#70 Don't Let Your Guests Ruin Your Show: David Goldberg's 8-Step Guide (Part 4)

Welcome to the Podfather Podcast. You can find all episodes on podfather.me. Today we're delving into part four of our series with David Goldberg, Guide Your Guests to Sound Great. As podcasters, we spend so much time refining our own voice, pacing, and presence.

But what about our guests? Their sound quality, vocal patterns, and delivery directly impact the professionalism and credibility of the entire show. David has coached thousands of speakers and performers, and today he shares how to follow eight easy steps to ensure your guest's sound quality and speech patterns elevate, not weaken, your podcast. We'll also explore the podcast guest success guidelines and how simple preparation can dramatically increase listeners' engagement and perceived authority.

David, welcome back to the show. Hello, Roy. It's great to see you as always.

No, I always enjoy these shows. It's fantastic information that you're sharing and with your wealth of knowledge. Well, thanks.

This stuff is a lot of fun, but what's not a lot of fun is having a guest ruin your show. That is not good at all. Everyone, don't let that happen to you.

Some thoughts. You put so much time and effort into your podcast, and you market it, and you get good sponsors, and you begin monetizing it, and all of these things are going really well, and then you bring on a big guest, which takes a lot of effort to get, and then they sound so terrible that they actually degrade your show. They weaken your show, and that's a shame, and with eight easy steps, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, you can get that guest to sound really pretty darn good.

The other times, you can get them to sound fabulous. It's all good news. Eight things make a big difference.

The thing to understand is that first impression is critical, and first, in your listeners, your audience's first impression of you and your show and your guest, they decide whether or not it is worth listening to, whether or not they should continue listening to your show or just move on to something else. As soon as they hear your introduction, which could be music or maybe another narrator playing a recording or yourself, as soon as they hear that introduction, they decide, okay, I'll keep listening, and then at some point, you invite your guest, and the moment your guest speaks, they, once again, your audience again decides whether or not they should continue listening. It will behoove you to do everything you can to make sure that your guests sound as good as you.

Now, if they sound better than you, that can kind of be a bad thing, because if they sound better than you, they may steal your show. They look better than you. This reminds me of talk show hosts.

Typical talk show hosts always sit on a chair that's a little bit higher than their guests. They want a little bit of the edge, but not too much, just a couple of inches higher. Watch your favorite talk show.

You'll see their platform or their desk and their chair is up about three or four inches. It gives them just that little extra power, that interest over their guests. You can do the same thing with your guests, or you can come in at an equal level to your guests, but certainly, it's not great if they sound way better than you, and most importantly, if you sound so much better than them that they don't sound good, then your guests will hear the first word of your, your, sorry, your audience will hear the first word of your guest that they will tune out.

I would recommend a week at minimum, even two weeks before you have a guest on your show, run through a checklist of items with them, eight items on that checklist, and then the morning of the show, make sure you get them on your show an hour beforehand. It's a lot of time, I know, but get them on an hour before, so if something's not working, you have a moment to kind of do a quick finagle of things and get them to sound better. We broke down the list of eight things to tell your guests into two categories.

The first category is sound quality, and the second is speech patterns, so I have four items to talk with you about sound quality, or I could say that otherwise, four items that you should talk with your guests about, and same with speech patterns, another four items to talk about. I'm going to read you the whole list of eight items right now, and then if you want to write them down or something, you have a moment, and then we'll fill in the gaps. I have my cheat sheet right over here.

I'm going to read off of my cheat sheet. For sound quality, make sure you talk with your guests about acoustics, their microphone, audio compression, which we'll have to definitely talk about, and their overall levels, which we call gain structure, and then the four speech patterns. Talk with your guests about their pacing, their spacing, getting them to use a natural pitch, and number four, respect.

We'll get to that. Respect probably sounds like a theoretical topic, but it's not at all. It's a practical, specific technique.

Okay, so weeks before your guest is on, call them up. Get them on Zoom, on your Riverside, your phone if you have to, speaker phone. Get them on something where you can hear them with decent quality, and make sure you walk them through being in an acoustically treated room.

Microphones pick up all the noise of your room. They pick up everything in your room. If you have a microphone and you have a lot of echo in your room, and so you turn down the gain on your microphone, that doesn't help, because eventually, if you turn down the gain, your host, or you, has to eventually turn up the gain.

And for those that don't know, what do you mean by gain? Oh, that's a great point. Thanks, Roy. That's why everyone needs a Roy to host them.

Okay, let me go back one step here. So when we talk about acoustics of a room, what I mean is the echo within a room. Your recording room.

Wherever you are recording, if I can call that your room, your recording room, that room is made up of, obviously, a ceiling, floor, and walls. And when you speak, your voice bounces out from your mouth and goes everywhere. It definitely goes everywhere.

You may think, well, I'm facing that direction, my voice only goes that way. But here's the thing. Even though I'm facing this direction, as my figure is pointing, if someone stood behind me, they would hear me.

If someone laid on the floor, they would hear me. If someone went to that wall, or that wall, or if someone was like Spider-Man. It's funny, we both thought about that.

They were up on the ceiling, they would hear me. My voice is going in every direction. Okay, maybe it's a little bit louder this direction, but my voice does bounce around.

It gets everywhere. And every time your voice hits a surface that is hard, like a tile floor, or a wood floor, or a ceiling that's made of dry rock, also called sheet rock, or wall boards, every time your voice hits something that is hard, it bounces right off of it. So my voice goes that way and hits a wall, so it bounces back that way.

Hits another wall, so it bounces back that way, and it goes back and forth. Or maybe my voice hits the ceiling, that way hits the ceiling, bounces off of the ceiling, down to the floor, bounces off of the floor, back to the ceiling. When you get these ping-pong sort of echoes, they're called flutter echoes.

And flutter echoes are what we also commonly know as echo, very fast echo. And just for the fun of it, when you have echoes that are so fast that you can't distinguish between the repeats, that's called reverberation. Reverberation is a type of echo.

Anyway, when you sit in your room and you record, your voice is hitting all of these walls and floors and your floor and ceiling and bouncing around, and it is causing reverberation. Interestingly, it's really a kind of echo that we call reverberation, which we shorten to reverb. So I'll just say the word reverb, because that's what's common in the world, in the podcasting world.

Reverb. You do not want to record with reverb, everyone, nor should your guest. Make sure your guest is in a room that doesn't have reverb.

And to get rid of reverb is really easy. More on that in just a moment. If your guest is sitting in a room with their microphone, and there is reverb, meaning there are hard walls and a hard ceiling and a hard floor or any combination of those, then when they talk, you're going to hear lots of this reverb sound, which sounds like distant echo.

It's going to sound really bad. As soon as your audience hears this really bad sounding reverb person, they're probably going to deem your show as less quality, less credible, and they'll probably tune out. So tell your guest, whoever you're on the podcast with, to go into a room that doesn't have hard walls and doesn't have a hard ceiling and doesn't have a hard floor.

Instead, they should be in a room that has thick carpeting on the floor. Thick carpeting soaks up the sound waves from your voice. Your voice will go down, hit the carpeting, and it gets absorbed into the carpeting.

It doesn't bounce back to the ceiling. And on your ceiling, it's ideal to put foam squares. They're very inexpensive.

You can buy them online from just about anywhere. And once you add the carpeting on the floor and the foam squares on the ceiling, you will sound so much better. But you still need to contend with the walls.

So then you can do the same thing on the walls. Put foam up on the walls. Ultimately, you need roughly 80% of the surfaces around you.

Top, bottom, and all four walls. 80% of those surfaces should be covered with something that absorbs the sound waves. Your voice.

And when you hit that 80%, that number, usually your voice sounds pretty good. Where I'm speaking right now, I'm in a room where all of the walls are padded. Now, we have a hardwood floor, but we have things on the ceiling, foam on the ceiling, that soaks up the sound.

So if any of my voice goes down and bounces off of the floor, it goes up to the ceiling and is absorbed. I have about 80% coverage. I also have a big couch that direction.

That soaks up a lot of sound. And so with 80% coverage, there's no reverb, or also known as reverberation, truly echo. There's none of that on my voice.

And my voice should sound clear. Make sure your guest does this. They can't throw this together last minute.

They need time. If they don't have foam and they don't want to put foam on the ceiling, which is understandable, then tell them to take a big, thick blanket, like a sleeping bag, and just nail it to the ceiling above them. One nail in each corner.

Yeah, they'll have four tiny holes in their ceiling, but you know what? Do it. Send them a few dollars for a little ceiling compound that they could patch up the holes. They're talking tiny little holes.

It shouldn't make a difference. And when you tell your guests to take a blanket to the ceiling, make sure that they don't make the blanket tight to the ceiling. Ideally, the blanket should kind of swoop down a little bit from the ceiling.

So if this hand represents your ceiling, the blanket you nail into four corners, and it kind of swoops down a little bit. When the blanket swoops down just a little bit, an inch or two inches, then when your voice goes through the blanket, there's more material because the blanket is not so tight against the ceiling. It's softer.

And so your voice goes through it, and a lot of your voice is stopped through the blanket. Some of it does get through, and that part that gets through hits the ceiling and then comes back down through the blanket again and gets absorbed a second time. So the blanket sort of doubles the impact by dropping it down just an inch or two.

It's great if your guest will take a couple of blankets, a moving blanket that's thick, or a sleeping bag, and it hangs one down one inch and another blanket down an inch below that. And then you're sure that there's no echo or reverb coming from your ceiling. Take pride in this.

Because when I was doing, when I started off first, I was doing them in person, and I used to put blanket over a table as well because it made a difference. So I presume with this furniture that maybe perhaps you should do that as well. Absolutely.

If you're sitting at a table, it's a great point, Roy. If you are at a table or a desk, take thick towels. They work even better sometimes than blankets.

And fold them up and put them everywhere. Sometimes when I travel, I end up having to zoom or go into some type of podcast software from my hotel room. And a lot of hotel rooms have carpeting on the floor and they have a big bed and everything, but the walls are completely bare and echoey, and the ceiling is echoey.

And I always ask for extra blankets. I ask the hotel for extra blankets and extra pillows, and I prop them up around my, I build like forts around my computer. I make sure to angle my computer so no one can see the bathroom or anything weird like that in the background, and I build these forts of pillows.

And I've done a couple of times, I've done shows where I've needed more blankets or pillows or soft structures. I take my clothing out. You don't know this right now, but maybe I'm in a pillow fort right now, but I make sure that it doesn't get shown.

I could have pillows, which I don't in this case, in this room, but I could have pillows going up the side of my computer, over the top, down the side, with my sweatshirts and sweatpants like right across the top, and whatever stops the sound from bouncing around is what you do. It does take a while to do. It's a mindset.

You need to make sure that your guest has that mindset and they have the time to put into making sure there are no echoes emanating from their speaking room. And then the microphone is also important. So talk with your guest about the kind of microphone that they will be using.

There are lots of kinds of microphones out there, and they are for different purposes. The more expensive the microphone, not necessarily the better the microphone for you. Sometimes the more expensive microphones, in fact, Roy and I were just chatting about this before we went live, sometimes the more expensive microphones would be the worst choice.

You might actually be better off with a less expensive microphone. More on that in a moment. First, I want to talk about the different kinds of microphones very briefly, and then help you figure out how to help your guest figure out which microphone type would be best for them.

Here are the different types of microphones that we are concerned with right now. Shotgun microphones. Those are microphones which are incredibly directional.

A shotgun microphone is a very long, skinny microphone. They're aimed at your mouth, and it picks up what's coming at it, and it rejects what's coming from on top and on bottom and to the left and to the right. So they're great if you are in a noisy room where there are refrigerators or boilers running or kids running around or even echo to some degree.

Hopefully there's no echo left. But if you are in a room with any of these noises that you don't want on the microphone, a shotgun microphone is fantastic because it really does help reject a lot of the other sound. It doesn't reject everything, but it could get rid of 50% or 80% of the other sounds and other end echoes.

With that actually, because is that one that, because sometimes somebody will kind of like go away and they'll talk and then the volume goes way down. Is that one that you have to make sure that you're not moving away because it won't get affected? That is the minus of the shotgun microphone. Yeah, if it wasn't for that or for having two people on a microphone, that would be the best microphone for just about everyone in every application.

Yeah, shotgun microphones are so direct that they're good in some ways, and as Roy said, they're not good in other ways. Some people are just natural movers. They're fidgeters.

As they talk, they're left, they're right, they're sitting back, they're sitting forward, and I know that as I'm moving around like that, you hear a change in my audio quality, but not nearly as much as you would if I was on a shotgun microphone. If I was on a shotgun microphone right now and I moved this far away, you would barely hear me. It makes a big difference.

What's the price point of the shotgun mics? Interestingly, I think the price point is almost a question we don't need to worry about anymore because in all of these microphones, there are high-end and low-end, and the low-end microphones are just about the same price as the low-end of other types of microphones. Maybe shotguns are a little bit more expensive. Maybe the least expensive decent shotgun microphone could be, I've seen them for 50 bucks, 60 bucks, and I've seen diaphragm microphones like this for 50 or 60 bucks, so I think we're in a day and age right now with USB microphones that there's something at every price point.

With a shotgun microphone, if you have two people on a microphone sharing a microphone, it won't work. You cannot take the shotgun microphone and aim it between two people, like if this is the microphone, have one person on the left and one person on the right, and put the microphone in the middle. That will not work.

It will pick up neither person very well. You'll hear just a faint voice from either person. So if you are in a noisy room and you don't move too much, then a shotgun microphone is great.

Shotgun microphones, by the way, also have a kind of a unique sound to them. It's a very direct, very pinpointed sound. That sound is very often used in television promos that are promoting TV shows that are upcoming.

It's a very direct, like a clear, very clear sound. Another type of microphone is a large diaphragm microphone like this one I have here. I'm going to lift it up a little bit so people can see here.

And this one is a side address microphone, meaning I talk into the side of the microphone. Some of them you talk into the front. And larger diaphragm microphones like this one give the speaker more latitude to move around.

They're more forgiving. So I can sit back a little bit. I can go closer a little bit.

I can go left. I can go right. And yes, my quality changes, but not enough that it really negatively impacts my voice.

You can still hear my words, unlike a shotgun. So this is great, except if there is any room, I'm sorry, if there is any noise in my room or in your guest's room, as we're talking about, then this is not a great choice. Because this microphone is going to pick up all the noises that you don't want.

This microphone will pick up the furnace and the kids and the sirens outside and traffic if you live on a busy road. And it's going to pick up all of that stuff, which right now is making me think, uh-oh, I may have made an error because I have a heater sitting by my feet. And I'm hoping that the noise from that is not getting picked up.

It probably is. With the Zoom, actually, there's noise cancellation. So at one stage, because I'm listening, I'm near the fire station, and they have this siren that goes off because it's for volunteers.

And I was always like, because you just don't know when it's going. So I'd always pause it. And I've realized the person can't hear it.

And so the way that the Zoom works, so there's times that, like, I often say that if there's someone in the house, I said, listen, don't be on your phone having a conversation, because these things, without the Zoom, they can pick up everything. Then somebody could take it. So it can be dangerous if people don't realize it's picking up everything that's in the house.

But when it's done with Zoom and with the cancellation, it's an advantage. However, what if I've changed my Zoom settings, as I do sometimes when I go to musician mode, which means the noise suppression is cut off. So right now, I'm thinking, uh-oh, maybe I'm on musician mode, and my heater's running.

Now, I'm so close to my microphone that it probably, the sound of the heater running by me, I don't think it would get out to the microphone anyway, because my voice is so much louder because I'm close to the microphone. So have your guests think about what kind of microphone to purchase. There are a few other types to talk about briefly, either a shotgun microphone or a large diaphragm microphone, like this one, which has, by the way, a much more open sound, unlike the shotgun that had that pinpointed sound.

This is a more breathable sound. It sounds more real, like someone is right there with you. Shotgun microphone sounds like it's a recording.

A diaphragm, a larger diaphragm microphone sounds like someone is in the room with you, which is nice. It's great on podcasts for that reason. The other common type or microphone type to use would be a wearable microphone, a clip-on microphone, also known as a lavalier, also known as a tie clip microphone.

These are little clip-on microphones. Roy, I know you had one. You've shown me that little... I can actually grab it there.

Yeah, it was a Sony one, so I can show the listeners. And I have my brace on me for those that are wondering what's Roy wearing. That's my brace for after my accident.

But yeah, I'll hold that up. Yeah, little clip-on microphones. And those are great because if you get a decent one, which also can start at about 50 bucks for something relatively decent, 50 US dollars that is, then you clip it on and everywhere you go the microphone goes with you.

But like anything, there are some downsides to that. Number one, if your clothing is loud, like a starched shirt, a nylon running suit, or any silk blouse that a woman may wear, that will be loud. Also, some people tend to touch their bodies a lot when they're recording, and that can get picked up by the microphone.

Or a necklace as well. That can be kind of rattling. Yeah, I had someone two days ago, a man who was recording something, and I kept hearing a clink.

And for about five minutes, I could not figure out where the sound was coming from. And I realized he had this really cool looking bracelet, but it was like a double bracelet. And every time he moved his hands, we got this clink.

But it was muffled by his shirt, or jacket, which was over it. So it was like a very muted clink sound. It was a cool sound, but not one for the recording.

It was not good there. So the other problems with these clip-on microphones, or wearable microphones, is that very often people forget that they are there. Because you can't see it.

It's clipped onto a shirt. You kind of forget it's there. And what people start doing sometimes is inevitably getting louder.

You forget that it's not right there. And people tend to get louder when they have a wearable microphone. Whereas when I talk into this thing, or if it was a shotgun microphone, I'm reminded every second that this thing is right in front of my face.

I don't really enjoy having this big thing in front of my face like that. But it captures my voice really well. It's in the way of my computer.

It's in the way of my notes. It's in the way of my screen. However, it's more important to me to sound good.

If I have a clip-on microphone, I don't visually see the microphone, and I might get louder. And that's not good. I don't want to seem like I'm shouting.

And you don't want your guests to be shouting on your show. The other thing that goes wrong with wearable microphones is that people turn their heads. If I have a microphone and it's clipped to my shirt, and if I demonstrate, if I look to my right, I look like that.

Then my mouth is facing completely away from the clip-on microphone. So every microphone has a purpose. Work with your guests on finding the right microphone.

If you know that you're going to have a bunch of guests on, it might be worth it to invest in a couple of good microphones and send them out to your guests and have them send them back when they're done. We've done that many times, probably 100 times over the years. We've sent really good, sometimes really good microphones to people to use for a recording, a podcast, or whatever recording they may be working on, and then they sent the microphone back.

So far, everyone has sent the microphone back. Maybe our accounting department charges them in refunds. I don't know what we do, honestly.

But we've never lost a microphone, to my knowledge. Okay. Just curious, because I've come across a few times where people have the earphones with the mic, and yes, to see one that's good.

Is there good ones that people can use for them? That's a great point. Yeah. I'm telling you, everyone, you need a Roy.

If you're going to interview anyone, make it be a Roy. Seriously. This is not me trying to get on his good side.

I think we already are on each other's good sides. He's awesome. The microphones that you wear, some of them are fantastic.

We all see famous musicians wearing them sometimes on live shows. They can be really good. They do exist, good ones.

The problem is, if your guest is being videoed, if it's a video cast where the audience can see your guest, the microphones that go over your ears and they have headphones on them and everything, that's not a great look. Studies show that when someone is wearing headphones, as my kids do when they come down in the morning sometimes, when people are wearing headphones, the other person feels like we're closed off from them, or they are closing themselves off from us. It's not a good look.

It's a turnoff. Ideally, that's not done. If it's an audio-only podcast, then that could be a really good choice because as the speaker, you see the microphone in front of your face.

You can angle it so it's about three or four inches away. No matter how you move your head, it goes with you. Theoretically, your mouth is always the same distance from the microphone, which is very helpful.

That can be good as long as it's a good quality one. I think those tend to run a bit more expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if you have to spend maybe 100 US dollars for a good one, but I could be mistaken.

We don't purchase those. I have one just for myself when I'm on a call or something, and I don't feel like going on the speakerphone or holding the phone. I wouldn't hold my eyeglasses.

I wear my glasses if I want to see clearly. Same thing if I'm on a long phone call, I put that headstrap thing on, and it's convenient, but not for a podcast. I wouldn't do it on a show like this.

I don't like that look. Like I said, study show is not the best look. Work hard with your guests at least a couple of days, preferably a week or two weeks before the show, to make sure the acoustics of their recording room is good, and the microphone selection that they purchase or borrow from you is good.

Third thing is compression. Make sure your guest sounds good by compressing their voice. They can't do this.

You should do this. When guests come in, they will usually, not always, but usually be more dynamic with their volumes. I'm going to say this differently.

I'm so used to recording that I know I shouldn't yell, because if I yell, it's going to sound loud, and I know I don't want to whisper, because if I whisper, it could be harder to hear me, so I try to control my volume dynamics. I try not to change it too much. I mean, of course, I'm human.

We are all human, and we have volume fluctuations, so I try to limit my fluctuations so my volume is coming through at a consistent level. However, sometimes when you get guests on, they're not used to or considering the volume thing, and so one word is loud, and the next word is really soft, and their volume changes all over the place, and to your audience, that doesn't sound good. So you can tell your guest, okay, don't go too loud, don't go too soft, but then they're thinking about all of this the whole time.

They may forget, or if they're concentrating on it, then they lose their performance because they're so focused on the volume, and I always encourage the podcaster, you, the host, to take the recording from your guest and run it through a processor called a compressor. This is confusing because there are two kinds of compression out there in our world. There's data compression and volume compression.

I am not talking about data compression. I am talking about volume compression. Hang on one second.

Sorry. Pardon me. So I'm talking about volume compression, and what volume compression does is it sort of, it doesn't sort of, it does, it squashes the dynamics, the highs to the lows.

So if this hand here represents the loudest your guest speaks, and this hand represents the lowest volume that they speak, when you run that, their voice, that guest's voice, through an audio compressor, a volume compressor, it takes the highs and it brings them down. So there's less variation between the high volume and low volume. Lots of people complain when they watch TV that the commercials on TV are really loud, and they are.

They tend to be louder. And at least in the United States, there are some regulations from the government that states that the advertisers cannot be over a certain amount of decibels louder than the content of the TV show. Interesting side note, so interesting, I'll actually interject this.

Roy, this is fascinating to me. When the government, I believe during the Barack Obama years, instituted this regulation saying that commercials cannot be louder, the advertisers out there, probably an association of somewhere, of some sort, came back to the government and said, but we need the commercials to be louder so we have more, we grab the attention of the audience and everything, and what ended up happening is the government specified how much louder a TV commercial can be on average. Averaging out the volume of the entire TV commercial, that is.

So I'm making up a number because I don't know how many decibels louder a commercial can be on average, but let's just use the number 10. Let's pretend that if a TV show is running at a decibel level of 70, well now the commercials could be running at an average level of 80. And what advertisers did was fascinating.

Advertisers said, okay, my commercial has to average 80 decibels. So what I'll do is have part of the commercial have no volume, really low, maybe just a little music way in the background. And then when the music comes in, it can be twice as loud.

So the average still ends up to be 80 decibels. So kind of the advertisers still found a way to get the volume way louder on commercials. Kind of an interesting thing.

And I think that that regulation... It's trickier in everything to always find ways around things. Yeah, you have to, I guess. And so when your guests speak, you do not want their volume to be ranging so much because it bothers people.

If your guest is really loud at one point, then your audience has to lower their volume. And then a moment later, if your guest is very soft, if they whisper a word, I don't know if they'll necessarily whisper, but if they soften their voice like this, well then your audience has to raise their volume. And that's an annoying thing.

So run your guest's voice through this audio compressor. And that's what I was explaining. So you have your low volume or your guest's low volume and high volume and the audio compressor just takes the loud volumes and brings them down.

So there's less space between, less delta between the high and the low. It's a more consistent volume. And it sounds great.

There is only one downside to compressing the volume. When you take the low and the high and you turn the compressor on, it brings the high volumes down. So if your guest gets really loud for a moment, it brings it down.

But then the whole level is sort of low. That doesn't sound good. So then you need to turn the whole level up.

And look, my left hand, the low level is coming up as I gain the entire level, as I increase the volume of the entire level. Which means the lowest volume things like noise in the background, your breaths, mouth clicks, the heater running by you, any noise in the background gets actually increased. If you're not used to running audio compression, practice it for a while and find out how much can you compress so you find a good balance of making sure that your guest sounds really good.

You get at the same time, you don't increase or raise the volume of the bad stuff in your guest's room. Because no matter how good of a sounding room a guest is in, there is always some noise. And you don't want to increase that noise or the mouth clicks from the guest.

And like, would it be software that's doing that? Like Audacity, I know Audacity works both on PC and Mac. And then there's GarageBand. Is there any in particular that you find is because I'm always conscious of different budgets as well.

I know some people are able to pay, you know, for fancy software and get the best. And others are kind of trying to get whatever's available free. Are they ones like Audacity? Will that actually suffice? Yeah.

Yes, it will. Audacity is free software. It's been free for 20 plus years, probably since it's been around, I think.

And Audacity has compressors built. Oh, wait, let me back up and say to your audience, right. Audacity is recording software.

So when you record your voice and your guest's voice, your voices have to be recorded in some kind of software, some recording software. And recording software is called digital audio workstations. Again, we call them digital audio workstations.

So you know what? No one ever calls them that. We call them by the abbreviation DAW for digital audio workstation. We refer to them as DAWs.

And Audacity is a super popular DAW. Meaning there are probably millions and millions of people who use Audacity software. It's free software.

You can run the microphone into it. And you can record your voice and playback parts of it. You can edit your voice.

And Audacity has compressors built in, which is great. It's free. And the compressors work fine.

I know lots of people who use Audacity software for professional applications. It really works for you. The biggest component of your audio quality is the acoustics of your room and the microphone.

Buying the right microphone. That has the biggest impact of your sound quality by far. Well, and you staying relatively close to the microphone.

That's important also. And not going so close that you overload the microphone. If you get really right on a microphone, if I move and I get my mouth like right on this microphone, I will overload the microphone.

It will distort and you'll get these kind of like pop sounds that just don't sound terrible. So anyway, you typically want to be about three or four inches away from your microphone. So you need to really make sure that the volume from your guest is compressed.

It takes a little while to get used to it. When you begin with a compressor, there are typically only three or four settings. I'll tell you what I suggest you start at.

Then you'll need to play around with them to figure it out. When you turn on your compressor, whatever compressor you use, typically there's a button called a threshold or a gauge called a threshold. And what all the threshold says to the compressing software is at what volume, at what louder volume should the compressor kick in.

Because if I'm whispering, we don't want the compressor to kick in and lower me. Why lower someone whispering? And if I'm speaking at a regular good volume, then you don't need the compressor to kick in. You really only want the compressor to kick in when someone gets louder like that.

So if someone does get louder, the compressor automatically kicks in and lowers the volume, which we call gain. So that's the threshold. Just while you're on that, actually, because I know I'm using Adobe for podcasters.

And there's been times we've even done a live and somebody recorded and one of the guests, unfortunately, was on a laptop. And I thought, I can't get this off. And it was incredible.

Is that working in the same way? And it's just kind of doing its magic without you having to physically do all the different changes or what's your thoughts on that? Are you referring to presets? When you put in, when you upload the sound, it enhances the sound. Yeah, with a preset. Yeah, I didn't know the terminology.

Oh, yeah. So that would be, well, at least here, we call them presets. It's the system saying, here's what we suggest will be best.

Hearing the incoming audio, we think it will be best to add this kind of treble to the voice or this kind of bass and this kind of compression. Yeah, that's a preset. Because I'm so fiddly, I never use presets.

Sometimes I fear that the preset might work for the average voice, but everyone's voice is different. And I don't know, I don't believe that presets take into consideration the energy of you. They only take the energy of one person.

But I like to capture the energy of the conversation. Sometimes more dynamics sound great. Sometimes less dynamics sound great.

Or dynamics referring to the range of volume. I was listening to a song yesterday by Lionel Richie. You know Lionel Richie? It was one of the older songs, I'm guessing from the 1970s or so.

And as I listened to the voice, I was listening. I don't think they used much compression. There was definitely compression on the very, very top end, but very, very little.

Some of his words were really loud and full and some were really hard to hear behind the music. And I was thinking, wow, that's really interesting back then how they recorded that particular song with virtually no compression. It almost sounded like there was no compressor and maybe someone manually in those days stood there with a volume and every time his voice was loud they kind of quickly lowered it a little bit and then they brought it back up.

And I don't think that was necessarily the case. They probably did have a compressor. Compressors were around in the 1970s, but it didn't sound like the engineers used the compressor much.

And it gave the song a beautiful sound in the sense that it was so real. It was like Lionel Richie, the singer, this famous singer, it sounded like he was right there next to me. Yet at the same time, the lower words were completely lost behind the music.

And if I didn't listen really carefully, I could not have heard the words behind the music because sometimes his voice would trail off when singing a song and a word would get soft and you couldn't hear it because the drums were there or the piano or the guitars and other instruments. So the idea of using volume compression is great because it does even out the volume and makes the audience, your audience, able to hear all of the words more carefully. So I would take into consideration using that for your guest's voice.

And sure, a preset is probably fine, but like I said, there's different dynamics in every conversation. You may or may not have music. Maybe you would like the idea of more dynamics or less dynamics.

So if you go through a preset, that's the machine saying, I think it should sound like this. And you may not want that. So I don't use presets, but I'm sure the presets these days are pretty good.

When you're saving, because most podcast platforms require mp3, but sometimes you can get away with wifi. Do you lose something when you're saving that as an mp3 or what's the best way to save it if it's allowed to be uploaded in that format? I believe that these days an mp3 is completely fine. Technically, you'll lose something.

Anytime you compress the volume of the entire track, the audio. Well, let me go back a step and just explain what this means because this is data compression, not volume compression as we spoke about. What data compression does is it takes a big file and it makes it smaller.

And when you record audio, real audio takes up a lot of space, a lot of memory on your computer. If you have an hour-long podcast with two people on it and music and everything, that is a big, big file. Too big to email to someone.

You need to use some type of online delivery system like an FTP or Google Dropbox or something like that to re-transfer any of these systems that let you transfer large, big files through the internet. You can deal with these massive files that take a long time to open up on your system and the audio players have some latency when they begin playing them. Or you can take that big file and compress it down into a smaller file.

And mp3 is one of the most common compressed files. And it's great. You can take a 10-minute recording that is otherwise very large and compress it down into something that you can email to someone.

That's amazing. So the idea of data compressing, the recording is great. MP3s used to not sound that great.

But over the years, the algorithms have been changed and I think they sound brilliant. We have done tests here where we take raw audio and we play it next to an mp3 version of that. And it's really hard to hear the difference.

Now, there are different grade levels of mp3s. You can compress to an mp3 and go for full data compression and make a big file like nothing. I will exaggerate and say just a megabyte or two.

You can also use a higher quality mp3 and maybe it ends up to be 10 or 20 megabytes. So there are different grade levels. Typically, if you go to a decent mp3, the audience will never hear anything other than perfection.

By the time your voice goes through the internet and through someone's headset or their speakers or their earbuds, an mp3, I believe, is totally fine. Excellent. Okay.

So fourth and final thing here was levels. I have touched on this already. I just want to touch on it a tiny bit more.

When working with your guest, make sure that their levels are good. In this industry, the volume level, we don't really call volume level. We call it the gain.

And there are so many gains that can be annoying. Some microphones, especially USB microphones, may have a gain output on the microphone. You can decide how much.

Sometimes, I think I've even seen inputs on microphones. There could be an input gain or input volume, an output that goes into your software called a DAW, as we talked about earlier. The DAW may have an input adjuster called an input gain.

Your equalizer, I'm sorry, your compressor, if you are compressing, that can have an input and an output volume. The final output of your entire program, your recording, can have an output. In other words, there are lots of places where there are volume adjustments.

And if you improperly set them, your recording will probably sound hissy. Yet, if you set these levels correctly, you probably can avoid having hiss. And so, there's just one basic thing to think about.

Always start as hot as you can. Let me explain what that means. Everywhere your voice goes, turn up the gain or the volume as high as it can go.

Crank it. Crank, crank, crank it. It will probably distort.

Your voice or your guest's voice will probably distort because you have everything at full. So, as soon as you're turning it up, you go higher and higher and higher. The moment your guest's voice distorts, then back it down just a little bit.

And then go to the next volume and turn that up as high as it can go. And once it begins to distort, then back it off just a little bit and go through the whole chain that way. That way, everything is as amplified as it can be going into the next process and you eliminate the chance of hiss.

The only exception to that is if you have different quality pieces of equipment along the way. In other words, if you use some of your own software, like your own compressor, rather than the compressor that comes with the Audacity software and things like that, sometimes different pieces of software are higher quality or lower quality and may introduce more or less noise. But for the most part, if you follow the gain structure that I mentioned, you probably will eliminate that hiss in the background, the electronic noise.

And then your guest sounds really good. So, those are four things to consider getting your guest to sound good. I do want to throw in a fifth thing.

And very briefly, it is really nice if all of the components of your podcast sound equal to one another in terms of volume, which we've spoken about, also in terms of tonality. And that's when an equalizer comes in. An equalizer is a fancy word for a bass and treble adjuster.

These days, our equalizers are more specific than just turning up the bass or down the bass or turning up the treble or down the treble. Today's equalizers allow you to have a frequency anywhere in between. Any frequency you want, from the lowest bass to the highest treble.

Roy, if your microphone and your recording room produces a very bright sound, and my microphone and recording room produce a very dull, bassier sound, then when you put the two together, they don't blend. They don't match. It sounds like we're in different rooms.

And if it sounds like we are in different rooms, I know we are. But if it sounds that way, it doesn't sound like we're having a conversation. It sounds like one person is on the street in a loud city, and one person is inside a library where it's very quiet.

It's weird. The dynamics are different. It doesn't sound like the two people are together.

And a podcast should sound like the people are together as much as possible. It's supposed to be a conversation. So use an equalizer to balance the tone so your voice and the voice of your guest sounds similar.

That's just a very important thing to do, everyone. Same thing with compression, or the volume. Make sure the volumes are consistent.

Okay. We have to talk about one other thing, and that's speech patterns. When you bring on a guest onto your podcast, you need to make sure that their speech pattern is pretty good.

In fact, there are four things to talk about here. I mentioned them earlier. Pacing is one.

Spacing is the second one. They're looking at my cheat sheet is what I'm doing. They're there.

Make sure they're in their natural pitch. And number four, respect. Okay.

Very briefly. These won't take that long to talk about. Make sure your guest is aware of their pacing.

Make sure that they don't speak so fast that your audience can't understand what they are saying. Because if your audience can't understand what they're saying, then it defeats the point of the podcast, and your audience will not like your podcast, and your audience will turn off your podcast, and that is not what you want for your podcast, obviously. So talk with your guest about slowing the rate of their words down, assuming they are too fast, which I don't know.

Roy, what percentage of people get on podcasts for the first time and speak too quickly? Yes. There is a percentage. I think, yeah, for the first few minutes, definitely, the nerves kick in, and they get excited, or they're just so nervous that that happens.

So remind people to not go too fast. But before you remind people not to go too fast, first listen to them. Because if they already don't go too fast, then there's no reason to make them think about something.

Less stuff in their head is always a good thing. Ideally, you go into a podcast with nothing in your head. But does that really ever happen? No.

But the less we have in our head, the better. There's a thing on that, actually. Sorry.

What I've learned is sometimes you go on a show, and people are like, all right, I'm already in. And that's their kind of model. They're going in, they're recording.

I always like to have a little chat. Then they're getting to know you. You're having a laugh.

They're relaxing. And then when you press the record button, they're at a different tone. And I think just give them a bit of space to get to know you.

A lot of the times, it's the first time you're talking to a person. Some people do pre-calls, others don't. But I would say, just have a bit of banter, get to know the person.

And then they don't tend to go, speedy Gonzales. I remember speedy Gonzales. Yeah.

That's a great trick, everyone. I would not even, right, what you're doing, I would not even call a trick. I'd call it a technique.

Having good banter with someone, build that into your time with someone. Build in five or 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes to just banter. And then get those nerves out.

Maybe even tell, wow, my goodness. Okay. I'm saying this out loud, being recorded.

And I don't like the idea that I'm about to say something, but I'm going to say it. Maybe lie. I don't condone lying.

But maybe this is like bending the truth or white lying. If you have a guest and they sound nervous, then I would, while you're bantering, maybe tell them that you're recording. It's part of the show.

They're really nervous. And you go five or 10 minutes into the show when they relax. And then say, oh, crap, I forgot to hit the record button.

I'm so sorry. Do you mind if we go back and start again? And now they are relaxed. I don't know if that would help or not.

But I feel like if you banter with someone, and they start to relax, then when you say, okay, you're ready now, we're going to hit the record button. You ready? You ready? Their nerves may come back. And their rate of speech, their pacing will increase again.

So yeah, maybe just kind of say, that was great. Let's do that again. I forgot to hit the record button.

I'm super sorry about that. And just kind of keep going. I don't know.

Another thing that I do as well as that is sometimes saying the crypto, because sometimes people, excuse me, in the crypto world, they can be nervous as well. Excuse me. And what I'll do because of my research, I go, oh, I see you're into fishing.

Or I see, oh, you're into mixed martial arts. Nothing related to the crypto. Just to start off on that, because people can connect with the person then as well.

They just go, oh, I like fishing. Maybe I can connect with, or whatever it is. And when you talk about someone's passion, it comes up in their face.

And then when you move on to the next thing related to the topic, it just flows. These are ideas, everyone, by a master podcaster. Seriously.

Yeah, that is great. You can make that connection. You talk about something that's personal to them.

Yeah. And get them talking. So you can, and wait, so what about this? I find the idea to work with someone a couple of days before the recording, or even a week or two weeks before, in case they need to change the acoustics of the room, or even change the room that they are going to record in, and maybe you need to send them a microphone.

Would you, or would you not, and why, have a test recording the first day you meet them, two weeks before? Yes, you have to do a recording, or a sample recording a few weeks before, just to hear the acoustics of the room. But would you spend any more time than just, I'm asking you specifically, would you spend more time other than just checking level? You could have someone say, testing one, two, three, testing one, two, three, and you can gauge the acoustics and the sound quality of the microphone. But at that point, two or three weeks before, would you banter with them? I don't do pre-calls.

I don't check the stuff and everything, because when I'm doing my research, I'm going in listening to other shows, and I know, okay, their sound is good, and I won't even invite or agree to have them on, if I see that their quality isn't good, or the sound is bad. So that's how I do it, because I've got six shows, and I guest as well. I've been on ones where people do the sound check.

They ask, I want to make sure everything's okay, and that's all right. And also, sometimes in the form, what people do is they list what exactly they expect. Like some of the things they say, look, you need to have a mic that's this, you need to do this, you need to be in a quiet place, so people actually put it.

But especially for some people, they're doing the podcast tour. It's not as if they go on one a month or something like that. They're just kind of, some people are doing five a day, and just to promote their business or book or whatever.

But for me personally, no, I don't do it. But if I come across, that's why I wear the earphones. So I've had a lot of famous people.

One guy, he wrote 80 odd books. I paused it. I said, I can hear your fan.

I can pick up on things. Same with the lighting and everything. I've had a famous doctor, and I said, this isn't going to work during the dark areas.

We're kind of at the same level. So sometimes you see somebody in there like that, and I tell them straight away, you have to take control of your show and make sure that no matter how famous they are, it doesn't matter. And what I've noticed, and it shocks me, loads of times people come on, and I think they're kind of just shooting the breeze coming on podcast.

And then they see my professional set up and they go, oh, give me five minutes. And then they're really getting everything ready. And then they're going, oh, I need to do this.

So it's like, make sure that when you're turning up, you're bringing your A game because a lot of them, unfortunately, they don't. Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

Everyone take pride in your show and take pride in your guest show. And that's what this whole episode is about. Making sure that your guest doesn't take over you, like they don't come across better than you, nor do they weaken your show.

Because another thing as well is there is times because you don't know, I'd say, hey, the sound is very bad. Let's do this some other time. Make sure you get a mic because I don't want to damage my listeners because if I put out crap, it affects me.

So if there is times that you don't know, maybe they haven't been on other shows or anything and you go, hey, the sound is bad. Can you get another mic? Can you change over? Plus, I mean, it's happened to me once or twice, the way you're going from Riverside to Streamyard to all these different things. Sometimes the technology changes things around and it actually goes into the microphone of the camera.

And I make sure I get people to check that as well. And I think that's why wearing, they're the Audio Technics earphones, but they're good quality earphones. And I can pick up on these things.

And just by saying it to people, sometimes they go, oh, I didn't realize that. And I mean, you know, I'm not trying to insult them or anything, but it's just you're taking full control. And by listening to every single thing, you're ensuring that you're kind of respecting the listeners.

Yeah. A great thing about listening on headphones, everyone, is you can hear so much more. Anytime I'm called in to review someone's voice for a podcast or a recording or anything, I always listen on headphones, good headphones.

Headphones that are good enough that they can reproduce the low quality, like the low frequencies rather. So you know exactly what you're giving or sending your person. Wherever your audio goes, you want to make sure they can hear it.

Sorry, let me try that one again. Wherever you send your audio, you want to make sure that it sounds good for them. So listen back on headphones, good quality headphones, and headphones that don't have noise cancellation on them.

This has been happening a lot to me lately. People send me audio and it sounds terrible. And I say, there's a lot of bass rumble or high pitched noises or furnaces in the background.

And they say, I didn't hear it. And I say, did you listen back? And they say, yeah, I listened back. And I say, are you listening back on headphones with noise cancellation? They say, yes.

And I say, well, then your headphones are cutting out the audio. You have no clue what you're sending me. So yeah, make sure you listen to real good audio without noise cancellation.

Okay, so the four types of speech patterns to tell your guests to use. One is to not go so fast that your audience can't understand them. Tell your guests to slow down, especially in the beginning of the podcast.

While your audience needs a moment, their brains need a moment to kind of acclimate to the speech pattern of your guests. Everyone has a different speech pattern. It takes your audience just a moment to kind of figure out their speech pattern.

They have to become used to it and be able to decipher it. So your guests should speak more slowly in the very beginning. Your guests should say their name slowly.

People tend to say their own names very quickly, to the point that it's hard for your audience to understand it. We all know our own names so well that we say it very quickly. Your guests should say the name of their business slowly.

They should be branding these things, making sure they are clear, and so on. The second thing for your guests is tell them to leave more space between sentences. I love this analogy.

If I have 10 things to tell you, which is I think we're doing eight today, if I have eight things to tell you, I have them written in front of me with bullets. It's really nice for me to see these bullets because I can separate them. I can look at the piece of paper that's my cheat sheet of the eight things I want to tell you, and I can see there's one.

With a clear indication, I can see what the second one is, and so on. Bullets really help organize the content for whoever is reading that page. Therefore, when you speak bullets, you should use spaces.

You need to use space between the items on your list so your audience can hear what belongs with what and what doesn't belong with what, just like the bullets on my page. If I took all of the words on my page, all of the words that are split between these eight bullets, if, there's the word if, if I got rid of the bullets and all eight things were one long sentence with no punctuation marks, it would be really hard for me to decipher or to parse what the notes are. So to make it clear for me, I separate all of my words into eight bullets, and I put the bullet there.

It just, it makes it easy for me to look at and understand what I'm supposed to be seeing. Do the same thing for your listeners. Take space between sentences, space between paragraphs, space between bullets.

When you take space between sentences and bullets and so on, your audience has time to absorb what you're saying. They have time to digest it. If I went from the first thing to the second thing to the third thing, and here's the fourth thing, and the fifth thing is this, and the sixth thing is that, and the seventh thing, and here's the eighth thing, you can't take that in.

Your audience can't take that in. And once your audience becomes confused, they check out. They tune out.

They are gone, gone, gone. It is incredibly rare that you could ever get someone back. Once your audience perceives you to have low quality, whether it's low speaking quality or low audio quality, the moment they perceive you to have low quality, that perception is in their head, and it is very, very hard for you to get them to reshape that perception.

They will tune out, and they will never come back, most likely. Studies and studies and studies prove this. So tell your guests to take space between sentences.

Interestingly, one more thing on this. When you look at a whole book, a book is split into multiple chapters, and there's typically a blank page in between chapters. That page is a visual cue or clue that there's a new chapter.

The content is being organized into chapters, and then within the chapters, within each chapter, the content is organized into paragraphs, and now there's a blank line of space between each paragraph, and then within the paragraph, the sentences are, or the content is split into sentences, and there's a period and a blank space to separate the sentences, and even within the sentences, there are commas to separate the phrases, and all of these techniques, the commas, the periods, the blank lines between paragraphs and the blank page between chapters, organizes the content for the reader of a book. Do the same thing when you speak. Take space.

Leave space. Leave pause so people know what goes with what and what content doesn't go with what. It makes it easier for them to hear you, to take it in, to think about it, to write down notes if they want.

Spacing and pacing are two of the four things we want to talk about. The third one is using your natural pitch. Tell your guest to speak in their natural pitch.

When guests are nervous, and Roy, you mentioned that guests are often nervous for the first two minutes, or especially if you work with guests who aren't used to being on podcasts, when people are a little bit nervous, even slightly nervous, their natural pitch goes higher and higher, and they speak like this. In addition to increasing their speed, their pitch goes up, and your audience will know, immediately know, they will recognize that your guest is nervous, and that is not a good sound, because it shows, it gives the perception that your guest is not experienced, and if your guest is not experienced, well then why would you take hold of what they say? They're not as credible when they don't sound confident. So tell your guests to speak in their natural pitch.

That's a key thing. Their voice will come through better, they will sound better, they will record better, their voice will be more consistent. Find that natural pitch.

It sounds better, they sound more credible, and they mask their nerves. And the fourth thing, respect. In everyday conversation, when people talk, they cut each other off.

I give you the funnest homework of all time. Listen to people just talking, two people, listen to them. Listen to two people at the water cooler at work, two people at the grocery store, listen to any two people having a conversation.

And probably without exaggeration, 90 to 95 percent of the time, when one person is finishing a sentence, the next person begins their sentence. The sentences overlap. And that's fine, that's natural.

We all do that, and that sounds great. When you're on a podcast, sometimes it's harder to see the person, because they're in a little square. So it's harder to figure out when they're about to speak and when they're not about to speak.

And sometimes you both start to speak at the same time. That's happened to Roy and I, there's no way, it's inevitable, it happens. And so have respect, always to let the other person have their way.

If you are a guest on someone's show, give them the respect. And actually, I can say this differently, figure out the pecking order before the show begins, is really what it is. Like Roy, when you interject, I learned from you, I want to hear what you have to say.

I want to stop talking and hear what you have to input. And I think that we have like mutual podcasting, I don't know, like we respect each other, like we both have knowledge and skills, and you've done a lot of podcasting, I've done a lot of podcasting. It's fun to share this thing, our thoughts, and I always want to hear what you have to say.

When you work with a guest, figure out the pecking order, figure out who gets to jump in. I would work with your guest and say, if I have to say something, please let me take over. When it's time to end the show, listen for my cue, I will say this or I will say that.

When you hear me begin to wrap up, just please stop, we're out of time. Work with your guest on the respect. So throughout the show, your guest doesn't sound disrespectful.

You want to make sure that your guest comes through and knows when to talk, when not to talk, when it's okay to jump in, and so on. You can work with the guest and say, in the event that we both start speaking at the same time, I would love to defer to you. I'm bringing you on to my podcast because you are an expert in a certain subject matter.

Or you may say, if we need to speak at the same time, please let me take over, because I may have an important message for our audience. And those things are fine, but state those things up front so your guest is ready for it. And that way, everyone sounds respectful.

And it makes for a much more pleasant show. It really does. So those are the eight things that I wanted to talk about.

Eight things to work with your guests so when they come on to your podcast, they enhance your podcast, not weaken it. Your words, Roy, on those, and I like those words. I always tell the guests, I've changed as I went along.

I've kind of looked at my analytics and modified it, but I'd say, I'm going to do this, going to do the introduction. We'll have our conversation. Near the end, you can say where they can find you.

And then I do a quick outro about me and 5% to 10% of people, I'll do that. I'll say, thanks very much for making the show. And then they go, well, that was great, wasn't it? And that's editing work for me.

And it's like, I know it just, so I tell them, which is, so a lot of people don't tell them, so they don't know, but I make sure I tell them, but even when I do tell them, they'll still do that. And there's a small percentage. And you mentioned about the sound that people switch off.

So thankfully at the very start, when I started eight years ago with The Speaking Podcast, I was conscious of that. And somebody said, I'm listening, the cast not great. And I hired an engineer to come down and show me how to use audio techniques, what exactly to do.

And that was grand. But then kind of maybe half a year later or something, I started a Polish one and I had a co-host. They had a mic, but there was times where it was obviously coming from the laptop and everything.

And I went through the things and it was okay. It was grand. It was doing very well.

Now episode one seems to, it's got like 75,000 or something like that on just that episode. But people didn't write about the sound quality. It's very bad, blah, blah.

And I remastered it and released it. So I'm conscious of it. And I was always getting five star and everything.

And now I go, there's comments and I'm getting ratings, one star, two star, but the sound is terrible. They don't realize that if they keep going, they might just so it can affect you. Because I know that anybody that does that, they assume that it's like that the whole time and they're gone.

So once you're doing it, make sure you never do that. And don't put out something like, if the sound is bad, you think, oh, this was a great conversation. The software that can make it better.

And like what I used to do at the very start, when I was learning, I'd listen and listen, upload it and listen. And for some reason, the Polish ones, there were five minutes or just, I don't know why I didn't copy it. But I was like, if you could take something back, but you can't.

But what I say to people starting off, don't wing it, don't do that. Don't just put it out. It'll be grand.

No, it won't be. Listen on earphones, good quality earphones. And you go, oh, that's not great.

And don't damage your reputation. Exactly. Well said.

Listen, I mean, I totally enjoy these, but where will people find you, David? Thanks. My email address, everyone, is David at Edge Studio. That is Edge, is spelled E-D-G-E Studio dot com.

Again, David at Edge Studio dot com. Send an email. I'll be happy to respond.

I am super responsive on email. If you have any questions. Yeah, I'm here.

Excellent. Listen, thoroughly enjoyed it. Look forward to part five.

And you'll find every episode on Podfather.me. Scan the QR code to find my website, which is also roycoughlan.com. And thanks to David, kind of explaining. I've been doing that since. Actually, it's C-O-U-G-H-L-I-N.

And if you're looking for virtual assistants, go to va.world. Be sure to give us a thumbs up, as they're written, and share with tree friends. It really helps. Until next week, take care.