TechStuffIn this podtastic episode, Jonathan and Chris explore how podcasting works. Tune in as they touch on everything from how TechStuff got its start to tips for listeners who want to become podcasters themselves.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you Well. I'm still working on some really big and complicated tech Stuff episodes, and as a result, I thought that it'd be fun to take a listen to a really, really really old episode of tech Stuff. This one came out way back on November two, two thousand and nine, and the title of the episode is called how Podcasting Works, But I honestly think that title is not really that accurate. I think it would be more like history of tech Stuff slash podcasting Tips. Now. At this time, this was when Chris Palette was co host of the show, and we talk a little bit about the fact that Chris was also the original co host with Josh of stuff. You should know, which is just kind of a fun little bit of trivia, is that, you know, Chris had been one of the first people on The House Stuff Work's staff to podcast. He recorded several episodes with Josh before Chuck ended up taking over that spot and then the rest, as they say, is history, and Chris got saddled with me. We recorded quite a few episodes together before Chris moved on. He decided he wanted a career change and he went to pursue a career in library science, which is pretty awesome. And meanwhile, I've been back here helming the Tech Stuff Ship ever since. So listen to this classic episode How Podcasting Works, published November second, two thousand and nine, and enjoy today going to talk about some podcasting tips. We actually get a lot of requests to do an episode about podcasting, and.
We keep coming up with the reasons why we shouldn't do it today. Right today, we decided to do it today. We're like, you know what, We're going to get this out of the way.
You know why, because if we weren't doing How Podcasting Works, you know what we would be doing cantennis or tech conspiracy theories. Oh yeah, two other ones that we keep putting off.
Actually, just between you and us, we're not supposed to talk about the tech conspiracy.
Oh that's right. They don't want you to know, So let's talk about podcasting instead. Now, we've had a lot of people ask us things, everything ranging from what kind of equipment do we use? What kind of software do we use, and just general tips on podcasting, So people who want to get into podcasting, what should they do, what should they avoid doing? And a lot of the stuff that we have learned over the course of our what year and a half of podcasting, mainly we've learned through trial and error. Wow half. Yeah, sorry, Yeah, and it's pretty much been a year and a half. And yeah, and he's he's right.
Actually, we were one of the very first podcasts at how Stuff.
Works Yeah com and we followed Stuff you Should Know and stuff you missed in history class. Yeah, so we were the third one. Yeah, Marshall Brains. Marshall Brain has been doing one for a while.
Right, He was doing a podcast in a blog sort of independently from the group for a long time. And then and then we jumped on board. And actually when when I was the first Josh's first co host on Stuff you Should Know.
Right, So you've been doing this longer than just about anyone else besides Josh. True.
True, But it's funny because we tried a bunch of different stuff. We've actually had uh, we got we've gotten some comments over the course of the last year and a half, like you know.
Who writes this stuff? Right?
And the answer is nobody.
Yeah.
We actually, Josh and I tried a little bit writing some of the stuff out and that just totally we tried to test with that and that totally didn't work.
Just tech stuffs. We we outlined the heck out of those early early shows.
Yeah, all right, so.
Let's let's talk Let's talk about the genesis of tech stuff in general, and then we'll talk about some of the equipment we use, and then we'll give some podcasting tips. How about that?
That sounds great?
See, you know, this is the sort of stuff that we used to talk about before the show, and we would outline it and we would go point by point. We don't do that anymore, which is why we kind of go through things in a haphazard way.
Although I do feel compelled to point out that not all the podcasters here at how Stuffworks dot Com go buy that theory. Now, Yeah, in general, we do try to be conversational.
I mean, that's there.
Nobody's I don't know of anybody that scripts out what they're going to say when they come on to the podcast. But I think everybody pretty much, you know, just has a good rapport with his or her co host, and it's sort of a Okay, we're going to talk about these ten things. Make sure we cover this or that. Jonathan and I are just sort of looser about it, don't.
We don't meet beforehand like some of the other podcasters do. So yeah, everyone as their own style. We'll get to we'll get to style in a little bit. So let's let's do the history of tech stuff Sour our editor in chief, came to us. Connell Byrn, He came to us and said, guys, we want you to do a podcast about technology. Think you would blow it out of the park. You'll be super rock stars, that kind of thing.
And I had looked around and said, I'm sorry.
What are you talking right?
And I was like, let me go.
I want to do it, Let's do it now. And uh so we were told at that time that we were trying you know, this, this was brand new for us. It was not something that house Stuffworks dot com had been doing before. Besides Marshall's podcast and the this is before even Stuff you Should Know had started to publish. This was just before it started to publish. So at that time, since we were all kind of new to this, we decided to put some limitations and some parameters up to kind of give us a framework so that we wouldn't just flail around the way we do.
Now, let's speak for yourself. I flail pretty handily, thank you, Mitchell.
Okay, So the very the very first rules were that the episodes had to be around five minutes in length, and they were supposed to relate back to a specific article on the site.
Wow, that just makes me want to laugh.
Yeah, we don't do that anymore.
We don't.
We don't do either of those things anymore. Now. Now other podcasts they do, they'll they'll still cover specific articles, which is fine. We just that we don't have to do. Yeah, we're no longer required to do that, but we can do that if we want to. And we've done a couple of episodes where we've talked about specific articles, but fortunately we're no longer restricted to just that. So back then, we discovered very quickly that it was hard to get into a topic and cover it in five minutes. Most of our episodes were pushing seven or eight minutes easily, because by the time we were telling me the introductions, we had about two and a half minutes left to explain whatever it was we were talking about. Yep. But we also got feedback from our listeners that and the most of the feedback said, you know, I like the podcast, but it needs to be longer because you're not really getting into the topic. So with that, we extended the time to about ten minutes, right, We went from five to ten. Yeah, And so if you look at those early Tech Stuff episodes, you'll see the first few or five minutes long, and then the next group is about ten minutes, and then after that kind of explodes because we were told one day we came in and that was when Jerry was producing our show, Yeah, and she told us one day like, oh, don't worry about the time, just don't go over you know, twenty five minutes. That's probably that's probably about the upper length of what we want to hit. But other than that, you know, go as long as you need to go to explain the topic. And that's when our episodes really started to change. At the same time that we had the five and ten minute rule, we were outlining our episodes pretty heavily. Yeah, yeah, because we had to make sure we hit that time limit, right. We couldn't go over it, so we wanted to make sure we knew what we needed to hit. We couldn't just talk our way through it.
Yeah, And we also when we had that was very helpful when we had specific ideas that we wanted to hit in the podcast too, which we don't always get to In some cases. I've gone back and looked at my notes on a couple podcasts and gone, oh, man, I didn't talk about that.
Yeah, that's happened to me too.
So you know that it can be useful to have an outline, especially if you want to do that. But then again, most of the time when we do that, it's because we get so excited about whatever it is that we're talking about, and then we have so much we want to say about it that we just keep going.
Yeah. So once those uh, once, once the format changed, we we started to change our own methods, and we began to realize that the more we try too short well not yeah sometimes so we went to the German opera range. But no, the we began to realize that the more we would prepare together for a show that we were about to do, the less conversational it was and the more like lectury it sounded. You know. Yeah, it didn't sound like we had two guys trying to explain and talk about a topic and give it context. It sounded like the pre recorded notes for some sort of you know, technology lecture. And so we started to do our own studying at that point, and then we would just meet for the podcast and we'd each have our own notes. We would sometimes share links if we saw something that was really useful, so that the other person would also have access to it and not just you know, come out of nowhere. But then we would just we sit down at the microphones and hit record, and then we would torture whoever it was that was producing our show at the time with horrible puns as we talked about whatever the topic was.
Yes, that's a helpful tip that I would give you if you're considering doing your own podcast. Make sure to use plenty of puns.
Right, yeah, because Lord knows everyone loves puns. Oh yeah, Josh and Chuck are incredibly fond of puns. Yes, they like puns the way I like pie.
You must hate pie a lot more than I thought you did.
Hey, it's Jonathan from twenty twenty four. So when we recorded this episode back in two thousand and nine. It was before we had monetized podcasting, so there were no ad breaks built into the episode. That's why I'm here to let you know. We're gonna listen to a couple of ads and we'll be right back. So let's talk a little bit about the equipment and software that we use.
Okay, all right, So what do you want to start with? Microphones?
Yeah, we'll talk about the mic So we were asking our producers about the microphones. Because you may find this hard to believe, but even though we are the tech writer and editor of howstuffarce dot com, we do not have a database filled with every single piece of equipment that is in our office.
Yeah, that's that's true, and you know, sort of bridging the gap between this history of tech stuff and the equipment.
There are.
One of the nice things about us getting into podcasting in the first place was we already had a studio available to us because there were other projects that we used a lot of this equipment for. We already had, you know, high end video equipment and audio equipment and people who knew how to use it. So you know, you don't necessarily this is not necessarily the setup we already had some of the stuff.
Yeah, we we repurposed a lot of stuff that we had for other projects, specifically for podcasting. We are not saying that you need to go out and purchase similar equipment because for one thing, it's probably out of a lot of people's price range, none of my price range. Yeah, it's definitely on a mind if I were to do this on my own. But this is people have asked us what we used, so I thought we would go ahead and explain. So for our microphones, we use akgs and they are C two thousand B microphones. We were told by mister Matt Frederick that they are not omnidirectional, despite the fact that they totally look like omnidirectional microphones. But they're not. They're directional. They just have a wide angle or wide cone that you can speak into, which is a good thing because occasionally we'll, you know, lounge in a weird way and just talk toward the microphone and it still seems to pick us up pretty well.
Yeah, we also have a nice pop filter in front of itself.
Yes, we do use pop filters because we don't want to pump our pes. Nice. Yeah, we also have as our pre amp. You don't necessarily have to have a preamp if you've got a microphone that plugs directly into say a USB port, but we aren't using that. We're using a pre amp, the Applied Research and Technology pre amp, and we have one of those per input. We have got three of the preamps because we do have three inputs, although we have not actually used the third one yet. Yeah, Stuff you should know has used it for their healthcare series. They had Molly in and she got to she set in and joined Josh and Chuckers as we like to call him, or sometimes listeners like to call me Chuckers when they forget that my name's Jonathan.
Well you know Jonathan sounds like Chuck.
Yeah. We haven't figured out, by the way, which one of us should be more offended, Chuck should be more offended, or if I should. Neither of us are really offended, because you know, Chuck's a cool guy and yeah, and I'm not on his radar. So now, as for as for the software we use, we're using uh Final Cut, right, Yeah, so that's the that's the audio software we're using. We record with soundtrack, which is part of that suite, and then for all of our sound effects whenever we do soundscaping. Liz pulls that from the suite as well.
Yeah, we are using a Macintosh computer to do this, but you there are software programs for Windows and Linux both that can can do the same kinds of things, specially so and.
Matt Frederick also wanted to me to point out that his favorite piece of equipment that we have. We're not using it right now, but his favorite piece of equipment is called the Blue Icicle and you can plug and excel our microphone into this. It converts it to USB and it actually has a volume control on the device itself, so you can help control that the levels before it ever reaches your computer. Yeah.
Yeah, then the name of the company is Blue and it is in Icicle.
Yes, so, but he wanted specifically for us to point that out. So that's that's our setup. But here's the thing. Now, we're going to get into some podcasting tips, and one of the tips I would give people is don't sweat the equipment and software that much. Yes, that's absolutely not necessarily the that that should not be your number one concern because if you're concerned with having the most technologically advanced equipment and the most the software with the most features. You might have a podcast that sounds really good, but that that's not enough for listeners to tune into you week after week.
Yeah, I mean it's it's uh, as long as you have a quiet room, you know, something preferably without hard floors, and yeah, something.
Where you're not echo.
Yeah, I mean you might.
You might even try out a couple of different settings, especially if you have a laptop computer and something that you know, something that simply plugs into your your machine should be fairly easy for you to test a couple different environments and see what sounds good to you.
Yeah, you can. I would suggest testing up several different kinds of microphones maybe, Like there's some headsets that actually aren't that bad. They actually provide a very decent sound. At home, I use a snowball mic which works really well for me. It's no omnidirectional mic, and it actually I like it a lot. But I use that with my mat Yeah, and then a lot of you know, I would probably recommend against using a native microphone on a computer. I mean, some of them can pick up some pretty well, but most of them you're not going to get the best sound quality out of those. And that's one thing I would say is getting an independent microphone is probably a good purchase, a good investment.
Yeah, I think that that's sort of a very basic necessity. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah, but you don't have to fork over, you know, hundreds of dollars to do that. In fact, you can even get a good XLR for less than a hundred dollars really or maybe just over right.
You would just need to have the equipment to plug it into exactly, so perhaps an icicle or a pre app.
Or a a you know, an expensive board.
It depends on how many inputs you're going to want to use, too, because if you are, if you're going to want to have, say, get your your friends together and do a podcast with a bunch of people, you're gonna need something to handle the different channels. Assuming you're not all going to speak into one mic. Uh, it could be a little cozy quarters there.
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about some other stuff like uh, post production. OK, I just said, oh right there, that was an uh, yes, I heard the uh. Now, some podcasters would want to go in and take out all the uzz ums, pauses, things like that, in order to make a podcast sound more smooth and professional.
That would be really time consuming.
It takes so much time that that can take. Okay, imagine a thirty minute long podcast and then you go with yes and now you're going to you're gonna take I keep doing. It will take you hours to get the sounds of Palette screaming out of your podcast because you're strangling him repeatedly throughout the Yeah. So, concerning yourself with this, I think taking out really really bad stuff, like stuff where it just it bringing the recording to us halt, that's fine. But I wouldn't worry about any of the small things because it gives you your podcast a little character. People really talk like that. It's not something to be ashamed of. Yeah, and unless you're like some sort of professional voiceover actor or radio personality, you probably haven't trained yourself to take that that stuff out of your speech. I haven't, and I'm doing this as part of my job. So that's all well and good.
However, nice radio now, Yeah, I think one of the problems with that is, I mean, you sort of have to think about what you're going to do here. But I think that also makes it sound really flat.
Yeah.
I mean, if you were reading off a script, you don't have any ums or us it just it comes off.
As really really flat. Yeah, it doesn't. It's not very inviting to the listener necessarily. Uh So, let's talk a little bit more about some other tips. One of the big tips I would I would give anyone who's getting into podcasts is really, what's the purpose of your podcast? To find that, figure out why you want you know, why do you want a podcast? What is it that you want to say? Is there a specific topic or a category of information that you really want to talk about. Is there a specific game that you want to do a podcast about, or a specific television show or genre. Don't you know? Doing a podcast about practically anything sounds like it's very liberating, but it actually ends up being really frustrating and difficult to pull off. Well. It also is hard to get an audience because someone may have a real interest in one topic, but your next topic doesn't interest them at all because it's not at all related to the first one. It's hard to build an audience that way.
And one thing you.
Can consider too is limiting yourself more at the beginning, because you can you can always change. You think back to the early days of tech stuff, we had to we had to talk about a specific article. So we would look on the site for something that we wanted to talk about and then okay, we got a topic, a specific topic, and we you know, would riff on that for five or ten minutes. Well, now, one of the things that Jonathan and I like and I like to try to do, I mean, other than answering listener mailes. That's kind of been where we've been the last few weeks. But you know, we've we want to try to come up with something that's not on the website. But you know, we still are working within the confines of computers and electronics, right. But you know, it did give us a platform from which to start, because we already had something to talk about. I mean, you could say, well, I want to talk about everything, but maybe start with something you know, well, like video games. And then maybe you say, well, I like talking about video games, but what if I want to talk about board games too, so you could have a games podcast or.
Even like or yeah, exactly, I've been talking about role playing games. Now maybe I should talk about this fantasy movie that I really like and that'd be fine too. I mean, having it grow organically is probably a good tip as well, you know, don't you don't necessarily have to force it into any kind of any specific Hey, it's Jonathan from twenty twenty four. Again. We're gonna take another quick break, but we'll be back to wrap up this classic episode of tech Stuff that originally published back in two thousand and nine. So an easy way to build an audience, A good dependable way pay them no is to have a regular and dependable production schedule. Yes, if you publish your podcast, you know, whenever you have time, and that's it. And so it may be that you push one out one week and then the next week you have a second episode, and then it maybe three or four weeks before you have a third episode. It's very difficult to build an audience that way. People will tend to to lose interest and start to leave. So it's good to set up a schedule of publication and stick to it as best you can. And part of that that can be really challenging if you just you know, some weeks you just don't have the time to do recording, right, I mean, or you're sick with the swine flu. Yeah, so what what what we do is Chris and I will sit down, we record two podcasts at a time, sometimes three uh in one recording session. Uh, and then we do enough of these so that we've built up a backlog of episodes so we can when when we started publishing, we had actually recorded I don't know, maybe six or seven episodes total before the first one ever was released.
I think there may have been more of that. More than that, It could have been as many as like ten or twelve. Yeah, so they plus they wanted to evaluate them.
We wanted to.
They had other people listening to them too to see what they thought. And you know, they change, so, you.
Know, because it was a thing we were lucky they didn't have to. They didn't want us to change too much. I mean, they they gave us the go ahead to make them longer, and that was about it. But the yeah, you know, if you if you record them ahead of time, if you do, if you do several episodes so that you have a backlog, then you don't have to worry so much on those times where you know you just don't have the time to record, You've got episodes to fall back on and you can keep publishing them even if you had to take a break on recording. Now granted, of course that's only gonna work for so long. You can't, you can't. We found that out. Yeah, Yeah, we've we've run Yeah, we ran out of the backlog a couple of times and then had to go into some intense recording sessions to build it back up. We're currently I guess maybe a week and a half ahead something like that, something like that. So at any rate, the the best advice there is just make sure you've got a few episodes recorded, uh, and and publish them, like I said, on a regular basis, whether that's once a week or every day. I mean, if you're doing a daily podcast, you're probably recording every day. Anyway, that might be a little bit different.
That's like challenging.
Our episode is not necessarily timely. We aren't always tackling something that's in the news, although we have done that before, and we do a little of that on Tech Stuff Live. Yeah, we've got a live streaming show that we handle most of the timely stuff. We don't. We don't worry about that so much in this podcast, although we have, like I said, tackled some some fairly timely topics. Yeah. Yeah, so if you're if you're not handling, if you're not talking about something that is time sensitive, then you have the luxury of being able to record as many as you like before you start going live if it is something that's time since, of course that does change things. If you're doing something where you're you're discussing, say a show, a television show, and you want the episode to go up live the day after the television show airs, you don't have that kind of flexibility. So, I mean, it all will depend on your situation, but I do think that if you can, if you can established that reliable publication schedule, you will build an audience much faster than otherwise.
And just just as a comment, I sort of envy, uh stuff you missed in history class, because you know that's history for us. We have actually recorded stuff and have it have had it go out of date before it actually goes live because we're doing publication.
Yeah, and then you know we go oh.
Man, yeah, nothing like saying something like you know, android phone is never going to go to any other carrier, It's just going to stay on T Mobile. And then the next week you're like whoa, it's unsprint. Well all right, well you know that. Haha. We'll just have people, Oh it's on Verizon. Now we've some of them.
We've had to uh have our engineers re edit a couple of the podcasts, like go back in the studio for five minutes and sort of record a patch to uh rip out the old one.
You may have actually noticed a couple of yeah, because there's some of those just in. Yeah, we've done a PostScript where you could tell that we had to go in afterward. Sometimes our our editors are just very good at cutting out the offending bit and inserting a new bit and you can't even tell thank you, Lizzy, Thank you Lizzie. So, do we have any other tips that we want to give, like any other like just general tips about podcasting.
Just want to reiterate, don't get hung up on the whole podcasting biz thing, because you can honestly do this with a computer and a microphone. Just make an MP three of your yourself talking and making a podcast. Yeah, it's not it's not rocket surgery. I can't yeah, I can't imagine.
I can't imagine what it would be like to do this on my own.
Yeah, I think it would be harder.
I mean, we have people who record this for us, we have people who edit the podcast, we have people that publish them to iTunes for us, which is for which we're all extremely grateful. Speaking for everyone there, well even I'm pretty sure.
I mean, even just thinking about doing it without a co host. Then when it's just you and a microphone, that changes the dynamic quite a bit. O whither. Yeah, I don't know if he meant that he was gonna ditch me or that he was going to, uh, you know, he wanted to take the show over himself. Yeah, I was.
I was totally gonna start a new podcast called Stuff on my Desk, And because that never changes, I don't have to worry about it.
Seven episodes and then just rerun them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of a mini series. Those are our our tips and just you know, general information of what we do. Uh. If you you're curious about our process, we pick our topics usually the week before we record, and then the day of the recording is when we've end up doing research. Despite the fact of having an entire week to have looked into it, but we researched the topics independently, we come together, we have our conversation, and then we sit there and notice that we've been recording for like thirty minutes and then realize that we need to stop.
I notice the timers off.
Well, that's because my phone started vibrating because of.
The Oh yeah, there's a kick. Leave your phone out of the studio.
Okay, I have my phone set on airplane mode. It's just because the damn schedule thing went off.
I'm I'm telling you. I'm saying, don't forget to turn off that stuff. Actually, uh, we're not. We're generally not supposed to have phones in here because they actually cause interference with our equipment. Yeah, including phones that are because our studio is actually in the middle of the office and people whose phones are the people who sit just around there.
It can the equipment can actually pick that up.
Well, that's that's why I have it on airplane mode, so it doesn't I know, it doesn't say I'm stop a tip, stop persecuting me. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff. It's always fun to go back and listen to those. I was actually really enjoying that listen because I got to hear some names of folks that I haven't seen in years, like Liz, I haven't seen her in years. She was such a joy to work with, and also names of people that I still work with to this day, which is amazing you think about how much time has gone by, but you know, Matt Frederick, he's still a coworker. Jerry, She's still a coworker. So pretty cool to go back. I mean, I think it says a lot about a company, even though the company has changed around us a couple of times. But it says a lot about a group of people when you have a core of those folks who just stick together. That I think is a really positive aspect of any group. I hope you enjoyed this classic episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
