Tis I, Lord Podcast. Are you yearning to equip yourself with the confidence to record?
Elijah, the skilled podcast professional, is preparing himself for a tale of tools and skill that only a mighty podcaster may employ in one's podcast journey.
Elijah, I do believe that we shall teach our weary wanderer the confidence that they strive to achieve.
Shall we start a podcast?
We shall. It's settled.
Let's start a podcast.
Let's start a podcast, shall we?
I have the master of happy endings and podcast professional.
He's been here for way too long in the podcasting game, but still enjoys it.
Mike, the Hobbit?
Bicket. Hello.
Yes.
Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you.
I am excited to be here and talk shop.
Right on.
Nerding out on podcasts is kind of a luxury for me because all my friends go, what the hell are you talking about?
And my wife, especially, she's like, just shut up.
I don't care anymore.
So it's nice to be able to go back and forth.
Why the Hobbit?
Do you hide under bridges?
Is that a long time nickname?
It's a long time nickname.
An old roommate of mine, you started calling me the bobble headed Hobbit from SoCal because I'm originally from Southern California.
And that got shortened to the Hobbit.
I joke it's because I eat a lot and for a couple of years I didn't have a car.
So I walked everywhere.
But it has lent itself well to the podcast casting game as I do a lot of shows in the geek and pop culture area.
So having a geeky nickname is not necessarily a bad thing.
No, it fits with the branding.
And I obviously want to get to the podcast that you do and the GUI network, the cute play on words, the dad jokes that you put through.
I listen to a couple and enjoy the heck out of them.
I suck at pop culture, so it's really nice to hear things from you, Mike, about Axl Foley and others when you're playing Smack My Pitch Up and trying to do some mashups.
And that's when I gravitated to.
So it was fun.
Most importantly, I think people really are dying to know.
You started a podcast to get laid.
Is that right?
Yeah, it was really poorly thought out plan.
I saw all my stand up comedian friends bragging about how much they didn't get laid.
And I thought I can do better and get less laid.
So I decided to start a podcast as you as we're talking.
I don't know if the listeners can tell from my voice, but I'm the one on one of podcaster.
I'm a chubby bearded cis white man.
I look like somebody that talks about Bitcoin a lot.
So podcasting was a natural fit.
And comics, nerds, video games, all the stereotypical stuff.
Or is it any particular flavor that you really dive into topic wise?
I'm a pretty across the board nerd for the most part.
I aged out just before the Pokemans.
I don't do the Pokemans and such.
I do enjoy some anime, but it's a lot more of the old school stuff.
But Star Wars is a big one.
It's been a challenge in recent years to be a Star Wars fan because of all the toxicity and back and forth of the different types of Star Wars fans.
I've just gotten to an age where I'm sick of fighting like Star Wars, the way you like it.
And I'm happy to support that.
Honestly, that attitude has permeated through most of our shows on the network is the idea of defending people's rights to like things the way they want to.
We are anti toxic fandom, very inclusive.
And then if there's anything that's a common theme between all the different shows, it's that it's that you should be able to celebrate what you love without being told that you're wrong.
In any way.
But yeah, I would say probably Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, the whole swath of standard pop culture nerdery I am on board with.
Awesome. I started late in the D&D game.
And that's I love I'm kind of passive by nature.
So I get to more of a barbarian sort of style where I get to frontline just bash heads and have a great time in the theater of the mind.
I guess that translates while the podcast and more people are coming out with different crazy ideas.
And here you are just kind of posting in a great way coming up with the GUI network, the Geeks Under the Influence, which is awesome name.
And you have a ton of geekery there.
Is that something that just kind of came out of nowhere one day or you'd said, I got a lot of friends with podcasts.
Let's get together, create a network and then the rest of history.
It actually started from one show.
The stereotypical thing that happens with friends is you're sitting around having drinks, talking about who shot first on on whether he shot first or not.
Those conversations. And we were so tickled with ourselves that we decided we should probably start a podcast.
Other people needed to know how funny we were, of course.
And of course, it was awful to start. We didn't know what we were doing.
I had no background in engineering.
I've been on stage before as a musician, as a standup comic, but that was more in the creative space.
I didn't have to do a lot in the back end as far as the editing and the engineering of the of the stuff.
So it was all relatively new.
And we started with one room mic and one vocal mic.
And that's it for six people drinking heavily over two hours.
Basically, the worst format, the worst format you can possibly pick up.
And the first 41 episodes of that show, which is Geeks Under the Influence, that was our first show, is not online.
You can find a zip file on our website if you really want to be a completionist.
But it's not on the stream because it's virtually unlistenable.
It took till episode 42. We got a new sound board. We got some more mics.
We started taking things more seriously before it started to sound a little bit better.
We then cut it down to an hour instead of two. We cut it down to four people instead of six.
And we got old enough to drink less and focus a little more on the content than the party aspect of it.
There was still a little bit of that party element, but it was a lot more about the conversation and the community than it was the actual partying part that it started as.
The show itself really started as kind of our poker night, a reason to get together with friends and talk about things that we loved and celebrate our fandoms and record it to see what happens.
And as time went on, I learned more and more about podcasting, about the process, about editing and engineering and promotion.
And I fell in love with it. And then the thing that we didn't expect to happen happened is we started getting popular, especially locally.
But yeah, we had a decent sized, not huge, but decent sized, but very, very intense following.
Our fans really loved us. They bought the t-shirts. They came out to the live shows. They came out to events that we did. And it was amazing.
And as we continued to do this, a lot of our regular guests, you know, my friends that would panel with us to talk about specific fandoms, they wanted to start their own shows.
So I started holding classes in my living room, plugging my laptop up to the TV to show people how to edit, how to use different programs, how to's on building your format for your show.
And I made walkthroughs for people and really taught people how to podcast. And from that, they started their own shows and we developed into a network.
And then that network, some of those shows got popular. Some of we changed gear some and some people dropped shows and started new ones, you know, as you do, as you learn, you figure out what fits best.
And eight and a half years later, almost nine years later, here I am, not only with a network that we're in the middle of kind of a reformatting, but I'm also working in the industry, helping every day, helping people as head of customer experience for RSS.com.
I get to mentor people for a living.
That's cool. So do you invite random strangers to your living room still, or is it more of a digital sort of mentoring thing?
It's a lot more digital now. The pandemic definitely changed the way that we did podcasting for a lot of it.
There's still some get togethers. I have a home studio, home audio video studio, and there's still a lot of the people, you know, in the network that live not too far from me. It started kind of as a local thing.
So when we get a chance to, we'll do a live one, you know, or an in-person one. But a lot of it's remote. Cool. Just because we're older, it's harder to find time to actually get out somewhere and get everybody's schedules to meet up.
So a virtual is a lot easier to just pop in real quick and do. And with the hangovers now, it's really rough outside, especially in the winter.
Yeah, the drinking on a Tuesday night thing has gone down to maybe one or two instead of, you know, really going for it.
I'm a 42 year old man now. Yeah, those hangovers last days now. They're not, I'm a little tired in the morning.
Oh, so my curiosity is that you love this, but it's a passion thing. It probably doesn't feel like work and yada yada all those cliches, but you got the network with geeks.
And then you have Smack My Pitch Up. You have all these other podcasts that you're editing, co-hosting and going through. Is there enough time for all of this work or do you just find a way not to take shortcuts to be really super efficient
and maybe use a bit of tech to kind of help you get through those podcasts to move on to the next one?
Well, I think the biggest tool that I've had over the time of being a podcaster is failure. I've done things the wrong way more like 10 times more than I've ever done it the right way.
When I started in 2015, I didn't really have any mentor to go to, to learn how to do this stuff, which is why it was so important for me to be one when I started learning the right way, or at least a correct way.
There's always more than one right way to do something. I didn't want other people to have to make as many mistakes as I did. Learning how to podcast. And one thing that I did make mistakes with is overloading myself.
There was one point where I had five podcasts and a full-time job and helping run the network. So that was manageable in that I got the episodes out, but the quality of the show suffered.
The support of those shows suffered. I wasn't doing as much time posting on social media, doing all the necessary advertising and such to push those shows.
So I was spending so much time creating, but not enough time promoting that nobody was listening to some of these shows.
And it made me realize that there's more to podcasting than just the creative process. You need to make time for all of it. Otherwise, if you want to find an audience, you have to. Otherwise, it's just you're doing it for yourself, which is fine.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a podcast for yourself. But if you want an audience, you've got to create more time promoting it and getting the word out about your show than you do even creating the show.
Now I've made more time for that, but it's scheduling. You have to have a schedule. You have to know exactly what day you do certain things and make time for it. Make extra time for it because something will always mess up.
Something will always take more time. And you have also hopefully a forgiving and tolerant partner that knows that this is something you care about and is not going to be in competition with you over your time.
Which is helpful.
Yeah, very even it does your, your better half also call you a legendary by delusion or is that just something you hold on to near and dear to your heart.
No, she calls me delusional. I don't know if she calls me legendary. My partner Amy, she is my co host actually on one of our shows deeply upsetting.
And, and now my fiance, we've been engaged for approaching a year now we got the date and everything set. Cool. She's incredible. She's, she loves podcasts as well. She, she understands the value of them.
She's not as deep as I am, which is probably healthier, but she, she gets it and she is very good about making sure that I have time to do my stuff.
So that's why she knows the secrets like Mike doesn't like Rom Zobby movies. He's a good guy, but movies aren't for you. So that's part of the game, I guess. Just knowing those secrets. You have a great chemistry and it's you get to do something together.
That's really cool too.
Exactly. The chemistry is really the key for most of what I've done in my career. I mean, honestly, part of the reason why I have the job with RSS is chemistry. It's being able to connect with people, being able to understand where people are coming from.
At the end of the day, the reason why I started podcasting the same reason that other people do and really what everybody wants in life is to be heard.
Sure.
And so, if you can engage that, if you can make people feel heard through being a host and empathizing with your audience to in a way that they feel like you understand them in a way that other people don't.
With people that are reaching out to RSS.com and asking questions, telling them, I'm a podcaster as well. I have had the problems you've had before. Being a host and just being able to empathize with my guests or other podcasters.
You know, that is where you create those important relationships.
The relationships come from the local awards. Cautiously get to, I don't seem like a guy likes to brag, but I love to talk about things you're doing well.
Locally in Richmond, I think it is. You got some awards. Can you talk about them a bit?
Sure. In 2018, I want to say probably 2017 to 2019 was the heyday of the network. We were really firing on all cylinders. We were having multiple live events during the month. We had, I think, 10 or 12 shows on the network.
We were going. And it was the first time that we got recognized by an award. We were second place as the best podcast in Richmond.
The next year we won first place and then pandemic happened. And then so 2020 was kind of a blur. But then 2021 we won best podcast again from another local paper.
And we've gotten, you know, I've got a letter from a senator thanking us for our contributions to the community. And my joke with that is that it's like dick jokes and talking about Star Wars. I don't know how much contribution, but we actually do.
We do fundraisers for nonprofits and we normally offer our time for emceeing or involvement with some local stuff like Toys for Tots and fundraising and stuff, you know, trying at least a little bit to give back to the community.
Secrets out, Mike. Senators also like dick jokes. Who knew?
Apparently. Especially Anthony Weiner. He was a really big fan of those.
That's a perfect last name too. Awesome.
Yeah, right. Yeah. But yeah, we've been written up in a couple articles here and there and gotten awards. The thing that I'm actually excited about that more than the award. I mean, yes, it's cool to have awards on your wall.
I'm not going to be like that's rad. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But ultimately it means more visibility. And at the end of the day, that's kind of the important part is, you know, having an audience. Like having people that get you, that want to listen to you.
And geeks like street credit because that's not something we're known for. Known for book smarts, right? So to have that street knowledge, if you will, podcasting, it's kind of cool. And then here you are spreading knowledge as a master, if I may say, of the experience.
Challenge for me though is that at RSS, there's so much competition. Like you can Google hosting companies like a bazillion of them. There's Podbean and Libsyn and whatever Anchor, Spotify, Podcasters, whatever they're changing their name to. There's a ton. You can't control everything. But how do you differentiate from the customer experience standpoint, RSS?
I don't like being sold to personally when it comes to both customer support or sales. So that's how I approach the conversations as well. I'm not trying to sell RSS.com to anybody. What I'm looking at is if it's going to be a good fit for somebody.
A good thing is I have a friend, a good friend who is a tattooer. And when somebody comes in and wants a design, he will do it. But he's asking questions, are you sure? What about this kind of style? He's trying to make it the best version of it as possible.
Is something that's going to fit this person, fit in the right part of their body. Making sure that the longevity of that tattoo is there. They're going to like it 20 years from now. That's kind of how I look at it with customer success as well, or customer support.
Is that when somebody is looking to onboard, I want to make sure that we have the tools necessary for the long game. That in five years, they're still doing the show and they have the tools they need to continue doing it. That they're going to continue to be happy with the service.
That might be something another service has that a certain podcast needs that we don't have. That's the nature of the beast. Different hosting providers have different tools available or focus on different things. I think we have a pretty good selection of tools for both the beginner and advanced users.
Especially because of our adoption of Podcasting 2.0, which is a measure to try to improve accessibility and tools for podcasters through different tags available on the actual RSS feed.
Stuff like Value for Value, where on certain apps listeners can actually tip the podcaster. There's also Transcripts and Soundbytes and Text and all sorts of different types of tools that are now available.
A lot of which haven't even been popularly adopted within the industry, but we are trying to add as many as possible and implement them automatically into our system so that both the advanced user and the basic user can use them.
Transcripts is really important for both search engine optimization, but also for people at different levels of audio accessibility. Somebody that has difficulty hearing may want to know about what you're talking about.
But if they don't have a transcript or some sort of subtitle to go with, they're not going to be able to access that information. So, Transcripts are immensely important and we give them free with your account. It just comes with you push a button and it takes a few minutes to 15 minutes because there's both the fast, medium and slower version.
The slower version being the more accurate version of Transcripts that we offer everybody along with YouTube audiograms that we can make so that you can put an audio version of your show on YouTube with your little graphics and the little sound bar at the bottom.
But that's also incorporating our chapters feature, which is another 2.0 option where chapters you can put different album art basically at different timestamps throughout your show.
On podcast apps like Spotify, they'll pop up. You know, a lot of those apps have the little album cover space. The pictures will change as the episode goes as it hits those marks, but also on the audiograms on YouTube, the pictures will change at the different marks. So you could put five or a thousand different pictures in your show and have them pop up at different points, which is rad.
I thought they were just text only the chapters like YouTube or I know Apple's outing this will be, you know, but you guys are going step further to change the album art every chapter.
We're fortunate that Alberto, one of our founders, one of our two founders, he comes from the tech head side. He was building podcast readers and stuff and giving them away for free on like SourceForge back in the day. And that's how we ended up getting pulled in with Ben to start RSS as a hosting platform is he was this indie coding guy that was making really cool stuff for people just for fun.
And so there's that very DIY, let's see if we can do it kind of attitude when it comes to RSS. So we got a lot of stuff built in house. We've got a lot of a lot of that. Let's see if we can do it attitude, which as an old punk rock kid myself, I love that energy. I love that DIY spirit of let's give it a try.
And it's why we have a lot of those 2.0 tools that when it does get popularly adopted in the industry will have already implemented it, it will already be commonplace for our users so that it will be more seamless for people using our service.
It's kind of cool because podcasting is kind of has kind of has that grassroots flavor, you know, that whole hobbyist underground sort of thing and then RSS is kind of going, hey, well, we're just going to do our thing and see if it flies. So that's kind of awesome.
Do you find that there's anything that you dream of if there's no time and money that was endless for for these guys running the show? Would you try and pitch something really cool? A feature or something you would hope that RSS would adopt one of these days in the future?
The hardest thing for every podcaster is visibility. You know, when I started in 2015, I think there were only about 250,000 podcasts. There's over five million now. That's nuts. That's a massive difference. And so there are just like wherever you live, there's a local band that you're wondering why haven't they gotten famous like nationally, internationally famous because they're that good.
It's visibility. It comes down to people being able to find you. And with podcasts, it's the same. There's podcasts out there that are probably your favorite podcast and you haven't found it yet.
And I don't know the exact answer on that visibility. But what we need more than anything probably is some sort of service for podcasters and podcast listeners to find each other to be able to like find the right show at the right time for the right reason.
You know, and another to point out tool that helps with that is the location tag where shows can now tag what location they're talking about. So if they're having a conversation about a serial killer in Boston or, you know, niece in France and how beautiful the beaches are, they can location tag that so you can search and find that show based on the location, which is very cool.
So for this podcast, I shouldn't tag it at SoCal because that has nothing to do with either of us. So yeah.
No, not anymore. I've not been in SoCal for a little over 20 years now. So that'd be a late tag for sure.
But yeah, it's searchability I think is the key is more than just show about dogs. You know, you need something deeper, richer search features. And that's something that is going to require a little bit more
of a synchronicity between the different hosting providers, you know, that's always the balance, right, with the podcast industry is that there's this wild west aspect to it, where everything's decentralized, which is keeps it safe from being overrun by one particular service or industry.
But also because it's decentralized, the names of different jobs within the industry, the different terms that we use are all kind of scattered. There's five different terms for the same type of job, you know.
And so, to be able to have that proper search functionality, we need to be able to start pulling those terms together and having, you know, just specific terminologies for stuff.
And that's coming, that'll come in time. It's a little more than a Tinder or a Bumble podcast, you know, you swipe left or right for ones you don't like, probably more involved than that.
A little bit. Yeah. Yeah.
Otherwise, it would just be swiping either left or right for 30,000 true client crime podcasts before you find one of a different category. I'd love that anybody can get their own niche out there. And that's a proof, a testament, a proof that you can just go and do it.
But there's got to be a line somewhere. Maybe you guys can control this whole saturated topic, or maybe you don't care. Just like, go have fun. Put your own spin on it. Because you're right. There's like 30 bazillion crime podcasts.
There's a bazillion. Yeah, we are definitely not the ones to make those, those calls. Like the line that we draw is legality. Yeah.
We got to be careful about what's legal or illegal to host. And we keep track of that. But as far as content goes, it's like the American way of like, I might hate some of this stuff, but you have the right to host it.
You know, it's, it's, it's the nature of this industry, you know, you've got to be able to create a place for everybody to be able to have their voice be heard.
But the plus side of that is that we also have these amazing shows that I've gotten so much perspective from. That's the biggest power of podcasting is, you know, it's intimate.
It's something that you get to have a moment with the host and their guest or their co-host. You get to have a moment with them, almost just the two or three of you.
And because of that, when perspective is shared, somebody's story could be a story of a single mother or somebody that's escaped in a disaster or somebody that won the Indy 500.
It doesn't matter. It's such an intimate moment that you get to share. It becomes personal to you. It gets ingrained in you.
And it's kind of an at home version of what Mark Twain used to say is that like that traveling was was poisonous to to intolerance.
Like that being able to learn how other people live and how other people see the world changes your own perspective and makes you better understand the human experience.
And and I've been fortunate enough to really have those moments with a number of different shows and other hosts as I've helped with RSS or other podcasts get off the ground.
While you're having a special moment with 200 plus people that you administer and you mentor, is there any particular place that people go to? Is this a paid thing?
Do you just do it for the goodness of your heart or where can people get a little help from, you know, the legend, if I may?
I do have a group like a Facebook group. You do meetups and stuff called the RVA Community of Podcasters. I'm based out of Richmond, Virginia.
So a lot of the podcasters in the area, like I said, I didn't have mentors when I started.
There was really nowhere to go. And there's only two or three podcasts maybe in the in the in the city. When I started, I wanted to build a community around this.
This is something that I feel like podcasts have such a great opportunity to build community by having that that perspective there, you know, that that the ability to find other like minded people or other people that can better understand you.
So using that, it makes sense to have a podcast community. So we've got about 250 members. I started this about 2016, about a year after I started podcasting.
And it's been awesome. We do meetups. We've done little little field trips around the area, like we've been able to check out Virginia Public Media's studios, like professional studios.
We've gone to like breweries or little coffee shops and stuff to meet up and just talk shop guest on each other's shows, help each other out, you know, answer questions that people have as they're getting started.
So that's that's a good place if you want something for me specifically, but also there's all sorts of groups like this bigger groups that you can find on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter, a place where podcasters can gather and ask advice, give each other a hard time a lot of the time as well.
A lot of big big personalities and podcasting. There's a ton of last point I want to bring home that the piece to resistance, if you will, the podcast movement.
There's a ton of resources on that website, but I saw some action shots there. It seemed like you were there. Did you have a booth or do you just go around and, you know, dressed up as a microphone or how did it go?
No cosplay this year. I was there with our founders Ben and Alberto from RSS.com. And yeah, there are a couple meetings here and there. But for the most part, it was a networking opportunity.
It was a chance to talk to people in the industry about what's what's happening. There's a lot of conversation right now about AI and what that has to do with podcasting, how that's going to change the nature of podcasting in the next even year.
Conversation about new services, new applications, new ways of approaching podcasting, information about how people are consuming content, which is huge to know how people engage if they're listening in their car, are they listening more or less at home than in previous years?
Are they listening to certain types of shows? That information is vital, especially when you're looking to start a show to know what might be the best way to engage the largest audience without losing your niche in podcasting.
The panels there were vital to that. Hearing heads of, you know, the big names of the industry, you know, people I would have trading cards of if they had trading cards that nobody else outside of the industry has ever heard of, but are like superstars sitting up on on there talking about ROI and you know, CPMs and all the different abbreviations.
Yeah, acronyms for podcast stuff. And I'm just sitting there just giddily typing into my phone notes about the different panels. But really it's a place to learn and also just to recognize you're not the only one that's dealing with the stuff you're dealing with as a podcaster.
You know, we all have those moments of self-doubt or moments of hitting a brick wall or moments of not knowing how to monetize or moments of, you know, the plus sides of moments of pure, you know, excitement when you get your first good review on like iTunes or something, or you get recognized in public or you get an email from a listener that said, you know, that this particular episode was immensely important for one way or another.
You know, those are so cool. And the bad moments are really great to get like cosigned by somebody else that this is just the nature of podcasting. Everybody goes through it. And these conventions are great for that for just commiserating.
You've been through a ton of experience. You have a community, you help other people, you're in the industry, you seem to have it all figured out. So for people looking to where to find Michael, I'll just have some great tips in the show notes. You have podchaser, you have the GUI podcast network, you're at RSS. And is there anywhere that I miss that people can hang out and say hi to you?
I mean, socials are all attached to the different websites and, you know, I'm on all the major socials. I think I even still have a mastodon account. I don't know if anybody's even doing that still. I'm babysitting on a few accounts until we figure out what's happening with Twitter or X, whatever the hell it's called.
So I've got a blue sky, I've got threads, I've got all of them. So you can track me down pretty easy. Just find you on the internet or like I'll have all the links in the show notes too. So people, I'm forgetful. So it's handy to have.
But I will say to you, the figure it all out part. I think the trick to growing as a podcaster and also just growing in any industry is being very open to not having it all figured out.
Because if you think you haven't figured out, then there's not as much room for growth. But knowing that you're basically a functioning idiot, most of the time, and just actively trying to improve your station day by day, just learning little bits information, learning how to be a better version of a host or an engineer or just a person.
That's where the growth comes from. And that requires a certain level of humility as well. You can't think you're on top of the world and grow. Because where's there to go? There's no room at the top to grow.
So the trick is to just always look at yourself as a student and not the teacher, even when you are teaching.
To have this experience for so many people, probably tens of people gaining from the listening and experience from you, Mike. It's good. And soon with your help, they'll be functioning idiots 2.0.
So thank you for your time. This is great. I appreciate it very much.
This has been fun.
Let's start a podcast.