Podcasts

I wonder what happens if you listen to a C&R podcast backwards.

 

Do ESPN execs ever pause and realize they once had Bill Simmons, Dan LeBatard, Dan Patrick and Colin Cowherd in their stable and did very little to monetize their podcasts?

They had a second empire and let it just walk away.

It’s newspapers and online advertising all over again.

 

But you see, they ONLY made millions off of those products, not eight figures plus. So it simply wasn't worth their time!

 

Does anybody here run a podcast? I'm still a newb to it. I record one every couple of weeks for our association and it's actually pretty fun. I have super rudimentary equipment, but I get some pretty good sound out of just a little Sony digital recorder. We record remote interviews through Zencastr, super easy and free. It's nice to use some of our interviews after championships on the pod. I've had a crash course in Adobe Audition but it was super cool to go find the right royalty free music to use for intros and ad reads, and the mixing process is pretty neat. I'd love to have a producer like nephew Kyle, but it's not all that hard to do by yourself.

 

Ha, Nephew Kyle is a good character, but he's a pretty lousy producer. There's a reason Ceruti is now also a named producer on Bill's show, and for the 1000th episode there was a third name that I didn't catch.

But, don't mean to derail here! I did a classic games podcast with my buddies, 250+ episodes, here. The biggest battle is just making sure you have a quiet place to record, and if you aren't in the same room, making sure the stream quality is good enough. Out of 250 episodes, the worst ones were (unsurprisingly) when I was traveling, and had to record from a hotel room or a seaside rental cottage with awful wifi. Once you've got a "baseline" for the room, you can tweak your audio equipment to your needs. Honestly, most podcasts don't need $500+ mic and recording setups. Record individual streams (so you can "drop" the audio from one friend, if he's got a dog barking in the background or forgot to mute himself), mix them together, and you should be good to go in 99 percent of circumstances.

Likewise with editing software, all I ever used is Total Recorder, which is a pretty bare bones program from like 2005. It was incredibly easy for me to cut and snip though, plus it has some basic features (volume normalization) that you can apply to sound files. For more intense audio editing, Audacity is free, although it doesn't have much a tutorial, so you need to know what you're doing.

 

Figuring out where to record myself has been the biggest issue. My guest today sounded awesome on Zencastr. My levels were super low for some reason so I had to max them out in Audition so my volume matched the guest's. Probably something to do with my mic level or the room I'm in. I'll play around with it and figure it out.

 

I always found it easier to juice the volume levels up, and then ramp down later in post if needed, vs. need to amplify volume after the fact. If you're also using an "area" recorder - i.e. a standard digital recorder, a cell phone - then I'd recommend buying even a cheap $15 to $20 plug-in mic. That can make a big difference. Even a gaming headset can work pretty decently.

 

I’ve really enjoyed “Hot Money,” a Pushkin production that has Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson digging into the porn industry since the streaming tube era. Fascinating look into how financing of the big streaming sites works, how the major players stay relatively anonymous, the outsized influence the credit card companies play in regulating what is kosher and what isn’t in online porn and a revisiting of the Playboy v. Hardenburgh case, one of the more interesting cases I remember studying in my media law course in college.

There’s been six episodes so far, but the reporting is so thorough and the subject so interesting that they could keep this thing going for dozens of episodes.

It’s the best podcast I’ve encountered in years.

 

I started listening to Smartless with Sean Hayes, Jason, Bateman, and Will Arnett. The guests are mostly actors and directors, but there are a few musicians (Dave Grohl, Eddie Vedder), and guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

https://www.smartless.com/episodes

 

Big fan of this as well. In contrast, the current season of Gladwell's pod is a tough hang. Between Hot Money and Against the Rules, I like the non-Gladwell stuff on that network much more.

 

Gladwell has a great podcast voice and style, but I think he does just an ok job when selecting topics. The first episode of his new season was beyond brutal, but the next two were better.

The Gist returned after a long hiatus. I like Mike Pesca a lot, but the aftermath of his fight with Slate has made the show less fun.

 

Will check it out.