and things like that. But both of them give you about 20 DB of of nice clean gain. So it's pretty handy for the technically if you got to the road cast or the zoom will give you enough to to get this thing. But you're right the the Shiraz some seven B in the high PR 40 which is another really popular microphone have really low output. The the microphone that you're using is a fairly expensive microphone for podcasts. But for the recording industry it's a very inexpensive microphone relative to. Yeah, it's so but, but it's used an awful lot in the industry for music recording so it's a very good I think the more yeah. The the S M seven everybody who's who's likes to mention that Michael Jackson recorded Thriller on that and then in the the podcasting world everybody loves to mention that Joe Rogan uses this and I was like, yeah, but it's not the microphone the mic that made Joe Rogan, you know, that guy started his career in 1988. Most people forget that it's like he was, you know it took him 12 years to do his first comedy album. He's been on at least four TV shows you know I'm like, that's why Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan not because he has a $400 group. How many questions what what a microphone was using the whole time. Okay which one question at a time please. Oh it was a joke just which which he use the entire time is a real question. I don't know to be honest. With you. I know it's funny if you find the early versions of his show, it's in like a like a dark apartment with him and his buddies and it's like he's using the camera on his laptop. They're horrible. I mean, we all start off horrible. But yeah, I don't know what he was using in the in the early days, probably a 58. Being a comedian, he probably had one laying around. How how long would you say it takes to get good as a podcast or as a production well, first of all, you have to figure out what your target is. So who is my audience? Who's who's listening to this? And so many people like, oh, our shows for everybody. Well, great, because that's not going to work unless you have unless you're a celebrity. Like I listen to about 15 minutes of Marc Maron talking to Tom Segura about old comedy clubs that had closed. And it dawned on me after about 20 minutes that I was bored. I'm like, this had I'm not a comedian I'm not going to go on tour. And I'm like, Well, okay, well, let's kind of like reverse engineer this. Why don't I just listen to 20 minutes of something that I got nothing out of? And I was like other celebrities that's why. So if you're a celebrity, you have a little more wiggle room. But and now I've completely forgotten what you asked me. Doggone it, what was how long does it take Oh, the for me, I tell people three years to really grow an audience. It takes, I think the first year you're you're getting confident behind the microphone. In the second year, you've now started to grow your audience. And by the third year, now you've got some momentum going. The problem is when you're a writer, you don't put out your your rough draft to the audience. Actors have dress rehearsals. You know, football players have pre-season. There's all sorts of things that don't count. And so many people record that first episode and they go, holy cow, we got it through and it didn't burst into flames. And they put that out. And I'm like, No, no record, like three or four episodes and throw them away because they're probably not any good, you know? And then the other thing I see is people don't edit they think, Oh, I'm just going to keep it real. And I'm like, Okay, but realize there are times you'll have a really good guest on but they don't know how to tell their stories. And they'll keep repeating that. Like a lot of times they'll say the same thing over and over and over and over, and you're like, Okay, we heard that point back here. I don't need to hear this again. And so you can to me, I will say, I know Joe Rogan's got, you know, 11 million downloads an episode. He's it's not a bad show. It can be a great show if he did some editing. My favorite is when you get to listen to Joe, look at YouTube because he'd be like, Hey, Jamie, Jamie, pull that up, Jamie, look at that. Oh do you see that all holy. While you look at that, it's audio. Joe, I have no idea what you're looking at like you are wasting my time here. I don't need to hear you go. Oh, look at that. Oh, did you know? I know, Joe. I didn't see that. It's an audio podcast, Joe. I'm not watching the video version. And so keep that in the video, but cut it out. When I edit an interview, I listen to the question, and then I listen to the answer. And the first thing I listen for is, did they answer the question? Because you might say, Hey, Dave, what's your favorite podcast? And I go purple. All right, well, I answered your count your question but did I actually answer the question? No, I did. I gave you an it's it's a politician thing, right? Well, how are you going to bring down inflation? Well, I think tomorrow and then they give you this answer. So first things first. Did they answer the question? Number two? Okay. They gave me an answer. Does that bring value to my audience, which goes back to we got to know who the audience is and if it does, it stays. If it doesn't, it goes. You are the goalie. The your audience is behind you. And if somebody tries to feed your audience crap, you're going to smack that out. Of here. Nope. Get that up. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Because the last time I checked, most of us don't have a lot of free time. And I know there's a fast forward button and a skip button and a listen fast button. And things like that. But you're not going to waste my audience's time. That's just not the way it's going to work. Uh hmm. That's good. Yeah. Good. Well, and here's the problem. I like Joe Rogan. I don't listen to him a lot. I cherry pick my questions, but I've heard so many people go, I'm going to I do my podcast Rogan style, and I go, Okay, what's that mean? Oh, we just talk for 3 hours. And I'm like, Okay, just realize you're not Joe Rogan. Like, you're not bringing that celebrity that people. I want to hear what Joe has to say about this. Nobody cares what I think about. I'm no celebrity, you know? So it's one of those things because let's think let's go to this. I can start a podcast and say, I'm going to call it being more confident. Right? Nice, clear name. Got some keywords in the title being more confident because who doesn't need to be more confident, right? But I'm not going to have a group of people that say, Oh, I've been looking for that podcast, but if I say, Wait, a minute, how about being a more confident parent who now just cut out a bunch of people right now? It's not for everyone. It's for parents and not everybody has kids. So then what if I say, Wait, what about being a more confident first time parent? Oh, now I cut out even more people, and those people are like, Hey, like, this thing won't stop crying. Nobody told me about meconium. Like, What's going on? I don't know what I'm doing. Right, okay, let's go eat. And for the record, you don't have to keep cutting down. You know, I'm this is just an example. But what if I said how to be a more confident, first time interracial parent? Oh, now we just cut out a whole bunch of people, but the people that are left are like, Oh, God, I've been looking for this podcast my whole life. This is because we need to talk about some stuff. And those people can I. And those people will tell their friends. There's there's a show called Adoptees On by Haley Radtke, and it's all about being adopted. Because it turns out the only people that know what is what it feels like to be adopted are people that have been adopted. And I was talking to her about this once, and she said, will realize if you watch like the after school special, the Hallmark movie, you always see these adopted people looking for their parents and they find them and, you know, happiness ensues. Right? She's like, there are a lot of people that spend years looking for their parents and then get rejected again. And I was like, that hurts just to say it out loud. But those people, the only people who understand what it's like to go through that are other people that have gone through it. So it doesn't have to be hyper, hyper neat but one of the things that's great about podcasting is you can talk about things that nobody's talking about because it's not if you look at a newspaper, for those of us that remember newspapers, or turn on the TV, right? It's business, it's health, it's sports and it's money, those are the right. That's everything that's, you know, okay, so I can get that anywhere. But when I start talking about, you know, sports teams, I see people that do not just the sports show because now I'm competing with ESPN who wants to do that? But I'm going to do a show about the minor league team in my town because they get no, no exposure at all. And I love my minor league team. So I'm going to go do that. That's that's those are the people that sometimes have a little better chance at growing an audience because you have no competition I mean, I'm he was before my time, but Milton Berle was the, you know, the king of TV. And I always go, Yeah, but do do your research. Uncle Morty was up against the test pattern many times. So it's kind of easy. It's not easy to win when you're you know, you don't have any competition talking about us. I feel like we have a very niche angle and concept. I don't know if that translates to a niche target audience. For example, like if this was a pretzel making podcast, I think there's very few pretzel makers, you know, but we would know who those people are. Whereas here the tagline thing is having intergenerational conversations very, you know, millennial and then grandpa. Right. And so I'm I'm curious what you think about that and how that would translate into the advice that you're giving right now? Well, I listened to the episode on grieving. Yeah. And your guest did most of the talking. That was one thing. And I didn't hear any question that any question that was asked had no it could have come from anybody. So I didn't like part of me expects and I use this phrase all the time, you know, the back in my day right because I'm 57. And so I guess that's what I'm expecting is a little, well, grandpa, we don't do it that way anymore. Well then and then you can kind of say, well you know what, the way we used to do it actually has some merit to it. We should maybe do more of that and then it might be, well, yeah, but you guys do it this way. You know, that actually has some merit to maybe we should try to blend the two together. I don't hear if that's your niche. I don't hear it in, in the, in the conversations yeah. Grandpa, tell us about we are you're basically saying that we don't ask enough questions and not answers. You see that? I guess I expected and I think you guys did this on your earlier programs. I thought it was more of a conversation between you two like, hey, today we're going to talk about, I don't know, money or whatever. And so Grandpa could say, well, you know, I remember when my dad used to tell me I remember when I could go to the movie theater for a nickel and I could get candy with that or whatever it was. My dad would always say that. And so, you know, what are the differences between, you know, because obviously there's you're going to have different views because you both have different experiences. That's what I was expecting. And I tuned in and I heard the bad widow explain how her husband, you know, she held him in her arms to take his last breath. And for the record, she said that about nine times when I talked. Now, that's not bad. And how are you going to edit out somebody who is talking about her dying husband? But there are times when she she made the same point multiple times. And I was like, yeah, okay. Got it. And again, wasn't a bad interview, but it was just I was like, yeah, I know you held your husband, but I didn't hear a lot of you guys in it. You're saying that it's boring when it's repetitive like that, when it gets boring. Well, you tell me. Well, you tell me. Well, you tell me. Well, you tell me it's the same thing. So it's not that it's boring. It's not that it's boring. It's that there comes a time when, you know, even when we're growing up and we're kids, you're like, Okay, fine, Mom, you need to make your room. I got it. You need to make, you know. So there comes a time when you're like, Okay, I got the point. And a long podcast are hard, too. When I asked you guys earlier, you said, Hey, we're going to interview you for 2 hours. And I was like, Good God. I don't know if I can be that entertaining for 2 hours. It's hard to make a short show because you have to figure out, what am I really trying to say? And so when she made her point and again, I feel bad for I mean, I was listened to her was like, oh, man, I can't imagine holding somebody you love and watch them die. That that just ripped out my heart. But if I said like, let's see right now, I start talking about microphones again and I go, You know what? I really love that Samson cue to you. You're like, Yeah, we we kind of talked about that like 10 minutes ago. We got that point. In fact, I'm going to put it I'll put a link on the show notes. We don't need to cover it again. So there are times like that that and a lot of times I'm cutting me out of my show because I'll interview somebody and they'll be like, I remember this one time when, you know, my friend and I were drinking orange Gatorade and there was a hole in the bottle and blah, blah, blah. Well, then I'm going to me, to him, and I'm going to go like, You know what? I had the same thing. I was drinking a two liter of Pepsi and blah blah, and I'm like, We don't really need my like all I'm doing is saying the same thing they did. It's a conversation, but I'm here to make my guest sound smart. I don't really need to have my story like I'm just saying, yep, that stinks when that happens. So, you know, there are times when I leave that in and things are not, but it's that's how I do it. And that's the joy of podcasting. You can, you can do it however you want. Did you pick the grieving little pockets or did someone pick it for you? Now, I picked it because I. It's that one. Why did I pick that one? Because now I'm like, maybe if I click on this one, I want to hear about her husband dying in her arms the whole time. No. Well, no, it was grief is something that I study in a way. I've when you get older, you'll find this out. When you get older, people die. And sometimes I handle that, okay? And other times I don't. And I was like, well, I'm always looking for some sort of I read a book once and it basically said, everything we've learned about grieving is crap. Like, you know, oh, time heals all wounds. Well, it turns out it doesn't. And, you know, all this other thing we got to like about in the end, it's like, Oh, sounds like I'm picking this one. Yeah. So I was kind of like, so I'm always looking for that magic bullet of like, okay, there's got to be something with the grieving process that maybe I just did wrong or something like that. And so I was looking to hear what her thought was and you know, her story was amazing. I mean, she loses her husband and she basically, like, just kind of shut, like, she couldn't do anything. Like, she said, I couldn't do this, I couldn't do this. And I was like, wow. I was like, okay, because my mom died when I was 24. I went to my college and I said, Hey, like, my mom died and I know finals are next week. But like, you know, my mom died and I got to go to a funeral stuff. And they went, Yeah, we, we can't let you get out of it. You still have to take your finals. I was like, Wait, what do you got to do to get out of finals? Holy cow. So, you know, it's that's one of those things where you kind of like, all right. It's it was an interesting story, so I don't I don't want to I don't want to throw shade on on the bad widow's just as I listen to it. Like every story, she just, you know, kind of slightly repeated herself to where there was a point of me. It was like, okay, I got it. Like, what's because I'm lost again? I was listening for the nugget and I was like, Yeah, we heard that. Did you? No, I'm glad. I'm glad that's why you picked it. Yeah. Okay. So how do you how do you take what you take away from me? You take any grief? How you feeling, grief wise? How do I take it? See, that's the question there. There are some questions if you want to find out if your show is good and this is the thing, you got to bring some extra skin because I always tell people I wouldn't open a restaurant without having somebody eat my food and say, Do you want more of this? Do more of it. If they go, I'm good. Like, you kind of want them going, Can I take some home? Do you have any extra? And so you have to get somebody not named Mom and not Cousin Earl and not your best friend. You know, Marty from Forever get somebody who should be your audience and listen to this and go, I want you to talk about this like I'm not in the room and then say, did you listen to the whole thing? And if they say no, go. Okay. Again, not, not, not, not hurt. How far did you listen? And then the big one is, what was your big takeaway? And so we know my big takeaway was she died with her husband in her arms. That's what I remember. I try to think if she gave any kind of strategy, like how to deal with it and I know she said towards the end that she had friends, like she was doing the opposite of what everybody thought. But I can't remember what it was. Um, I think a lot of what we talked about that day was like communication and like what to say. Yeah, what to talk about. That was one because I was like she said people would come up to her and ask her, how are you feeling? And she goes, I taught them how to ask better questions. And I was like, That was interesting because she's like, How do you think I'm feeling? I just died there. I just died. My husband just died. It's kind of like when you ask the the winning quarterback in the Super Bowl, what's going through your head right now, Mike? I don't know. I just won the Super Bowl. I feel awful. I'm like, Wait, why? What's the dumbest question ever? So, you know, my and my husband died two weeks ago. How are you doing now? If you're if you're lucky, you'll get the head nod like the leaning head. That's the other thing. When you're when peak when when you're going through grieving, people give you the leaning head nod and go, how you doing? And they give you the little head nod. So if if she fell, I thought as I listened to that, I thought she said, I taught them how to ask better questions. And I thought, well, really, why not just tell them how you're doing instead of, like, getting mad and saying, how dare you ask me that? Why not just say I'm doing awful? My husband died two weeks ago and I feel like crap. I can't do anything because she mentioned how they all kind of ran away from her. And I go Yeah, but you weren't really being honest with them. You weren't saying, I don't know what to do. I can't do anything. I can't think. I can't. I don't know. That was my thought on that. So it was it was interesting. That it made me think and that's one of the keys of a podcast. You want it to either there's there's a couple of things. And what I did was I, I took like two weeks and I wrote down everything I watched, read or listened to, and then I asked myself, why did I, why did I read this? Why did I listen to it? Why do I watch it? And for me, and this is just me, it made me either laugh, cry, think, grown, educate or entertain. So she made me think. I was like, well, that's an interesting way of doing that. I don't know if I would have done that, but I can see why she you know, she was still trying to help people, which is great. She's like, I mean, let me give you a better question to ask here. But if you look at some of the shows I really like I like John Oliver on HBO it's a political kind of new show. But he also makes me laugh you know, there are so I like Shark Tank because it makes me laugh. And at times it makes me think because I like when people come in there and they don't know their numbers and I'm like, you're on Shark Tank. Why are you not why are you not prepared? Things like that. And yet I still watch things that I hate. I just watched West Side Story, and I hate musicals. Like I'm a musician, but I hate musicals because they have this great story and they keep they keep interrupting it with all this dancing and music. And I thought, Oh, Steven Spielberg, this has to be good. And I got done and I was like, You know what? It's official. I still hate musicals. They do. They drag out the story well. And so I know people that I've you know, we all have that hate watch, like, oh, I hate The Bachelor. When's it on again? You know, whatever it is. So that that is something that people will tune in. What's the old saying? Hey, how's it go? If you have listened to every episode I've done and you hate them all, bitch, you're a fan, you know? I mean, it's like if you're tuning in every week, so you got a chance. Yeah, I was. It's made me think of love is blind. And I don't I don't dislike that. So. Yeah, see, is that something you hate to watch, but yet you still do love it so much. Yeah. And it's and it's trash. It's trash TV. It's trash in every way. So we do have hope yeah. So, you know, so I always try to because if I'm not laughing or crying or thinking or groaning or if you're not teaching me something or if you're not just entertaining, I'm bored. Wow. You made a noise earlier. That was a groan. Like a cat noise. You laughed. I've heard you yeah. Dave, what instrument do you play? I play my primary one is the guitar. I started playing when I was around ten, and I've got one sitting somewhere. But have you done any recording? Yeah, actually, it's really bad. It's if you guys have ever watched friends and, you know, there's you'll see where Ross talks about his music, and he'd be like, Oh, and he plays this really crappy keyboard. And I. It dawned on me a years ago that I was like, Oh, my God, I was Ross because I had a little recording studio in my basement, and I listen to it, and it's just hideous because just because you can hit notes when you sing doesn't mean you should. And there's the old saying that if you sing in your range, people think it's endless. But the minute you sing outside of your range, everybody knows, Hey, guess what? That guy can't sing above that. And I grew up in the eighties, so it was all hair metal and everybody's singing here and it's like, Yeah, I couldn't do that. But I tried I'm a good I've played guitar in many bands over the years and had a great time and I can carry a tune. I used to sing in the choir, but man, the stuff when I wrote my own stuff and recorded it, it was I look back and go, Oh God, I mean, people listen to this. Just Do you think any kind of music intro or at the end of a, of a podcast is helpful or not? Not appropriate. It works is long because I listen to your intro and it explained you know, what the show is about. That's really what you're looking for in that first minute because nobody gets on a bus unless they know where it's going. So, you know, and you had the the song there and you're explaining what it is and grandpa and the millennial and blah, blah, blah. I it's like, okay, that's because that's really what you're looking for is usually it's, hey, you know, welcome to the show where we talk about blank so you can blank. That's a real generic one. So that person can go, oh, this is about, you know, fitness for people over 50. Great. That's, that's me. I fit that today we're going to talk about intermittent fasting. Oh, I've heard about that. I might want to hear that. So I know exactly right now is that because I look at my phone, I'm like, okay it's 38 minutes so am I willing to invest 38 minutes in intermittent fasting today? And I was like, yeah, I got to go. And I, at that point I don't hit stop. So but if you think of it, I grew up with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and when I heard the opening theme music, you know, I knew it was either a time to go to bed and if it was during the week and it's something I've, I've thought about changing my theme song for my show and I've had people say, don't you dare, because it pumps me up. So it's kind of a it's a branding thing. After a while. So and the other thing is you don't have to have one. I have a friend of mine that does a show, and he just starts off and says, Welcome to the New Media Show. I'm Todd Cochrane. Joining me, as always is my host, Rob Greenlee. That's their intro. You know, they just kind of figure what's called the new media show. So you should probably know what it is. But, you know, so it's kind of up to you. I have most of my stuff has some sort of music and explains what it is and what's coming up so people can figure out if they want to stick around or not. I one of my podcasts is called The Podcast Revue Show, where we you basically hire me and a guy that's been in radio for 30 years to look at your show and we kind of go over what your goals are for the show and what the content is and your website. That would be one of my questions. Why do you guys not own Grandpa in Chicago? Yeah, well, let me let me see. I think we have Grandpa and Sheldon, both Broadcom and Broadcom. Now, which one sounds more professional? Which one's easier to tell your friend? Well, this is. Yeah, and at the end, you at the end, you say, find us in Spotify and Apple and blah, blah, blah and yada yada. Whereas if you said, hey, if you want to subscribe or follow to the show, just go to Grandpa and Chilcot because I got news for you, Spotify and Apple, especially their search is horrendous. Like bad. Like I have a show called the Podcast Radio Show, which no one. Try not to have the word podcast in your name because I don't say, Hey, I'm reading this new book called Book Title Book. Like I don't go to the movie slash movie. So take the word podcast in the word the out of your title so that you're not ranking against all the other bazillions of shows where the word podcast is in their title. But I had one. It wasn't supposed to be a real show. I started it as a just a test. I was testing some technology and it was called the Podcast Radio Show, where I grab a random podcast and see how long I can hang on because usually you can kind of tell within the first minute or two if somebody's going to waste your time. And I would type in podcast radio show in like nothing would come up. You had to search for Dave Jackson for that to come up because I was ranking against everything that had the word podcast and everything that had the word show in it. And I think Apple only shows the top 300 and I was not in the top 300. So saying, Hey, find me an Apple Podcasts was like, Yeah, you got to search for Dave Jackson. And at that point it's way too hard. And so if I said, Go to a podcast rodeo show accom, click on the follow button in the upper right hand corner because you want to make it super easy for your fans to No. One share because 70% of podcast growth comes from people telling their friends people always worried about what category should I be in Apple and I'm like Apple and Spot they're just phonebooks for those of us that remember phone books, they don't make you famous. They make you easier to be found in theory, but they don't actually make you famous. So you want your your website should be your hub this is if you know because people don't realize this is this is before your time, Brendan. But there was a thing called MySpace. It was huge. It was so big. It was it was amazing. I huge. And people, you know, like built their whole website just go to MySpace dot com slash Dave Well, MySpace is like nothing now. So before that, there was a thing called AECOM and they were musicians that literally were making a living selling their music on e-com and they never gave another single website and then com got sued and taken down and all those musicians lost their livelihood. So you want your website to be your that's ground zero for you. And then the tech talks and the face chats and, you know, all the other things that are going on around it. Those are your little satellite offices that point at your main website areas because we just talked about MySpace for 20 minutes before this show, literally. That was just what we were talking about that and rotary phones with Grandpa so. Oh, yeah. There we go. Yes. You get all pissed at somebody like, oh god, they got two zeros in there in G. Yeah. You wanted somebody address their phone number to be 11111111. Instead it was like 733000. Yahoo! Oh, good God. Zero that was saying, you had to literally crank it or something crazy. Like, the river is so strong um, my grandparents had a shared line with their next door neighbor. Like, they pick it up, like up. Katy's on the phone. I was like, wait, what? Oh, like, yeah, we have a shared phone line. We're going to say, fine, no, I just going to X about any podcast myths that are out there now that we know how many hours we got. Number one, no, one reason reviewers, it helps us get found. No, it doesn't. Ratings and reviews have nothing to do with being found. What they are is social proof. So if you have two shows with, you know, similar topics and this one has 100 reviews and this one has six, some people might be, you know, inclined to click on this one. But my whole thing is if you kind of have a niche subject and there's only two podcasts, I'm going to subscribe to both of them. So that's one but you hear in I ask somebody the other day, they said, Oh, I always ask for reviews because it helps you get family go. How how does it help you get found? The algorithm told you that, you know, like everybody says that. Yeah, but it isn't. The algorithm is based on how many followers you get within a 24 hour period. And I love this one. They started at factoring in how far do people listen to your show? And I was like, Oh, that's a scary one. But the big one is how many followers you have. And then I think total downloads within a period but ratings and reviews are not in there. People used to obsess over New and noteworthy and Apple Podcasts, and the company I work for is Lipson. We had a show not in New and noteworthy, but like when you open up, they always have those featured, you know, podcasts at the top. We had one there and I was expecting to get three, 4000 downloads a day and we got a couple hundred for the week and I was like, Wait, what And I'm like, No. I was like, I can't be right. So that's another one. If you build it, they will come. That's, you know, everybody loves that movie from Field of Dream. Nope. Writing a book. I wrote a book, and I thought writing the book was the hard part. No, getting people to read it. That's the hard part. So same thing, creating a podcast. I could fart into my phone right now and having an apple by tomorrow. It's not hard to create a podcast. Creating a good podcast, though. Take some talents, some dedication, some focus, things like that. So that's another fun one. If I get a better microphone, it's going to somehow grow my audience. What was your audience telling you that your audio sounded bad? No. Well, then it's not the microphone, but it's easy to do this. It's harder to realize that, huh? Maybe I'm not making people laugh, cry thing, groan educator entertain, and that hurts. So people would rather go by. I call that castration right there, just like I got to do something to make it look like I'm trying to grow my audience well, my favorite example of this is the Lone Ranger, I believe was in like 1990 something, but it was Johnny Depp at the height of his Johnny Depp penis, right? He was right out of the parent Pirates of the Caribbean and everything. That guy touch was just a blockbuster. So he's playing Tonto in the lone Ranger. And I'm here to tell you, they had the Happy Meals, they had tons of TV promotion and things like that. And that movie tanked like nobody's business. It's in the top ten. And the reason for that is it's a horrible movie. I know because I saw it and when I came out, I did not call any friends and say, You got to go see this movie. It's amazing. Meanwhile, fast forward, I think another five years. The Sixth Sense came out. It's almost an independent film. Bruce Willis, if you've never seen it, you got to watch it. But then I'm not going to spoil it. But when you get out of that movie, when you get in watching The Sixth Sense, the first thing you do is tell somebody, you got to go watch this movie and you have to watch it with me because everybody who saw that movie saw it twice, and consequently it made huge amounts of money. Meanwhile, The Lone Ranger, it comes out first couple of weekends not doing very well. So what did Disney do? Because it was a Disney film. They're like, oh, nobody knows about this movie. We need it. So they spent more money on marketing. Like, Hey, if you didn't know it, Johnny Depp's in a new movie and it didn't work. It lost like hundreds of millions of dollars because it was horrible. And so, so many people think if I just put it out there, you know, it'll be great. And here's a scary thought. Netflix cancels shows any like why is that so scary? Because Netflix knows exactly what you like. You think about that. They know what you watch. They know how far you watch through things. They know who your favorite actors are, and they put them all together and go, here it is everything you want in a show. And for whatever reason, if it's timing or luck, you go there and they cancel it. So there is a certain level of of timing and luck. I mean, think about it. Would we have really watched Tiger King if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic? I mean, everybody everybody would talk about hate. Watch. We're all like, have you seen this? These people are horrible. When's the next episode coming out? So there are those things I mean, I just got back from Nashville and there are incredibly talented musicians there that are bartenders and assistants and, you know, Uber drivers and they're all, you know, just having the talent isn't some cases the the winning ticket. You got to have a little time and you got to have a little luck. Sometimes it's who you know. Another myth is I just need to get on a network and that I've seen go horribly bad working in tech support. I had somebody they join a network thinking it was going to be this golden ticket. And not only was it not a golden ticket, but a they lost control of their show. So you had to, like, transfer your show to this network. Thing. And then the network went out of business and they had no way to contact them. So they completely lost their show. So all the momentum they had done and I would say if you want to join a network, No. One, if they're asking you to pay run, do not walk away from them. And no, to find somebody who's on the network and go, what were your numbers before and what were your numbers after joining the network? Because if the goal is to drive up your numbers, you know, find out, sometimes you'll join a network because you'll get access to maybe other people on the network. I know podcast one is a network, and you might be able to interview Adam Corolla or something like that, but realize you can make a network. For me, the biggest benefit of a network is having people cross-promote. So if you're have a network and you're all talking about whatever NASCAR, great, let's get six people that all do shows about NASCAR. And this week we're going to talk about Todd's podcast. All right. All the other five, we're going to talk about Todd. And then the next week we're going to talk about Nancy's show and you're all cross promoting it. You don't need a network to do that. You just need like a handshake and everybody to agree. All right. This is what we're going to do. And in the end, we're all going to get promoted. That, to me is one of the biggest advantages of a network is being cross-promote it. So the other thing is, and I work for a media host, like, oh, I'm on Buzz Brown. I bet if I worked if I moved to you know, Captivate, I'd get more downloads. Nope. Because in the end, a media host, they all do the same thing. They have your file go from their server to your listener, and they all do that exceptionally well. The rest is just interface and extra features. But in terms of getting you more downloads, it's like taking a Corvette and putting it on a runway in Texas and say, Hey, wow, that thing when 190 miles an hour. Great, now I'm going to take that same Corvette and I'm going to put it on a runway in Arizona. It still goes 190 miles an hour. It's not the the technology that helps you grow your audience. It's the the content but again, that's one of those masturbation things for you. My golf, I just move to a different host. That's the problem. And it's like, oh, no, not really. Waymo Oh, I feel like I should have really access a lot earlier before we get into the week things. But if someone was interested in starting a podcast, if I now what would it be? The things that, like, why would you start a podcast? What are the reasons to do? I'll go through all this. Well, and here's the thing where some people don't realize they're successful. I had a guy come to me and he said, Hey, I want to start a podcast about Batman. And I'm like, Okay, because I'm thinking there's already, you know, be like me coming up saying, I want to do a true crime show. You're like, okay, because there's a few of those already. But he wanted to do a show about Batman. And I said, All right. And he goes, Yeah, I know there's already 8 million shows about Batman. He goes, But here's the problem. He goes, I want to talk about Batman. And my family has said, Nope, no more Batman talk. We're done. We've had enough of Batman. I don't want to talk about Batman anymore. So that guy needed to find a community where he could talk about Batman. So he started a podcast, got his friends, join him, and he was talking about Batman in the basement. The minute that guy put out an episode, he was a flaming success because all he wanted to do was talk about Batman and he was doing it. So I'm like, You know what? Forget about money and downloads. You are doing what you wanted to do. I wanted to talk about Batman, so there is that. So you have to know, you know, why? Why am I doing this? And then some of it is I want to be seen as an expert and it's a great way to do that. I do. It doesn't look like it, but I'm I do a weight loss show. I started it to kind of hold myself accountable. And I say at the beginning, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a trainer. I'm just a person like you trying to lose weight. And yet I get these insanely detailed questions like I'm a doctor, like, well, you're the you're the weight loss podcast guy. And I'm like, No, not really. So they're like, well, my my red blood cells are such and such and blah. And like, look, I'm new, but they see me as an expert because I have a podcast. So there's that. I see people that do that because they're trying to grow their network. So if I go to a CEO and say, Hey, can I pick your brain? For 20 minutes to be like, Get out of here, kid, you bother me. But if I go to that same person, say, Hey, Mr. or Mrs. CEO, would you like to come on my podcast and share 20 minutes of, of you know, knowledge from your head to my starving audience? I'll be like, Oh, what headshot should I use? What microphone? They're ready to go. So some people use that to grow their network. Some companies use it to increase their kind of relationship with their audience. So I remember Evernote, the, the note taking the note taking app had a podcast for a while and people would they have like a call in number and they'd say, here's what I did with Notepad today. And the CEO was on that show and the head technology guy. And how often can you send in a question and have the CEO of a company answer your question? Like that was kind of cool. But they ended up finding out what their, their customers really loved about their software. And they also found out because we were like, Well, can you get it to do this? And they're like, No, but we might be able to do that in the future. So those are some of the reasons why people start the thing. I always tell people, if your goal is to make money quickly, keyword there is quickly there's a lottery, you know, if not in your state, somebody else's, because making money quickly, if you don't have current audience it's just you can't monetize dust. And the thing people go, Well, I'm going to start a patriot or I'm going to go use Glo dot our FM. And this is where it's just soul crushing. And I wish I had a better answer, but they're like, Wait, I've got 700 downloads an episode. If I could get 50% of those people, just 50% to give me five bucks five times 350 is holy cow, that's a lot of money. Well, you're not going to get 50%, you're not going to get 40% or 30% or 20 or ten unless you're an absolute God. And when I did my research, 3% was what people were getting and you're like, Wait no, that can't, no, it's 3%. And there's a really super popular show called Radiolab, and I love that show. And they did an episode once where they were kind of doing like a PBS, like, Hey, help support the show kind of thing. And they were trying to get up to 1%. So that's where I always feel like I'm the guy that's just walking around crushing people's dreams. But I'm like, I'm just trying to let you know, you know, that doesn't mean you shouldn't go start a Patreon. I do see people that will spend 80% of their time trying to figure out what levels to use on Patreon, and they're not focusing on, Okay, but how am I going to get the audience in the first place? Because 3% of the people are going to use this. And I always say it's plan your podcast, launch your podcast, grow your podcast, and then you monetize and they're going planned launch, monetize it. And like nope, you skipped the great part. Got to have that audience first. And so and there's a a great website called Graph Tree on. So Grab a tree on Tron. And it's people that have turned on their stats on Patreon to be public. And there are people over there making $211,000 a month and you're like, Wait, why? That's more than I can a year. And you go in and then you do some research. Nobody over there is, you know, they've all been doing their podcast for at least six years. And that's where people like, Yeah, but I want to make that now. Mike And how many episodes do you have? Seven. You like that? That's not you're just a little just a little early there. Keep going. You know, Batman well and see, that guy is ecstatic. And the things I see that just ruin people is I remember once there was a person there like, I can't believe I have 300 people listening to my like every episode I put out, I'm getting 300 people. And that is amazing if you think about it, because there's AMF FM, there's Hulu, there's Netflix, there's HBO, there's Sirius Satellite. They're all these are the things people can be doing. And you have 300 people that is 15 classrooms of people that, you know, there's no spam in podcasting, right? I can't make you listen. You either listen or you delete and so she was ecstatic. And then somebody came in and said, Hey, we just went over a million downloads and it was like she was the Wicked Witch of the West. She's like, Oh, what do they have that I don't have? And why don't? I was like, No, wait, you were you were super happy a minute ago with 300 downloads an episode, and now you're like me. And so the worst thing you can do is compare yourself to other people. Consider podcasting like golf, right? You're up against your last episode and you're trying to do better than than that. How do you yeah. Go find I like these not not that I like them. How do you go from sort of full stop only working on content or figuring out things within content and then being like, Okay, I need to start working on this social media. I need to start getting this website as good as possible and well, first you need a website. So that's, you know, you've got bus brand that's not a bad website. You get that domain. I'm here to tell you, cooler websites dot com has really cheap domains. But when it comes to social here, again, one of the things people don't don't work on is your your episode title. So you have good episode titles. I did see that. But I see a lot of like Dave Jackson power our for you know March 16th that doesn't make me click and it's the same thing when people go to social and they go, hey, episode 27 is out. Okay. But if you said, hey, do you know somebody who you know, whatever likes the Beatles we talk about them in this episode. Do you know somebody that remembers MySpace? We talk about it in this episode. Think of your your social following is not as you want. That's really your sales staff. So many people go, and I wish I could hire somebody to promote this. We already have them. It's called your audience they already like the product because, well, they're your audience. If they didn't like you, they wouldn't be listening. So you want to give social. It's kind of like saying, hey, here's a marketing flier for this week's episode, and you want them to turn around and tell the people behind them that don't know you yet so that they say, Hey, let me tell you about my favorite show. It's Grandpa and Chill. On this episode, they talked to some guy and he was just totally throwing shade on this poor widow, you know? And I'm like, No, no, I wasn't. But you want them to tell their audience you're trying to reach new people. And there's a really good chance that the people are following you on social already know you have a podcast and they're already subscribed. So we got to get them to tell their friends on why they should listen to your show. And that's another hard that's another hard question to answer. Why should somebody listen to your show? Here's the funny part about all that, Dave, is none of us use social media in our personal lives. Yeah, yeah. I'm not wrong about that. Right? I know. I don't. I know Grandpa doesn't, but and we we it. The good news is you are a lot less distracted the rest of the world. That's not a bad thing, really, because there's a lot of. Yeah, you know, you're missed. You're missing the joy of trolls and and people arguing over things. I always when I see people argue about politics on social media, they're like, you know what? Or something like, I bet you won't even say you support the troops. And I was like, I'm always thinking, did you think that last remark was going to be the the thing that completely changed the person's mind? They're like, you know, let's go, Brandon. Oh, you know what? I've totally changed my you know what? You made me think about that, and now I'm a bigot. Yeah, it's I guess I didn't I didn't have social media. I mean, I haven't through that whole thing. And for about two months, I thought everybody was just being really supportive to me on the street. I was very confused as to what was going on but. Yeah, yeah, but so we have we have dedicated socials for the show and Sierra Sierra comes up with the name title. She is really incredible at that. And then our social media. But it's hard to launch a social media if you don't have a personal account with thousands of friends where you're like, you know, you know what you do. You go, hey, first of all, here's how you grow your audience. You say, Hey, I can see where we're at the whatever 28 minute mark here and you're still here. And first of all, notice I didn't say, Hey, guys, because I'm not talking to a bunch of people. It's not like there's ten people in the car with you on the way to work. I go, Hey, thank you so much for tuning in. I see where we're at the about the 42 minute mark. And before we ask Dave something else, I just want to take a second and say if you're enjoying this show and you know somebody else that would enjoy the show, could you do me a favor, man? It would mean the world to me. If you could just share this with one friend, that would be so awesome. You're probably listening to this on your phone just to swipe left or right. You'll see a share button there. And if you know somebody who needs to hear this and would benefit from this, could you do me a favor and do that? That's how you and I, you get this. If you watch Billie Eilish or Who's the Blond that is super duper famous and hates Spotify, God, I can see your face. I can't think of her name. She's dated everybody. John Mayer. She's blond. She used to be in country. You can tells no Taylor Swift. Thank you. Not only. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Spotify. Yeah. Taylor Swift. Well, she's she's rerecording her stuff, right. But Taylor Swift is another one, and Billie Eilish and both of them will stop their show, like, straight up there in the middle of concert. They're like, hey, hey, hey, I want to talk to you. And Billie Eilish is like, these poor 13 year old girls are all crying and holding up their phones. And she's like, Can you guys put the phones down for a second? I want to talk to you. So it's it specifically slowly and confidently asking people to share your show, and they do kind of the same thing. They're like, I want to talk to you. Are you guys okay? Because if you're not okay, then I'm not okay. But it's that same thing. But what happens is when we go to promote our show, we, we feel like we're in 1970s car salesmen and we're selling a bucket of bolts and we go to promote it and it sounds like this hey if you like, you know, want to like you don't have to, but you can kind of like, you know, if you have a friend or something, I don't know, like, you know, whatever you want to do. Our website is dot com and things like what I didn't hear that and it's, it's, and I get that because we don't want to we feel salesy and I'm like, know if your podcast is giving your audience what they need you're not, you're helping your audience. They're like, Yes, I can't wait to listen to this episode. When I listen to the show, it helps me forget the fact that my boss is a jerk and it makes me laugh and think and groan or whatever it is. So don't, don't hesitate to tell your audience and then have one call to action and that call to action should be go to grandpa and chilled out, calm. Everything you need is there. If you want to follow and subscribe to the show, you can do that. If you want to sign up for our newsletter, you can do that if you want to follow us on Twitter or Facebook. It's all there, grandpa and she AL.com. I call that a website sandwich because it's the your website. You're one call to action grandpa and Chilcot and then blah blah blah yadda yadda. Grandpa and yo dot com. The last call to action. The last thing that should hear is your website. Why? Because your website is your main hub and everything floats around that. Mm but it's hot. Hop back into the. So tell me more about the widowed life. Yeah, right. So no, I how do you do I get I deal with grief with, with, with comedy. So I tend to yeah. I'm the guy that's cracking jokes at the funeral trying to make everybody laugh. This is why you pick that episode. I see. Okay. Yeah. You know what's funny is we've had like one or two dedicated people in Germany that have been listening since very early on. I have no idea how they found the show. And that specifically snowballed into quite a good chunk of people in Germany that I tell anybody there that listen, you know, so I want to thank you guys. Thank you guys so much for checking our show. If you like Mitsubishi if you'd like. That's that's a that's one of the reasons I'm into podcasting. When I first started and when I first like a friend of mine came back from this event and he said, Hey, I know what the next big thing is going to be. And I go, What is it? He goes, Podcasting. And I Googled podcasting and I thought I had broken the Internet. There was one and a half pages, and I was like, Wait a minute, maybe I typed it wrong. Podcasting, Google go one and a half pages. There just wasn't anything about it. So when I finally figured out how two pieces part one together and I had this software that was super archaic and it put the podcast in, I saw my podcast download, I was like, Holy cow. So I took a newsletter. I was doing for musicians, and I started putting out that same content as a podcast, and people said, Wow, this is cool. You've gone from being words on a page to an actual person and my first piece of voicemail was from Michael Van La from Nuremburg, Germany, and he said, Hello, Dave, this is Michael Van Line from there. And it's like, Did he say no? Germany I was sitting here with my brother and he's like, Did he say Germany? And I go, Yeah, there's some dude on the other side of the planet, the fan, my show, and he likes it and it hid. Why? Hello, this is Michael Van La. I kind of like I can't. Hello, this is I must listen to a thing. 30 times I was like, there's some dude in Germany I can't believe a fan make my show. And then he actually likes it. And so I've seen people working at Lipson. Well, they'll freak out because they'll be like, there's got to be something wrong. And like, why? Because I, you know, normally I get X amount of downloads, and today I'm getting like 100 more than that. So there's got to be something wrong. And it really boils down to all it takes is one newsletter or somebody on a podcast or somebody on a stage speaking somewhere or some website to mention it, to say, I really like this show. And if you deliver content and people know like and trust you and you say, I listen to this, there's a really good chance they're going to go listen to this when they find your show and they like it. I hear this all the time. Well, people like, Oh, I found your show and I wouldn't download them all. And I go, You don't mean like, all right? And they're like, No, no, it's like 800 downloads. And I was like, No, don't listen to the first stuff. It's awful. Like, you know, but all of a sudden, if somebody if one person did that to me, that's 800 downloads in a day. So if you have 30, if you have 30 episodes and five people find you and they like it, that's the key. They will download your whole back catalog. And that's all the sudden where you get these big spikes of people yeah. Cierra, did you see the Gramps Jefferey numbers or whatever? No, I mean, look, we so we released an episode with this author. It was, I think it was our first other grandpa called Gramps Jeffrey. And suddenly like a week or two ago, we were getting ten times as much daily downloads just for that show, like 100 and then over and over and over again. And I was very confused and I was trying to find like an Instagram thing or what happened. I have no idea. But yeah, it is. It's, it's cool. It's really weird because that, that's been up for months and months. But yeah, I mean my first episode was out April 4th, 2005 and it still gets downloads. Wow. So it's supposed only 72 back then. I yeah. Grandpa, do you have any questions? No, I'm learning a lot, you know, as far as, you know, increasing our our watcher watchers on the show. Good ideas. I'm, I'm glad Grandpa has an idea of her podcast he wants to start on the side solo. You should tell him it's so much better. Well, I haven't really done anything with it. I haven't gone ahead with it, and I kind of let I had applied for a trademark, and I kind of let it lapse, but I guess I could still get it. I think it would be a good idea just people calling in and giving us, giving their complaints about life in general, you know, whether it be personal or their country. Or their city or their spouse or whatever, that could be interesting. That's like feeling bad, having a bad day. Call this number and kvetch right people. Just click on, click on the microphone out of the website or whatever, right? Just let people the fun. The the hard part of that is when you start off, you need your audience to chime in and you don't have an audience yet. That's one of the mistakes I made. One of the shows I started was called the Dates from Health Show, and it was me and my now ex wife. And we were at a table once where we're swapping stories about horrible dating. Like she had a guy once that she, he thought he'd give her a tour of where he worked and she went to the bathroom and came out. He had dropped his trousers and she's like, Yeah, I'm out of here. Thank you. And so we're we're just trading these stories. And her friend said this would be a great podcast. So we started a podcast and we each had about, I don't know, three or four stories. So that made it to seven episodes in the whole time were like, Hey, if you have a date from hell story, you know, calling this number, blah, blah, blah, well, we don't have an audience. So nobody, nobody was calling in because you know, we're telling all our friends. And then the other thing you have to realize is some people are really worried about seeing anything in public. So because I do this once a month, I have one episode where I let my audience chime in and I get a very small percentage. Luckily, I get enough to chime in so I can turn it into an episode, but I was asking people to chime in and I was asking them to kind of throw themselves under the bus, like, tell me about a horrible time when this happened. So it didn't work, but I would think your idea just, hey, if you want to rant, you know who doesn't have a good rant in them? It's a good way to vent for people to vent. And I think that a lot of people would relate to what, you know, their problems are probably a lot of people have the same problems or similar. Yeah. So what's what would be the goal of the podcast I guess just to give people a voice to be heard with their situations. Got it. Now, would this be a hobby or a business? I think more of a hobby, but it possibly could turn into a business if you had a large enough audience yeah. Because that's the that's the question because I have people sometimes I'll be like, well, it's a hobby. And then they do four episodes and they're like, I'm not making any money. I'm like, Wait, you said it was a hobby? Which one is it? Because if it's going to be a business, you kind of have to again go back to, Okay, who's my audience? What do they want? You know, that kind of thing. And then, I don't know, maybe you get a, you know, the final with and this is where if you don't have enough downloads, you can there's a type of way of making money called affiliate marketing so the most profitable way is not ads. Backed ads often don't work for 90% of podcasters because they don't have enough downloads. But affiliate marketing is where you find a product that fits your audience, which goes back to knowing who your audience is. And then you can promote this product like all my weight loss show I found a software app that I use. So no one, I can talk about it from my own personal use. And every time somebody uses and they sign up for the app, I get two bucks. And so I think I made a hundred bucks this month, $2 at a time. But you know, a hundred bucks is better than a poke in the eye. And so you don't always have to have your own products and services. And I don't have enough downloads to really, you know, a lot of times with ads they're going to pay you a penny, a download, you know, like, okay, I'm going to have a dollar 38 when we're done. All right, excellent. So, you know, that's sometimes where you can find an affiliate program that will fit your audience so the tricky part was starting multiple shows said the guy who has four is you think, Oh, we're podcasts. I have. Yeah, I have I have school of podcasting. I have the podcast review show, the podcast rodeo show and ask the podcast coach, you're the first person on our show to have ever beaten finances podcast. No. Okay. And then I have Building a better Dave, which almost doesn't count because I do that like once every two months. The most I've ever had was seven and that's when I went, I have a problem. I need to stop. I need an intervention. Yeah, but some of those I've probably started over 30 and some of them like I did one for ten years, called the musicians, the marketing musician, and I after ten years I was like, Okay, I think I've said all there's to say, you know, I wasn't in a band anymore. I'm like, all right, I'm done, you know, and then you just start another one. But the, the problem you run into is you think, Oh, I'll start a second podcast because I've already I know all the kinks. I know how to get into Apple and Spotify and all that stuff. It's a piece of cake. And that again, it's like starting the podcast is not the hard part. Getting people to listen is the hard part. And that's when you're like, Oh, I have 24 hours a day and now I have to promote two podcasts. You've actually it's one of those things that sounds like a great idea, and it is at times there. I know a lot of people that their first podcast was really just training wheels. Like they, they eventually kind of said, Yeah, I'm done with that one. And then their second show, they kind of had they learn some lessons from the first one and they applied it to the second one and it started to take off a little more. Finesse has three podcasts this moment, I think. Right? I do. Yeah, they're doing well. You know, we're not we're not following majority of these things. I was looking down this list and like, Hmm, I'm doing it all wrong, but it's good for the passionate part. I'm passionate about it, I suppose. Um, what Mike is, is to, you know, that is hopefully. Is that a blue yeti? I I don't know. Oh, you don't know or you're asking me. I'm asking you because of the blue. I don't have one laying around here, do I? The blue yeti is a microphone that shows the power of the Internet because somebody somewhere wrote a really popular article that said, look at this microphone. You can plug it right into your computer. And everybody used everybody uses it wrong because it can pick up what's right in front of you. It can pick up what's in front or back or in every direction. And unfortunately, everybody has it set to pick up in every direction. Then now you have yours on the stand. Some people put it on their desk. So now it's a good, you know, one to two feet away from you. And it's picking up in every direction. So you sound like you're in a cave. I don't know what you get my room. Yeah. So you have the windscreen going. I always tell people I, I try to get about three fingers away. Now, this, this microphone kind of pops a little more, even with the stupid pop filter on it. And then I pointed at the corner of my mouth so that if I talk right into it and say, please bring Pete, there was a good one, please bring pizza, pronto, I got a problem. But if I kind of talk across it, I have less chance of it doing that. And it's a most microphone type of thing called the proximity effect. And all that means is if I back away and talk louder, you can still hear me. But I don't have quite the same warm sound as if I was right here. So the closer you get the the base here it gets. And sometimes people get, you know, they want to get that cool FM radio in there. They're right up on the microphone and they're talking about, Yeah, I can't understand you now. It's just this low level rumble, so and that's just something it just takes I just got this microphone around Christmas and I'm still figuring out how to talk into it. Yeah, it's weird because after a while I just kind of learned that if you're going to get louder, say a thing with a bunch of PS and BS to kind of turn your mouth a little bit. And then the thing that this microphone does and I notice it as I turn away is it's it really only picks up what writes in front of it. So if I happen to look over here at my monitor, my voice gets much less than if I'm right here. So that's the but again, still not worth the 400 bucks. If I had a cue to you here in front of me, I plug it in and show you it's really not that much of a Dave. Dave, have you had any experience with ribbon microphones? I know of them. I've seen one. I was in a studio once with a band of mine, and I just know they're super delicate that if you, you know, send a bunch of wind through those things or you'll break up. Well, they've they've improved, I guess, situation that's good. Yeah, I understand. They they pick up a much wider frequency range, so you'll get much more higher highs and the S's and Ts will really be crystal I just purchased one. Oh, nice. Bad Widow is going to be listening to this and like, oh, they're talking about microphones again. That's it. She seri but to that point, this is a question that's been on my mind for a while is I understand what you're saying about specifically targeting and raising that entertainment factor. Right. But the the good intentions of that I learned through maybe the first 20 episodes for myself and we're still we're very early learning and growing is like the the stuff that I wanted to happen if I was trying to force things to happen within the show like this wasn't the platform for that it's too free flowing and I just have a better time like chillin out and then letting the flow happen. And I don't know how that's being perceived by an audience but it, it goes back to the Netflix thing of like you can have the perfect production of what they want, but it's not the right thing because that, that heart's there. So yeah, I'm curious what you think of like finding that balance of like that sort of just being in the moment with whoever's on and then also maintaining the thinking and you named like five other very good things. But yeah, laugh, cry. I think grown educator entertain is my pitch phrase. Yeah. So it's a matter of listening back and I understand it, you know, we're just keeping it real. But trust me, everything I'm not saying right now is golden. So the stuff where I'm boring I take it out because here's the one thing about it's like, well, if I edit it, then they're going to come back and listen to it. They're going to know I edit it. Well, No one, hopefully you edit it to make me sound smart because I say, you know, and like an arm and all that stuff. And there are times when I sound pretty stupid. So hopefully you made me sound better. And number two, I'm not going to listen. You know why? Because I was hear the first time I know what I said. And as long as you're not making me say stuff that that I didn't say, I usually don't go back and listen. I will be happy to promote it on Twitter and Facebook and say, Hey, I appeared on such and such. We talked about this and that. But most, most people worry about. Yeah, but what if they hear it? And I edited it. I'm like, yeah, they're probably not. And they're probably going to be happy if you did because you're, you know, your audience better than I do. So if you're taking out things that you know, maybe your audience just I'm tempted to say maybe your audience isn't in the microphones is what you're saying. Right? That's I think that's four times we've mentioned microphones. So we'll have a battle. We love you better. Yeah, we can take that out. Right. So exactly. So I think that's it. It's a matter of I'll give another example. I interviewed a woman once and it took her three years to finally talking to a microphone. And she was talking about, you know, what was kind of holding her back. And then about 30 minutes into the interview, she just dropped this giant bomb. And I was like, oh, man, this is cool. And I, I didn't make her say things that she didn't say. I just took that and put it at the beginning of the interview. I'm like, I don't want to have my audience wait 30 minutes to get to the good stuff. Like, let's take that question and that answer and put it here. So that's what I do. Sometimes I will rearrange because I just look at each question and the answer as a segment. I'm like, Okay, here's this and that. This is this is good, this is okay. We'll put this over here in the maybe pile and then kind of go from there. Got you. So you don't seek that sort of full control in the actual recording or taping as you're okay. Okay. Not because I'm going to edit. I mean, it's just if you think about it, Mount Rushmore yes. It's a Native American. Oh, what's the word? It's sacred ground for the naked in the naked, the Native Americans and the naked Americans. They love. Right. Mount Rushmore. But there was a time when Mount Rushmore was a bunch of rocks and then somebody did some editing. So I am not I don't have enough ego to think that everything I'm saying right now is like, oh, you must hear every word. I'm like, No, there's probably a bunch of stuff here that you're like, Yeah, we're going to cut that out. And here's that part where Dave went on for about 27 minutes on blah, blah, blah. I get that out of here. And the other thing I do, and I'm doing it now and I cannot stop. I keep talking to you because you're on my screen and this is video. I need to look at the audience, which is over there, and that's there's always room for improvement. So I am not a I'm not offended if somebody edits me. I kind of hope they do and you can keep the flow that way. Dave, you you mentioned in the beginning of the program that you're an electrical engineer. You studied in my correct about that. Yeah, I, I barely remember Ohm's Law at this point. That was a long time ago. I Ah yeah. Yeah. So did you ever work in that area, in that field doing. No. It or whatever. It's funny because yeah, about man, about three fourths of the way through my degree, I was like, I came here to be a technician. I don't want to be the guy that designs the circuit board. I wants to be the guy that fixes stuff. And they said, Oh, you can use this degree to fix stuff. So I was always a person that wanted to be the technician. I didn't really want to be the engineer, so I didn't really use much of it. I made a couple. I know how, man, back in the day, I made a box where I could switch a couple of things on my stereo to to do this and that. But the engineering thing wasn't really oh, my, my top thing. And then what? I kind of fell into the, the world of training I was like, oh, this is this is actually where I belong. And so my the first time I did that, I would go out and I was working with a copier company and I would go out and I would take my my technical skills to basically plug in the copier and make sure everything was all in alignment and blah, blah, blah. And then I would train people how to to run it. But more importantly, because of my technical background, I was there to explain to them how to not run it. So please don't put paperclips in this and that and the whole nine yards. So yeah, the electric it was funny because one of the things where, you know, I paid thousands of dollars for that education and I, you know, besides five years of math that I don't use, you know, I don't really remember a whole lot. I could help me get some of it, but that I bought this new microphone and I went to use it tonight in my mixing boards, not working. And I need someone to fix the mixing board check, especially if it's that ribbon microphone. It might need phantom power. That's not the problem. I can't get the the board to turn on at all. Oh, it has a switching supply and it apparently it's very complicated to work on. Yeah. Some of them have little fuzes in them. So you might be that you blew a fuze. Yeah. You know, then all the other obvious stuff, you know, check the, the cable and the outlet and have on your own. So is that your background? What was your background when you were growing up? Well, when I was growing up, I had a hobby of electronics and astronomy and whatever, but I studied, I went to business school in college and then I owned a company that made a pretzel ice cream cones and whatever, a manufacturing plant. And then I was in the same business in a different business it sounds fun. Yes and no. Some of it was. Some of it was. Yeah, Grandpa invented the pretzel cone yeah. Are you serious? Yeah, that's cool. Have you ever had this is Rosie. Very nice to introduce you. I'm trying to think of I ever had a pretzel come. Probably somewhere, so I forgot. You may have already told us where you have up. Where are you located? Yeah. Yeah, I'm based out of Akron, Ohio. It's about an hour south of Cleveland, you know, home of LeBron James and Devoe. Oh, so, yeah. Twisty. Good. That's all right. Cool. Pete Pablo picks petals. Atkins. I was trying to test the on my mike, but I was like, I'm going to cry what am I being facetious? Oh, yeah. Maybe. Maybe his accent, this is me is being facetious because I don't edit my podcast. I put it out there. Maybe is ego. That's. Yeah, edit all right. That people will care well yeah. That's it. That's it. You have to have a little bit of ego because if you didn't in fact a lot of people again don't think anybody will listen to them. Amen to that. Like who would listen to me? And it's that usually happens because the people you hang around with know the same things, you know, and you get this impression that everybody knows it. So I I've talked to a few people today. Did I tell you guys the best story yet? Now tell us. Okay, so I grew up I'm the youngest in my family, so I inherited it all. My, my older brother and sister. I inherited their music. So I was the only kid in first grade who who knew who Jimi Hendrix was when he died. So I inherited the Beatles and all this other stuff. And I was out with some friends and I said something. I'm like, Oh, man, what a total Pete best. And she said, Who's Pete Best? And I go, What do you mean, who's Pete Best? I go, The original drummer, The Beatles, you know, he was there before Ringo. And she looked at me, she said, How do you know this stuff? And I go, What do you mean? I go, Everybody knows about peace best. And she goes, No, they don't you. Where do you get this information? I go, I just. But then you think I hung around with musicians. We all knew we were the guys that were nerdy enough to read the the back panel of the albums back when there were those. And we knew all the details and the trivia and stuff like that. So I thought everybody knew who Pete Best was. Turns out no, no one knows who Pete Best does. So when you hang around with people, birds of a feather flocking together, you think everybody knows this. So that's why you think that your information may not have value, like, oh, I'm going to talk about, you know, prezzo I'm going to do the Pretzel Cone podcast. Yeah, everybody knows about pretzel cones. I'm going to do that now. Nobody knows that or, you know, starting a business or things like that. So a lot of I see a lot of people that won't start a podcast because they think, well, everybody knows this stuff. And I'm like, maybe not. So that's, that's something I've seen. And then the other one is just there's a phrase for it is called imposter syndrome. And my favorite example, this is Garth Brooks. He was in, you know, so Garth is, you know, Captain Nashville, Mr. Country Guy, and he's in New York City, not exactly the country music capital of the world. They hand him some sort of plaque for like at the time, he was like the top selling male artist of blah, blah, blah. I just the super insane number of records sold. And they made it like Garth Brooks Day and he was going to play Central Park and he locked himself in his hotel room and pulled all the the curtains closed and he convinced himself nobody was going to show up because it's New York City. There's no country music fans in New York City forgetting the fact that just told him you've sold more records than any other male artist, blah, blah, blah. Now in Garth said he's like, now nobody's going to show up. And so finally, you know, so many hours come by. It's a couple of hours till the the thing and his wife is like, I'm going to go look. And he's like, no, no, don't don't look. I don't want to see. I don't want to know. And she's like, no, I'm going to go look. So she comes back and she's like, Garth, you're not going to believe it. He goes, Nobody's going to show up, right? She's like, No, no. She's like, you know, there's actually she's I talked to this guy and there's like 845,000 people. Here's our 84. It was a large number of people are here 45 minutes ago. And he goes, Wait, you're telling me there's that many people? And she goes, No, I'm telling you there were that many people. 45 minutes ago. They just had to move the barricades back because they're running out of room in Central Park. So everybody thinks that nobody will listen to me, even Garth Brooks or Dennis Miller. I'm telling some other ones that I've run into. The people have just had tons of success and they still have this you know, mental block that, you know, maybe I have talent. Maybe people actually want to listen to me. So you need a little bit of ego. Just admit I'm sorry. Sorry. Go ahead. We're off the subject a little bit. You're probably aware that there's been a resurgence of vinyl records and now it looks like CDs. Yeah. Where do you think the business is going with respect? To those two items? Yeah, it's interesting because part of me think it's like it's a fad. It's a novelty. I mean, I've got bookcases full of CDs. I used to have vinyl, and then one day I was just like I kept moving and I was like, I'm not listening to these things anymore. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in like, I don't know, five years because I can't I mean, I have tons of CDs. I never listen to them because I have Spotify, and every CD I own is on Spotify. And if I want to listen to it, I type it in Spotify. I does a thing where every week they're like, Hey, based on what you just listen to, here's a bunch of new stuff you might want to check out, and it's actually really good. Rarely do I get a list that I go, Oh, that was that whole thing. Was awful. So it'll be interesting to to see it does make me kind of scratch my head. And because I. For me, the. The people that talk about how vinyl sounds warmer and things like that, I'm like, we're listening to things in earbuds, you know? I mean, like what are these people listening to that's going to pick up the differences in the fidelity and the different. So it's, it's surprising. And I like it because it's like, well, that doesn't make sense or anything. It doesn't make sense. I like to kind of look at and go, okay, what's, what's the draw here? Why are people doing this? So it's interesting I guess people are suggesting I Yeah, I think so. I think it's one of those things where because I don't know about you. I mean, I kind of when I hear a vinyl record, I hear static. People like, oh, it sounds so much warmer. And I'm like, I never put on a CD and thought, wow, that sounds cold. In fact, I actually heard the opposite it. I think what it is, is maybe the the higher end, the, the more treble end of the spectrum kind of came out better than vinyl. But to me, I was like, yeah, those symbols sound really great now. So I'm like, why would I, why would I want to listen to something and think of it like? But they've been told I think I think sometimes influencers especially can say things probably because they're getting paid and not not letting people know that, which is against the FTC. And, you know, if they say, you know, Kim Kardashian says this is the new best thing and I love it, it's great. They're going to be a number of people that are going to believe that because, well, she's at it and you know, she's she's this guru or whatever. And then, you know, I follow everything she does because I want to be just like her. So I wonder because for me, when I listen to vinyl, I go, I don't I'm missing something somewhere. It doesn't sound bad to me. I don't hear much of a difference when I seek a particular subject on on a smart television. Let's say I want to find out something about any particular subject. There's usually a lot of a lot of different articles that I can pull up. And there's also usually two advertisements, one that maybe will last 5 seconds and another one that lasts 30 seconds that you have to you have to listen to in order to get to the subject matter that you really interested in. And I'm just wondering how that revenue or business compares with the podcast business. Well, I see people in podcasting. It's and it's a weird strategy and that is I'm going to make my podcast awful for my audience by just cramming a bunch of ads into it because I don't know about you. I don't wake up and go, Hey, when is that ShamWow commercial coming back on? I love that thing. It's like we don't really like commercials. And so I see people like I just Adam Curry, who was the one of the guys that invented podcasting, was on Glenn Beck. I had kind of forgotten about Glenn Beck back in the day. I used to listen to him on the radio every now and then. I was like, Oh, well, in. Tune back in and see what Glenn is up to. And Glenn's podcast, I could not. I listen to one episode and I want to go back and do a study and see how much of his actual show was his show, because there was a huge amount of commercials in that thing. The DriveTime guy in Cleveland, I mean, he was like the top drive time guy. When I downloaded the first hour of his podcast, it was I want to say 37 minutes. And I went, Wait, were the other 23 minutes? And I was like, Oh, it's the ads. So it's weird when people do that, but then they will turn around and say, Well, you can get this one for free, or if you want the ad free version, just go over here and use chloroform or whatever it is. So it's it's a weird strategy that you kind of, you know, I'm going to put out a product that's kind of annoying, but it's, it's so I annoy you enough to, you know, YouTube does that I pay my ten bucks a month because any time I log in under a different YouTube log in and I'm not on my premium account I get smacked in the face so hard with ads. And I was like, oh, holy cow, stop it. I'm drowning in ads. But that worked because there was just a time when I was like, I can't take another ad, what is it, ten bucks a month? Fine. Hulu does that. Hulu has I think you pay another six bucks a month to get it without ads. And I will actually, I have YouTube TV that I use kind of for live TV, but it does record some shows. But there are times when I'll see that I record a show on YouTube TV and I will go over to Hulu to watch it without ads. Even because Hulu has a thing like if it's been a day or two, it'll be on their account and I will. It's a much better experience to watch it on Hulu. So it's one of those things that for me especially like I have ads on my podcast on occasion, but there are things that no one I've used so I can talk about them from my firsthand experience and they fit my audience. My podcast audiences are podcasters or wannabe podcasters, so I've had things like a different mixer. I've had microphones and I had one that I had to do a survey had a guy that teaches people how to launch a book, and so I put out a survey to my my membership site and to my general newsletter, and I said, How many of you are thinking of writing a book in the next year? And about 85% of my audience is in the middle of writing a book. And I was like, Okay, that fits my audience because it wasn't a Oh, that fits. I was like, But once I saw that, I was like, Okay, because I don't want to talk about launching a book if nobody is launching a book. So I think of the ads fit. They're not quite as annoying. I used to listen to a podcast and it was something about websites or internet, and the show itself was actually kind of weird and it wasn't that good. It's one of those where they start off the show talking about French toast recipes and the weather, and you're like, Can we get to the Internet stuff? And but their ads were amazing. Their ads always had these weird products that were super cool and super niche. And I would actually listen to the ads a little bit like the Super Bowl. I was like, I'm just tuning in for the ads and that was that was an interesting experience. So I think that's that's part of it. There is a type of advertising called programmatic, and what this is is, it is this is where you get into like the Progressive Insurance and the Home Depot, these big, huge brands. And they just want to keep their brand out there. And in some cases, you can actually get these will automatically you go into your file and you say, put an ad here and put an ad here, and they will just stitch them in and then but when I did that, when I did my research, I was getting paid.001 $0.07 per download. So it was like, you know, a dollar 74,000 downloads. And I was like, that's a lot, not a lot of work. But it was like and then there's you always have that weird thing where what if you're doing a show that's, you know, a political show and it's pretty far left and all of a sudden some giant right guy comes on. You know, you don't really have a lot of control over the ads and things like that or maybe you're doing a religious show and all of a sudden alcohol or, you know, marijuana store comes off way. That doesn't fit my audience. So I'm not anti dynamic content. My favorite is taking the dynamic content to and talking about my stuff instead of having progressive insurance or things like that. We only have 5 minutes left. I really want sort of a quick rundown of your specific tips for us or things that we could take away or things that I would just write in a notebook that would help us in the next year or whatever. Yeah, no one get that domain yeah. I got to do it. That's going to be really nice because someone stole it. Just going to steal it. Yes. I was going to say. Yeah, yeah. So if you don't have a domain place, cooler websites dot com is a place I use. They have really cheap stuff. Then I would figure out who your audience is because if you have a wide even if it was think about this. If I did a show about blues music, just blues music that could be electric blues. It could be Robert Johnson and an out of tune guitar from the thirties Delta Blues, and then you've got, you know, rock blues. And so something of that is going to probably tune out the, you know, a listener. I always give the example. Jordan Harbinger does a show that gets hundreds of thousands of downloads per episode, and it looks like Jordan is talking about anything because he'll have an astronaut on and then he'll have Kobe Bryant, and then he'll have somebody else but they're all through the lens of critical thinking. Everybody on there is geared to help you think smarter and kind of step back and look at yourself. So it looks like he's talking about everything, but it's all through critical thinking. So you just have to remember, like, you know, you think, oh, we talked about the I think her name was Alison was Alison and White Penny. Yeah. So, you know, so who is going to now that's that's a beneficial show, right? Because we've all somebody who's going to die in our life. So that's beneficial information. I saw something about how to ask for help. So it looks like most of your stuff was about how to be a better person or get through life, which is I was kind of going, okay, how do I fit into this? I like how many, I guess people that want to start a podcast or whatever, but benefit your life through podcasting. I did have a guy wants to take a quick tangent. I'll say this quickly. He he contacted me. He was he had lost his best friend he had lost his job, and he thought he had cancer and he had decided he was going to blow out his brains on Halloween. And he said, I heard your podcast that said having a podcast can give you a purpose. So I decided not to kill myself. And I credit you for saving my life. And I was like, It's hard to make Dave Jackson speechless, but that one caught me off guard because I'm like, it's just me in a spare bedroom, you know? So what else would you do? Get the website. Probably I need to. I only listened to the one episode and again, you know, it wasn't a bad episode. Just make sure that everything in there is, you know, valuable and making people laugh. I think an educator entertain and then get on social and figure out once you figure out who your audience is, like, I go to Facebook a lot, I go to Reddit, I go to different places. And if I can answer questions yes, I do. And and I also see what people are talking about. So that gives me an idea of what to talk about on my show. And then depending on the group or the Reddit or whatever, in some cases, if somebody says, hey, what's the best microphone for under 100 bucks? I had to say that. Oh, yeah, I can say I actually talked about this on this episode, and depending on the group, sometimes you can actually link to stuff. Other times people see that spam, but, you know, get out there with your audience and I always say to to grow your audience, no one forgot who your audience is and a crystal clear way. No to go to where they are because the whole if I build that, they will come doesn't work go to where they are and make friends with them. A lot of people like to skip that step because the next one is bring value to the conversation you have. So wherever that is on the Internet or in person, and then tell them about your show because if you skip step three of make friends and you just go to where your audience is and say, Hey, guess what? School of podcasting dot com? That's me. They're going to go, Who is the spamming idiot? Get this guy out of here. I remember before that again, it's going to date me before Facebook. There were these things called forums and I walked in and it was a bunch of xD JS and I swear when I walked in I was like, Oh, like angels. I was like, This is my target audience. These are people that want to get back on the air. And I walked in, I said, Hey, I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting. I'm sure you guys want to get back on the air and keep your chops up. Follow me to the school of podcasting and in 20 minutes they banned me from the forum. Why? Because I didn't make friends with anybody. They're just like, Who was this guy? He just walked in and started talking about his podcast and they just kicked me right to the curb. Real quick. So figure out where your audiences go, their make friends, and then tell them about your podcast. And if you're looking for that 10,000 downloads switch, let me know when you found it because it takes, you know, those two friends and they told two friends and they told two friends. So it is a slow build and that's why it usually takes around three years to to build up an audience. Yeah, we always do. Last thoughts on this show. I'd love to like just go around fineness lasts. This is really informative. I learned quite a bit. Thank you. I appreciate it. Finding finding your audience. It seems really cool and learning about your audience sounds actually just like just, you know, nice and general. Getting getting to know your know your little community sounds really cool. Appreciate that. See, I want to figure out how to start a podcast about the lottery because that feels like that would do what what? You were telling me that you make a lot of downloads and money at the same time. I just I think I can do both. There you go. You're helping. Thank you, David. Dave. Yeah, Grandpa. Dave, I been very interested in your very career, and and I've learned a lot from from listening to you. I think that Brandon and and Ciara and finalists and myself will be able to hopefully improve our show and get a larger audience come from what we've learned from you. Thank you, Sierra. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. This was really interesting, and it really gives me a lot to think about and a whole lot more. I can hear you looking forward. What? Damn down here. All right, thank you so much for coming so this is very helpful. And it gave me a lot to think about. And I have a lot of ideas about like literally everything you've been talking about from editing, planning guests are our show direction. Well, yeah. The one thing you guys did can can we can we talk real here? Can you know, this is coming from a place of love, right? Yes. When you say show up at six 30 and I scramble and get dinner ready and did it and I rush back here to get ready at six 30 and you guys don't show up till six 45. That is not a good first impression. And even in the message you sent me and said, Hey, you might be in the green room for a while because we might have technical difficulties. And I get that. That's like the truth. But there's like, hey, you guys got like, you know, 50 episodes out. Like, the technical difficulty should be behind you now. And the other thing you guys used to schedule that bombards you with free ads is try cowardly that they have a free version because whatever you sent me to was like, wow, I get the feeling I'm going to get tracked here. Because it was it was a I would try. Kat Kelly has a free thing acuity scheduling as a free thing. Whatever you're using was like, oh, this is awesome. So but other than that, I really do. Thank you guys for having me. This has been a lot of fun. And Brennan, what's your final thought about I had a thought about what you said before in regards to the niche because we we did used to have a lot of the episodes are structured around a theme and then we'd have like five guess, bam, bam, bam to talk about that. And it was usually generational or something in relation. Yeah, but but it's very hard to sustain something like that because the, the, the well is not so deep in that regard. And also five people an episode was a really, that was a large task for me to scheduling nightmare. And I, I, yeah, I managed to find people and I think we did it for like 20 or 30 episodes or something, but then it just naturally evolved into this. But I, yeah, I would say that I appreciate your honesty and I feel good about taking some of the hard stuff and some of the good stuff and stuff that I agree or disagree with and like just being able to have that conversation. It's part of why I like this show. I mean it's, it's nice well, grandpa remembers this. We used to do these things called dialogs where you would say something and then I would say something. And if we disagreed with each other, we'd go Hmm, that's different. And then we would be friends and we would walk away. Now, if I disagree with you, it's like, I want your job. Oh, my gosh. What? I just you guys are so awesome. Well, just. Yeah, you know who's a better singer? You know, David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar. You can actually disagree on that and not have to cancel each other. Yeah. Yeah. No, I really appreciate, because when you wrote on the thing, you're like, is this a really 2 hours question mark? I said I was like, zero. I so we might lose this guy, but she doesn't mean we did it. And we're still talking. We're, you know, so that's it. Well, that's when I was getting ready for this, and I was listening to episodes, and I was like, man, I've never been interviewed for 2 hours. I'm like, I'll be interested to see what this is and what it does and what the end product is. And I'm like, This will be a fun, you know, I'm always up for trying new stuff because there's only one way to know if a recipe is good, right? You got to put it in the pan and cook it up and then eat it. So sometimes you eat it and you go, Yeah, we're not going to make that again. And then other times you're like, Oh, that was we need to do more of that often times. Don't be afraid to. A lot of I have the most fun, like the last 45 minutes of the show. So maybe it's just so not selfish. But anyway, yeah. What are your last thoughts, Dave? We've gone through all of us. Oh, my last thoughts was this. This was the number one, 2 hours went by quick. There's a part of me that's like going I hope I didn't say anything too stupid because I can't remember what you know. I remember I said I was a paper boy. I was like, Does the audience really need to know I was a paper boy? Yeah, I'm hoping the whole bad widow thing doesn't blow up in my face. Obviously, that was just pointing out that I heard her say something four or five times. And again, note no disrespect to her at all. Yeah. And here's the thing. Oh, I hate to talk like this, but I always tell people when you first start off and you interview somebody, interview your kids or your parents, because somewhere eventually you're going to be really glad you have those. Like, I have my grandpa when I was growing up before we could open up presents on Christmas, would read the Christmas story to us out of the Bible. And he's not he's not around anymore, but I still have grandpa on tape. And so this is something that you guys can share forever. Like, Hey, man, that one time we interviewed that jerk from the school of podcasting, he kept talking about microphones like, you guys are making memories. You don't realize that. And to me, that is something at times that are more valuable than any kind of money or downloads or things like that. So that's another side effect of the podcast of the show. I think you listen to a giving podcast, bro. That's it. Wow. Hey, so did I think. Oh, yes, the nice is the nice. I would go, I got the night that is done the seven be. It's all our audio listeners that are curious what it looks like. Fuck, you know. Yeah, that's how we use them. That's how you get, that's how you get people to your website. Hey, if you want to see what that drawing looks, I go to our website at Grandpa and Jie-Ae maybe up by the time you hear this. On that note, Dave, where can they find you Yeah, everything you want for me is at school, a podcasting dot com. That's you got my contact information my social my 800 some episodes that please don't listen to the early stuff and it's old school podcasting gqom that is what you call a website sandwich. Thank you so much Dave for comment on that's our show. See you guys next week. I love you, grandpa. Love you too, Brandon. Great show. Yeah. Good night. Yes. You know, you were your