Planning For The Unplanned

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  0:02  
Matt, welcome to the podcast, Super Friends. Five podcast producers from across North America get together to discuss podcasting.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Another addition to the podcast, Super Friends, I'm Matt Cundill, and today we're going to be talking about disasters, and hopefully we don't encounter one. We'll say hi to the Super Friends. We'll go clockwise, and we'll start in Fort

Johnny Podcasts  0:25  
Worth Hello. I'm Johnny. Podcast. Excited to be here. You

Catherine O'Brien  0:29  
know what I love is the Easy, breezy. Everything's going exactly as to plan. And then we launched the podcast, Super Friends. That's what I love. The E just the ease, no problems, no snafus, no real life examples of what we're talking about today. Hey, I'm Captain O'Brien in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Hey,

Jon Gay  0:46  
I'm John gave and jag podcast productions in Detroit, Michigan, where I'm the dog sitting around me while everything is on fire. Meme, today,

Matt Cundill  0:54  
we're going to talk about something that we've never had to really sort of consider until yesterday. And I'm so glad that Jag, I mean, even though it was only a minute and a half, you did a podcast episode about what happens when things go wrong, and this is about planning for the for the unplanned. And as it turns out, yesterday, there was a lot of people online who were struggling and trying to figure out what to do. And as you mentioned on your show, there's been a couple things in the last little while that podcasters have not been prepared for. So who can answer what happened yesterday with the AWS outage?

Jon Gay  1:32  
No one really I can attempt it. Okay? Please from asking folks in the IT world. So aws amazon web services separate from Amazon, box shows up at your front door, although same parent company, obviously they had an outage. And a significant portion of the internet the world, 20, 30% I've heard even higher, runs this in the background, Amazon Web Services, AWS. So because of that, all these things went down Snapchat signal or Telegram, one of those encrypted apps. Notable, get we'll get to this in a minute. Riverside had issues. Descript, descriptive descript had issues. Simple cast, my podcasting host had a hiccup or two. So when now you're in a situation where a lot of your tools are offline, and, yes, all our eggs shouldn't be in one internet basket, and that's for a different podcast. But this cascading effect really caused an issue, starting at 6am ish Eastern yesterday.

Matt Cundill  2:32  
So we've already gone around the horn once to talk about how, you know, give our names and where we're from, but, but Johnny, how did this affect you yesterday?

Johnny Podcasts  2:38  
It? You know, it really didn't affect me until later in the afternoon, after I had seen everyone say stuff online, like, oh, the shortages or the outage has been fixed. Everything's good to go. And I was like, Oh, great, awesome. What's funny is, you know, we talk about having backups for recordings, backups for this, backups for that. Yeah, I didn't realize how much I really relied on Riverside and descript to get so much of this stuff done. So the case. So the specifics for what happened to me yesterday was an episode needs to go out Tuesday, which means it needs to be finalized, exported, uploaded, show notes, everything, all of that needs to be scheduled to go live by Monday at the latest. Our host recorded the introduction to the episode. Hey, this is host so and so. Welcome to the episode today. I'm talking with so Who's he? What see, and we talked about X, Y and Z, critical portion, critical portion of the episode. It has to go in every episode, because if we don't put it in there, then it's different from everything else. This is how our show flows. That was recorded Monday morning. I go into Riverside, and it's fully uploaded, but it's still processing. And then now I can't even load Riverside, and now I can't get to it, and I couldn't download it until 8pm that night, so everything that the entire episode is on halt until that's done. So that was one the other was a client wanted some additional edits done beyond what we had done so far on their audio podcast. So the easiest way to do it is upload into descript the things that they wanted to cut where the guest was an excessive, like, like, like, like, you know, you know, you know, very excessive on that front. And can't, can't upload a new project into script. It's just not working. It's not working. It's not working. So you're stuck in limbo for, you know, for like, two hours, I couldn't do anything, and I've if I felt really stuck. And, you know, we always harp on we need to have these backups for for things. But, I mean, are we supposed to have? What is the backup to Riverside Jag? I'm guessing it's, it's the but it was descript and squad cast that was down too. So is it zoom? Was Zoom? Zoom was down

Catherine O'Brien  4:40  
too. Just gonna say we need to check in with David and see what zoom.

Jon Gay  4:45  
If only David were here today. I was telling you zoom for six years,

Johnny Podcasts  4:50  
so there is an actual backup to this for that specifically. So what I would recommend to podcasters, if this you know, all of the stuff that we're doing, we. Can bump it by a day, it'll be okay. I had two recordings Cancel for different reasons, other than the outage, so it actually worked out really well that they didn't record yesterday, but had they wanted to record and Riverside was a problem. Here's what we would have done. We would have opened up Google meets that way. We're face to face. If I'm the host and Matt's the guest, I would jump open up Google meets invite. Matt would join. Matt would open up QuickTime player on his end. I would open up QuickTime Player on my end. We would both hit record. We would record locally. That way our audio and video onto QuickTime Player upload both of those into a shared drive folder. That way we can piece together a podcast after the fact, if we can't push it, and then you kind of have to go full caveman on the editing. If you're really used to script for a lot of the editing, we're going back to the basics here. You're doing a lot of cut and drag editing, and this is going to take a long time, time to get done. So there are backups to all of this stuff, but you don't realize how much we rely on this stuff. Like imagine for all of us, if chat GPT had gone down For show notes or time codes or any of this stuff that we're using it for, we'd go, oh, it would just be horrendous. So that's what happened to me yesterday.

Matt Cundill  6:13  
Catherine, what happened to

Catherine O'Brien  6:14  
you? Well, the horror you just described, I actually experienced. I had to write show notes from my own mind, using typing into Word into a Word document. Can you believe it? The horror, the absolute horror of this situation.

Catherine O'Brien  6:32  
Yeah. So yesterday, yesterday was I was thinking, Oh, I am completely unscathed. I have gotten through this big Oh yes, all these other things. I'm not ordering anything from Amazon. I don't have to worry about this big crash. And it wasn't this interesting that how many things are running on AWS. Then I approach descript to work on an episode that I needed to have done today, and lo and behold, and again, this is not a this is not a dig on any of our very favorite tools like descript or Riverside, or anybody like that, because everybody was having the same but I realized how much time I had just put on having my being able to do what I wanted to do at the time that I wanted to do it, and it was nothing was happening. It was just not available. And rather than go the caveman route. I did do some other things, but that did include, I just realized how dependent I have become on so many of these software services. There's so many things that are that are holding it up, but I do one of the sort of the interesting things I've been thinking about in in terms of maybe how we thought about podcasting before, sort of the podcasting 1.0 world versus the podcasting 2.0 world is that when everybody is impacted, that gives you a lot more grace, like everybody's like, Oh yeah, I had the same kind of problems. My work was this way. So pushing things off by a day is not a big deal a day or two, because people are having those same kinds of impacts, whereas I think in the earlier days, we had that push, let's say that consists, you know, if you if you miss your day, everything's gonna go to heck in a hand basket. And you know, your listeners aren't gonna forgive you, and the audience is gonna go that those things have really not proven to be true, so especially when everybody else's impact is having the same sort of issues, there's a lot more grace there than there might have been or in in some of those earlier times.

Jon Gay  8:31  
Jag, I had a couple issues. So as you may see right now, if you're watching on video, I have been struggling with my lighting here in my studio to do videos. So you mentioned the minute and a half micro pod I recorded yesterday about this topic. I was planning on recording with my iPhone on my couch and in my in my living room, and I had a tripod set up, and it was great, and I was going to use the Riverside app, like, oh, Riverside apps not loading. That's fine. So I actually just recorded the the episode on on my iPhone as a movie file, and then I edit it in Adobe Premiere. Actually, at that point, descript was working for me also, but and then I and then I got it out. I had one client who I hopped on, did a sound check with at the beginning of her podcast. Now I don't know if this was a squad cast issue or not. I want to be clear, she had a guest who was not super tech savvy and had a and had an older laptop, and the audio wasn't great on the sound check. But in I said to myself, well, that's okay, like I can. We'll fix it in post studio sound and all that. And unfortunately, with, I don't know if was interested the recording with the studio sound, or just, it was a bad laptop, but the audio was unsalvageable. The podcast can't be used.

Matt Cundill  9:48  
Can you tell me what the audio sounded like?

Jon Gay  9:52  
It was just your best impression. No, it was. There was a lot of dropouts of like, parts of syllables in the audio. And I believe. The guest didn't have headphones, so she had to use Echo cancelation, and I and I think there was audio coming back, and it was causing the waveform to break up, is my best guess.

Johnny Podcasts  10:10  
And those older computers and a weak Wi Fi connection, there's a if you have a bunch of tabs open, there's a gazillion factors, and all of them combined, can result in a really poor sounding recording, which sucks. And you know, either as a host or as a producer, you never want that to happen, but it's like Catherine said, you know, one in one during one of these kind of global outages, there's a lot of grace that can be handed.

Jon Gay  10:36  
And I'll ask you mentioned a friend of mine, so I've mentioned his podcast before, and I don't want to bash on Riverside, because Kendall was great. We love Riverside. My friend Jeff Kirk, and who does a baseball podcast with his dad, Jeff Tim Kirk, sorry, who, who is an ESPN baseball analyst. Yesterday was game seven of the American League Championship Series between the Blue Jays and and the mariners. They had recorded 70% of the podcast prior to the game, and they and Jeff texted me during the game. He's like, I can't get the recording. Riverside won't load for me. And I said, Well, if you recorded it and it all uploaded, it's there. You can't get it, but it's there. And then he was able to, he was able to, after the game, go in and get the recording and then and finish the episode talking about who won the game last night. But imagine this, you're doing a baseball podcast. It's the biggest game of the year outside the World Series, and you're down. That's That's unfortunate.

Johnny Podcasts  11:35  
Do you know stream yard was down yesterday? I don't.

Matt Cundill  11:39  
I did not check it yesterday, although I managed to schedule this yesterday, so I don't think it was too much of a problem. Because

Johnny Podcasts  11:46  
Jack, I wonder if, like, they could have if, if, like, you know, hindsight, had you just suggested, let's just live stream the rest of the episode on stream yard and do it there. I don't know.

Jon Gay  11:58  
I offer my squad cast through him. I said, maybe zoom. But luckily, he was able to get into Riverside by the time the baseball game ended last night. We'll talk what happened in the game. So, okay, cool.

Matt Cundill  12:07  
We talked about some of the major problems that we have doing the podcast and not being able to, you know, to do our work. But Ticketmaster also went had a little outage yesterday, and they, I don't know how they were going to scan the tickets for that game last night. Oh, so that was an issue at three o'clock yesterday afternoon.

Jon Gay  12:26  
Was great white north, yeah. So somebody asked

Matt Cundill  12:29  
me why it wasn't a new story yet, but it's kind of like, Well, isn't that just the story? I don't know. Yeah, if there's any more in that I had, I've got two people who work here who were kind of left with nothing to do, saying we can't get on. We had clients asking for stuff, and I should know better, but in my top right drawers, I should have additional projects to give them to do. Maybe it's like work on a website, work on some other things, if they just can't get into descript or into Riverside to do work, you should have some rainy day activities for your staff lined up and ready to go. I did not, sadly,

Johnny Podcasts  13:06  
well, even even extracting that out further, digging deeper on that specifically is, you know how this can apply to the podcast or listening. This is why we always promote record stuff ahead of time. We don't, unless you're doing something that's really timely, like a news podcast, or, like, in Jack's case, it was, you know, the the MLB podcast, where it kind of matters that they record it right after the game, because that's it went out this morning. Yeah. But for the majority of podcasts, you should be one or two episodes ahead of your release calendar, you should have one or two things in the bank. And then taking that a step further, you know, whoever's your producer or whoever's your editor, whoever's on the back and actually putting these episodes together, don't wait until the day before the episodes going live to get into Riverside. Download the files, get everything worked on, because it's going out tomorrow. Like these things need to be worked on ahead of time, that way. Well, it doesn't matter if there's an AWS shortage for 24 hours. My episode is going out tomorrow. It's been done for three days, so I have everything ready to go. And I will say megaphone was not down. Libsyn was not down, YouTube was not down. And then big one that was down. Canva, for a lot of people, that's huge, that's thumbnails, that's graphics, that's marketing material. Photoshop was not down. Photoshop was loaded on my computer. I'm able to get thumbnails done. We're able to get marketing material together and ready to go so on. You know, go through every part of your podcasting process and say, this goes away tomorrow. What's my next step? What do I do to get x done and then on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And there should be at least one other place that you can go to get any part of a podcast episode or piece of content produced

Jon Gay  14:59  
to further. Point, Johnny, you know, one of the questions that I get commonly asked by new clients, and I'm sure the three of you do also, is, How often should I do my podcast? And I always say it's whatever you have the bandwidth to do. It's if you only have the band to do one podcast a month, then commit to that one podcast a month and be consistent. But to your point, Johnny, we would probably extend that out a little bit and say, you know, do as much as you have a bandwidth for but also be able to work an episode or two ahead for this exact reason.

Johnny Podcasts  15:25  
Yeah, yeah. I think batch recording is one of the best things that people can do, because, you know, the people that we work with, they all have full time jobs outside of podcasting. The podcasting is either a direct benefit to whatever their job is, or it's a passion project, X, Y or Z. Reason that they're doing it batch recording. You're gonna have weeks that are really busy. I can't get to the podcast this week now. It benefits us to be three episodes in the can ready to go that we can just pull from and go to all of the people that I work with. I'd say 95% of the shows that I work on are at least two episodes ahead of the release schedule. They're just ready to go. And that it relieves so much of so much pressure from you as the host,

Matt Cundill  16:10  
outside of the outages that we don't see because they're elsewhere, you could have a hard drive crash, sure, and as long as you're two episodes ahead now from that, oh, the episodes I downloaded, they're on the hard drive, and now I don't know what to do. This is why I recommend, you know, Google Drive, or a Dropbox or some scenario like that, where you know, to keep your files so that they are living somewhere else, aside from on a hard drive, because hard drives have a habit of blowing up. Yeah? No, it's,

Catherine O'Brien  16:43  
don't say that too loud, Matt, 

Johnny Podcasts  16:45  
my hard drive might hear you. 

Catherine O'Brien  16:47  
Yeah, I don't want anything. I

Catherine O'Brien  16:49  
remember the I think it was Leo Laporte, who's a, you know, long time radio tech guy, and he was saying the standard is, if you have to have something saved three spots for it to be considered safe, because I've thought that before, like, Okay, if I What if I lose my hard drive and lose all the intra outro music and the pre recorded they and the artwork and all these kinds of things, that's always my nightmare is like, Okay, well, how would I recover those, those pieces, or any of those assets? That's what I sort of dread having to do so. I have a my active hard drive, external hard drive. I have a second that is just purely for backup that I occasionally will upload and make sure everything is, you know, recording there and then using a cloud service as well.

Matt Cundill  17:40  
Jag looks like he wants to say something.

Jon Gay  17:41  
I'm trying to not be better interrupting Catherine and others, which I do too much. But I actually have a large external hard drive, same as you Catherine, that I store a lot of stuff on. And every once in a while, I'll back up what's on my Google Drive to that physical hard drive when my Google Drive is getting a little too full. And then invariably, I move intro road trip music from a podcast onto that hard drive. So I load my session, and this file is missing. All right, plug in the hard drive, okay, find the file, move it over to the active folder. And bottom line, you've got to have a system, and it's got to have, ideally, two backups to your point, three places, Catherine, but at least one, and having one in the cloud and one physical hard drive, if not too is probably ideal.

Catherine O'Brien  18:21  
So this is a little bit of a spin off of what Johnny was saying. Do you all remember way back when we were baby podcasters, so many years ago? And one of the common things that we hear at places like Podcast Movement is to have a finished episode ready to go, and that it that that was just like a standard, if you so, that's as if you have a interview dropout, if you have any of these things that was like a very common especially for the hobbyists like you always have to have one that's completely finished, ready to go, you, don't you just, if you have to break the glass and get it, that's, that's what you have in the back up there. And I remember back this, this will, this is going to give you some dates here. Some of you might remember that in 2016 Baton Rouge had a flood. And so all that, all of the podcasting that I had planned, which, you know, was again podcasting 1.0 for me, I was so glad to have some of that those ready, because a lot of people were impacted by, you know, my local customers were impacted by the flooding, and some we just, you know, punted, and you know, nobody's going to be listening anyway. It's a local podcast where the flood is the story. We're not going to be doing that. But I remember so well having using up those, those emergency podcasts for that very circumstance. And yeah, and it's interesting how that's kind of dropped off as like a standard podcasting advice. But it's a little different to have, you know, everything batch recording and all these these people ready, ready to go.

Johnny Podcasts  19:53  
And they Yeah, because I feel like that advice has morphed into your next episode should be ready to go. Uh, before, like you were just saying, but yeah, your next episode, it shouldn't be recorded the day before we're releasing. It should not that. It has to be completely done. It's got the intro music. It's like, all I have to do is hit publish. But it should be recorded at the very least well in advance, because if you just keep one episode up on the shelf, it gets dusty very quickly. It gets very old very quickly, and then you may end up never releasing it. So that emergency one should always just be your next one. And so that one's done, and now we're working on this one, and then this one, and then this one, which I think

Catherine O'Brien  20:33  
is, I think that's probably better, you know, it's more of a contrast from the the olden days of podcasting to the modern Yeah.

Johnny Podcasts  20:40  
Yeah. Well, live streaming has, has taken over so much. There are a lot of shows that are heavily reliant on live streaming. So in that case, it's like, what do you do? We're supposed to live stream on this, you know, x, not x Twitter. Well, like X platform, and it's down because of the the outage, and that's a day's revenue that we're not getting because of that. So I would be curious to see, to hear what the really big money making live streaming shows dealt with, and how they, you know, what their

Jon Gay  21:10  
work around, particularly last week when YouTube had that outage last week, yeah,

Johnny Podcasts  21:14  
yeah, I had a client email me, you know, in the middle of the night being like, hey, this random episode that I just happened to be looking at doesn't work. Can you look at it? And it? And I just responded with, I was like, all of YouTube is down right now. It's not, it's not, it's not just this one video. It's everything. It's this one episode. Yeah, that you know episode 40 out of our 200 episode podcast. I do want to come back, if

Jon Gay  21:35  
you don't mind, to Riverside for a second. I want to give them props on two fronts. Because, actually I because I texted Jeff Kirk, and I said, Do you mind if I tell your story on the podcast? And I didn't hope he'd say yes. And he texted back, yes, just now, you have to edit that out, Matt, don't worry. And so, and so he texted me back, yes, of course, you can use it. They were very responsive via email, and was able to get the podcast edited and produced ready for midnight release. Still love Riverside, so props to them for being responsive while this outage was happening. And then on the other front and I apologize, I've told the story in the podcast before, but one of my clients, one of the CO hosts, was on a family vacation in the Bahamas. The Internet connection was beyond awful. She was probably getting like, two or five or 10 megabytes upload. It was, it was bad. And we were recording on Riverside, and she she was in and out, but the files synced up, and the parts that I had her for were great, but miraculously, and I don't know if this will happen every time, Riverside still was able to transcribe the parts that didn't get the audio and video recording. So I was able to go in with her the next day, and I had the script for her of everything that Riverside get. And so we did a little bit at a time upload, a little bit of time uploaded, and then when it got to the point where we just couldn't upload it anymore, I gave her the last couple paragraphs, she recorded it on her iPhone and put it on like a Google Drive, and I download it, and I stitched the whole thing together, and through like three backups within Riverside, they really saved my bacon. When was this? Wow, this was within the last year. So, so I feel like

Matt Cundill  23:17  
it probably would have taken a year to do that. There

Jon Gay  23:20  
was a, there was, there was a lot, there was a definitely a lot of surgery involved. And there were a couple parts where the conversation happened and she wasn't there, and I had to just throw up a logo on her corner of the screen. And so be it. But, but Riverside really came through for me in that moment.

Catherine O'Brien  23:35  
That's right, if the magic B roll come in the visuals, yeah, something gone. Wow, that is a yeoman's effort. We these are all my nightmares. We should retitle this episode Catherine's nightmares, because that is also a nightmare of just, you know, stitching together, piece after word to word to word. Oh my gosh.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  24:01  
The podcast. Super Friends support podcasting 2.0 so feel free to send us a boost if you're listening on a newer podcast app, find the full list at new podcast apps.com.

Matt Cundill  24:13  
Catherine, you mentioned floods where we are. There's there's, you know, storms that blow through parts of the US. There's hurricanes. And if you have a show, and you've, you know, especially a live show, and there's bad weather coming in, that makes me really nervous. I get very, very nervous that the power is going to go out. So one of the things I did was I bought an uninterrupted power supply, and it protects the hard drive from, you know, surges and flickering and stuff that might go on during during a storm. It'll keep you going for a few more minutes. You'll have to, like, consider shutting things down or moving things along, or perhaps dropping out of it, but at least it won't ruin your hard drive. So an uninterrupted power supply is something you might want to consider for a purchase. And I'll tell you, I. If in 2019 we had a really bad storm. Here it was an ice storm, and it bent all the trees. Every wind storm after that meant the power was going to go out. And before I lost a hard drive, I made this purchase, and it saved me a lot of money in the end. So something to consider if you're prone to power outages.

Jon Gay  25:18  
Another backup that I have found, I am recording right now on the rodecaster two duo, and I have, and should the rodecaster to duo ever? Conk out, I've got a scarlet that I will just flip over and and unplug my mic and headphones and plug it into the Scarlet. And I have found out recently, shout out to my IT guy, Steven Kurtz that my USB C connection on the duo was wonky, and sometimes it would just cut out and stop in the middle of a recording. So I went into my system settings for those of you on Windows, and I turned off the setting that says Turn off power to USB to conserve power, because there are a couple of times where the USB died. Thankfully, I was recording. I was recording on the rodecaster. Was also recording on Riverside, so while the other hosts were talking, I just reconfigured and plugged everything back in and and all thankfully synced up. But you know, there are so many things that can go wrong. That's not a cable quality issue, right? No, it's the cable that came with the rodecaster. I'm told. It's a bit of a known issue with the rodecaster, the duo, the mini one that I have.

Johnny Podcasts  26:23  
Yeah, another thing to think about, too, and we're talking about planning ahead. Outages happen. You know, you don't. You shouldn't live your entire life thinking that disaster is around the corner, but you should take a reasonable precaution. So, for instance, I just did a an episode where that was filmed in 4k so a normal 10 ADP episode is going to end up exporting it around like five to seven gigabytes, and with a strong, a strong internet connection that gets uploaded to YouTube in about five minutes, a 4k video. That one ended up being 138 gigabytes, beautiful, beautiful looking video. It was about 90 minutes of upload time. And that's a video that's with like fiber. That's like Fiber Internet, that's, that's the fastest you can get. We pay for it. Like to to get it up there. Think about those things. So if you're if your upload times take longer than expected, don't wait to the last second to get those things uploaded. And then try to find workarounds for the instances that you don't have the strongest of Internets. Last year for me, I was in Idaho mule deer hunting, and we had to get an episode out. And my I was staying at my uncle's place, and he's like, yeah, we've got internet. You'll be great. And I was like, Are you sure I gotta upload stuff to YouTube? Like, this is I'm going to I will be severely punished if these don't get uploaded. And, you know, I dragged the video into YouTube to upload it, and it says four hours to upload. And this is like a one or two gigabyte video. The key is, there are hackarounds around that. And I've mentioned this on the show before. A great tool is called hand break. One word, hand break is a downloadable program that can compress video files without sacrificing the quality too much. So if you're interested in learning more about that, it would be way too much for me to explain. Now, just DM me on Twitter, and I'm happy to give you the settings that I use for that, but you can shrink a like 15 to 20 gigabyte video to one gigabyte and still keep all of that quality. And it's, it's, it's been a lifesaver for me many times

Jon Gay  28:45  
the upload thing is interesting, Johnny, because I'm on cable internet and my upload speed does not match my download speed like yours does on Fiverr. So for a 1080 video to your point, six, seven gigabytes, it can sometimes take, depending on how busy the internet is, what time of day, it could take 4560 minutes for me to upload just a 1080 video. So there's a lot of planning that goes into that. That's often while, while I'm walking the dog or eating dinner that

Johnny Podcasts  29:09  
uploads, yeah, because and then you're you're uploading gets slowed down. If you're now working on another episode while that's uploading in the background, it's like, oh, well, I got to download three or four videos from Riverside to work on the next thing that I got to do, but YouTube's uploading in the background. Now, it went from 45 minutes to 90 minutes. It's just the whole

Matt Cundill  29:26  
the, you know,

Jon Gay  29:28  
two minutes from finishing a video edit, when, when we started today, and I was like, this is gonna have to wait, because if I try to export this while I'm on the same way, it's not gonna, it's not gonna

Johnny Podcasts  29:38  
work. Yeah, I had, I had a logic project pulled up for an audio export. Rick, right before we jumped on here and I just went, I'm not going to export this in the background. I'm just minimize this. This can wait and it can run later.

Matt Cundill  29:51  
Does anybody own a generator? No,

Johnny Podcasts  29:56  
I got out of my prepping phase around like 2021. 20. But once there was like, significant fear about the world ending in civil unrest, I had, you know, chest freezer, lots of extra food lying around, but I didn't

Jon Gay  30:09  
end up pulling the trigger. You don't have the 30 gallon drum of MREs Johnny. I won't disclose what I may have or not.

Catherine O'Brien  30:16  
That's the right answer.

Matt Cundill  30:19  
Is Starlink, a possibility for backup,

Johnny Podcasts  30:23  
yeah, oh, for a backup. Well, sorry, I have experience with Starlink, unless anybody else wants to jump in. I know I just finished talking. Okay, so I have Starlink at my dad's farm in another undisclosed location. We had a really hard time getting an internet provider to come out to his place, which is not like it's rural, but not like in the sticks by any means. You know, there's a town and a you know, there's civilization within miles of where he is. But for whatever reason, the internet providers, every major internet provider, would not come out there, because they wouldn't go there. And my dad was just like, I love coming here. But you know, if you guys want to come out and hunt or farm with us and do stuff like you need to be able to work. We need to be able to do stuff. He's like, I want to watch Blue Bloods on Netflix. And I can't do that right now. So we got Starlink. It is the easiest thing in the world. It literally shipped right to the door. Plug it in. Point it at the sky. You have internet. Take five minutes to set up your account. It's $160 for a month of unlimited data. But that is not recurring. You can pause your service. So we go up there. He knows how to plug it in, set it up, point it at the sky. He texts me, I turn on the subscription. I get charged 160 bucks. And then for the next 30 days, they have internet. And when he's done, he just unplugs it, puts it back in the house, but you can mount it on your roof, blah, blah, blah. It is a fantastic backup. I don't think they ran into any outages yesterday.

Catherine O'Brien  31:51  
I know some van lifers who view Starlink to that in that same way. And just thought it was just amazing.

Johnny Podcasts  31:57  
It's, it's on, it is really like we talk about, oh, in the future, we're going to have this and this and this and flying cars and whatnot. Starlink is very much a we're living in the future like you, you have internet literally anywhere,

Jon Gay  32:10  
upload and download, compared to, say, cable or fiber.

Johnny Podcasts  32:13  
I wouldn't say I am able to work fully up there. I could move up there and keep still do my full job if I wanted to. Yeah, it's, it's that good. So I don't think it's fiber, but it's, it's, it's close enough, it's good enough.

Matt Cundill  32:30  
So when I think satellite, the two things that in my mind that might get in the way of a signal is Trees and leaves that might affect the signal, and then the other one would be thunderstorms that roll in. And the third one, which is rare, are sun spots. Are those things. Have you ever encountered those?

Johnny Podcasts  32:52  
So for the trees and the leaves, the physical obstructions that are that are permanent, that aren't weather, when you set it up, the app will tell you like, hey, we can, we can sense obstructions. You need to have it pointed at an unobstructed space in the sky. So if you're mounting it to your roof and you have trees overhead, you're not, obviously not gonna be able to put it there, so you're putting it in an open space. Ours has been rained on. It's been snowed on. It has performed exceptionally well. I don't believe there have been any downs. And, you know, it's in an area that is not that experiences all four seasons. I've never, I've even heard of sun spots, though there's, like a solar flare.

Jon Gay  33:36  
Yeah, there's a plot line on the awful eight on the ABC show 911, and they're stuck on the Space Station right now because of that. It's funny. We're talking about it.

Matt Cundill  33:46  
I just had a note come pouring in from Triton. They say all their systems are now back online. So Did somebody say that? Something went out again this morning?

Johnny Podcasts  33:57  
Not that I'm aware. Okay, as far as I'm aware, everything was back online as of like, six or seven o'clock Central yesterday, which is why I don't give too much credence to this stuff happening. Like there's there are so many people working on it like you. All of us know that feeling in the pit of our stomach where we go something is wrong, and it is on me to fix it right now? Whether it's an episode edit or something wrong was uploaded, or something happened with a client, that is what the majority of the world was experiencing yesterday. Asana Riverside, Fortnite, Roblox, zoom, all of these people working 24/7 so you know, I was confident wasn't going to last more than a few hours, if up to 24 at the most, it would be genuinely shocking. If things were still out today, then I would think, okay, something, something is seriously wrong. And then that moves beyond, oh no, I can't get my podcast out tomorrow. Then you're like, all right, maybe I should have bought that generator.

Matt Cundill  34:56  
Yeah. Who attacked us? Were there any scenarios where. Were like, I know my staff was saying, oh, Asana is not working. You know, what do I do? And I said, Well, did you try the web version? Because the web version was working, not for me. Oh, wow. Okay. I think everybody

Jon Gay  35:10  
had different experiences with different apps. I got, I had descript working for a lot of stuff, Catherine, when you guys said squad, cast, descript was down. So it was very hit and miss.

Catherine O'Brien  35:21  
And I wonder, too, if it wasn't like the things I was trying to do, because, you know, I went to the error screen, and I was, I was trying to download things, and that's was not where it kept it was, it was so promising. It was like, I'm gonna have your download ready in 85 minutes. Okay, now it's 63 minutes. Okay, now, 20 minutes. Just give me 20 minutes. I've got it downloaded. Don't you worry, it's going to be so great. We'll just the downloads coming. I promise you. Seven minutes. Are you hanging in there? We've experienced an error. This download has failed. And that's like, Okay, thank you. Well,

Johnny Podcasts  35:58  
that's a great point. Catherine, Matt this, I think Matt's the only one here that has the the aura to really say that he has staff. I don't think any of us here would say that we have staff. But Matt, for your staff, do you provide them, like external hard drives? Because, you know, when we're not downloading Riverside stuff, like I just recorded, I just downloaded files from a on site, recording that was done without me, but it was 375, gigabyte files, and I was like, I can't ask one of my editors to download this work on it and then re upload it, but I would just take forever because I don't know the state of their internet XYZ. Is that something that you do for them?

Matt Cundill  36:38  
Everyone has access to Dropbox, so we all share that in a particular way. When I'm interviewing, I ask for, like, how fast is your internet? And I'll also ask them a little bit about their computer. I know it's a little bit, you know, nosy to do that, but after you hire somebody and their computer doesn't work, that's not a good hire, right? So yeah, there are some questions like that, asking about, you know, their capabilities and the ability to do it. And, you know, sometimes I will disappear and go to a place where there's little to no Internet, and I will give them the job to do the uploads. And as long as it's uploaded, I can get to my destination where there is not much Internet, and I can just type stuff in. I look at going to a if you go to the cabin, or you go to the cottage, or you go fishing, or whatever it is, that's a writing exercise. We're going to be writing that weekend. We're not going to be spending a lot of time, you know, on cloud based stuff, doing work. We're definitely not handling much in the way of video. And anytime I'm going to be doing editing, and I'm away from strong internet that's going to come locally onto my computer. I'm going to do all the editing there, and then when I get back to the city, I will return the audio and overwrite what was there before

Jon Gay  37:54  
I've done that on planes. It's

Matt Cundill  37:58  
a plane strategy.

Jon Gay  38:00  
Download the audio file and do your edits without the internet on the plane or sketch in another plane, and then you upload it when you get your destination.

Johnny Podcasts  38:07  
Wait, what are you guys doing that is editing without actually downloading the files to your computer? Am I? Am I missing something? If you're saving the file locally on the hard drive, oh, if you're editing within Riverside or descript, I

Matt Cundill  38:22  
understand, we still, I still edit the old fashioned way.

Johnny Podcasts  38:26  
That's I edit the old fashioned way. I Every, every podcast that I work on, every file is being downloaded to my computer. And then it's either, you know, being secondarily, uploaded to Riverside. I mean, sorry, Riverside Drive for somebody else to work on. But at the end of the day, it's all, it's all going to be on my computer,

Matt Cundill  38:45  
the panic from earlier in the show. I can't remember where it came from, but when we can't take out those, those crutch words, because this, you know, the system is down, yeah? And we either have to edit that manually. And by the way, I had a two podcast, one hour long. I forgot to check how many times somebody said, you know, in one of them, but I did manage to get on a one hour podcast a client with 869 likes between the two of them, over 65 minutes. So we should have like a

Matt Cundill  39:19  
charging by the like, holy smokes, we should

Matt Cundill  39:23  
have a competition.

Johnny Podcasts  39:25  
Millennials are becoming the podcasters this problem.

Jon Gay  39:28  
Yeah, I think that's sometimes where you can show somebody a screenshot if it was a problematic guest, or if it was a weaker guest, or or, you know, and there's obviously a tactful way to do this, but if you're, if your host is asking for feedback, and say, Well, you know, here, here it is in black and white. You said, um, 400 times in 60 minutes, yeah,

Catherine O'Brien  39:54  
delightful pushback there. But we take those out so that that doesn't become a problem.

Johnny Podcasts  39:59  
What are. What are they paying but they should always be wanting to improve though, you know, because at the very least, where you can say to them is, this is how you sound to the other person that you're talking to during that recording. When it comes to that style of editing, I think a lot of that is, is is a case by case scenario. So in a lot of video podcasts, I will shoot to remove most, if not all, of those crutch words. However, when we're recording in person and we're doing like a 4k experience, where there's real cameras, there's real lighting, there's it's a very real studio doing that, I generally leave those untouched because I think it gives it I think that rawness and that authenticity combined with, like the really high quality cameras, kind of the high qualityness of the video, I think, is it hides the sort of the blemishes that happen When we're recording in person, because you look at the big podcasts, you look at the rogans, a lot of these in person, large shows, they don't do any of that crutch worth editing. So I think that that's it plays differently depending on the environment of you know that particular episode.

Catherine O'Brien  41:15  
I have thought about this many times, and if you recall, when we were talking to Kendall, I asked her, I said, What do podcasters need to know about live streaming? Because I think that, especially like your example of Rogan, it feels more like a live stream in a movie set than it does a podcast. Let's say, you know, air quotes podcast for I think that exact reason is there is very little editing. It isn't taking out crutch words. It isn't most of those people are well spoken anyway, so they don't have a lot of crutch words to begin with. But that feel of you're there with them, and you're seeing the whole enchilada. I think that is more of what those play to. And I actually, I am seeing more people in our world who are saying the live stream, that's going to be more there's going to be more focus on the live stream. The live stream is going to turn into the podcast. And so I'm paying attention to some of those things that you're talking about there, Johnny, and I think this is still on topic, is I was watching a video with somebody doing an audio interface with AI. The AI added in us to make them sound more natural. So the AI was using some mild crutch words. And I was like, Okay, wait a minute. Wait a second. Here. I have also noticed some I used to be really very hyper vigilant about breathing sounds in podcasting. I would, I would edit those always out. And actually, you guys have helped me to not be so hyper fixated on the the breath sound people breathe. I hate. Let me tell you, people breathe well, AI has sometimes will add a breathy quality to it too, as if the AI is breathing. And I'm like, okay, so they're trying to make that sound more natural. They're trying to add in crutch words. All that is a, it's that's crazy town, and B, that should tell us, or us as podcast people, what is the natural sound that people are going to be responding

Johnny Podcasts  43:19  
what is normal?

Jon Gay  43:20  
I'm sorry you caught me on the phrase the AI is breathing. That freaked me out. Sorry. The next

Johnny Podcasts  43:29  
thing you know that chat GPT is going to be responding back to us, misspelling words to be more like us, like, oh, I can't spell

Catherine O'Brien  43:37  
either. I was typing so fast I couldn't do it?

Catherine O'Brien  43:40  
Yeah, I was lying. They're already lying to us. I mean this, they'll straight up say, Oh, whoops, I lied about all that information. So that's another human quality they're trying to emulate. I have a question for the group. So leaning back again to the podcasting 1.0 world, how much value do you think that there is in your podcast host being able to have some sort of idea that they can execute on for an episode? Should they run into any disaster, for example, a, reintroduce you episode. A top 10 questions that we get in our industry, not not past tense, that is a podcast Time Machine. That's a musical jukebox Time Machine. Totally different.

Matt Cundill  44:29  
That was that

Johnny Podcasts  44:34  
it's the best podcast ever made. It's

Catherine O'Brien  44:37  
top 10, past 10s, okay, having some, some sort of the top 10 questions that they get in for their industry, some sort of tent pole type of episode that they would be able to do, I really, I think there is a lot of value in our in our hosts, having that sort of idea of, if they needed to, that they could execute. That kind of episode, just to be able to have something to go. I think that a lot of the podcast audiences, if they connect with a host, they want to hear more from that host. It's always good to be able to be ready to do some kind of solo episode, industry episode that they can deliver that if the if the need came up.

Matt Cundill  45:22  
So in radio, we used to have the topic, we would reset a topic. Or if we came back from commercial, we would find ways to reintroduce, to invite a new audience into something we were currently discussing on air, so to keep everybody up to date. But I think that's probably a smart thing to do, is to, you know,

Matt Cundill  45:42  
twice a year, maybe

Matt Cundill  45:43  
do an episode

Johnny Podcasts  45:44  
like that. I have clients that ask me about that Catherine, and they say, like, Is there value in me doing this? And I always am, capital Yes, 100% of the time, because a lot of these podcasts are interview podcasts, and within those podcasts, the audience is really hearing from the guests the most of the most of the time. And I tell them all the time, like, look, a large reason for why someone is tuning into the podcast is for for you, Matt, the host. They want. They like you, your interview style, your personality. Yes, your guests are really valid, and they're providing a lot of information, but they love Matt. They're like, Matt's my guy. I like, consider him, like, almost an extend, like a really close friend, because I've been listening parasocial, yeah. So it is really great for you to be able to just solo monolog, deep dive on some topic, and be able to just pull something out. And, you know, I think we all have a lot of faith in our host, because they are generally very smart people, that they could riff on something for. It doesn't have to be 60 minutes. It could be 20 minutes about something that they're super passionate about. And yeah, I'm I, I get really excited about that kind of content. Same I

Matt Cundill  46:55  
usually do that when I can't get a guest.

Johnny Podcasts  46:58  
Yeah, and that's, that's the easiest way to go, is when the when the client freaks out, say, like, I can't get anybody booked. I go, Oh, okay, don't freak out. You're a very smart person. Let's dig in on you know, X topic for like, 30 minutes, and just riff on it. You'll be great and it'll be a great episode,

Matt Cundill  47:12  
yeah? And script it, but script it conversationally.

Catherine O'Brien  47:15  
Yeah. I think some good standards are, what are the top questions you're being asked right now? What do you think is going to happen in the next year? What does this mean for you, the consumer or the client or the customer? I think all of those are really helpful. And I always think of those as kind of like tent poles, like, what? What are the basics getting, kind of getting back to basics. What are the most important things that are happening in your industry or your whatever those are. I think people have find more interest in those than maybe our hosts would sometimes give it credit for.

Johnny Podcasts  47:49  
And those are great fodder for social clips too, for shorts and reels, those, those solo content, because it's just street it's literally, I'm not moving. It is going to be me talking for the next 20 minutes, and you're going to get four or five really good clips out of that, just so if anything, even if you don't do it as an episode, just record that stuff and just chop it into shorts.

Matt Cundill  48:10  
So that's something that goes in the top it goes into the top right drawer, and when your guest doesn't show, that's your episode. So yeah, just to drop this under the umbrella of disasters your guest doesn't show then this is your topic idea for the week.

Catherine O'Brien  48:23  
Let me just write this down for Matt's staff. Just this is a quick memo you're going to be making clips the next time things go down,

Matt Cundill  48:31  
well, Cap cut. Just can't you use cap cut. You don't need to use descript for this, right? Or Riverside, I

Johnny Podcasts  48:38  
haven't used cap cut before. I haven't either. I think, I think that's big with the kids. I think that's what they all use for tick tocks.

Jon Gay  48:45  
Okay. Well, the kids, yeah, my nieces were not happy yesterday.

Johnny Podcasts  48:54  
They probably felt so isolated. Be like, what do I

Jon Gay  48:56  
do? Oh, my God. I have to send a text.

Johnny Podcasts  49:00  
I have to look up and speak to the other person.

Matt Cundill  49:05  
Has anybody? Has anybody done? Have they ever uploaded an episode using 5g 4g or their cell phone data?

Matt Cundill  49:18  
Oh, no, thank goodness I may have

Jon Gay  49:22  
on the mobile app, not not the app, but the mobile website of simple cast I know I have, when I have a couple clients that publish, I publish them at 6am and for the short that is tied to their full video podcast, I'll log in when I wake up and I will connect the short linkage of the main video in YouTube. But I'll also because YouTube now, I'm sorry, Spotify now allows that 92nd video clip. If the clip is less than 90 seconds, what I'll do is I'll go into Google Drive, save the file to my device and then upload it to Spotify for creators once the episode publishes, so they have the video.

Matt Cundill  50:00  
Teaser in there as well.

Johnny Podcasts  50:03  
I try not to be too far away from Wi Fi,

Matt Cundill  50:05  
yeah. So

Johnny Podcasts  50:09  
I have not just because the, you know, an audio podcast is different than uploading a video to YouTube. They're general those mp three files are generally much smaller. They're like, less than half a gigabyte depending on the length of the interview. So those ones you could probably get away with. The problem is just the the potential glitches or things that can happen to where it says it's uploaded, and then it stops, and then it's gone, and it's just, it's really frustrating. So if I were going to be on the on the road all the time, I would probably just get that Starlink Mini, the little one that's about the size of an iPad, and just carry that around with me at all times

Catherine O'Brien  50:47  
this conversation has, this portion of the conversation has jostled a memory in my mind where I did have to go to a public library and use the Wi Fi there because and I if because of power outages, back to Matt's point in our area, and I remember thinking, if this doesn't work, I'm going to go, have to go to get a hotel room somewhere. Is your is your internet working? And see if I could do it.

Matt Cundill  51:13  
That hotel Wi Fi, that's that's not something that updates itself. It does not keep up. I can confirm that, having had a few guests in hotels. Where are you today? Oh, we're at a hotel that that explains why this isn't working very well. Yes,

Catherine O'Brien  51:26  
this would be my third choice, though this is like now I'm I'm down that far,

Matt Cundill  51:31  
and I have also been to the public library as well within the last few months. Oh, you're not the

Johnny Podcasts  51:37  
things we do for you clients that are listening, the things we do for you, we love you.

Matt Cundill  51:42  
Are there any

Catherine O'Brien  51:43  
only the love must show? That's only the love must show.

Matt Cundill  51:48  
Are there any other disasters that you might have encountered in the past that would have fit into the today's show that we didn't touch on?

Johnny Podcasts  51:55  
I remember during covid, when the shutdowns first happened, Excel went down for like, three hours, and my wife was working, and I lost my mind. I thought the world was genuinely ending, because I was like, the world

Matt Cundill  52:10  
runs on Excel. It's over. All right,

Matt Cundill  52:14  
that's funny, boy, thanks for bringing it today. This has been great. Yeah, this is fun. And I don't want to plan for the next disaster, but I just want to be ready for it. Yeah? Know what I'm saying? Yeah. I

Catherine O'Brien  52:26  
have to say this. I am a I am a true student of Murphy's Law. I am a true student of Murphy's Law. And one of the best defenses against things going wrong is being prepared. So the more prepared you are for the disaster, the less likely it is to happen. So that is, those are some words to live by. We

Matt Cundill  52:44  
are about three years away from me saying, Oh, it doesn't matter. We'll just do a double ender, and nobody know will know what I'm talking about.

Jon Gay  52:53  
Old school podcasting term, right there, Matt,

Matt Cundill  52:55  
yeah, yeah. All right, let's go around, say goodbye, bye.

Johnny Podcasts  52:59  
Thank you so much. I'm Johnny podcast, please subscribe to the show. Follow us on Apple or Spotify, and if you so want to, you can follow us on socials.

Catherine O'Brien  53:09  
Bye, everybody. This is Catherine O'Brien in Baton Rouge, the storm prone at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saying, Take care, keep everything safe. Blah, blah, blah.

Jon Gay  53:19  
John Gay jag podcast productions Detroit, Michigan, home of the first place, Detroit Lions. Jag podcast productions on social

Matt Cundill  53:25  
Matt Cundill at Matt Cundill with the final show from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, moving to the ice storm capital of the world, Santa del Quebec, coming up shortly. Thanks everyone.

Sarah Burke (Voiceover)  53:40  
Bye. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Super Friends for a transcript of the show, or to connect with the Super Friends, go to the show notes of this episode, or go to sound off dot network, produced and distributed by the sound off media company.