Podcast Etiquette

Speaker 1 (00:02)

Hello and welcome to Podcasting Anything and ask me anything for all things podcasting. I'm your host Ben CLOY, and I'm joined here in the studio with Mathew Passy. The podcast control. Matt and I wanted to move the conversation beyond the Podcasting 101 topics and move into the intermediate to advance Podcasting strategy. To reach your goals, to interact with the show, submit your questions to be answered live, book a podcast audible with Mathew, or find the notes from today's show. Head on over to Podcastminiething.com. Welcome back to another podcast, meaning I am joined, as always here in our PMA Studio three. I know that would give you a nice ring there, Matthew. How are you doing today, Matthew?

Speaker 2 (00:42)

I'm doing all right. What about yourself?

Speaker 1 (00:43)

Not too bad. It was a perfect, like, 75 degree day, and you remember that you put up with all the bad days for days like today.

Speaker 2 (00:52)

I'm glad you got at least one of them so far this year. We had an interesting day where we were being threatened with severe thunderstorms, horrible conditions. The weather was going to be so bad that I actually went and got my kids early from daycare so that we could be home and safe when the storms roll through, which are going to happen, like right around our normal pickup time. And then nothing. Just a beautiful sunny day, a little bit of rain after bedtime, and a lot of panic for not do your.

Speaker 1 (01:22)

Bad storms come from the Atlantic or do they come from the west?

Speaker 2 (01:26)

No, they typically go from west to east across the state. So it's like we were looking at just one single line of storms that was going to come through, but when they came through, they were going to be really bad. We're not prone to a lot of tornadoes. I mean, we do get Hurricanes. Recently we've been seeing a lot of directions, which is like just a very quick, powerful, concentrated storm with like 60 to 80 mph winds. But the whole thing lasts like five to ten minutes. And so we were being threatened with one of those right at pick up time. I was like, why don't I just get them now?

Speaker 1 (02:04)

I never heard of the one Rachel until we had one go through Iowa. And I'm like, what the heck? I feel like in the last five years, there have been more like skeleton weather terms pulled out of the closet, like polar vortex derecho. These words I never heard my entire life until, like, the last five years.

Speaker 2 (02:21)

Man, I wonder if there was something going on in the world that would correlate to intense weather events in the last five years.

Speaker 1 (02:28)

True.

Speaker 2 (02:29)

I can't think of what it would.

Speaker 1 (02:31)

Be, but I feel like they're going into the archives to find words. I don't know. These words aren't new, but I never heard them use them to scribe like a pre tornado weather.

Speaker 2 (02:42)

They were exceedingly rare weather events that have happened in the past, but they happened once in a blue moon, which is why you never heard about them. And now they're happening pretty awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:53)

Let's go ahead and dive in because we got some really interesting news, and it's definitely a head scratcher of storms. Yeah, definitely a storm. And this one, I don't know if there's lightning, wind or not, but it's definitely a front. That's called a front. We're just looking at some dark clouds. We're not sure what's going to bring. Hopefully there's a rainbow on the other side of the storm. But news came out that Apple is shaking it up and inviting third party providers to integrate directly with their platform. Matthew, kind of break this down and tell us what it means for podcasting and as a podcast or what we need to know about it.

Speaker 2 (03:28)

Yeah. So this really is focused on those folks who are trying to offer premium paid content through Apple. Right. So earlier this year, we talked about that Apple opened up the ability for podcast creators to offer paid subscriptions. So you want someone to pay for access to your podcast. In the past, you've had to use a Supercast, a Patreon, a member for. Right. Like some sort of premium offering that you built on yourself or went through a third party server to do it. And then Apple was like, well, why don't we just offer it so now somebody can hit whatever $5 a month and pay you for access to your podcast directly through the Apple podcasting platform. Well, the whole thing was that you have to run it through Apple. Right? This was their thing. And that's why they kind of built out Podcast Connect. And they added all these extra features and bells and whistles and they opened up the stats and blah, blah, blah. Well, sure enough, today I get an email for a Press release from Libson, of all places that they are going to be part of the Apple podcast delegated delivery program that they are launching later this year.

Speaker 2 (04:29)

And I was like, oh, wow, good for Lips. And that's a major partnership. That's a really good deal. Some forward thinking. And then, of course, later I see the announcement is from Apple saying that, no, we're going to do this with a bunch of different providers. And these are really some of the legacy large scale providers. When you think of kind of like enterprise level podcasting providers, these are some of the folks you think of. I'm not going to be too disparaging. I'm not a huge fan of eight Cast, although they are one of the ones included on the news article from Apple, Art 19, who I don't have a ton of experience with folks like them, but I just don't know them all that well. Blueberry, of course, one of the real legacy ones, Buzz, brought a big legacy player, Lipson. We just talked about Omni Studio, who a lot of people probably don't know in the States, but internationally, they have a massive presence with podcasting. They're kind of like a big network platform. A lot of public media companies and radio stations outside the US use them to kind of create like a network feel.

Speaker 2 (05:31)

They were actually one of the first ones to have visualized audio players built directly into the platform, which was kind of cool. And for a while there, they kind of priced that individual plans. I think they brought them back. But anyway, Omni Studios and then RSS.com kind of a newer player into the entrance of Podcasting. But according to this one article that I'm seeing in The Hollywood Reporter, these providers, these 123-4567 providers represent 80% of the premium subscription listening on Apple Podcasts. So folks who are offering paid content through Apple, 80% of them are coming from these different providers. And now you'll basically be able to control, manage and take care of all that stuff directly from your hosting so that you don't have to go through and work on several different platforms in order to get your content out there and get paid directly for it.

Speaker 1 (06:24)

So let's ask the question that I'm left with sitting here. Will it matter? Will it work? Because from my stand, Apple still has a Clunky player. So cleaning up and allowing this integration of back end for something that in many cases, a lot of iOS users are exiting the podcast player on Apple for all their issues, it will it be enough to keep people there or even incentivize more usage of the iOS platform?

Speaker 2 (06:54)

I mean, I think in fairness, when we talk about people exiting from using the Apple Podcasting app, we are talking a lot about power podcasting users, folks who either are podcasters themselves or people who have been in the space and listening for the last five, maybe ten years. And sure, they've come to expect a higher quality, more feature rich experience than what they've been getting from Apple. And certainly the latest iteration of the podcasting app was especially clunky and a little bit difficult to use. But that said, it still represents a large majority, and it depends on who's reporting these numbers. Right? Some say it's Spotify, some say it's Apple, but still represents a large majority of the podcast consumers that are out there. And not that I think anything was said officially on this, but there have been some rumblings and some people who we trust who think that this is also one part of a plan to get the Apple Podcasting app on Android devices, which at that point, I think could be a game changer, because at.

Speaker 1 (07:58)

That point, they don't let the damn break. And if the other like I mean, there's a lot of like, Apple TV is on Roku. So the precedence is already set for these agnostic platforms to experience an Apple program and software. If that program and player were to expand. And if these issues with the app kind of get better as they do all those upgrades, what would this mean for an indie podcaster? Because a lot of what they did with the subscription was tied to people that have larger followings. So as an indie podcaster, is there any homework that we should be paying attention to? Like, if I host on Lipson, is there any strategy adjustment? If I'm getting 150 to 300 downloads per month, per episode, does this really change my strategy or is this more elevated to the big players?

Speaker 2 (08:55)

I guess I'd have to see what the actual integration looks like, but my sense is it's probably going to be easy enough to offer premium services. So listen, you're getting 150 downloads. Most of those people, they're probably going to stick with it. But if you could pick up 1020 premium subscribers over the next year or so and they're paying you, I don't know, call it $5 a month, right? Five times $20. Talking about $120 a month. Sorry, talking about $100 a month. That's off. $100 a month. Do that over the course of a year. It's one $200 that's in your pocket. The only thing I'd say you have to be careful of is that it does cost money to be a part of the premium subscription plan with Apple. So I wouldn't necessarily jump into it right away unless you're pretty confident that you have folks who are going to pay for it. And also, if you are able to offer some value, it's one thing to ask people for money. It's another thing to not give them a reason to pay you. So whether it's an ad free version, extra content, bonus episodes, longer episodes, you can't just be like, hey, we've got a show for free, but if you like, you can pay for it.

Speaker 2 (10:06)

No one's going for that. You have to give them a reason.

Speaker 1 (10:09)

Is there such a term for podcast? Clickbait. I love doing this podcast for free, but I'm now doing it for a subscriber and then just take the same thing over. That'll be strange. Yeah. The other thing that kind of hit me when I was thinking about this is just your basic ability to also collect payments, which is something like Patreon generally fairly good at. I think that's something that people rely on Patreon for. And if you're able to stay in your hosting platform, get it sucked into Apple and rely on Apple collecting the money and processing it, and somehow paying it back through probably like a Stripe account that could also lower the barrier to entry for someone to subscribe it, even any app that you download. I was just doing a few of the other day, they clickbait me on Instagram, download this new little cool photo app. I click it, and then right away they give me a trial for three days and three nights to subscribe. I hit my button. Apple subscribe to me in their ecosystem, I forget about it. They get more 399 per month on me. Luckily, I'm usually smart enough and I go in there right away to cancel it.

Speaker 1 (11:11)

But all of that happens right there in the Apple ecosystem. If it leverages that, there could be a case that this gets some traction and some legs on it.

Speaker 2 (11:21)

Yeah. Listen, I don't know if it's going to change what a lot of folks are doing. Right. You have the NPRs in the world that's creating their own premium NPR app, and you can pay for ad free versions or ad free versions of the show specifically through their content. Wondering does the same thing right. There's plenty of folks who've kind of already set this up for themselves who are probably not going to be making a big switch. But listen, the space is going to continue to grow. More shows are going to come on, more people are going to jump into the pool. And I think for those who are new, who are coming on, who don't know what is already out there, what is more convenient?

Speaker 1 (11:53)

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:53)

It's going to be very tempting to be like, I've got to put my show on Apple. Oh, I can get paid through Apple. Why not? And so I think over time, you'll see this grow a little bit.

Speaker 1 (12:02)

Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and take a pivot. And we're going to do a different kind of deep dive today. We are going to do essentially, I would call from the Midwest a Midwestern nice guy approach to podcasting. And so you're out in New Jersey. I'm not sure what you guys call it because generally people out in the east are not to stereotype them all, but they're kind of cranky. Do you have this term out there for being nice in a world where often you're known as not being nice, is there any type of stereotype or New Jersey, is that known for being a nice state, breaking the norm of the east?

Speaker 2 (12:35)

No. I mean, New Jersey has a few different stereotypes. Most notably is probably like the Italian mafia and forget about it or go after yourself kind of mentality. That does not truly describe all of New Jersey. But I would say there's certainly we don't really care what you think. Like we're going to go do our own thing. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem and quit being part of the problem and get the hell out of my way. Kind of a thinking. But yes, I think the truth is we don't mask our niceties. If we're mad at you, we have no problem showing you.

Speaker 1 (13:19)

Yeah. Out here there's a great YouTube video by a YouTuber Charlie Barons, and he walks around at the gas stations cleaning up people's windshield wipers. He'll stand at the gas station holding people's door to be this Midwestern nice, as he called it in that video and so I've often played on that because I'm from the Midwest, so why not? So let's dive into this deep dive which we are talking about. Why is it so important to be nice in podcasting? Because in a world that's kind of cranky sometimes in a world that often there's a lot of reason to be triggered on any given day. Why in podcasting or in business? Because this is generally one of one stuff. We're not going to reinvent the wheel. What are you finding out there, Matthew, when it comes to people are not just generally accepting that you have to be a certain way or be professional in this marketplace and you can't just say treat us a different way because we're podcasters.

Speaker 2 (14:10)

I think it is really less about being nice, although maybe you want to equate niceness to empathy, to consideration. What's really going on is I'm just feeling this lack of professionalism that is happening. And it's not always guests being unprofessional towards hosts. It can often be host being unprofessional towards guests, host being unprofessional towards themselves. Like truly what's happening and this is probably what eats at us is that you are investing time, energy, money, blood, sweat, tears, all those different things into this product. Right. The people that we talk to, they're often doing it for a brand, they're doing it for their business, they're doing it to grow themselves, bring in more income, better their lives. Like it's something that you supposedly want to take seriously. And I just think coming off of this pandemic of two years of everybody doing Zoom calls and probably starting to get a little tired of it and probably getting a little lazy about it, I just feel like there are folks who are not really showing up with their agame. Right. Not thinking about some of the obvious things that you should do when you're supposed to be dedicating an hour of your time to a specific conversation or to your own recording.

Speaker 2 (15:34)

I think kind of like the one big thing that I've seen happening a lot. And truthfully, it's a problem because it really impacts recordings in a way that I think people don't quite understand. So hopefully this will not only be like the nudge for people to kind of wake up and grow up, but also kind of be a nudge to realize, like if this happens, here's how you fix it. And so we've been increasingly using Zoom Squad, Cast, Riverside, Zencast, all these different platforms for remote recording. And the nice thing is that most of them you have to use a computer, but they're starting to introduce more mobile apps that make it possible. And people are showing up and their AirPods aren't charged all the way. So they get halfway through a conversation they don't even realize the next thing you know, like their microphone dies and now they're just talking into the built in microUSB laptop microphone. It's like the quality change is so severe and so jarring that it's going to be difficult to negotiate or people who are recording something and they forget to not just silence your phone, but really put yourself on Do Not Disturb for an hour.

Speaker 2 (16:43)

You've dedicated yourself. You've promised somebody an hour to talk to them on the phone or do this thing. And so if you really care, you would put yourself on Do Not Disturb. You would turn off your notifications. But what's happening is that people are either on their phones going off in the middle, and then you're getting, oh, sorry about that. Let me turn that off. Right. And then they keep talking. About five minutes later, the phone rings again. It's like, I thought you turned that off or maybe you didn't or whatever. But what's really starting to happen that's getting even more annoying is that these platforms that we're using our phones. Right. Like, if I'm on a squad cast call or Zoom call and my phone rings, well, it's going to shut down the app. And the problem there is like, yeah, maybe you can get back into it. But one, your flow is messed up to what really has to happen is you have to stop what you are doing and kind of restart that call because there's a good chance that you go to rejoin. It's just not working correctly, right. It's not going to record you correctly.

Speaker 2 (17:51)

It's not going to pick up your microphone again, correctly. Or maybe it turned off the inputs. I mean, a real example that we had recently was there was a call. Somebody was using Apple wireless headphones. Not sure which one necessarily, but their phone rings and their Bluetooth earphones go from connecting to the computer to connecting to the phone. They got to pick up the phone like, hey, listen, I got to go. I'm in the middle of a call. Right. They're trying to do the right thing. And then they get back into the call. And because the platform is recording. Right. Because you're mid recording on Zoom or whatever, most of these platforms are like, you can't change your input in the middle. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:38)

Especially the Apple AirPods. They're not going to like, if it was a hard input, maybe you could get lucky.

Speaker 2 (18:44)

Yeah. And so it's just running into the situation where, listen, I get it. There are some folks who are too cool for the time and they are giving you their time, and you should be lucky that you get it. But for most of us, whether we're hosting or guesting or whatever it is, just take the time, put yourself in a good situation. Turn off the phone, turn off the notification, shut down the email, silence your computer, close the door, ask somebody to watch the kids or keep it. But now I remember we were interviewing. I don't know if I should say who it was, but this was the CEO of a major media company. And we had scheduled a time, we had confirmed it, their people confirmed it with us. I don't even think we pitched them. I think they pitched them to us. And we're all excited to get this interview. And then, sure enough, the person picks up, we're doing it over the phone because that's just how we did it in radio. It was just easier back then. And the person is literally talking to us while walking, getting in an elevator, walking out on the street, getting into the subway.

Speaker 2 (20:02)

Why did you book this time with us if you weren't actually going to stop and talk to us? And then, by the way, even if you are talking to us, we can hear all of New York City.

Speaker 1 (20:11)

I could just heard the afternoon go by you right.

Speaker 2 (20:14)

Like when your phone, by the way, isn't breaking up because you're in a goddamn elevator or going underground. In New York City, we've had people who unfortunately, they were on a three person call and one person was kind of dominating the conversation. The other person took themselves to the bathroom, did not mute themselves. Yes, we got to hear the whole experience being recorded. And by the way, this is before people were smart enough to always record individual tracks. So I couldn't really get rid of it from the recording. It was just there. So it's that kind of stuff. Like if you're going to be signed up for this, if you're going to invest your time, if you're going to be if you're going to offer yourself as a guest, if you're going to reach out to guests, if you're going to agree to do this stuff, just take a moment and put on a professional face and give people the time that you offer them. Right. Just respect the process. Respect the moment. Respect yourself, Frank.

Speaker 1 (21:17)

Respect your word. If you said yes, these people are going to remember what you did forever. So that's your personal brand memory of whatever happened to this person, that's the only part they're going to remember is that I go to the bathroom. You're never going to be able to win that back unless you do something in person or something.

Speaker 2 (21:37)

No, there is no coming back from that. And truthfully, again, it's just a matter of if nobody is going to take this seriously, then listeners are going to stop taking this medium seriously. It's probably the reason why you get so many indie podcasters who are frustrated that nobody is listening to their podcast because so many people instead are saying, well, yeah, I listen to podcasts from blah, blah, blah, major publishing company that has a team of twelve people that can check, double check, triple check, quality control, get a tape sync going, put somebody in the studio, all these different things, because they're going to have a more pleasant listening experience. And I think as the listening audience is maturing and growing, we kind of talked about this a little bit last week with the reviews. As more people are coming into the space, they're not going to be as forgiving for crap content. So if you're not going to bring your A game, if you as a guest aren't going to bring your A game, people are going to turn it off and tune it out. And frankly, it's not going to reflect well on you or your brand if that's the point of what you're doing.

Speaker 1 (22:44)

I wonder if there is any difference here with the paid guesting services like Guestio or Pod Match where there is more of money on the line for the interviews, whether they're paying to be a guest on it. But even then I've heard stories of John Lee Dumas, who last time I heard was charged like $3,000 for an interview. People would show up on that interview and be like, what are we doing here today? And it's like, what?

Speaker 2 (23:14)

I don't think you can necessarily blame the service. I think there are plenty of people who go on Pod Match or guests or whatever and who show up and do a terrible job. I think there are plenty of people who are spending hundreds of dollars a month on an interview valet or interview connection service, and a few of those are probably not really showing up when they're supposed to, even though they're spending more money. Now, my sense is if you are spending that kind of money, you are probably a little bit more professional or at least like your handler from those companies is kind of ensuring that you are going to be more professional. But like I said, when I worked in radio, we were dealing with PR teams and PR teams who were working with Fortune 500 companies who basically like the whole point of that day was to get the word out and do recordings and things like that. And even then the guests would just kind of be half assing it and not really showing the kind of respect, not necessarily even that we deserve. Because listen, I don't have that big of an ego.

Speaker 2 (24:17)

Like I don't need you to show up for me. It would be nice if you did, but I'm not even offended for myself. I'm offended for you and for the effort that all these people are putting in on your behalf to help you and your company and your brand. And then you still don't show up, probably because you're looking down your nose or probably just because you don't care.

Speaker 1 (24:37)

When I see those moments, I often feel sad because it's almost like you get witnessed to a train wreck that just hasn't occurred yet. That those types of people, the Karma, eventually catch us up with them and they're either like anything could happen. It's just a delayed slow motion effect that people like that generally don't stay moving. And I'm sure you actually probably saw this when working in radio because the personalities were probably even more egocentric and more self centered back in the day. Or they could be that person and it was probably what I would maybe stare at and say it was a shorter interview, so it was less frustrating. But in podcasting you're dealing with like an hour or at least 45 minutes. So it's almost kind of maybe exacerbates. What was a short period on radio to be a lot longer in podcasting? Was there a correlation of like what you saw? Maybe.

Speaker 2 (25:31)

I think in radio it might have been a little bit different. I think the situation is going to differ for everybody who whether it's your podcast or radio or television or videocast, whatever it looks like. But yeah, I mean, I remember there were times that our host was annoyed at that kind of blase, who cares attitude that you would get from the guests. And yeah, I mean, I think there is something to be said about listen, I reserved 60 Minutes and this person barely showed up for ten of them. Right. Like, that's frustrating. And we can talk about advice for podcasters what to do when you have somebody who doesn't really show up when you're kind of putting yourself out there. And the episode is kind of based on this person's content. But even though we were focusing on shorter content and radio, the fact that it was shorter didn't make it any less important. Right. Like, we were hitting big, top national news stories. We were talking to congressmen and senators and government officials and CEOs and people who are on the front line of stories. And it was probably even more frustrating when somebody wouldn't show up for ten minutes.

Speaker 2 (26:45)

I don't want to bad mouth anybody specifically, but what often happened was because we were part of a paper and a big news reporting organization. What we often did was we would reach out to the reporters and we would say, hey, listen, I know you're reporting the story, tell us what's going on. And we'll put that version out on the radio or in the podcast and they would get their Editors who are like, I need something now, and they would just cancel on this last minute or they wouldn't really be paying attention because they'd be answering emails or thinking about something else. Now, listen, I know they had a job to do and they weren't necessarily being paid for their time on the air. But then I think that's a bigger question of why wasn't the news outlet kind of pushing the importance of them actually giving that time reserving that time? Right. If you are working on a big story, part of your day should have that time, that dedicated time built in so that you could do media hits and so that you could be a part of more than just what was going to be the written word.

Speaker 1 (27:49)

I just had this thought because I was going to go a different way. And then I had this thought, I want to go down the triple for a second. Is the issue almost non relevant when it's TV media? Because in TV media, they plug satellite feeds from all over the freaking country for experts very rarely or at least they don't let them get to the air. They look like a hot mess. Is it the visibility of people have to see them being a hot mess, like, you can't fake it and talk to CNN and beyond the F train and audio just allows more laziness?

Speaker 2 (28:22)

Well, I think so, yeah. Typically, what happens with television is one a lot of the experts and the people who they bring on have a contract where trusted source. Yeah. They are people who kind of know, like, hey, by the way, you're being paid for this. And as a result of that, when we call, you have to present a certain way or two. We can't just bring you up on the phone. You have to go to a studio, you have to go somewhere. You have to be on tap. There's a lot of preparation in television also, especially at that level. There's a lot of pre interviews, like producers are chatting with them, checking in on them, doing things like that. So, yeah, there are a lot of checks and balances. Truthfully only in television, when you're talking about a big, big breaking news story and a big, big, major talent, Truthfully, our former President who used to do media hits on all the stations prior to running for office, he often was the guy who would just call into the station. But right at the time, he was a big enough personality that's like, well, if we need to talk to him, well, let's just get him on the phone and it's worth it.

Speaker 2 (29:33)

And he would do it. And, of course, it was an ego Stoke and blah, blah, blah. But you had to really rise to a certain level to be good enough for them to just bring you in on the phone. Right. They want somebody in studio, on the screen, splitting that half and half screenshot, putting up the Chiron, stuff like that. And in radio, you could do pre interviews. But the fact that prior to Pandemic, most of the time, we could not see these people, we did not know what their situation was. We were just kind of relying on them, wanting to be there and hopefully be a professional to hoping that that was enough for us to get something good out of them. But that's why Truthfully, we avoided doing a lot of live stuff because right away, the first few weeks of launching our show, we had several last minute cancellations, no shows or people who just really could not present at the moment. And so we kind of learned our lesson. We're like, all right, we're going to pretap more stuff so that we can control the narrative better.

Speaker 1 (30:42)

So I got a question that will close out with our episode, and I think this will be a good bow on this topic. So let's do a role play. We just had, say, a catastrophe, a 30 minutes interview that went all the sideways that you just described as the host. How do you process what just happened? Do you swallow it down? Do you swallow your pride? Do you just hit end and say, that guy's gone from the universe? Do you try to posture yourself to say, I felt disrespected, you really treated us horrible during that and let them know? Or what would you consider the right etiquette on the other side of a dumpster fire process that just happened?

Speaker 2 (31:26)

I mean, I think there are a lot of factors that are going to play into that decision and that choice of how you want to handle it when something like that happens to you. For me, what I would probably want to think about is one, how important is it to use that content right away? Right. So when we were doing radios, like we're doing every day, we were interviewing people for that day. So if you messed up that day, we were so we were not coming back and doing like, oh, let's redo it tomorrow. The story is over. It's done. But so if you're a podcaster, you're planning ahead, like, you interview somebody and it didn't go well or they were distracted. The question is, do you need that episode to run this week? Truthfully, I would say as best you can if you don't have a good interview. One my first sense is decide, is there something happening where this person was distracted or were they just disrespectful? Was it a case of, listen, family emergencies are popping up. I really want to be here. I'm trying, but I just can't get my head around in what you say.

Speaker 2 (32:44)

I understand would love to reschedule some time. Like, we're really interested in your story. Like, let's do this again. And then, yeah, you make those moves, you make those constellations so that you can work with this person again, or was it really just a person who's like, like you said earlier, what am I here for? What are we talking about? Sure. All right, let's do it. Bryan, you could tell right away that the attitude was, I don't really want to be here. I don't know why I'm here in the first place, but let's just get it over with, and then you still get a bad product. At that point. I don't think you have to tell that person that they were a jerk face because, truthfully, they probably don't even care. They're not going to listen later anyway. They're not going to share it anyway. At that point, I think you just move on and let it go. And if they ask, you say, no, it didn't work for us. Sorry. There wasn't enough there for us to work with. Truthfully, the only time I think you really should be confrontational with someone is in a situation where there is more of hopefully a long standing relationship or some sort of pre existing relationship.

Speaker 2 (34:01)

Right. Like, maybe they are a subject matter expert and you know that you're going to be going to them from time to time. Or maybe it is someone who they are paying to be on the show or you're paying for them to be on the show or you're doing someone a favor, in which case I think you have to tell them, like, listen, if you want to do this, here's what's going to have to happen, right? Like, we need you focused. We need you without distractions. We need to turn off all the other things, make sure you fill your notifications. Like, if you're not going to take this seriously, then we're just not going to use you and find somebody else. There's plenty of other fish in the sea, and I'm sure there's somebody else you could talk to. What I would hate to see people do is air an interview just because, well, we have it. So we've got to run it. It's your show, it's your audience. If it doesn't work for you, if it's not going to provide value to the audience, let it go, leave it on the cutting room floor and move on to the next thing.

Speaker 1 (35:04)

You know what? I've also thought of something to close out a thought here. In certain cases, if, you know, if you're well established in your podcast network, you probably could just get some references of people who've interviewed these people before and just get some basic instincts of what it's like to work with these people.

Speaker 2 (35:21)

Yeah. I mean, listen, if you have that kind of network, if you have those kind of resources. Yeah, that would be ideal. That would be great. I will tell you again, back in the radio industry, we used to get pitched, right? My inbox is just full of publishers trying to pitch their clients to be on the radio. And what I can tell you is that the people who got through my inbox were the ones who understood that if a story was breaking, we need a person on that topic today, right? And so a shooting happens and a publicist reaches out and says, hey, I've got this expert in trauma who could talk about what to do in the situation. It's like, great, this is a angle, there's a story, there's a person in angle. That all makes sense. What I need today. And when I reach back out to that publicist, I say, yes, we want to do it. The person is available. Right. Like that to me, is going to set up a relationship with that publicist that says when they have a guest to send me, when they have someone who they think fits, I'm going to trust them that they have solid, smart, timely, topical, professional people.

Speaker 2 (36:37)

But I can't tell you how many times we would get an email that says, hey, the market has crashed today. Want to talk to economists so and so about it today? Yes, I would absolutely love to. And then they write back and be like, oh, they're not available. Well, then why the hell did you email me in the first place as a podcaster? This drives me crazy how many pitches I get for cause Passy, which is like, hey, so and so is a really good philanthropist And I've been listening to your show And I think they'd make a great fit. My first question is always, do they have a podcast? No. Then you didn't listen to the show Because the show specifically says in the intro in the first 30 seconds, podcasters making a difference, right? So if you can't even show me that little grain of respect that you're going to lie to me off the bat, I'm not coming back to you. There's just no point. So like you said, relationships matter, networks matter. And where you can try and build up relationships with guests, the people who are the gatekeepers to guess the other people in your industry.

Speaker 2 (37:48)

And if you can maintain those relationships, then, yeah, you'll be in a good situation when you need a guest or want to talk to someone that you'll find the right person. And that's why I think we've talked about in the past. After you talk to a good guest, ask them about other people who you think you should talk to.

Speaker 1 (38:03)

That's a reference right there. Like ask them who do you know.

Speaker 2 (38:05)

That they'll be a good reference and you'll be a good reference, right?

Speaker 1 (38:09)

Yeah. Well, again, I think this episode is a great reminder that this is an important niche and it's important industry of podcasting and it deserves the seriousness of any other meeting. There's no difference between whether it be an operational meeting or a budget meeting or podcast meeting. There's still time being devoted to it, and I think that's something that we can easily discredit because of life, but this matters and your word matters. And at the end of the day, that's really the only thing you can control and give. So reminder to all podcasters to focus on how you show up and making sure that the people showing up for you are ready. And if they're not, recognize that, you don't have to always accept that as a gold standard. Well, Matthew, that does it for us tonight. Thank you for another episode and a good conversation on being nicer and more professional in podcasting.

Speaker 2 (39:04)

And thank you for always showing up and being a proceed.