Streamline Your Podcasting Workflow From Start To Finish

Whether you’re producing your first episode or your 300th, a smooth, sustainable workflow is the key to a long-lasting podcast. In today’s episode, we’re breaking down the full podcasting process: from capturing ideas and outlining, to recording, editing, and finally publishing! We share the practical habits, tools, and systems that keep Buzzsprout podcasts running week after week. 

We cover how to avoid bottlenecks, the most common places creators waste time, how to protect your recording schedule, and why templates, quick-capture idea systems, and consistent team habits make all the difference.

We’re also discussing recording setups, triple-ender workflows, remote guest tips, calendar discipline, how to streamline episode prep using AI tools, and the biggest workflow mistakes that lead to burnout or podfade. 

Shoutout to 2025 ARKAST Award winners, Tiger Talk! We hope they inspire more kids to start podcasting!

Don't forget to take part in our Buzzcast holiday help desk! Send in something that is a pain point in your podcasting journey and we'll try to find a fix!

Contact Buzzcast

• Send us a text message
• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Chapters

• 0:00 Kids' Podcast Tiger Talk Wins Awards
• 3:20 Today’s Goal: Smoother Workflows
• 6:55 Apps We Recommend For Organization
• 14:13 Planning Saves Time Later
• 17:39 Make Outlines Less Work
• 31:30 Scheduling That Actually Works
• 39:20 Good Recordings Ease Editing Workload
• 44:28 Promotion, Batching, And Templates
• 51:28 Fan Mail
• 57:44 Post Show: Jury Duty

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

I got an email from James Cridland over at Pod news with a scoop. And the scoop was that there's a Buzzprout podcaster who just won multiple awards at the 2025 ARKAST Awards, which is the Arkansas Podcast Collective. And this is a podcast. Oh, I went and listened to an episode and I shared it with both of you. Did you have a chance to listen to any of these?

Jordan: 0:24

Oh, yeah.

Alban: 0:26

It's so good. It's so sweet.

Kevin: 0:28

It is.

Alban: 0:29

So this is Tiger Talk. Tiger Talk is now an award-winning podcast, which is written and produced by the fourth and fifth grade students at John Tyson School of Innovation in Arkansas. They've been doing seven seasons. They were nominated for four of these awards, and I believe they won three of them. So they won Best Podcast for Kids and Family, Best Podcast for a Young Pod, Emory Johnson won, and rising star Jeanette Perez. And it's a great podcast. It's so much fun listening to elementary school age kids doing a pretty dang good show. So I I was really impressed. My daughter's in third grade. And you know, I've talked about us recording little things on uh just an audio recorder. And I wanted to send this over to her and show, like, hey, we should do this at your school. We should try to get them to start a podcast.

Kevin: 1:25

I'd love this idea. I tried to get my kids to do it at their school for years. I gave up at some point because they wouldn't do it. But as kids get into high school, it starts to look good on like college applications that you were the founder of certain clubs and stuff. And so for all of them, I've proposed this idea of starting the podcast club and starting the podcast for your school. None of them have done it. I'm so glad that somebody at John Tyson Elementary School took this idea and did it. And I think every school should do it. Every school needs a podcast.

Jordan: 1:52

Yeah.

Kevin: 1:53

This is fantastic.

Alban: 1:54

What I love about this idea for elementary students is with a podcast, they get to have a healthy separation between the creation of the content and like the consumption. And so they can podcast and people can listen to it. And there are other students in the school can listen to it. But you don't have the same, you know, they don't have to be on camera. You don't have to get all the comments when you put something online. If like if they were making a YouTube channel, I would feel so much more comfortable as a parent knowing my daughter was podcasting and anybody could listen to what she thought about what was happening in the world. Feels very different than if she was starting like a TikTok channel.

Kevin: 2:32

Yeah, I agree. On the consumption side, I love the fact that kids are putting out content for kids. And in my mind, anyway, it's not necessarily screen time. Like you are consuming a digital media, but putting in earbuds and listening to something, I think stimulates your mind in a different way than staring at a screen does. And so I love the fact that they're putting that content out and introducing other elementary school kids to content that's, you know, stimulating of the mind instead of just zone out and watch something.

Jordan: 3:01

Well, we're super excited. I'm gonna link to this podcast in the show notes. You should definitely go listen to it if you just need something to uplift your day a bit. I highly recommend it. Um so congratulations to Tiger Talk. And the best way to do this is to remove as much friction as possible in the logistics of your podcast production. Cause when things get overloaded or chaotic, it gets stressful and then things just kind of like screech to a halt and you don't want to pod fade. We want to keep you podcasting. So that's our goal for today is to go over where things tend to like break down in the podcasting workflow and then also give some ideas for how to create a smooth workflow that you can reuse time and time again. And this makes it easier to produce your podcast. It gives you like consistent quality and it allows you to uh produce episodes with way less stress, and you're gonna be really proud of the end result. So I'm excited about this one.

Alban: 4:18

I'm too. I think that you take out a lot of the stuff that's just no fun. Nobody's ever really said, my passion is in scheduling three different hosts to make sure they all have the right time for this podcast. Nobody's ever found joy in that. We find joy in like the creation and the editing and you know, maybe even the marketing. But when you get this stuff dialed in, you really get to set a lot of this on autopilot so that you can focus on what you really enjoy.

Jordan: 4:44

I think that's a really good point, Alban, too, is that you know, you're gonna have strengths in certain areas where maybe some other podcasters are not going to be as strong or they're not going to enjoy it as much. It's really important to kind of ask yourself where are things starting to bottleneck in your production process? You know, are you spending way too much time on certain things? So, for example, I know that there are times where my husband will spend like four hours creating a sound bite for his podcast. I'm like, man, I know there's better ways to do this. I think that this is a huge time suck and it's probably gonna like burn him out at some point. And so I think it's really important to just kind of pay attention to where you're spending the most time in your podcast production process because we gotta speed things up a bit.

Kevin: 5:26

So you know what they say, right? Failing to plan is planning to fail. I don't know who that is, but that's that's I mean, it's very true. It's an old um sounds like a military saying. It's something, but I've heard it a million times in my life. It does ring true. If we don't plan ahead, especially with something that's like a hobby, right? And especially if you have especially, especially if you have other people who are involved in this thing, then it's going to become very difficult to sustain over time because hobbies, of course, have to take the back burner to things like your job or things that have to be done around the house or needs of your friends and family or whatever. Hobbies will always come last if you don't schedule them, if you don't prioritize them. And also, like I was saying, if you have other people involved, if you have a co-host, if you have guests, if you have an editor that you work with that needs things by a certain date. And so oftentimes we can jump into podcasting without thinking through logistically, like how is this going to fit into my life, and then scheduling it and prioritizing it so that you can create a sustainable podcasting journey. And as Jordan mentioned, pod fading is very real. The majority of podcasts that start don't last. They don't last past a couple episodes. A huge percentage of them don't make it past the dreaded seventh episode, and then even fewer make it into the, you know, the 50 or 100 episodes. And that's what we want to do is we want to help everybody get to that 50th episode. We want to get to that hundredth episode, we want to get to the 200th episode, and we want to help you not only get there, but also enjoy it all along the way. And planning is crucial to that.

Jordan: 6:55

All right. So some apps that we recommend. I know I personally for an app that just helps me kind of keep my podcast organized, keep all my thoughts in one place. So for my personal podcast, I love and use Airtable, A, because it's free, and B, because it looks really slick. It's gorgeous, and I'm a very aesthetic person, but it also is a very powerful tool. You're able to like link to different things or view your projects in different ways. So I can view everything in like a calendar mode or in a spreadsheet mode or in like a Kanban style. And I can actually toggle between all of the different modes to view things, um, which I really like because for certain parts of my podcasting process, I kind of like to go between those two different things. So, like if I'm planning out episodes, I love having a spreadsheet version, like just simple Google Sheet style, Excel style. And then I can also link to like other tools in Airtables, such as like guest information or artwork or PDF files, things like that. And it makes it like super easy for me. So that's one that I use on my personal podcast. Do you guys have any recommendations that work for you?

Alban: 8:06

I mean, the recommendation I'd give is for this show, which is we use Basecamp.

Jordan: 8:11

Yeah.

Alban: 8:11

And I'm not recommending that people who are listening to this who don't know what Basecamp is go sign up and start using it for their podcast. It works for us because I think the most important piece is that all three of us use Basecamp all day, every day. And we know how it works, and it's where we keep our schedules, and it's where we share other docs, and it's how we communicate for work. And all of the tools that we need for podcasting, we found a way to get all of that inside of a single Basecamp project. It's called BuzzCast. And we can throw ideas in there, and we can write our outlines, and we can collaborate, and we can comment and everything. And there's like a principle here that's the fact that we all use it actively makes it so much more valuable. And there could be something else, you know, Notion or Google Docs or Airtable could also work really well, or maybe even better, but all of those would be, for at least some of us, a totally new tool or one that we're you not using every day. And the real principle here is we all use this, and we so we found a way to streamline our own lives by putting everything in one place.

Kevin: 9:23

That is a huge point that can't be overstated, is that if you already use a tool on a regular basis that could be adapted to work for your podcast workflow, then probably start there. I can't tell you how many like Slack groups I've been added to over the years, but we don't use Slack at work. And so once a month, when I remember, oh, I should check in on this community that I'm a part of or something like that, I open up Slack and it's like you've got 937 unread messages. I'm like, ugh, I'm out. Like I can't even keep up because it's not a tool I use regularly. So I think that's really good advice. If you have tools that you already use to manage your personal life or your work life or something, and you can figure out a workflow to bring podcasting into that, start there.

Jordan: 10:03

Oh, yeah. Most everyone has a Gmail account, especially for their podcast. You probably have a separate Gmail address. Google has fantastic tools, including like Drive and Sheets and all these different things that you can use to organize your podcast and keep it all in your uh Google account. It's funny, it worked out so perfectly because earlier today, 37 Signals had their like Crowdcast live stream about how they use Basecamp for their podcast rework. And I went and watched it because I was like, oh, well, this is perfect timing right before we hop into an episode about workflows. And it was so interesting to look at how differently they use the exact same tool that we have. So we have Basecamp, we use the messages for our outlines, we use the schedule, things like that. And it was so funny because they do a completely different system. They have like a card system and they actually don't use the messages for hardly anything. And so I think another point is to look at tools that have enough flexibility that you can use them in the way that's comfortable for you as well. Right. Because there's just so many different ways you can approach organizing your podcasts, scheduling it, collaborating, things like that.

Kevin: 11:12

Right. Now, I will say that speaking of 37 Signals, I just saw a tweet from Kimberly who runs their podcast. And she said they just launched a new product called Fizzy. And she's saying that she likes Fizzy better to run their podcast than she likes Basecamp. And so she's moving the workflow over to Fizzy, and that's F-I-Z-Z-Y.do. And the nice thing about that is you can use it free to track up to a thousand things. So we haven't tried that yet, but Kimberly runs a wonderful podcast for 37 Signals. If she's loving Fizzy, that might work for people who are listening to this as well. Yeah. And I think I think with a thousand things, that sounds like a lot of things to track. I think uh you could probably use it for free, at least for a while.

Alban: 11:48

There's another piece to this that's you have the tool and that's the base layer. And on top of that, you have like the way your team, your podcast team uses it. And so there's principles that you all establish. There's just habits that you fall into. You end up saying this is exactly how we all do things. You know, when if you're using uh Google Doc, uh, we write out the outline and then we indent and then we add something and then we leave comments if we want to change it. Like you end up creating, I don't know what the right word is, like traditions or something around how you use this tool. And everyone being aligned on the way that they're you're using it is important. When I practiced law, one of the things that always frustrated me was everybody had their own unique way of formatting documents. And they just did come to it personally. And we didn't have a firm style. And so often you would send something out and say, Hey, could I get you to proofread this? And you're really looking for like substantive changes. And someone would go, Okay, I worked on it for three hours. And you'd see one of the main things they did was they changed every double space after a period to a single space because that's what they thought it should be. Sorry, that was probably me. I mean, there's like some of those the changes I'm like, you you bill like $300 an hour. There's no way that was a useful way to spend the client's money. And we're just like undoing and redoing personal preferences. So I love like the way we use Basecamp is very opinionated. If somebody else joins in, um, like we have somebody come in as a guest, we're asking them to interact with it in the way that we interact with each other. And it's just like you build a certain level of habits in the tool that will continue to get better and better over time. And a really good tool nudges you towards the one, you know, kind of opinionated way of using it. But you do have to kind of build that as a team and talk through it and brainstorm and figure out okay, here's a problem with the tool. Oh, here's how we could solve it as a group.

Jordan: 13:56

Yeah. And stay consistent with using the tool so it becomes habit and it becomes second nature to all of you to share your ideas and stuff like that in that tool that you've chosen.

Kevin: 14:05

Yeah.

Jordan: 14:09

So let's hop into the planning and outlining portion of this. So this is basically like step one. We actually have a really great episode about coming up with like podcast ideas and how to organize those ideas or keep track of them. We did that with Dave Jackson. It's episode 189. Never run out of episode ideas. And so if you're looking for a deep dive on the episode, I recommend going back and listening to that because it is dense and it was really great.

Alban: 14:38

So planning is we use like a chat inside of our tool. And that's where we just throw ideas. And these are not ideas that have to be fully thought through. They don't have to have an outline, they don't have to have some formal process. And an example is I threw Tiger Talk in there a few days ago and said, wow, this is really cool. Some Buzzprout podcasters are doing this show.

Jordan: 15:00

Uh-huh.

Alban: 15:01

And that was the only communication we really had about it. Um, I think you both gave it like a heart emoji. But after that, the first time we really talked about it was on the show. So we threw it in there as ideas. When we got on to record, it's in the outline. We all are excited about it. And so it's part of the show. I like having somewhere to have a quick capture. Like I'm capturing an idea that's not fully thought out because a lot of your best ideas, that's where they start. They start with like a, huh? And what if we did an episode about unique marketing ideas and we throw it out there and it takes a little while to be fully fleshed out. But once it's fleshed out, then you actually go and create that full output.

Jordan: 15:40

And I think that we follow the same uh sort of principle that we do with fan mail, where we were, you know, telling people to reach out to us, you know, on Twitter and via email and text this number and do all this stuff. And what happens is everything gets spread out. And then you're trying to remember, oh, where'd that person say that thing? And so even if it is something as informal as just like a chat, and that is like the dedicated chat for the podcast, that helps so much because if you and your co-host are like texting each other story ideas or saying, like, hey, this looks kind of interesting, and then you like share something on Instagram, and then you like share something on Facebook, and then you share something in an email, it's going to be so hard to be like, there was that interesting story. What do we want to cover? There was something that we were trying to talk about, and I can't remember where we put it. And you're gonna waste so much time trying to find that idea or trying to search for things that would be interesting as a topic in your podcast.

Kevin: 16:37

Yeah, I will say things that are used for like general communication are usually not the best because, like you said, they're they're gonna get lost. So, email, like everything can come into email. And so, unless you're very diligent about creating an email system where you say, whatever, podcast idea as the subject or something, so that later you can search for podcast idea and just see all those, it's gonna get lost. The same thing with text messages and stuff like that. There's just too much other noise that's happening in those spaces. And so these tools don't have to be sophisticated, they can be things that everyone has their phone with them all the time and they have some sort of notes app or something. So you could have a shared note. I think in iOS you can you can have shared notes with each other. On Android, I'm sure there's a similar version. Or you could create a Google Doc or a Google Sheet or something like that, just where you drop random ideas. But it should be someplace that's dedicated to this purpose. So then, like as Alban said and Jordan said, when you're you're coming back and you're saying, okay, now I'm I'm in the mode to actually create an outline for an episode. Let me see all the rough ideas that have been thrown out in the last week or two and start pulling from those. You have one place that you can go to.

Jordan: 17:39

And then once you have those ideas and you're ready to move past the planning stage and you're going into like the actual outline creation process of your podcast episode, I think that outlines. There's some people that feel like there's a lot more magic when you just kind of like go into it and you're like, okay, where are we going to talk about? There's there's just like this something else that happens for people. And if you're really good at like improvisation, that's great. But it can also be a huge time suck if maybe you're having an off day and you can't figure out like you can't get your bearings for where you're at in the episode or where you want it to go. And so outlining, even though it feels like you're taking extra time to create something that's not gonna be seen by the end listener, it actually will save you so much time. It's gonna make you a better podcaster. It's gonna give you a little bit more direction. You're not gonna be editing so much, you're not gonna be rambling all over the place. And so, even if it's just something like simple bullet points, that can really help you, or you can, you know, script things out. But I mean, scripting everything out can also take time because you're writing out all the scripted information. How did you guys do the um episode outlines before I showed up on Buzzcast?

Kevin: 18:49

Yeah, I have no idea.

Jordan: 18:51

You never looked at them. You still don't know what they look like.

Alban: 18:55

We showed up about an hour and a half before we wanted to record and we said, What are we talking about today? And we would start talking about ideas and building a little outline together. And I think by the time we hit record, it was we were often pretty tired because we just had to sit there and negotiate some ideas, and we're all feeling a little bit tense because we're like, I've got to get back to work, you know, my other work that I was in the middle of before we started doing this. And you just feel, I don't know, it's a little bit more stressful. It's not as fun. So you don't have the high energy when you record. And I know that there's some people, and really the only two I ever think of are like Larry King and Joe Rogan, who they say they just go into it and they do no prep and they do well. Besides them, I don't know anybody who's good at this. Maybe uh Adam Curry, maybe somebody who's like a fame like has done radio for a long time and could just be entertaining off the cuff. But most of us, and I mean like 99% of us, are going to benefit drastically. With an hour of prep. And the prep is what allows you to have the structure that gives you the freedom in the moment. And the the freedom is like, oh, we can actually go a little bit off topic for a second because I know we're we all feel confident we're coming right back at the same point because we can all see where the outline goes. And we're on this page together. What's frustrating is like you get on an interview and you can tell the other person who's interviewing you has only prepped a couple questions. And so the whole conversation just like rambles. And even though you're a participant, you don't really feel like you know where you're going next. The price will be paid somewhere. The price will either be paid in a little bit of outline, it will be paid in a very painful edit, or you're going to pay for it with a bad episode. And I that price is getting paid somewhere. And I really think pay for it by doing a bit of outlining and everything else goes so much smoother. You know, maybe I should just start insisting. Like if people want to do an interview, just say, Hey, could you send me a few questions? Not as much for my benefit, but just to have a little bit of proof of, okay, so you've done a bit of research, you're ready to go. We're probably on the same page. We're going to have a great episode.

Jordan: 21:10

Yeah, because it's not fun being on the receiving end of an interview where you're like, man, this host knows nothing about me. They didn't do any research whatsoever. Yeah. I thought we got a kind of cool tip from Dave Jackson. Uh, he said that he writes a blog post first to help identify what he's trying to say. And then that results in less editing later. So I don't read my blog post, but it helps me flush out the idea. And I actually think that's a really good idea because you're putting forth the effort to like write out this thought, you're writing out the blog post, and then you're saying, okay, from this information I've already gathered, from organizing my thoughts into a cohesive flow. Now I can go over into the episode and I know what I'm talking about. I have it registered. It's you're not just showing up cold. And I think that's a really fun idea. And then later you can use that blog post as an actual post on your website too.

Kevin: 22:03

Yeah. I love that idea because for me, the thought of creating an outline is actually very daunting. I don't think well in like the idea of creating general categories of where I want a conversation to go or how I want a story to progress. I think more in a narrative. And so one of the tools that I've been using for the last year or so, whenever I have a situation where I need to create an outline, if I'm doing like a presentation, uh, there's a project that we're working on right now that I don't want to talk about too much yet, but it's sort of that year-end Spotify rap type thing that we do for Buzzsprout. Oh, yeah. That project, I could write a narrative very well about like what it is, what we want to accomplish, but I need to chunk it up into an outline because the way that we display those stats are an outline. Anyway, that's a daunting task for me. And if anybody else can relate to that, the LLMs are very helpful with that. So you can write a narrative of like who you're interviewing, where you want the conversation to go, the topics that you want to cover, and then you can ask it to pull out all the detail, but give me an outline so that I can progress through this conversation in a way that makes sense. And it's very good at doing stuff like that.

Jordan: 23:04

Oh, absolutely. I've used it to review my interview questions before we go into the thing because I want to make sure that I'm actually asking questions that are going to push for the story or even pull out a story that I want the guest to say. And it's so it's really helpful to be like, okay, here's the things that I really want listeners to glean from the episode, to walk away knowing after listening to this interview, and here's the questions that I think I should ask to reach that. What's a question that I'm probably overlooking that could like enrich this conversation? Or what's a way that I can improve or combine these two questions because maybe they feel a little bit redundant. And so, yeah, those LLMs are fantastic for that. I love that. Yeah.

Alban: 23:46

What are my blind spots here? It's such a good question.

Jordan: 23:49

Yeah.

Kevin: 23:50

I like the idea of being able to dump like a stream of consciousness into a machine and then saying, help me organize this in a way that makes sense. Because you're still generating all the creative output yourself. And then you're just helping it, you're asking it for help in organization, which again, if you're sort of more creatively minded, I think that's something that we struggle with. And I imagine if you're podcasting, you've got a lot of creative energy. And so if that's the difficult part for you with outlining, please like lean on LLMs. They're really good at doing that.

Jordan: 24:18

Some other things that you can do to like assist you with organizing everything into an outline. If an out if outlining things feels daunting to you, if it feels like it's going to be a huge time suck, I recommend that you create an outline template so you're not reinventing the wheel. So for one of my podcasts, I actually like research a bunch of stuff and put the story together for the hosts that then read it. And I knew that that podcast was going to require a lot of effort in the outlining process. But like the thing is, is I created like a template for every single outline. So I'm able to just like pull it over and I have the information ready to go. And a lot of things, especially calls to action, anything like that is going to be embedded in the outline template. And I just use a Google Doc because that's super easy. It's easy to share with everybody. Yeah. So I think templates are going to be your friend in the outlining process. And then as I mentioned before, like, don't script out everything if you don't have to. If you're just like writing out an entire script, like, yeah, maybe if you have a narrative fiction podcast, that's totally fine. But if you're just interviewing somebody or talking things out, it might work a little bit more in your favor to not script out every single thing.

Alban: 25:32

Absolutely. I mean, reading something, you can tell when someone's reading it and when they're just saying it and when they're talking out loud. Uh, my wife and I watched this documentary called Age of Disclosure about all the UFO stuff. And there's one guy on there who's obviously just reading a script. And every time he got on, I'm like, this guy reads like I did in the third grade. Like, why is it he needs to just tell your own story, dude? And it came off way less authentic because he's reading. So don't script it all out. Like, if you know, like, hey, we're trying to get the story, we have a few points in this interview. Definitely write the questions out and ask the guy you're interviewing. But having everything scripted out, it will always come off a bit less authentic.

Jordan: 26:19

Yeah. I think sometimes a lot of people struggle with, especially when you first start podcasting, it feels really difficult to transition from one segment to another. And something that I found helped and actually helped me so that I don't have to do it anymore, was I would just script out the transition line because there was something that was just getting in my way where I just couldn't figure out how to naturally transition from one segment to the next. And so I thought, you know what? I know I'm not going to script out this entire episode of Buzzcast because obviously you guys would not be down for that and it wouldn't sound as good. So I just do one sentence of a transition, and that kind of helps me get over that bump in the road when I'm trying to like just keep us moving in the episode.

Alban: 27:04

You've gotten a lot better at that. And I had not noticed that you'd scripted this, but I do remember there was a period where it really got under your skin and you'd kind of you'd get there and you'd be like, ah, I don't have a good line for it. But that was that was a long time ago. I forgot that that was a thing. So maybe so, okay, so scripting transitions seems like a winner.

Jordan: 27:23

Yeah, it works. And then pretty soon you don't have to script them out anymore because you're like, okay, I got the hang of this. I don't have to do it anymore. It's sort of like the call to actions. After so many episodes of doing the exact same call to actions over and over again, it's just it's in you. You got it. One last tip that I have for the outlining is to lock in your outline before the recording. Um, especially if you have like multiple co-hosts with lots of opinions and stuff like that. I think it's probably good to make a general rule that no one's allowed to edit the outline during the recording. I know that we've done that a few times. This is not directed at you, Kevin, at all.

Alban: 28:00

This sounds like a personal attack as soon as I started hearing.

Jordan: 28:04

As I was saying it, I was like, oh no, Kevin used to do this.

Alban: 28:09

I do it too. Uh Kevin and I both love getting into it and going, all right, I love that we've got this locked in. But what if we made it better?

Jordan: 28:17

What if we did this? It's one of those things where you want to reserve all of your energy for the actual recordings. So if you're wasting time kind of like bickering about like, I don't want to talk about this, or I wanted to talk about this topic or this story, or I think this would be funnier. You can do an hour before recording just so everyone feels prepared if like they don't need a lot of time. But if you have co-hosts who like to be much more prepared, like working with Priscilla, I know that she likes to spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, how she's gonna approach the episode. She needs like a few days to a week before the episode comes out and we don't want any changes. And then there's other people like Kevin who, like, you know, whatever.

Kevin: 28:55

It's a subtle suggestion of what we should talk about.

Jordan: 28:57

Yes. Yeah.

Kevin: 28:58

I like it. I'm reminded of a tip from Jeff Bezos that I think he talked about on when he was on the Lex Friedman podcast. He talked about how he does memos for meetings. And oftentimes they're long. So you think of memo, you think of like a couple paragraphs. But I think Jeff's were pretty long because he would, these were serious ideas that he was bringing to a bunch of executives at Amazon, and he wanted them to consider them. What he would do is the first 10 or 15 minutes of that meeting is he would distribute the memo to everyone, and they all had it ahead of time, but he didn't trust the fact that they read it ahead of time or that they put notes in ahead of time, or that it was fresh in their minds. So he would say the first 10 or 15 minutes, we're going to sit in silence and we're going to read this to yourselves. And then I'm going to direct a discussion around it. And it makes me think that this isn't something that we formally have said on this show that we do. But Alban and Jordan will both tell you that when we come into we launch our screen share for our podcast recording, the first five minutes or so, Jordan and Alban are often having conversations that I'm not paying a lot of attention to because I'm reading the outline. And I think it would be it, depending on the types of the dynamics of your the people that you have on your podcast, especially if you have a guest and you have an outline that you're sharing with them, it might not be a bad idea to say, I know I sent this to you a few days ago. Let's just take five minutes and read it. Ask any questions, any clarifying questions you have, and then we'll we'll jump into the episode. But it ensures a couple of things. One, that they have had time to read it. It ensures that it's fresh on their mind. And if they have any questions that need clarification before you start recording, that you can do that without having to figure out how to fix it all in post and create a long editing process for yourself. I love this idea.

Alban: 30:29

We all have been in meetings that almost immediately get derailed. Like they start with a singular purpose, and very quickly you're caught up in the minutia of something that's not almost barely relevant. Today, I texted a friend, do you want to grab lunch? And he goes, No, I'm stuck in this budget meeting that's running late. It's like so bad it makes me want to quit. And they're not fighting real things about the budget. They've gotten derailed by a really small little piece, and now everybody's working through lunch. It takes all the energy out of it. And there really is probably some good. I'm kind of leading into this, Kevin. Maybe we say, hey, we show up for the recording at today. It was 3 p.m. and we all just read the outline for 10 minutes and we jot down little ideas and then we jump in it together. I think that's actually a pretty good idea. Even if you've already read it before, load it all into your brain. Everyone's now thinking about it fresh, and then we're ready to go. Yeah.

Jordan: 31:31

All right. So let's move on to one of the problems that I think a lot of podcasters run into as far as like being a huge waste of time is scheduling with guests and co-hosts. Alban, I'm gonna ask you this. When you're being scheduled as a guest, what do you feel like is the number one thing that drives you crazy about it?

Alban: 31:51

I mean, I told you this recently because I did it, but scheduling with anybody. And one of the tips that I've learned, I think Kevin might have been the one to suggest this to me, is don't schedule anything more than two days out. If it's weeks in advance, that time almost doesn't even feel real. And so you're like, whatever, 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, that sounds like a totally reasonable time. And then you show up and you're like, I don't like doing stuff in 3 p.m. on a Tuesday because now it's in the middle of the day. And now I've got my kind of time blocks are broken up. And so now what I do is if someone wants to record and I look at my calendar and go, there's a time in the next 48 hours that I want to do this, I will send two or three times in the next 48 hours. And I know everyone just tells me start a Calendly, do this Google schedule thing. I don't want things popping onto my calendar. I just want to email someone, say, here are the three times. If any of these work, send me a meeting invite with the link, the outline, everything, and I'll be there.

Jordan: 32:50

Yeah.

Alban: 32:51

And I just did it with Dorian, who's actually a listener of BuzzCast, and I got an invite with all the info. And then I showed up the next morning at 9 a.m. and boom, it was a great episode.

Jordan: 33:02

That's perfect. That was actually like one of my tips in this segment was make sure that if you're scheduling with a guest, just send them one email that has the outline, the recording link, all that stuff, because it's gonna cut back on this back and forth so much. Because the thing that I can't stand is just the constant back and forth when you're trying to schedule with somebody. And so I think if you're not using an app like Cowley or something like that, that's a really good tip, Alban. Sending just here's the times and days that work for me. Let me know which one you want. And that's it.

Kevin: 33:33

This makes me want to lean into like life hacks and stuff.

Jordan: 33:36

Let's do it.

Kevin: 33:37

So I'll share a little bit about how I sort of manage my calendar. It's not gonna hit with everybody. I I get that. But I will tell you between 10 and 4 on a weekday, Monday through Friday, 10 to 4, no, absolutely no. That is 100% reserved for work stuff. And so work gets all the priority in there. And anybody looking to book anything outside of like the immediate 24 hours between 10 and 4, it's a no. Can't happen. Because I I need to be responsive. If somebody on my team needs me or the team's working on a project and wants to get together, like I need to that to be an immediate yes when somebody on the team says, Hey, can we get together tomorrow at 10 or 11 to talk through this project that I'm working on? Always a yes. Always a yes. And so I protect that space. And then the great thing about only the margins for outside hobby stuff is that it has to be better than like other things in my life. And so if a hobby's not giving you more, like if I'm not excited to hop on a podcast interview with somebody at 4 30 in the afternoon instead of whatever, like, oh, I get an hour with my kids before they go to their afternoon sports, or I might want to get a workout in before I go, you know, do something that evening or something. If it's not better than that, then why am I doing it? And so that's sort of how I run, I've been running my calendar for the past couple of years, and I love it. So protect this amount of space. Anything outside of that is open for any opportunity that comes up, but I know that it's coming at the expense of other fun stuff.

Jordan: 34:57

Yeah.

Kevin: 34:57

And so I weigh it against that. Like, oh, if I say yes to this, that means I might not get a workout in that day, or I might not get to go play pickleball that night. My kids have late start for school and I'd like to cook them breakfast. So do I want to do a podcast interview or do I want to cook my kids breakfast? Like it has to be better. And so that's where I am.

Jordan: 35:12

You know, that's important not just for work, but also for the hobbies is protecting the space, protecting the time slot for those things. And one of the things that you definitely have to protect is your recording time with your podcast because if you're not prioritizing recording time with your podcast or making it into a habit or part of like your weekly ritual, then it kind of falls to the wayside. Recording like the same time every week definitely helps us. I know that you guys had mentioned back when you first started Buzzcast, you guys didn't really have a recording schedule. Like, so we have every Tuesday, we record like our main Buzzcast, and then on Fridays we record our quick cast. And that's like what we do. And we just anticipate it. Everything else goes around it, but it wasn't always that way for you guys, right?

Kevin: 35:57

Right. And that that is super helpful to have things that are locked on your calendar. Every once in a while, like every, I don't know, five or six episodes, one of us will say, Oh, you know what, this person on our team, or I've got an appointment that I can't move, it'd be difficult. Do you guys have flexibility? I think we all ask those questions with the same like intent behind it, which is this is the priority. So the other thing's going to get moved if it's not easy for you guys to make an adjustment. But if it is easy for you guys, can we? And usually we're all like keep our schedules loose enough that we can accommodate.

Alban: 36:30

I like to think of it as a default. The default is we're going to record. I mean, I can look years in advance. And I know that like March 10th next year, we're going to record.

Jordan: 36:42

Yep.

Alban: 36:42

And I know that now. And if we schedule a vacation eight months from now, I can right then go in there and say, Hey, I'm going to be out these days. Can we move it? We were just before we recorded. We were talking about, oh, there's an episode that will come out the day after Christmas. What do we want to do for that? Do we want to move it up, move it out? And we can plan it so far in advance because the default is we're going to record at those times and then we can modify it. And it's the same thing as the outline. The structure gives you the freedom to make changes. What was painful was we'd show up on Tuesday, start pinging each other, Kevin, Travis, and I, and say, Hey, we were recording today. And then someone's right back at like three and say, I can't today, but maybe tomorrow. Okay, what time tomorrow? And then we'd we'd all spend, you know, 15, 20 minutes out of the day scheduling the time for the next day. And it just wasn't a good use of those extra 20 minutes. Now we just have this default. This is what I'm going to be doing every other Tuesday for the rest of my life until I find some reason that it's going to stop.

Jordan: 37:49

Yeah.

Alban: 37:49

It's just like it's it's one of the things that's locked in there. Uh, Kevin and I play pickleball every Monday night. That's a recurring thing on my calendar. So that when we plan something four weeks from now, I go, okay, I'm going to actively delete that off my calendar and tell the guys I'm not going to be there. I think it's just healthy to have things that are locked in and you can always change it. But having something on the calendar makes it so much more likely it's going to happen. The calendar invite should have a few items. It should have the time, the people, but it needs to have a link to where you're recording. And so, since the three of us, we all record our own audio separately, we all get in a Google meet. We have the link to that Google Meet on every single calendar invite. We have a link to the outline for the episode on every one of these. And so we know when this thing pops up on my computer, hey, we're recording in five minutes. I click the Google Meet link. I'm in there. I click the outline. It's up.

Jordan: 38:50

Yeah.

Alban: 38:50

There's nothing worse than someone showing up seven minutes late, and then you get an email that says, Hey, where's the link? I'm looking in my email and now you're doing that coordination. Everyone should have a link. Uh, for us, we use the same link every single week. And the benefit of us all using the same link every week is it's just one link and you never have to rethink about it. So make sure all that's in there when you send the first meeting invite, and you're just gonna save yourself a ton of hassle.

Jordan: 39:17

Yes. If we go over the recording and post-production workflow, we actually have a really good episode about best practices with recording. It's episode 191, Simple Habits That Save Hours in Podcast Editing. But we actually talk a lot about improving your recording workflow to save you time in the editing process.

Alban: 39:41

In the recording, a few things that we do that I think are really helpful. We get on, we often chat for a second beforehand, and then one of us says, I'm hitting record on my end. You should hit record on your end. And we all say, All right, it's recording on my side. And then we do three, two, one, we clap. And the reason we do that is so it makes it easy for Jordan to sync up the audio later because the claps should all be at the same point. Those two really help a lot. Is there anything else in the beginning that we do to help line things up?

Kevin: 40:13

No, technically I think you've covered it. But what Alban is talking about though is that recently we have, I would say simplified our recording setup. Now, to some it might sound simpler, to some it might sound more complex because we all have the ability to record locally, we all have roadcasters. And so I and I would suggest that if it's if you're doing a solo show or you're doing just a show with a co-host or a couple co-hosts and you don't have a lot of guests, that moving towards a setup like we have, where we're just all recording our own tracks individually locally, and then we're just hopping on to the video chat application of your choice, whether it be Google Meet or Whereby or Zoom or whatever, we're only doing that so that we can hear each other in real time and see each other because facial expressions or little hand cues that we're giving to each other. But we're not recording that. We're not using any of that. We're just using our local recordings. And as soon as we're done, we end the recording on our side and then we upload all those to a shared folder. Jordan pulls them all down and edits the episode.

Jordan: 41:09

Yeah.

Kevin: 41:09

It feels simpler to me because I can't tell you the number of times when we were using remote recording software and we tried them all. There would be some problem with the file. There would be a glitch, or it would be down temporarily, or somebody's internet would lag a little bit and something would get gargled, even though it said it wouldn't. And somebody would, I don't know, close a browser accidentally before the upload was complete. There was too many things that were just going wrong consistently. And again, this is not about one specific product. It was about we we tried a bunch of them and we would always run into these issues consistently. As soon as we simplified down to listen, does everyone just record their own local? This there was a name for this one. It was just like host and co-host. Everyone called them a double ender. Now we have three people on, it's more like a triple ender, but everyone's just recording their own thing and then sharing their save file at the end. For us, it seems like that's the simplest way to do it.

Jordan: 41:56

Yeah.

Kevin: 41:56

And we've run into less technical issues.

Alban: 41:59

I think this is a simplification for us because we're all pretty technical and we have really good equipment. But there's still space for this software to get a bit better. Trying to do it all through the browser has, you know, just is not worked super great for us. This has been as stable as it's ever been.

Jordan: 42:19

Yeah.

Alban: 42:20

Six months ago, we got really excited about uh FaceTime because there were promises of some future features that would really help with recording these kind of remote recordings. And so we started using FaceTime. We didn't use all of the remote recording stuff, just FaceTime as the video feed while we recorded the double enders. And it was almost like FaceTime was too good or it was too helpful. So Jordan would it would try to answer on her phone and she's trying to set up her phone and then it's swapping to the computer. Yeah. And then I'm getting a text to join a call that Kevin's already in, that I'm already in. Also, it just didn't work. And I was using Google Meet for pretty much everything else. And so I said, let's just jump in our Google Meet room. And that's been the most stable for us. So if you are going to go this double under route, Google Meet is our favorite so far.

Jordan: 43:11

Yeah, we're we're literally circling back to our first point about like use what you know. Like just don't experiment. It's just gonna be harder.

Kevin: 43:20

Yeah, you don't have this flexibility if you have guests because your guests are probably not going to have the ability to easily record on their end locally and then send you the audio file when they're done.

Jordan: 43:29

Yeah, you're lucky if they have microphones, usually.

Kevin: 43:32

Right. So you're gonna be using remote recording software to do that. And there are a bunch of options out there, and I I'm just gonna leave it to you guys to figure out which one you like best. Honestly, I would say that I know a lot of people kind of like Zoom was the the option to use in the beginning, and then it kind of like fell out of favor with podcasters. I would say if you're interviewing people and you're like in the business space, everybody has Zoom, everybody kind of knows how to use Zoom. And it might not be that there are some settings that you can set in Zoom to get you the highest quality audio. It is still going to be compressed, it's still gonna have a little digital artifact here and there, but it might be the easiest. There's other great products like uh Descript and Riverside, Adobe Podcast, there's a million of them. You've got to figure out what works best for you. I don't think at this point we have a strong opinion on it because for us, ultimately, what we ended up going to was we need something that's just consistent every single week and that we're in more control of. And so for us, that's these double or triple enders that we're doing.

Jordan: 44:27

Yeah. And one of the things, like as the podcast editor that I appreciate from you two is that as soon as we are done recording, you immediately export the audio file and drop it into the comments of our outline. So I have it, you can drop it into like Dropbox or Google Drive, something like that. But it helps so much to get that audio immediately as the editor, because if you catch a problem with the audio file, it's a lot better to catch it pretty soon after the recording, as opposed to like a week or two later being like, hey, so we got to re-record that entire episode. Sorry. It's a lot easier to do it right after, like immediately catching problems, immediately catching things that you need to re-record. Also, when you're editing, there's a couple episodes I have put off until like a week or two after we recorded. So I'm like, I've got time. We are so far ahead of schedule. And then I get into the recording, and it was so much harder because I feel like I'm listening to the episode for the first time. Whereas if I hop into editing immediately after we finish the episode, it is fresh on my mind what parts I wanted to cut. I remember we went on a little along this part, and I thought to myself, you know what? I'm gonna cut after this. And the editing process goes so much faster. So organization saves you so much effort later on. While I'm editing the episode to kind of like streamline the workflow that I know is coming in the post-production, like when I upload the episode, I like to make notes of like times in the chapter markers where I think those will be. And then I also like to pull together links that are mentioned in the episode, uh, guest information, things like that. So I don't forget about it when I'm doing the episode description. And then you can also make note of points that you think would be really interesting for sound bites. And then when you upload all the information into Buzz Sprout, it's actually really easy to come up with all that stuff because we actually have co-host that will come up with the episode titles, chapter markers, episode description, stuff like that. Because I know for me, there have been many times before we had co-host AI built into BuzzSprout, where I would be kind of in the after fog of creating an episode and having edited for like hours and hours. And then I upload it and then I'm sitting there and I'm looking at like the blinking cursor of the episode description and going, Oh my gosh, I have to write this now.

Kevin: 46:59

Right. So I feel you. I don't do the publishing anymore on Buzzcast unless you're out for a certain reason. But every now and then when I do get to jump into it, I feel energized because usually at the end of the edit, by the time you upload, you are sort of drained. You've just gone through this process and you've created this thing and you're proud of it and you're excited. Yeah. But you're also your energy is a little bit zapped. When I usually see that co-host output, I feel like something just listened to what we said, made sense of it, summarized it really well, gave me at least a really good starting point for different chapter markers and ideas for social posts and stuff like that. I was written a full blog post. I love reading that stuff. I just feel like it invigorates me a little bit again, brings some level of energy back and takes away the daunting task of looking at the blank screen with the blinking cursor of, oh, now I have to write a summary of this, you know, hour-long show that not only did we just record, but then I just spent a day editing and now I have to write this thing. I love the starting point of that.

Jordan: 47:55

Yeah. And maybe you just enjoy the creation of the podcast itself, but like writing or marketing, like coming up with SEO rich episode titles and a description is just not your jam. It's perfect for things like that. Like if that's where you struggle, man, it's it's worth it for sure. And then, you know, you had touched on how it creates social posts, blog posts. So if you want to streamline your workflow with the podcast promotion, if that's something that you struggle with, co-hosts can help out with that too. I know that a lot of podcasters really like to batch their content when they're marketing their episodes. So after they finish an episode, they will sit down and they will create, you know, soundbite after soundbite after soundbite, or, you know, post after post after post and use a scheduling tool to schedule it. Alban, you're in marketing. How do you feel about this?

Alban: 48:46

Well, if you're doing promotion, you're like, okay, I have five things I want to promote. You put those five together, batch that. But mostly when people talk about batching, what I hear is we're going to record seven episodes in one day. We're going to edit seven episodes in one day. And that I am just firmly in the man, way to take all the joy out of this. Like you took something that was a craft, like making an individual chair, and you instantly jumped all the way to you built the like whatever the conveyor belt that's making thousands of chairs. And I'm like, just enjoy the craft of your podcast. It doesn't have to be Henry Ford's auto line for it to make sense. Like, I don't know. You just I feel like you end up not in a creative space, you end up in a manufacturing space. So I don't personally love batching. Now, if you're gonna put together five posts, I don't want them to be the same. So that's like an hour of work. Do that all at once. But I like just doing one episode, we publish, it's over, and then we have a new episode the next week.

Jordan: 49:47

Yeah. And something that you can do that will help so much is, you know, in program like Canva or like Adobe, they have um templates like social media post templates. That is so much easier than creating something from scratch. So making templates of things for your social posts will help you kind of keep like consistent branding without putting it forth too much effort. Um, if you're making templates of your own from scratch, yeah, it's some time up front, but it's gonna save you so much time down the road. And you know, when you're 60 episodes in, you're gonna be like, I'm so glad I did this day one.

Alban: 50:21

And final thing, if you used a guest, reach out to them once the episode's live and ask them to share it. I think send them a link, you know, and say, here's the episode and give them exactly what you want them to write online. And you're kind of doing to them what co-host does for us. Just give them something as like a rough, you know, you think it sounds good, they have all the freedom to tweak it. But as soon as there's something there, they don't have to go look at a blank cursor and try to remember that episode. They just get to copy paste it over, tweak things to make it their own voice, and they'll post it on LinkedIn. You have such a better hit rate when you're sending something for them to promote rather than a follow-up, like, hey, will you promote that episode by the way?

Jordan: 51:03

Yeah. All right. So these are our thoughts on the workflow of our podcast, things that we have done to make our podcasting a lot simpler here at BuzzSprout. I want to hear if uh you have any ideas that maybe we didn't cover. You know, write in, let us know if there are things that you disagree with or maybe you prefer, if you have like tools that you recommend. I would love to hear it. So tap the text show link in the show notes to let us know. Okay, we got some Famo messages. The first is in response to the interviewing parents and grandparents. Man, this is getting such a good reaction from listeners, Alban. I'm so glad that you shared this. So, Chris from STEM Everyday said that he interviewed his World War II grandpa on STEM Everyday podcast one year after Thanksgiving dinner. And when we finished, my mom, grandma, and aunt, who were listening in the other room, were all like, I never knew those stories. And everyone should take time to do this with or without a podcast. We still listen to his stories today, even though he's gone.

Alban: 52:06

That is so awesome. Actually, one of my close friends today, his grandfather passed away today, and his grandfather was also a World War II vet. So he's over a hundred years old, lived a full life, but we don't have many of them left. And I love that people are recording their stories. Just really cool. I am absolutely gonna go listen to this episode. Uh, thank you, Chris, for reaching out.

Jordan: 52:30

Yeah, and then we also got a really fun message from Fletch uh saying one of my favorite things about my podcast this year that my listeners loved was a recurring segment called In the Smoke Shop with Pop, where I interview my 95-year-old dad. My audience loved it, and they regularly sent in questions for him to answer. There's something love about someone who's lived that long and answers questions on a podcast. Is that fun?

Kevin: 52:54

I mean, just the name of the segment. I want to go in the smoke shop with Pop.

Jordan: 52:58

Yeah.

Kevin: 52:58

That just sounds like a great place to hang out.

Alban: 53:01

I also have to ask, how is it that like I read all of this longevity stuff, and then every 95-year-old person I know like smokes and drinks? Oh, I know.

Kevin: 53:11

You never hear they're just humorman say life hack number seven, hang out in the smoke shop as often as possible.

Jordan: 53:17

Yeah.

Alban: 53:19

Yeah, I recorded a bunch of episodes with family members over Thanksgiving, and uh there were multiple stories I got from my dad that I'd never heard. Oh, cool. And he was just telling me about his dad and his grandfather, so my great-grandfather, and there were multiple stories in there. I was like, I didn't know about this. And then I told my siblings, and they're all like, Yeah, we all know that story.

Jordan: 53:40

You're like, What?

Alban: 53:41

So there's something different about when you're podcasting, people just tell the whole story, and you kind of maybe I'm a better listener when I'm podcasting than chatting.

Jordan: 53:51

Yeah.

Alban: 53:51

But I heard a bunch of stuff I'd never heard and I really enjoyed it. And so I've actually started taking all these interviews with family members. I'm going to try to weave a single story since they all talked about memories of Thanksgiving and memories of this house in North Carolina and stuff over the years. So try to work that all into one story, which then I'll send out to everybody at Christmas.

Jordan: 54:13

Oh man, if if these stories inspire like any of our listeners to interview their grandparents or parents over the holidays, please send it in. Let us know how it goes because this is just great. I also got a really wonderful fan mail from Clinton from North Carolina. And this is kind of a plug for the Buzz Sprout community. So if you're not in the community group, this is why you should join it. Clinton said, just wanted to say thank you to BuzzSprout for creating this podcast platform, the BuzzCast Podcast, and a community online that helps podcasters of all levels learn and grow together. I'm right at a month into podcasting, even though it's been a decade of simmering on it and acquiring the skills and ideas. I discovered a new podcast and potentially a new friend on a Buzzsprout Facebook thread today. I've learned so much already and have more confidence each day that I can make this happen. Thank you, especially to the podcast team for walking the walk and talking the talk. Isn't that great? I was so pumped when I saw this fan mail. Thank you, Clinton. So, what should we talk about for our next episode, guys?

Alban: 55:12

All right. Last year, a year ago, uh, right before Christmas, we had people reach out with their show and we came up with unique marketing ideas for their podcasts. And I wanted to do another spin on that. What I'd like you to do is reach out to us with what is the biggest pain point for your podcast right now. That can be anything from a piece of gear that keeps breaking. It could be something in your workflow, it could be marketing, it could be anything. You need a new guest, you need a new co-host, whatever it may be. Tell us what the pain point is, and we will try to solve as many of them as we can. Oh, this will be our holiday gifts back to you. We are not promising to solve all of these, but we are promising to read the lists.

Jordan: 55:59

So we're gonna do our best.

Alban: 56:00

Reach out, tell us the biggest pain point, and let's see how many of them we can solve. What do you guys think of this?

Jordan: 56:06

I love it.

Kevin: 56:07

Yeah, I like this idea a lot. I I would also say that sometimes we have blind spots. So if you don't mind, Alban, can I add a category onto your already excellent idea? Yes. If if you don't have any pain points that you're aware of, but you just want to maybe um figure out what's something you could do to improve your episodes, if you just send in your podcast, I wouldn't mind listening to a few. Like obviously, if we get 30 or 40, like we can't each listen to 10. But we could select a few and we could listen to some episodes and we might be able to offer some practical tips of like leveling up your podcast episodes. Yeah. So that might just be, you know, we might notice your microphone technique isn't that great. Or we might notice that you were, you know, had a guest on and you you took a segment a wrong way, or there's an opportunity to dig deeper and you missed it, or something like that. So we, you know, friendly, it won't we won't be mean to anybody. We won't be Simon Cowell. Yeah. And we won't like you should never be uh how do we do a British accent? You should never podcast again. We'll be mean to anybody. But if you're open to some constructive feedback, maybe we could offer that to somebody.

Jordan: 57:07

Why why the British accent? Were you trying to do like a Gordon Ramsay sort of thing?

Alban: 57:13

He's just like, you should never see again. Right. What we're gonna be like is Gordon Ramsay in the UK, where he's nice, not Gordon Ramsay in the United States, where they made him be mean. Right.

Jordan: 57:24

Oh, that's such a fun idea. I'm really excited about it. So make sure you get those in as quick as possible so we can start really doing some research for you. Um, tap the text show link in the show notes to send that in. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting. All right, so we are recording this episode late because I had jury duty. It was my first time actually getting into the courtroom for the jury selection process. I got into the courtroom.

Alban: 57:56

Wait, were you on a jury?

Jordan: 57:58

No, I didn't get selected. I was released, but I mean, it was a really big group. So I'm not shocked. But it was my first time experiencing the jury selection process. And one of the things that I noticed, because what they do is the attorneys will like ask questions to the group. And then if you like raise your hand or your number or whatever, they'll like ask more questions to you to like figure out if you're like a good fit for the trial. And they were asking like very normal questions, but the prosecuting attorney for the state asked a random question that I didn't understand. And literally everyone else, which was like 50 of us in the room, were also very confused by it. So he asked, Do any of you use gasoline to clean your windshields?

Kevin: 58:40

Yeah.

Jordan: 58:40

What does that mean? What is that? Is that a good question?

Kevin: 58:43

Oh, yeah. It's an excellent question.

Jordan: 58:44

We all were like flabbergasted, like, what is he talking about? And then this one guy was like, I don't know, should I?

Kevin: 58:50

Yeah, let me let me tell you why that's a good question. Okay. Because if you answer yes to that, you they immediately know you're insane.

Jordan: 58:58

Is that what it is?

Kevin: 59:01

Uh well, I mean, kind of crazy person. No offense to legitimate crazy people. But I mean, why would you put gasoline on your windshield? That's that's mad.

Jordan: 59:11

I don't know. I've never sli I was literally like, is this a thing that people do?

Alban: 59:17

I okay, I never took anything to trial, but here's my theory.

Jordan: 59:22

Okay.

Alban: 59:23

I've been on I was on a three-day uh jury selection and wasn't selected in the end, but three days of jury selection. So this was going to be like month-long plus case. And there were a lot of questions where what they were asking were hey, are you familiar with the stuff we're gonna be talking about in this trial?

Jordan: 59:43

Uh-huh.

Alban: 59:43

And are you already biased towards thinking whatever the person did is normal? Yeah. And so I'm wondering if that's actually a fact in your case. If there's gonna be some piece that's like somebody did try to clean a windshield with gasoline and then it fogged over. Or something. And then they got in an accident. The one I was on, they asked a lot of questions about sleep apnea. They asked a lot of questions about different types of trucks and you know, long haul rigs and all sorts of stuff about falling asleep at the wheel. Have you ever done that? And after the case, I look into it. And yeah, it's about a guy who had sleep apnea and fell asleep while he was driving an 18-wheeler and hit somebody.

Jordan: 1:00:25

Oh man.

Alban: 1:00:26

And so, like, there were like 40 of those questions, and it just felt like we were getting primed to be like, hey, do you guys do the stuff that this guy did? And we're going to, it's going to be a big deal. Uh, we need to make sure that you don't like side automatically with one of the parties. And so that's at least I wonder if there was a bit of that.

Jordan: 1:00:45

Yeah, as the questioning was going on, because at first I was like, I absolutely positively do not ever want to be a juror on a trial. And then as they were asking the questions, I was like, wait, I want to know what happened. Because they were asking a lot of weird questions. They were asking about like mental health disorders. They were asking about like, how do you feel about Walmart? Have you ever worked for Amazon? Do you know any police officers in this like thing? And I was just like, whoo, this is getting a little more interesting as we go. But yeah, the gasoline on the windshield one, I was like, wait, what?

Alban: 1:01:16

I it could be, it could be something like that.

Jordan: 1:01:18

He like set fire to an Amazon truck.

Alban: 1:01:21

I'm surprised that you didn't want uh to be on the jury after you watched that show, the jury duty show.

Jordan: 1:01:28

So funny.

Alban: 1:01:30

Kevin, did you ever watch this? I know what you're talking about, but no, I never watched it.

Jordan: 1:01:33

I thought about that show the whole time I was in it. I was like, these people are very familiar to me because of this.

Alban: 1:01:40

It was such a good show. It's a guy who is selected for jury duty, but it's not a real trial, and everything's a sham. Every one of the jurors is an actor, the judge is an actor, the attorneys are actors, everybody's an actor. Except for the doctor, and it's just like a social experiment to see how this guy acts, and he's so good. He does everything right, and he's honorable, and it's so good, it's so funny.

Jordan: 1:02:06

Yeah.

Alban: 1:02:06

Um, but and the whole time he's just like, Y'all are like losing your mobs here.

Jordan: 1:02:12

Yeah.

Alban: 1:02:13

Oh man. Uh I would I highly recommend.

Jordan: 1:02:16

But yeah, it was great.