Rachel Gilbert: Due to Underwhelming Demand

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Rachel Gilbert is one of those people who scores the trifecta for audio sometime in radio, a podcast and a voice over business. She rose through the radio ranks in a very local manner, culminating with working with Dave Collins and later foreman on the pure country format in Canada. The three have a podcast now called due to underwhelming demand, which does quite well in the London Ontario area, and her voice over business, voiced by Rachel, is the place to score awesome sounding commercials, e learning and corporate narration, audio.

Rachel Gilbert  0:45  
A baby doesn't just change your life. A baby changes everything. Pampers is here to help every parent love the changes a baby brings.

Matt Cundill  0:55  
And now Rachel Gilbert joins me from London, Ontario. You're great, Rachel.

Rachel Gilbert  1:00  
Oh, thanks. I don't know about that sometimes, but I just gotta

Matt Cundill  1:04  
know, what in the world would ever prompt you to apply to Fanshawe

Rachel Gilbert  1:08  
when I was in like grade, I was in high school, and we did, we did a tour of Fanshawe. And I always knew, for some reason I was thinking in high school, what am I gonna do when I get older? Because going back now to grade seven or eight, I had a teacher who said, and I will never forget this, if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life. And I had my dad didn't love his job. Sometimes, you know, you hear your parents complaining about their jobs. And so I thought, well, that's, that's what I want, you know, if I have to work and make money, obviously I'm going to have a job that I love so that I don't feel like I'm working. So then in high school, I ended up going on a tour of Fanshawe. I went to Medway High School in ARVA, Ontario. I grew up in ilderton, and we went through the broadcasting studio. And I thought, this is something you can do, like you can go to school for this. This is so cool. Now, my parents were always listening to the news. We were we watched the news every night. We were always listening to news talk radio. That was just a part of my kind of upbringing. When I was a kid, I a friend and I used to play like news anchor, and we'd want to, both of us would fight over, who's going to pretend to be the local news anchor? I don't know it was just kind of a part of part of my life. I studied journalism, broadcast journalism, so I just, kind of, I just it all fit together. I don't

Matt Cundill  2:26  
know, speak about the experience of fan Cha, but speak of it from a perspective of media schools disappearing and going away.

Rachel Gilbert  2:35  
That's hard. It makes me so sad that media schools are are disappearing because it's such a critical thing in our society. We have to have a credible way to get news, get information. We have to have people who are trained as journalists, sussing out reporting on information. And so at school, that's what you learned. You know, you learned the ethics of journal. We had a whole course on ethics. You know, you learn the ethics of journalism, and you learn how to do it properly, and how to have as many sources as you can, and you have to include all of those in your in your story. And it was a hustle. It was a hustle, you know, being in at Fanshawe for broadcast journalism, it was in the first year, was all classes, and you kind of learned the theory of some things, and you did it a little bit too. But the second year, you basically just ran the radio station, and it was, it's hard. It was hard, you know, we had to learn if you're if you're late to class, if you're late to your shift, no one's on the air, you know, and for like 1819, year olds, that's a learning curve, right? So, but it was fun. It was so much fun. It was one of the best times of my life. These people were we were all so like minded. We all became friends the whole class. So it was awesome. It was awesome.

Matt Cundill  3:52  
I get the feeling that a lot of people who were graduating from schools like Fanshawe were finding jobs because corporations need storytellers too, and those pay well. I think, you know, targeting to radio and broadcast is just sort of misguided. They're not going to pay well, and they're not necessarily hiring either. But I get the feeling that there's a lot of people who would graduate from a place like fanchon still find work. So why are we getting rid of the courses?

Rachel Gilbert  4:21  
That's a good question. I spent 18 years in radio and, like, a couple years in T I was in TV for like five minutes, and it had changed so much just in that time, I worked with a lot of when I started working, I was 22 I was still in school. I did weekend news, so I was in my third year, and I was working with a lot of older people who had been there forever, you know, and they, a lot of them were lucky to retire or get close to retirement before you're let go, which is typically the case in radio broadcasting. And even things had changed so much for them, you know, it's just a constant evolution, I guess, in. Broadcasting.

Matt Cundill  5:01  
Yeah, I just said that. You know, the radio schools are diminishing, yet, there are places for people to go still, so, but that does lead me in, by the way to I want to talk about your first job and when you left radio school, and where did you go and what did you wind up doing?

Rachel Gilbert  5:15  
Was where I was in school. I did two years of broadcast journalism, then I did one year of TV news. So in my third year, actually, right at the end of my second year, my teacher said, hey, the local radio station, the news talk station, is looking for a weekend person. Do you want to apply? And I was shocked, because when I was in school, I didn't win any of the awards. We had to apply to be, you know, news director, sports director, whatever we had to, I applied. I didn't get any of those jobs in school, so I wasn't considered by my teachers to be one of the best. But this teacher saw something in me, and she's like, give me your demo. I'll give it to the news director. His name is Ed Wilmot, and I got the job. He brought me in, we had an interview, and I started doing weekend news. Great opportunity, but when you're in college, you just want to go out and party on the weekends. So when you're when you're waking up early and you know that's but you know, it was a good sacrifice, obviously. So I learned so much working in the newsroom, because I started just before the summer, as summer vacations were happening. So I got to try out and fill in for almost every role in the newsroom, which was awesome. We had a big newsroom at the time. We had four radio stations, and there were six or seven of us working in there, which was a lot at the time, because by the time I left, 18 years later, there was like one or two people at most, mostly one which is sad, and then they got rid of the am station, the news talk station altogether before I left. So I learned so much from working with, you know, the old guys. It was kind of an old boys club, it really was, but I learned so much from those guys and and the people who'd been there forever, and I got to try out every role, and I just was thrown into everything and and it was such a great experience. I'm so thankful for that. And

Matt Cundill  7:07  
because you were working in the age of call letters, was it? CJ BK,

Rachel Gilbert  7:10  
CJ BK, and news talk, 1290 CJ BK, and

Matt Cundill  7:13  
does it? Does that mean that your parents got to listen to you? Yeah, the news. I mean, how exciting is it for them? And how exciting is it for you that you grew up around the news and now you're reading the news?

Rachel Gilbert  7:25  
Yeah, my parents were always listening to the competition. AM, 980 that's all. That's what we listened to growing up. And then the local news. We'd watch national news. We'd watch, you know, every Friday we watched 2020 before it was super sensationalized. So we always had the news going. My parents thought it was awesome. It was, they thought it was cool. And my family is all from the area, so they were, they were all listening. It was, it was kind of intimidating at first, because you feel like you feel a little imposter syndrome, like, who am I to be on the radio doing this, you know? But, you know, I settled in after a while. So it worked

Matt Cundill  8:01  
out. You watched 2020 when we all thought John Stossel was a little more grounded.

Rachel Gilbert  8:06  
Yes, Walters was on there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We would watch it. I would watch that as a teen, every Friday, every week, 60 minutes, every Sunday, we'd watch it. Yeah, you did some television too. When I was at the radio station, I kind of felt like there was not really, there wasn't really a place for me to move up. I was able to fill in for every role, but nobody was gonna leave, which is fair. So I felt like maybe I gotta find something else. I wanna broaden my skills a little bit. So Rogers TV was hiring, and I had volunteered at Rogers TV in London as a you know, when I was just out of school and in school, I was hosting a show called today's Londoner with Darren laidman, who now works in Hamilton, and him and I, he and I hosted that for a year or two together, and then they were hiring a full time videographer, because at the time, they had a news program called First local. And I thought, well, I've done TV. Oddly enough, I'd just gotten married, and my husband works, still works there. And so he was like, well, we're hiring. And I was like, do we want to work together? Like, this is, I don't know if that's a good idea, but they hired me, and I went and I worked there. And that was a learning curve, too. It was carrying all that equipment every day, probably 50 pounds of equipment before. Now they have a lot lighter stuff, but this was like the big cameras, the big tripods that was. It was a lot, and I did that for two years.

Matt Cundill  9:27  
Give the listener an idea about London Ontario. What makes the market unique? What makes it different? You've been there long enough you're the one who can really speak to it. I went there once for a field trip. It was really to go to Stratford anyways, and I think we just passed through London to go tour the University of Western Ontario. So give me a layout of London. What makes it tick and what makes it special as a media

Rachel Gilbert  9:51  
market. It's a standalone market, you know, once you get closer to Toronto. So London is kind of, we say, halfway between Windsor or Detroit and Toronto. Yeah. About two hours each way. So we're, we're a standalone market, once you could get closer to Toronto, like Kitchener Waterloo Guelph is Toronto kind of envelops those right? So we're lucky that we, we are our own entity, and we have a real mix of a lot of rural areas around the city, and then within the city. Some of the huge industries are healthcare, the university. Of course, there's a lot of very well educated people in London. A lot of businesses. Now we're getting a lot more businesses. We're on the highway. So there's a lot of businesses setting up shop right on the 401. Lot of businesses setting up shop because it's easy to get to Toronto, down to the states, you know, trucking things back and forth. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's nice, because it's a standalone thing. We didn't have a lot of outside cities competing for our listeners and viewers. When did

Matt Cundill  10:52  
you go back to radio? Or at least, how did the Dave and Rachel show get started? Were you in radio and then the show started? Or

Rachel Gilbert  10:58  
when I went to Rogers TV. And even before that, I worked at cjbk for four years, went to Rogers TV for two years, and then I was back at the group of stations which was astral, maybe it was still standard at the time, standard radio. Then it turned into astral. Then it turned into Bell radio, which included BX 93 which is now called Pure country. We didn't make a lot of money, right? My husband and I both worked in broadcasting. We were so poor, I don't really know how we survived, but I was just hustling. I was trying to find jobs. I was trying to do whatever I could. I would literally, you know, there was a woman who ran a magazine locally, and I just said, Hey, do you need a writer? Like, I don't really know how to do it, but I'd love to try. Like, what a pitch, right? She's like, Yeah, sure, you can do that. And then another person who who kind of worked with us at Rogers TV, I knew that their company did some webcasting, said, Hey, would you do you need any anybody to do webcasting? I could literally just ask for my own jobs. And she's like, Yeah, come on, yeah, you can come and do that. So I had my hand in a lot of different pots. So when I went to the TV station. I was still filling in at the radio station doing weekends or just fill in work, whatever they needed me to do. So I'd never fully left. They had a new boss come in. His name's Al Smith, and he, one day, out of the blue, called and said, Hey, can you come in for a meeting? And I was like, okay, yeah, I guess I went in and he talked to me all about a morning show on Q 97.5 and I was like, you want me to do a morning show? Like, I'm not even funny, like, I don't know what, I don't know if I can do that. And he's like, I think he could. And I was like, okay, so I left. That was just our initial meeting. And then he called later, and he's like, Hey, we want to offer you the morning show position on BX 93 and I was like, pardon me, like this is so out of the blue, but he knew me because we both worked in London for a long time. I still kind of kept my foot in the door doing news at the radio station. I think maybe he watched me on TV a little bit. So I don't really know what prompted him to take a chance on me to do a morning show. And I was like, okay, like, this seemed like a good idea, because at the time, Rogers TV was getting rid of the news program that I was doing, and so I thought, well, I don't want to just be a I don't want to do kind of what their plan is for me. This is not where I want to stay. So I was like, Well, I guess I'll, I'll take a chance on this morning show. And they paired me up with Dave Collins, who'd been in radio for an eternity. And I thought, if this doesn't work out, I'm the one that's going to get let go, not him. He's been here forever. He had the Dave and Jackie show. Jackie had gone. Kim Woodbridge was his next partner. Turns out, they were going to move her to easy rock to Q 97.5 at the time, and then, and then they decided to put me on BX 93 so anyways, it was a huge gamble. I didn't know. It gave me a lot of anxiety, because I only signed a one year contract, and I thought I'm leaving my permanent, full time job that I could stay at for a long time, to take a chance on this morning show. And Dave will tell you, the first break that we ever did together was like magic. It was like, he's like, as soon as you spoke, I knew, I knew you could do this. I knew we could do this together. I knew it was gonna work. Somehow we had the chemistry he he's a lot older than I am. So you I kind of wondered, what do we have in common? He had, he had a kid. He had kids my age. So he, you know, he, essentially, he was older than my mom. He is older than my mom. But it just worked. Like we had chemistry. It worked out. It worked. It worked amazingly. It was like, it's like magic on the radio, and you can't manufacture that?

Matt Cundill  14:40  
Yeah, so somebody saw something when you were on television. Probably somebody saw personality. You have no idea. Somebody read the personality and the writing you were doing.

Rachel Gilbert  14:50  
I should ask Al, because I'm still in touch with him, be like, What crazy idea did you get in your head that you decided you were going to hire me? Like, I didn't think I. To do it. And I said to them in the interview, I'm like, I I'm not, like, I don't do this. And he's like, Well, we're gonna need you to do it. Like, I was like, okay, you know. So I figured it out when, when we first started together, Dave had been doing it forever, but they were, they were gonna change how we were doing radio. It was no longer kind of a typical jock, yuck, yuck fest. You know, it was going to be more character based radio. We brought in a coach, and we worked with him for three full days straight, you know, off the air. Who that that was? Stan Maine, I think is his name from the States. Stan main if I'm not mistaken, I'd have, I have to look that up, but he was so great in getting us to assess our own characters. And the whole point of character based radio is being very relatable, exploiting your own faults, which is very uncomfortable. It is not a comfortable thing, but once you can get past that discomfort, you connect with people so much more, because people hear you say something like, Oh, I really messed up this weekend, and here's what I did. Like, what an idiot, you know? And of course, you'll get people texting calling and say, Yeah, you're a real idiot. But then you also get the people who who text or call and say, I've totally done that. You're not alone, right? So it makes you feel better, makes them feel better because, because that's all anybody wants is connection. That's all anybody wants is to connect with with one another. They're listening to you every day. And if you're talking at them and not resonating with them, they it's, it just passes right over,

Matt Cundill  16:37  
you know? And was it always the country format?

Rachel Gilbert  16:39  
Yeah, it was always country. So I knew a little bit about country music. I grew up in a little town called ilderton, just outside of London, so a lot of my friends were into country. My parents were not. We didn't really listen to it. My husband listened to country. So once I got together with him, and we went to Fanshawe together, that's how we met. I kind I knew a little bit about it, but I learned a lot more, and I learned to love it more, of course, when I was working there and the country audience is, they're a different breed. They are so loyal and so kind and so welcoming and just, it's a warm feeling, you know, and it's and it's very authentic. You don't feel like you have to put on, you know, a cool vibe to be with them, right? That's just not how it is. They want you to be real. You did

Matt Cundill  17:25  
11 years on that show. What were some of the were there any changes to the show as you as it evolved

Rachel Gilbert  17:32  
for the first maybe two years, Dave and I were on our own. It was just the Dave and Rachel show, and then our producer from down the hall. Foreman joined us. He's super into country music, and he was working with us, doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. And we were getting so many calls at the time. This was before anybody could text us. We couldn't keep up. Like we were literally inundated every break after each break with calls that we couldn't. We didn't have time to plan anything else because we were answering the phone, or we just had to not answer the phone, which doesn't help either, because you want the calls to kind of further the bit and and put those on the air. So we begged and begged and begged. We're like, we need a third person. We need a producer. We need someone who can answer these calls and do stuff for us so we can get everything else done. And you know, we had the, we had the good problem of being really successful. We'd gone up in the ratings a lot. And so eventually they were like, Okay, you can foreman, can join you as our producer. So he was never a named, he was never named in the show name, but he really just became the third, he really did become the third person of the show, which was which made it so much better, so much better.

Matt Cundill  18:44  
Yeah, I sometimes wonder, how anybody gets anything done with two people on a show, and you want to do so much in this day and age, with social channels, with the phones, with the text line, with producing on the fly, I wouldn't even know how two people can do it properly.

Rachel Gilbert  19:00  
Well, yeah, that's the key. When I first started, we didn't have we had Facebook, I think, but it was social. Wasn't a big part of it. Yet people were still calling it. Was still very, almost primitive. Now, when you think about it, we didn't have Instagram. We weren't really on Twitter, like it wasn't radio stations hadn't embraced the social media aspect of it quite yet. It took a couple of years before they did when I when I was there, so we didn't have to do a lot of that stuff. But as it became, as it became more a part of the show, we you know, that was a part of us saying, hey, we need someone else here.

Matt Cundill  19:37  
So when did Belle stop investing in the show? Which is another nice way of saying, When did they fire you? Or why did they fire you? Why did the show end? Belle

Rachel Gilbert  19:45  
didn't fire me. I left and Dave left. We decided to leave on our own, which is unusual and shocked. A lot of people, oh, look at me, assuming that's okay. A lot of people assumed that it's terrible. But I, but I'm trained to Well, I get it. I. Totally get it. They fired Foreman a couple years before we left, and the reason was, well, they were doing a mass layoff, so he was caught up in that there were five or six people in the building that got let go during that round of layoffs. Because, as you know, you work in radio every August or November, we were all holding our breath, like, what's gonna happen, right? We knew it was always a joke, like, if you see people in the hallway, you don't know, run outside, leave, just get out, they can't fire you if they can't find you. I

Matt Cundill  20:30  
had may down. May was always sort of a month, because they did budgets, right? And so I always found may to be a very particularly busy time of year for restructuring. And then one of my more favorite jokes that has surfaced is that, you know q2, results are due tomorrow. Get your resumes ready. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Rachel Gilbert  20:47  
exactly, because we all know, and that's the sad part of it. And I would always say, Well, how far can they cut before there's nothing left? Well, now radio programs are shutting down at colleges, so we're getting close. But anyway, they they let Foreman go, and that was a huge shock to us. We had a we had a great show, and people loved him the most. People listeners typically love the third voice the most, but he's funny, and he added so much to the show. So we were really bummed that he that they let him go. We didn't want him to go, we and we would all kind of argue, but that happens on a morning show, right? You get to be like, it's like a marriage you you are working so closely together, and you're telling each other things about your life that you wouldn't tell normal coworkers, because you need to find those nuggets within everybody's life and what they're doing to exploit on the radio, right? So, so there's arguments sometimes, but when they let him go, we were totally shocked, and it really it took the wind out of our sails, to be honest, Dave and I, and they wouldn't let us say anything about it. We begged to say something. Can we please acknowledge where he is, or that he was let go, or any they were like, Nope, you can't say a single word. Don't say anything about it. So we didn't, and we had people asking for months, even years, where'd Foreman go, what happened to him? And they were mad at us. People were mad at us that we weren't acknowledging it, but we couldn't that. I that was kind of the beginning of the end for us. I think it really took, took the wind out of our sails. I felt like our show. It was good, but it wasn't. It could have it was better with three people. Now, Bell wasn't paying for three person morning shows anymore, either. People just didn't have a producer. There are still some three person morning shows, but that was a reasoning with us. No other peer country, because at that point, BX 93 had turned into peer country. 93 no other peer country had a three person morning show, so we weren't allowed either. And so that was kind of the beginning of the end. But that wasn't the first time people had been let go, and it wasn't the last. You know, they did a few other rounds of layoffs. And I remember a year or two later, they did another round of layoffs, and I said to my boss, this is really disheartening, and she's like, I know, but what's she gonna do? Right? She's just had to carry out, carry out the duties. It sucks to be the you have some survivors guilt, right? When, when other people are let go, and you're still there, and then you have to pick up the slack. But you should be grateful you still have a job that's tough. It's tough. It's tough for everyone, those let go and those who are left behind.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  23:27  
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Matt Cundill  23:57  
So tell me about the bravery of leaving on your own with Dave,

Rachel Gilbert  24:01  
that was scary. I have a voiceover business. I call it voiced by Rachel, and I had been doing that since 2014 so I've been doing it for a while, and I'd been building it up. And the plan was to do that as a backup for when I got fired from radio, right? So that was my plan, and then I just didn't get fired. So it was building, building, building over. And by that point, I'd done it for eight years, and I did my taxes that year, and I thought, oh, I can support myself on this. You know, I could. I could do this. And my husband's like, yeah, you you could, if you want. He was such a support. And just and things that happened, they did another round of layoffs, and I, I felt like the country stations. I remember one of our bosses saying, well, country's very niche, but he said it in almost a way that was like, it's beneath the pop stations. It's beneath the top 40. It's beneath all the top performing stations. Even though we were a top performer, our sales were sold out. There was a waiting list to get on our radio station as an advertiser, our ratings were up. You know, we were doing well. I never felt like they gave us the credit that we deserved, because we were working hard. We did everything the consultants told us to do. It was working. We were performing, and I felt like that was almost dismissed a lot of times. And so by the time I realized I could support myself doing voiceover, and, you know, just, I just had this feeling like, I don't love the decisions they're making around here in that kind of way. And it wasn't the local level. It was kind of the upper levels, like, you know, I knew they weren't really supporting us, and they just wanted to do it as cheaply as possible. And so I was like, I'm gonna leave. It was a it was a big decision. It was a lot of thinking and talking to people and reaching out to other people who had left. And I, you know, asking them, literally, IS THERE LIFE AFTER radio? Because that's my whole life. That is this what I love. I love radio. I still love radio. I love radio more than television. You know, breaks my heart that it's seems to be dying. But everybody said, yeah, there's life after radio. You can totally do that. So it was a leap of faith, but I did it. I told Dave, I gave him six months notice. I gave my bosses six months notice too. And I said, I think I'm gonna leave. And he said, Well, I didn't realize you were doing so well at voiceover. I was like, Yeah, I don't really talk about it, because it's just something I do on the side at home. But I am and I'm, I think I'm gonna go. And he's like, Well, I'm not gonna go. I'm like, Well, you could retire. Like, what was your plan? He's like, I didn't have a plan. I was just gonna stay with you. I'm like, Well, I'm gonna go. And he's like, Okay, so for a while he considered staying, and then he was like, No, I'm gonna I'm out too. If you're out, I'm out. I don't wanna start again with someone new. We both just decided to leave. And

Matt Cundill  27:00  
what a compliment that is to you. Is it? It is, I don't know.

Rachel Gilbert  27:03  
I guess that I got to leave on my own. We had a lot of questions. People were skeptical.

Matt Cundill  27:09  
There's nobody I would rather work with than you. And I'm not sure the next, you know, or he thinks that whatever is going to be next is just not going to be the same. And you know, because you need energy to get out of bed to do a morning show.

Rachel Gilbert  27:22  
You know what? I never regretted, or I never dreaded, I should say, going to work, ever? I hated getting up at 330 in the morning. Nobody likes that. But I never dreaded going to work. I loved working with those. Those guys are like my brothers. They're, you know, I know so much about them, and they know so much about me now, and we had fun, we laughed, we laughed so much. We just had a great time. And if I dreaded my partner or going into work or any of that, I wouldn't have lasted 11 years. Because who wants to get up that early for something they hate, right?

Matt Cundill  27:59  
Who did you look at who was on their own doing something outside of a radio station? He said, Yeah, if they can do it, I can do it.

Rachel Gilbert  28:08  
I had a co worker, Rachel Ettinger, who worked on Verdin radio in London, and so we were both doing mornings for several years, and she was doing her master's degree at the time, while still doing morning radio crazy. She's a hustler. She left to take a job, I think, finish her masters, take a take a different job outside of radio, I talked to her. I talked to a little bit. I asked Sarah Kelly, who did the morning show, also on Virgin radio. She had left to become a realtor. And there was a, I can't remember who else I reached out to. I talked to Marianne Iverson, who is a voice actor now in Ottawa, and she worked in radio in Ottawa, but that was after I had made this decision to leave, and they actually hired her to fill in for our morning show, to take over in the interim, for about six months until they found a morning show, found a full morning show, and she was like, You're gonna love it. You're gonna love I'm so happy for you. You're gonna love doing voiceover. You're gonna love having your own business. And I said to her, I'm terrified. I don't know if I've made the right decision. And she's like, I'm gonna ask you this in a year and see what you say then. And a year later, I thought, I said, Yeah, you're right. I love it. I love being my own boss. I love doing, you know, having the flexibility. I got two little girls, I can be home for them. I am the vice president of our parent council. I'm that person. I can be so involved now, which is awesome.

Matt Cundill  29:37  
I love it, yeah, so I know all three of those examples that you mentioned, including Sarah Kelly, who worked at curve 94 three in Winnipeg, way back in like 2000 18,009 before going back to London. And I know Rachel from Halifax San FX graduate, if I recall correctly,

Rachel Gilbert  29:57  
yes, I think so. Yeah. I. I think I talked to Sarah Burke a little bit too, but I can't remember that might have been after I actually quit, but before I made the decision, I I think I reached up. I didn't want to tip anybody off, either. So I was I had to tread carefully, because, you know, News travels fast. In radio, somebody gets wind of Rachel might leave that. That's

Matt Cundill  30:19  
not great, right? Right. Yeah, somebody goes out for happy hour and starts putting a couple back. And, hey, I've got some news for you.

Rachel Gilbert  30:26  
Yeah, so I didn't really, I didn't tell most people until I had made the decision. But I talked to, like my my friends who weren't in radio, my family, and it was a my husband. It was a lot of talking before I could make that decision.

Matt Cundill  30:39  
Tell me about your podcast, and then tell me what you learned about taking a radio show and then moving it over into the podcast space. What did you learn about that

Rachel Gilbert  30:49  
our podcast is Dave, Rachel and foreman. We call it due to underwhelming demand. So the three of us missed working together so much that we decided to do a podcast. I love radio. I didn't leave radio because I hated it. I and I knew I would miss doing the show and miss having that fun. So I proposed to the guys, hey, do you want to do a show together? This is how we can be. We can do it together on our own terms and just have fun like we used to. And so they thought, Okay, let's try it. And we all kind of decided we'll float one episode out there, see if it gets any traction, and then go from there. Maybe it won't, maybe it won't work, and then we'll quit, whatever. Who cares. We'll just try. So we did, and it went over really well. We had a huge response. We already have a following, obviously, and people who listened to us, mostly in the in the London area. We do it very we do it very similarly to a radio show, except, of course, we have as much time as we feel like having. We try and limit it to like 10 minutes, which is still a long, still long for a radio show, typically, and but we can say whatever we want, right? We're not restricted. We can swear we can. We can do whatever we want and and it's fun. You know, we it's not a money maker. We don't make money on it. People ask me, how's your podcast? It's good, it's great, but it's not a money maker. That's not how I make my money, but we do it for

Matt Cundill  32:13  
fun. How do you judge success on a podcast? Well, I don't think we

Rachel Gilbert  32:17  
have, we don't have the listeners of some other, some others, right? We might get 1000 downloads the first week that the podcast is out, which, I think is okay,

Matt Cundill  32:27  
it's London, Ontario, and that's primarily where you're known and gonna market it, and that's largely where your audience is, and you're getting 1000 downloads. Yeah, you're doing really well. I hate to I'm gonna tell you,

Rachel Gilbert  32:41  
Well, that's good to know. We've talked to you a lot, of course, about podcasting, and got your expertise on that, because we didn't really know what we were doing. So I don't know. We just we judge it by we judge success by the feedback that we're getting from our listeners. Are they even excited to hear us? And we continually get feedback from people who love listening to us every Tuesday our episodes come out. They say we look forward to Tuesdays. So that's, you know, it's just anecdotal. That's how we That's how we're measuring it. We have 130 episodes now, and we're over 145,000 downloads. So, you know, maybe 1100 downloads per episode, give or takes. You know, it's not bad.

Matt Cundill  33:19  
Yeah, listen for something that is most of the content is going to be local or geo local. That's good stuff. And there's also, I think that's the future too. Is being local, local podcasts, whether it's video or audio or both combined together. That's the future.

Rachel Gilbert  33:40  
Podcasting is is like the Wild West, like it's there's anything and everything that you can find, and then there's great hosts and terrible hosts, right? So anyone can do a podcast, whether they know what they're doing or not. And we've, of course, had to hone ours, and we went into it knowing how to host a show. There's not a lot of local content anymore in any station, in any city, really, I think local podcasts are great, but it's the trouble is getting the word out about it right? And not everybody listens to podcasts either. It's a lot more effort to open your app, search for the show, whatever episode, and then hit play. It's a lot more steps than just turning on your radio right? And you've got your preset there. So, and that sounds like such a simple thing, but I think that's a that is a barrier for some people. So,

Matt Cundill  34:29  
so it is, it is harder because, because we're comparing it to the ease of radio, and you just get into a car and there's an am and FM, but what about the difficulty in getting a book? You have to go to the store. You got to buy the book. You have to download the book, you got to order it on Amazon. Then the book arrives. You got to pay money for and then you got to open like, these are just regular steps to get to where you know where it needs to be. So I would sort of just challenge you to think of it as something a little bit different. And the experience, too is different. Like, it's not like it's there. Air and I can start and I can stop. Because when you do a show, you start at the beginning, right? It's not join us at 815, halfway through what would normally be a show for the biggest quarter hour that we have to offer you.

Rachel Gilbert  35:13  
Yeah, we kind of, we do, kind of do ours like a radio show. We start at the beginning and we do it because that's what we know. I don't know. Does that fill a void, void for people? I have no idea. Does it deter some people because it's too much like radio? I don't, I don't know. That's just what

Matt Cundill  35:28  
we do at 1000 downloads. You're, you're doing something right? I

Rachel Gilbert  35:32  
guess so. I hope so. I'm just glad people connect with us and love us and love listening to us, not not even necessarily love us, but that's that's what I love about radio, and that's why I kind of gravitated to radio versus TV. Is that immediate reaction from people, the immediate connection with people, they could call, they could text, they could whatever you know, and you were talking to them right away in real time. There was no waiting around. It wasn't recorded. So I loved that about radio podcasting isn't, isn't in real time, but we do still get that feedback, which is amazing.

Matt Cundill  36:08  
I mean, if your radio show is going to be picked up by Netflix, you'd be like, Yes, I can't wait.

Rachel Gilbert  36:13  
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. Oh, that's the dream, isn't it? I mean, you're,

Matt Cundill  36:18  
you're like, all audio. You've got the hat trick of audio, you've got the podcast going, you've done radio, and you've got voiceover, I guess, like all audio all the

Rachel Gilbert  36:27  
time. I am all audio all the time. I guess, yeah, you're right. That's just what I'm good at. I say to my friends, I have a group of friends. Of course, my neighbors and friends, they're all so smart, and they are all and everybody's in different thing. Like, one's a scientist and one's a therapist, and one's, you know, everybody, the couple scientists, actually, and just they are all so smart, and I feel like I am not. I don't live up to that, because my only skill is talking. And I've said that to them a few times. I'm like, God, you guys are so smart. Like, these women are just amazing. And they're like, Well, you run a business? I'm like, Yeah, but what the what the hell you know who? That's nothing. So I do, I kind of feel like this is my only skill, connecting with people and talking with people. And yeah, I guess that's why I do it. I guess that's

Matt Cundill  37:16  
why I gravitate to it. Tell me a little bit about the voiceover business, because is is AI causing a dent in your cash

Rachel Gilbert  37:25  
flow? That's a good question. There is a dent in my cash flow this year. For sure, I feel that. I don't know if it's because of the tariffs and things that are going on with, you know, Trump or whatever. Maybe people aren't advertising as much because they're not selling as much? I don't know, but I've talked to several other voice actors and a few clients as well, who have said, yeah, things are definitely down this year. Ai voices. I think they will take away from the small, cheap jobs. I think they will be good for people who don't care that it sounds cheap, because once you realize that's AI, or that doesn't sound real, or that doesn't have like a normal inflection, then I think your view of the quality of that product or service goes down. So I think AI will take away the small jobs, the cheap, small voiceover jobs. A lot of clients are using AI as placeholder voiceovers. So I'll get you know, a video with a placeholder AI voice. And they say, Okay, this has the this is a mock video. This is what we're running to replace. I don't want it to be a lot of them will say, I don't want it to be as monotone as this. But here's my specs and but for timing, we put the voice in here, so that's what it's being used for. I feel like a lot, but AI is here to stay like we can't we can't get around it. I listened to a webinar recently about whether voice actors should be doing AI voices. There's a lot of text to speech jobs and voice cloning jobs. Voice cloning is essentially when they take your voice and they make a voice that sounds like you, so it is your voice, but if they do like a algorithm training or something, they might take a bunch of voices and combine them to make a unique sounding voice to use for that algorithm, right? So it doesn't really sound like any person in particular. And I think a lot of the thinking is voice cloning is more ethical, because you'll get paid for that, and as long as you're getting paid for the usage, and because a lot of them want it in perpetuity. And so what if you do a voice over for, you know, a certain skincare company, and you're the voice, the AI voice for that? Well, maybe another skincare company won't hire you down the road, so you could be shooting yourself in the foot. So there's a lot of things to think, but there's no one right way to do it, either. There's a lot of things to think about, though. So I think voice cloning, text to speech, that's, that's a lot, but you got to be really careful with what they're asking. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  39:53  
I just toss those in the garbage. I'm not doing those. Yeah, and I, I do

Rachel Gilbert  39:57  
too. Most, mostly, I've, I've, I. I haven't actually done any voice cloning jobs, but I'm trying to learn more about it so that I can be because I know it's not gonna go away, so that I can be at least open to the opportunity of, okay, if there's some company doing this ethically and they're gonna pay me to use my voice, maybe, yeah, if you

Matt Cundill  40:17  
and I had a combined voice, I don't know what that would sound like in the end, and they clone both of ours and then put them together.

Rachel Gilbert  40:23  
Yeah, so the algorithm training ones, I'm not all about, like, the if you're if you're using it to train train something or train a system, I don't love that. If you're going to use my voice and it's me, and you're paying me, and it's but again, it like podcasting that's kind of the Wild West like, there's not a lot of regulations, not a lot of laws. There's an organization here in Canada called cava, Canadian Association of voice actors, and NAVA in the States, National Association of voice actors. They're trying to do some advocacy work in terms of AI voiceovers and what should be allowed and what shouldn't be allowed? Because technically, they could take, you know, say, you put a video on Tiktok, a 32nd video. Somebody could take your voice and rip it off, right? That's all they need. So it may not be great, it may not be a great AI voice, but they could do it. Should that be allowed? No.

Matt Cundill  41:16  
Do you do any pay for play? Do you do any play for it was a pay for play. When it comes to, I do pay to play. Do you do any pay to play for voice over work

Rachel Gilbert  41:27  
I do, and I know that's a contentious issue. I'm in a lot of Facebook groups for voice actors, and everybody's got a lot of opinions. But I've kind of, I've come to realize, you know, you just do what works for you. I've met a lot of my long term clients on Upwork, which people hate? People hate Upwork, but I've met a lot of long clients that I've worked for for four or five years who give me regular I've made 1000s from them, and in my down times, that's what's kept me afloat. Listen,

Matt Cundill  41:55  
I've been on Upwork, and it worked for a while, and then I found that everybody wanted $5 for 10,000 words on YouTube, and I couldn't find the jobs anymore. Did that change?

Rachel Gilbert  42:04  
Yeah, no, those are still there. I liken up work to a thrift store. You have to pick through it like and there might be one gem in a month or two weeks to a month, right? But there it's, it's a lot of there is a lot of crap.

Matt Cundill  42:18  
This is excellent. This is, this is now a place where I can come and get help with my voiceover business. Yeah, well,

Rachel Gilbert  42:24  
I certainly don't have all the answers, but, like, a few friends and I have seen some jobs on Upwork that are just abhorrent, like, like, the prices they want you to do a full audio book for 25 bucks. You know, ridiculous, and we started reporting them because we're like, this is nobody should be asked. It's basically asking you to work for free.

Matt Cundill  42:43  
Oh, I did that too, and I actually thought it's like, This must violate some I don't think they care some labor laws in like, nine tenths of the planet. But here we

Rachel Gilbert  42:53  
are. You would think, you would think, but there's always somebody willing to work for a nickel. Who are those people? Right? Yeah. Not me. No, I you have to be really picky, which is, which is fine, but that's it. Just because there's a lot of crap on there doesn't mean that there isn't great, great clients on there. I

Matt Cundill  43:12  
know you do a lot of narration work. I know you do a lot of 32nd commercials. Do you do anything else, like, let's say, radio imaging, or anything like that.

Rachel Gilbert  43:21  
No, I don't do radio imaging, although you'd think that I would, right? I've thought, I thought about getting into that. I've started doing some audio books, more audio books, and I do, yeah, I do a lot of commercials, I do a lot of explainers, and e learning. E learning is kind of my bread and butter, like I have some ongoing clients that that's what, that's what I do. It's long, it's long, but it's not tedious work. It's long, yeah, and it pays the bills. You know, that's what you got to do. So, yeah, I'm on a few pay to plays. I have an agent. I have cluve I do my own direct marketing. I, you know, you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. That's what I say. You just see what works. You get you got to hustle and get your work wherever you can get it right.

Matt Cundill  44:00  
I love it. Hey, Rachel, thanks a lot for doing this. Thank you for having me. This is fun.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  44:04  
The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan sirminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com. You