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Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
Talking Podcasts 2
We hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! As we recover, we're continuing our discussion on podcasting. Our podcast platform AI suggested the topic for this episode be "Overcoming Perfectionism in Podcasting." That's not an inaccurate description! Join us as we share our own podcasting mishaps and triumphs and the lessons we learned that underscore the importance of progress over perfection.
This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. I'm Scott Sosbe and I'm Gene Preuss, and this is Talking Texas History. Well, welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Preuss.
Speaker 1:I am Scott Sospe. Gene, are we going to continue? This is going to be our second. We actually have enough to say to make two episodes out of. So you Want to Start a Podcast discussion? We even have, so I guess we do know a little bit more. Or we're just making stuff up as we go which may be a secret to a podcast. Just make stuff up as you go. We make're just making stuff up as we go. Which may be a secret to a podcast.
Speaker 2:Just make stuff up as you go we make a lot of stuff up as we go, so I'll do that in class.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it's uh. We talked last time kind of about you know the getting an idea and you're pitching it. An audience, uh getting that idea, kind of letting it. You know, come together and do you want to have guests, how do you deal with that? Let's talk this time, uh, about kind of the nuts and bolts of once you kind of have all that preliminary information done, how do you actually get it on the internet? How do you get a podcast up and going?
Speaker 1:It's a good topic. You probably know more about it than I do. I'll offer what I can.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, one of the things, and I'm kind of one of these people that I start looking into things and then I get obsessed with the research and trying to figure out what is the best way. And I spent, you know, a long time, scott, doing oral history and working with oral history, and I was editor of a couple of online oral history discussion boards HNET Oral History for about 15 years and I saw a lot of the discussion, a lot of people talking about the idea of oral history, and it's not much different from podcasting and what happens is people oftentimes we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and by that I mean, you know people talk about well, what is the best microphone, what is the best technology? Now, not all podcasts are just done like we do ours right, we do ours strictly for the listening connoisseur, right, the listening audience, but some podcasts are visual.
Speaker 1:The listening audience. Some podcasts are visual. Yeah, some of them are made for, I guess, to make money too as far as that goes.
Speaker 1:We're not experiencing any of that either. You know, you say that about the microphones and stuff, which I think is interesting. When we first started doing that and when I first started actually looking okay, what is this actually looking. Okay, what is this.
Speaker 1:So I went on and I looked on what's the best, just like you said, what's the best microphone to use for a podcast that you use a laptop to do, and all those things. And boy, I read all these reviews and they pointed me towards all this fancy stuff that was supposed to have. So I went out and bought a quite elaborate set with filters and all these things to plug in and various different kinds of aspects, and the first couple we did, if you'll remember, my microphone was having trouble, it wasn't working very well, it was echoing and it wasn't very well and everything. And so I said, well, I'm not going to use that anymore and I used just plain headphones for a while. But then I went out and bought just a simple Bluetooth you know pretty cheap microphone and it's worked great ever since then. So yeah, you may have to pick and choose and decide what works best, but my, I guess, experience says, you know, most expensive doesn't always mean the best.
Speaker 2:I suppose Right, Most expensive doesn't always mean the best, I suppose. Right, I mean, and you know any kind of technology, whether you're talking about a microphone or you're talking about a computer or a car, right, Even the best, you can get a lemon, you can get something that's not put together right or something that you know you have problems with, and so people you know fret over these things and there's debate rages over oh, this is the best, this is the best, Just get it done, Just put it out there and plug in your mic.
Speaker 1:If you're running a Bluetooth microphone, that you have to, you know. Charge up the battery. Make sure it's charged up for you, Go on. Today I'm back using headphones because I didn't charge my battery up and it's dead on my microphone. That's very good advice.
Speaker 2:I mean working with oral history. This is the thing you got to make sure your equipment is ready to go. There's nothing worse than going out and having your equipment die on you because the battery went out. Back in the old days we used to have cassette players. We would go out and do oral history and you didn't bring a cassette or you didn't do something right. They had those little tabs. You had to preserve the recording. Do something right. They had those little tabs you had to to preserve the recording. And if you forgot, to punch your tab out, I'd seen people who'd recorded an interview and then they go out, talk to somebody else and record over over it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's amazing. I mean I use, I have this little that I use for all things, this little sony voice activated unobtrusive microphone but I recorder. But of course you can still do if you don't check technology. You're talking about oral histories. I did one where I was interviewing a very key person to the Bright Coop research stuff I was doing here. She was Charles Bright's sister and boy. It was a long interview, two hours. It was great. But you know what, I forgot to check the total quality of it and I got back and I couldn't hear three fourths of it.
Speaker 1:She was a very light talker and everything else, and I thought, well, I'm going to have to go back and do that again. Well, she died two weeks later and I couldn't go back and do it and it was a big blow to that. So, yeah, technology, I guess, can be important. You know. You say oral history too. I know we said this before, but I think it's worth reemphasizing.
Speaker 1:Knowing the mechanics of oral history and knowing how to conduct oral history is a valuable skill and it comes in very handy in a podcast situation because essentially that's what you're doing to a large extent. We are conducting some sort of oral history, particularly when you have guests on and you've got to. You know there's a, there's a, there's a skill, there's a craft to interviewing somebody and you get better at it. But you need to understand first off, and number one I may have said this last time, I'm going to reiterate it the number one thing to learn is you're not that nobody's tuning in to hear you talk.
Speaker 1:If you've got a guest, they're tuning in, probably to hear your guests talk. So let them do what they do best, and what you brought them on to do is taught, but you've got to know how to draw that out of them. So it's important, I think, to have a set of questions beforehand, uh, and also to ask questions that elicit someone to give you the response that you want. So, no, these can't be just okay. I'll think these questions up 10 minutes before the podcast, not saying we haven't done that before, but there should be some thought put into it before you do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's a really good advice and keep in mind that you you know we talked last time time that one of the most important things about any interview is shutting up right, ask your question and let the person you're talking to fill in the gap, fill in the talking, and not cutting them. You know, not cutting them off is a big.
Speaker 1:A lot of interviewers have that problem, don't they?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, even you and I do quite a bit, and especially we're using Zoom, and so sometimes what you say I don't hear, and vice versa, right, we don't always get immediate interaction, and so I don't know if you're talking, if I'm talking Technology, going back to the thing about microphones even the best technology has its problems.
Speaker 1:All you have to do is attend a couple academic conferences to realize that that don't you. It never fails. If you're depending on technology as a big part of your presentation, that technology is going to fail exactly lost without it, and the same thing you don't get the worst thing. We had that happen to one of our podcasts. We won't say the name. We did what I thought was a fantastic episode and the technology failed and we didn't get any of it. Now we're going to have to go back and do it again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I feel bad about that too. But you learn right. And going back to the old cassette tapes is you learned from mistakes, from mistakes and you know, unfortunately, like you were saying, with that person you interviewed who passed away before you could reschedule, that happens too, you know it may not be to that extent but in oral histories that was always certainly a problem. But let's talk about how. So let's talk a little bit about technology so you can do podcasts with a variety of different types of technology. You know, you and I do this via Zoom, I edit it, I use a little editing program and then I get it uploaded. But a couple of. Well, last year, maybe a year before last, I forget, we were in San Angelo and our good friend John Caraway was doing a little bit of podcasting and he invited us to his studio and we did an interview with him.
Speaker 1:In Abilene.
Speaker 2:In Abilene, sorry, Abilene San Angelo.
Speaker 1:You know it's all West Texas In Abilene.
Speaker 2:Sorry, abilene San Angelo you know it's all West Texas People in San Angelo will not be happy about us saying that Well that's right, they'll forgive me because I'm living in Houston, but he had this great studio setup. I mean it was just awesome and the quality and everything was just so nice.
Speaker 1:It's nice. Yeah, we have one here. I've never looked into using it. We have a studio that you use for podcasts. Our college was doing a podcast for a while. I don't know that they're still doing. I know that I went down and sat in a podcast with them Gosh years ago now when we talked about the 1619 project, uh, and things like that, and it was an elaborate setting up. Uh, just like uh, john carraway had at cisco college, uh, there in abilene. It was very, you know, they had all the latest technology. But you know, I'm gonna say I've listened to that podcast, I've listened to some and I, you know I knew the studio set up it doesn't sound much different than what we do, I mean. So you know you don't have to have that elaborate setup. It does work. I know a guy I've talked to that does a podcast and he does it every time on nothing but his iPhone. It's just he does the whole thing on his iPhone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, sets it completely up all the recording thing and the microphone and he has a software program that he has and he just it's all. He has a software program that he has and he just it's all he ever records. Only said I just do it on the iphone and then just upload it, uh, straight from my iphone well, you know that's, that's, that's true.
Speaker 2:right, there's a democratization of uh, communication, uh, with social media today, and that's so much more available than it used to be. I I mean, when I was in high school in the 80s, I worked in radio, so I did that for 10 years. It got me through college working in radio stations and back then it was, you know, we used that magnetic tape and you had to splice it with a razor blade and cut it and use the tape to put it back together again, and you could do all that. It was very expensive. Today, you know somebody with their, with your iPhone, your cell phone, you can do it. So this is another thing that we want to tell people is that it really doesn't have to be expensive. You can do it on a limited budget or no budget, it depends. It's just on how you set things up.
Speaker 2:And so, moving from the technology, so microphones the only advice I would say on microphones is you're going to be better off with what's called a dynamic microphone. There's two kinds there's dynamic and condensers. Most of the microphones you see in the wide world are condenser microphones. The problem with those is they condense all the sound that they come in so they get all sorts of sound. They bring it in, they bring it up to a level. Dynamic microphones the closer you are to the microphone, the better the quality, the better the voice, and it may not even pick up stuff from far away. So right now I'm in my office sitting to you, talking to you, and outside I can hear the highway traffic. If I had a condenser microphone, it would elevate and you could probably hear the traffic. In fact you may hear it. Now, if I was using a dynamic microphone, that would probably not even register to you. So that's one thing, one piece of advice I would give you. That's one thing, one piece of advice I would give you.
Speaker 2:So after you get it, after you get it recorded, after you get it recorded, you might want to edit out things like recorded it right. You might want to edit out some of these things. And here is another area where don't let budget get in your way, because there are a lot of free, online or downloadable editing softwares that you can use. I mean, you're going to have to make this digital right. You can't.
Speaker 2:The old days of analog tape aren't around anymore for social media, or if they are, you'd have to convert it into digital. But once you have a digital and with the editing I said I used to use a knife and tape to do editing. Today it's all on computer and I can do that, and the beauty of that is nothing really gets thrown away, nothing. The computer is just told start here, stop here, start here, stop here, start here, stop here. And so it doesn't really affect in the great scheme of things.
Speaker 2:You can always go back, you can always correct mistakes, and that's that is a nice thing that we used to not have. Also, you can increase the sound. Back in the old days of magnetic tape, whenever you turned up the volume. We're talking about how the person you interviewed talked very lightly. With analog tape you could only go up so high and then you get hiss and hum and all this other extraneous noise thrown in there. Digital not so it just picks up what it hears and so there is no hum, there is no and, and you can filter a lot of that stuff out. So that's another area.
Speaker 1:some people don't even edit right, like there's some people do podcasts oh, and you can listen to some podcasts and you can tell hey, they didn't edit this, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just like editing a book, right, or an article. You put in things and you go maybe I really didn't need to say that, maybe that doesn't add to the story, and so maybe you want to edit.
Speaker 1:I don't know what to do.
Speaker 2:Was I drunk when I wrote?
Speaker 1:this? I don't know. I've never done a podcast drunk. I've written drunk, but I've never done a podcast drunk. Maybe we should try that sometime, just see how a podcast will turn out if us and a guest just come on loaded. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, we don't know that. Not all of our guests have been sober.
Speaker 1:It might be better if you do come on here loaded. If you're one of our guests, we could get one. That's what we could do. We'd get our good friend Leland Turner. We could almost guarantee he would come on drunk.
Speaker 2:So that would be the time to do that. Yeah, I mean and this is the other thing right, make the podcast what you want, what your listeners want to hear, what they will well, in our case, what they'll put up with listening to.
Speaker 1:Oh when they're real bored and stuff. Well, gene, I think also part of that is you talk about, and a good thing for us to start talking about is how you're going to platform this thing, because, listen, you can do a. It's like a book that you wrote, it's like anything you've done creatively. You can do something that's fantastic, but if nobody hears it, if nobody can access it, if it's too hard, then it doesn't matter, because nobody's gonna nobody's gonna know what you've done. So you gotta have a good platform. So maybe we can tell about the platforms we use and how we you know why we decided on what we decided.
Speaker 2:Well, that's right. So first you got the of getting the recording made, then you've got to think about how are you going to, if you're going to edit it, and this is important. You cannot not edit it necessarily because, um, you have to have a platform. And I don't want to talk about platforms and give you specifics. I'll tell you what we use. We use a platform called Buzzsprouts and what we do is we put together the program, we get it edited as much or as little as we want, and then I have to feed that into Buzzsprouts and Buzzsprouts.
Speaker 2:In any of these platforms, they have specific requirements that you have to follow, and what I mean by that is what format it's like. Well, I'm going to put it in, you know voice. Well, I mean, there's certain formats. It's just like on documents, right. Whenever we're saving a document, there's DOC, there's DOCX Back in the old days there was WordPerfect, wp and then there's text, right. So you get all these formats. You need to figure out what format your hosting platform wants, and that's what we're talking about hosting platforms and so Buzzsprout tells me it needs to be in this format, it needs to be this many bits per second, and all this other technical mumbo jumbo that doesn't make any sense. But the thing is you don't need to know what it means. You just make sure that the numbers, that it's in their format, that they want, and there are some standards, so it's not like you have to hunt around, it's pretty easy. Okay, it has to be in this, it has to be in this, it has to be in this, okay, good. So then you upload it.
Speaker 2:And what Buzzsprouts does for us, it does two very important things. Now again, I edit, and when I edit because we're on Zoom and so sometimes there's some phone it sounds like you're on a phone. So the editing software, I try to run it through an equalizer so we balance out to a more natural-sounding voice and that doesn't take but a couple of seconds. So that doesn't. It's not hard work on my part. I cut out extraneous stuff or interruptions, I cut that out. But what Buzzsprouts does for me and there's a number of hosting platforms what it does is it takes that and it balances everything out, it equalizes it on top of what I've already done. So it makes it sound much better. I'm always impressed because I thought, I think, I like to think, I do kind of a good job, or at least a passable job. It does a better job of that.
Speaker 2:The other thing that it does and both of these are added features is it and Scott, this is witchcraft, this is magic. It takes our discussion, our podcast. It transcribes it, all right. So there's a transcription made and then it uses the wizardry of AI to interpret that.
Speaker 2:Now you know, we sit around as academics. I don't know. We've had several meetings among faculty on how to use AI, what AI is going to mean, how it's going to change the future and who uses it, the different things you can do with it. But AI takes our transcript and it summarizes what we talked about, and so it writes show notes for me. So if you go to the click on the podcast, you go to the show notes, it'll give you a summary of what's in there, and then it helps me so when I tag it so other people can find it if they're looking for it. It provides all that information and that saves me so much time. It gives me suggestions on titles. It is fantastic. It's a time saver, it's an idea generator, and so I've got to take my hat off to it. That is the benefit of the hosting platform.
Speaker 2:So Scott do you guys use AI any.
Speaker 1:I have begun to use it a little bit. You know, as a, as a tool I've can. First off, it makes, if you, I've got a, I've got an app that, if you record your lectures as you give them, gives you an outstanding summary. The AI gives you your notes, what you said, and it's great to go back and look and say, yeah, I did that. Well, you know you don't have feedback from your lecture quite often or you go man, that didn't turn out like I thought it should have. For, you know, next time, AI is something that's a whole other show we ought to do.
Speaker 2:That is something we ought to talk about.
Speaker 1:We ought to talk about, because I think, as historians, we get a little bit defensive of something like this and don't realize how good of a tool something like AI could we think it's going to go into plagiarism and all these types of things, I think, and it doesn't. It's a tool just like anything else. What we need to learn to do is teach. We need to learn how to use it and we need to learn how to teach students how to do it. And also it gives me an idea. I think about it now.
Speaker 1:I said you know what I need to do in class and what I need to impart to my students is to teach them how to do more than what ai can do. We know what ai can do. Ask them a subject. So what I want my students and what my lessons should be, y'all do go beyond what ai can do and that's what you know, and there you go. That's the you know and there you go. That's the whole thing. But yeah, and I'll have to give Buzzsprout a lot of a lot of kudos because it is I mean, I don't know about any others, but it's turned out to be a very great platform. I would recommend it for everybody. And they also distribute our podcast to Spotify and and Apple podcasts and things like that, which is also another fantastic tool for people to get it out there.
Speaker 2:Well, that's another thing. So you get this platform, like we're using Buzzsprouts, and look, technology programs change all the time. That's why I don't want to say, use this one, but I'm just going to tell you my experience with AI. You know so, not AI, but with Buzzsprouts. But it gives you and you check this more than I do it gives you all these statistics on how the show is doing, where people are. I mean, we know, and I tell you, when I first learned this, it floored me. There are people in other countries who have tuned into our podcast.
Speaker 1:I figured that they made a mistake, thought it was something else.
Speaker 2:That may be. I don't know that they come back. But, you know I mean but the fact that we can tell and track and see how many people are listening to it, where they're listening to it, which platform they're using it. Now I like to say you can find our podcast wherever fine podcasts are sold, and you know that's just an old thing where people used to say that about books.
Speaker 1:Where all fine stores, wherever things are, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the thing about podcasts right is so you have to find a distributor. So after you get the, it's kind of in the publishing world, like with a book you have a publisher and you've got distributors right. So the podcast world works very similarly. You've got Buzzsprouts, which is the platform, the publisher, and then it sends it out and it helps you do this. If you get another platform, you may have to do some of this work yourself, but Buzzsprouts yeah, and that's why it's a great platform.
Speaker 2:It makes it so easy because it distributes to Spotify, to Apple Podcast, to Google Play and a whole bunch of others that I can't even think of.
Speaker 1:And does it very well you know there's a question about podcasts.
Speaker 1:This is more attuned to people in the same profession as us and it's an academic type world, but it might apply to others. But I just put to you, and I guess we can end the programs we're getting close with kind of a discussion about podcasts. This is that. Is this doing a pod? I haven't thought about it, but I've been thinking more and more is this a creative scholarly? Is this doing a part? I haven't thought about it, but I've been thinking more and more. Is this a creative scholarly output? Is it a creative scholarly exercise? You know, in our world we have, you know, we have faculty activity reports. Would you put this on something like that? Is that what we're doing here?
Speaker 2:Something that's very creative.
Speaker 2:I put it in teaching I consider it teaching, yeah, but I mean, I guess, right, you could, depending, I mean, I think, in our I see the way we're doing it and again, this goes back to the you know what is your concept. I see what we're doing as teaching others, right, we're, uh, we get this is a podcast, I for people who are teaching history, want some new ideas, want to talk about what they're doing, and this is for students, but also for people who teach Texas history and practice it and maybe have some interest, right, so I see this as a teaching endeavor, interest, right, so I see this as a teaching endeavor. But I think, depending on what your podcast, I mean, some people do writing and they're writing the podcast. And if I were doing on my own research and I were talking about new research that I was doing, yeah, I would consider that scholarly.
Speaker 1:I ask that and it comes to me just as a sense of you know you said a word earlier about talking about social media and this type of activity democratization of the message, if you will and it goes back to I always when I've done some research and stuff and we talk about when the airlines are deregulated and you had an airlines like southwest and and jet blue and some of these other come along that started as low cost or whatever one thing that the theme of that is that those outlets, whatever you think of them, democratized flying.
Speaker 1:It became something that everybody did instead of just a few wealthy people did. To a large extent, and I think in a creative sense, podcasting is democratizing people getting their message out or what they're interested in out. You know, both of us are published authors and we know how difficult it is to conceive the book but even more than that, convincing a publisher and doing it to get that out there so people can buy it and read it. But a podcast allows you to almost self-publish on your own at a very budgetary means and get that word out and get some of what you say out. So podcasting in a whole sense may be the democratization of messages in the United States.
Speaker 2:You know, scott, I think you're 100% accurate. I want to agree with you, and I think that's a good note to close the show out. We've had two episodes on this and I'm always happy to talk to people about it more, but I think you kind of summed up that that is what we know about podcasting.
Speaker 1:That's what, yeah, and what which?
Speaker 2:means. That's it. I think that I think you're right, you know. So, um, I want to say thanks a lot for listening, All right.
Speaker 1:We did all right.
Speaker 2:We still need to do one on food.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, I'm going to teach a whole class on food.
