No. 021 Why Just-in-Time Learning is Critical for Your Show’s Future

We know we need to be constantly learning. It’s the only way to get ahead, stay ahead, and sometimes just keep up. But can too much learning actually be a bad thing when it comes to the launch and growth of our shows? Yes. If we overcomplicate it.

This week’s new episode of The Showrunner begins with Jerod outlining how he prepared to unplug on vacation while none of his five shows missed their schedules.

Then we jump into this week’s main topic, yet another inspired by our time and side conversation at Podcast Movement.

We discuss:

• What just-in-time learning is, and why it is critical to your survival as a Showrunner
• How podcasters, and especially podcast course leaders, overcomplicate the process of developing, launching, and running a show
• Why just-in-time learning, combined with a commitment to simplicity, common sense, and taking the next step, is the path to a prosperous podcasting future

This discussion is followed by our listener question, via Geoff Reese of Wake Up Your Why, who asks Jonny exactly how he would go about shutting down an interview that just isn’t working. You won’t want to miss Jonny’s answer (yes, it’s more substantial than just “don’t be so Canadian.”)

And then we delve into this week’s podcast recommendation, which takes on a brand new format for the first time. Instead of us offering up a recommendation, we bring in another Showrunner to offer up a recommendation.

Melissa Dinwiddie of Live Creative Now pops in to tell you why you should give her show a listen.

Oh, and stick around for the end. Jerod just can’t help himself and decides to rant about some frustrating connection issues that plagued the creation of this episode. 🙂

Listen, learn, enjoy:

No. 21 Why Just-in-Time Learning is Critical for Your Show’s Future

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Welcome to The Showrunner, where we have one goal: teach you how to develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. Ready?

Jerod Morris: Jonny, what do you say we record everything in the right order this episode? Like actually do the intro first, and not at the end.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. I got a bit confused last time. That’s not hard to do for me, but I think that it’ll be easier if we keep it in order. I like one, then two comes after one, you know, three. It makes more sense to me.

Jerod Morris: It does. It very much does, and this episode is about doing things in order in a process that makes sense, so that’s actually a good lead-in to it. With that said, welcome to episode number 21 of The Showrunner. I am Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM, as well as the co-host of The Lede and several other shows, and I am joined today, as always, by my co-host, Jonny Nastor, defender of humanity. Jonny, how are you?

Jonny Nastor: Oh, I’m doing excellent. Thanks for asking. I appreciate that.

Jerod Morris: You’re welcome. I’m doing excellent as well, and I’m going to be doing even more excellently come Saturday of this week, because that is when I’ll be beginning my vacation. Heather and I are going down to the Keys in Florida to spend a few days.

Obviously, that presents some challenges when it comes to shows and their schedules, because during the time I’ll be gone, I have a Monday episode of The Assembly Call that is scheduled. Obviously, my daily show, PRIMILITY Primer, that’s three days of episodes: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We have the episode of The Showrunner on Wednesday, the episode of The Lede for Tuesday, and an episode of Podcast on the Brink for Wednesday, as well.

Holy crap, that sounds like a lot now that I say it out loud.

What I have been doing for the past week and a half is basically preparing for this vacation because I don’t want to interrupt my schedule. I’ve pre-recorded episodes for Podcast on the Brink. For Assembly Call, I actually went in and pulled one of our post-game shows out from the archive, because the last time we did it, people really liked it, and so we slapped a new intro on it. We have that scheduled, so it will go out on Monday. For PRIMILITY Primer, I’m pre-recording three episodes, all scheduled to go out Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at 7:00 CT, so we can’t do the live component, but at least the podcast will be there.

I tell you all this because I know that a lot of our listeners, they will ask us, “What do I do when I’m going on vacation? How do I keep the schedule going?”

I think you have a few different options. You, again, you can just skip it, although I would let people know that you’re going to be skipping. You can rebroadcast an old episode, or you can just plan ahead. If you have the time, or if you want to burn that midnight oil and get those episodes ready to go and schedule them, then you can keep your schedule, which I think is the ultimate show of respect and commitment to your audience, so that’s what I’ve chosen to do.

What are your thoughts on that general topic?

Jonny Nastor: My thoughts are, if you’re a podcaster, you should never go on vacation. You should never take holidays. You should never take time off, because it’s way too much work to do all this stuff in advance.

But no, I’m actually, I’m taking the same … Actually, I’m going Sunday, and I’m coming back Wednesday night. My family and I are going to do some island hopping throughout the Vancouver islands. The Gulf Islands, I guess they’re called. We’re going to drive and just do a bunch of different islands, so I won’t be doing podcasts either, so I’m pre-doing them. It’s a lot of work.

Jerod Morris: But it’s worth it. I really do think it’s worth it. I mean, there’s a reason why we do that work, and it’s because we don’t want there to be an interruption. We don’t want people who normally listen to our shows to look for it, miss it, and then go listen to another show. We want to keep that schedule.

Jonny Nastor: So funny thing, right, funny thing. We say this all the time, right? We’ve been saying this since, what, March now, that you have to keep your schedule. On this show, that’s what we’ve been saying. You can’t miss. When your audience wants you to be there or expects you there, you have to be there, or else things happen. So I toyed with it.

Late May and through June, I missed episodes, like randomly throughout, just to see. I do three a week on Hack the Entrepreneur, and I never skipped two a week, but I skipped one a week lots of times, different days.

There are different days. Monday’s by far the most popular day for downloads for me. Now I plan it so that my most popular guest that week is Monday, like that person themselves, because that is the day that I get the most downloads anyway, but I played with the different days. July 1st, I stopped doing that completely, and I went completely back to a full schedule, and now I’m six weeks into that. The downloads have skyrocketed because of it, and it’s hilarious.

It was one of those things where we were saying it a lot, so I was like, “Well, I wonder if it’s actually totally true,” so I toyed with it. It worked out because I was just moving out to Vancouver, so there was lots of stuff going on anyway. So I was like, “Let’s just play and see if it actually affects it.”

It didn’t affect it negatively as much as I thought it would, so that was kind of surprising. The downloads didn’t really drop off that much. I mean, they dropped off by a third some weeks because I had a third less episodes, but that was to be expected for me. But then once I got onto a schedule for six weeks of complete consistency and pumping out that content every day I said I would, it’s doubled in size, which is amazing to me and really does prove the point.

That was me being a guinea pig for everyone out there, just toying with my audience to see if it actually did what we said it does. Not only does it do that, but it exponentially increases your reach and your audience participation and interaction and downloads. It’s amazing. It’s kind of blown me away this last week and a bit now, so I wanted to share that.

Jerod Morris: Thank you for being a guinea pig.

Jonny Nastor: This is what I do for you, Jerod. This is what I do.

Jerod Morris: This is what you do for the showrunners.

Jonny Nastor: This is what I do for the showrunners. Now, if the showrunners asked me to go for a fourth or fifth episode every week, I probably wouldn’t do that, but I’m a guinea pig when it means being lazier and doing less work. I just wanted to clarify that.

Jerod Morris: How noble of you.

Jonny Nastor: Don’t ask me to try going to seven days a week and see how much more exponential it gets, because I just don’t think I have it in me right now. I needed to clarify that.

What Just-In-Time Learning Is, and Why It Is Critical to Your Survival as a Showrunner

Jerod Morris: Well, you know what we do have in us right now?

Jonny Nastor: We have a main topic?

Jerod Morris: We have a main topic. Let’s get to that main topic.

On our last episode, Jonny, you introduced this idea that you had this massive list of ideas for episodes that you wrote down at Podcast Movement. We culled through that massive list. I mean, there were thousands of ideas. We searched through it to find the four best ideas.

Last week, we did one of those ideas. In this week’s episode, we’re actually combining two of them. In next week’s episode, we’re going to talk about another one. They’re kind of these big-picture theory ideas that I think are very important for podcasters.

Would you like to introduce this week’s topic again? This is one of three ideas. This one morphed from two ideas, from thousands of ideas that we got at Podcast Movement. This is this cream of the crop, the absolute top-shelf ideas. Not to over-promote it or anything.

Jonny Nastor: Twenty-three-hundred and ninety-six ideas I had written down.

Jerod Morris: That’s incredible.

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. We’ve now gone through — you’re right — and sort of joined a few of the ideas up. We’ve got it down to one good one for today.

Jerod Morris: Yes. Do you want to introduce that idea for today? Because I love this idea, and I’m looking forward to talking about it. We just talked about it a little bit during our pre-show conversation, and I thought you gave an excellent description that I’m hoping you can reproduce right now.

Jonny Nastor: Okay.

Jerod Morris: … which is always dicey, which is why last week, we just started recording from the beginning. I just realized we didn’t follow our own advice this time, and we weren’t recording from the beginning, so we can’t use that explanation that you gave.

Jonny Nastor: We never follow our own advice. Well, we do, maybe.

Jerod Morris: Most of the time we do.

Jonny Nastor: Don’t forget, an episode or two ago, I stated the fact very clearly that I want to become a walking contradiction of myself.

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

Jonny Nastor: Just-in-time learning is the main topic that I want to cover today. This was actually pulled from Pat Flynn’s keynote. This idea was one of the ones I wrote down. He got it from the guys over at Internet Business Mastery, who are one of the original business podcasting guys, who I got to meet one of them on the bus at Podcast Movement. It was really, really cool. The idea being ‘overwhelm.’

We deal with overwhelm in really terrible ways, usually, ‘overwhelm’ meaning that we want to start a podcast, and there’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of big concepts that we have to get our head around and a lot of tiny, little steps that we have to get through from coming up with the idea, determining a format, coming up with a brand around it, starting to record, finding guests — if that’s what we’re doing — and then actually recording, learning how to record, learning how to publish, learning feeds, figuring out a WordPress site, and then getting it to iTunes, and then following it through with years of promotion and growth.

Those are all massive, daunting things. There’s a whole bunch of them. The idea of just-in-time learning is something that has helped me a lot, in business in general. I think it will help a lot of people even if you already do have a show, because there’s so many different things, so many different directions you can go, so many things further ahead of you, six months ahead of you, three months ahead of you, a year ahead of you, that you might not need to know right now.

It’s just-in-time learning. I think this is the thing that allowed Pat Flynn to stop circling himself and chasing his own tail to actually taking action, building a show that’s now a massive business. Is that a good introduction for it?

Jerod Morris: I think it’s great. The most important part of that is taking action, because we see it so often with people that we talk to. We saw it with people that we talked to at Podcast Movement, and I’ve seen it with people inside the course — this paralysis through analysis.

I think the intentions are noble. People really want to make sure that they go out with putting the right foot forward and that they really have things planned and well-thought-out, but you can do too much. It’s like when we were going to launch The Showrunner podcast, even if we had an inkling of an idea that there were going to be a course around it, we didn’t need to learn how to use all of Rainmaker’s learning management system tools before we went out with the podcast, right? We could learn that stuff when it was time to build and launch the course.

I think that’s so important, that there are so many components of this, of podcasting, of what you need to do, and it’s important to give yourself a chance to get good at them as you go rather than inundating yourself with so much information, so many skills and techniques and tips and gear recommendations, and all of this stuff.

You can just get lost in it to where you forget. You’ve just got to put that next foot forward and actually record and get an episode out there. I think this idea of just-in-time learning comes in with that. Plus, they say … “They say.”

Jonny Nastor: Oh.

Jerod Morris: There are studies that have shown — I can’t cite them, but I know that I’ve read this from reliable sources — that we retain the information better when we actually learn it when we need it and then can use it, and then it really becomes knowledge. It’s not just information. It becomes knowledge because we’ve put it into use.

I think that’s another reason why this is so important, and it’s something that can really benefit podcasters, especially those who are really struggling to get going or who struggle to keep going, is figure out the specific thing you need to learn to take the next step, learn it, and then take the next step. Don’t just keep learning other stuff. Actually take that next step.

How Podcasters, and Especially Podcast Course Leaders, Overcomplicate the Process of Developing, Launching, and Running a Show

Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Let’s clarify that, because we’re not telling you that you don’t need to learn things. You obviously have to constantly be learning. I mean, if you’re working online in any way, everything is evolving and moving at a crazy pace. There’s new technologies, new platforms, things coming out.

But that’s totally irrelevant to you right now. The idea being, that if you’re just getting started and you’re coming up with a name for your podcast, it shouldn’t matter to you what myself — as a podcaster who now has a show that’s coming up on its first year, has over a hundred episodes — what I’m doing right now for promotion of my episodes, because it’s one year away from you. That’s way too far.

All we tend to do as human beings is procrastinate by, “But I don’t know how to promote this show once it launches.” That’s possibly four months from you right now, or three months, two months, whatever your timeline’s going to be, and so we use that. “Well, once I learn that, once I figure out how to work plugins better on a WordPress site …” but you don’t even have a name or a format for your show yet. We use it as typically just procrastination.

I did the same thing, actually, with the course itself when we went to create a course. I had never created a course, and so I was looking at technology around it, even though that had nothing to do with me because it was being put onto Rainmaker and the learning management system, and we have amazing designers than can take care of it. It was a procrastination thing that I went through, and then it was like, “Well, what about the launch of it?” What am I even talking about — the launch? I mean, I don’t even have this mapped out what we’re going to teach people yet.

Then I brought it all back, and I broke it into twelve different little steps of how I needed to create a course. Then we talked about that part, and then it was like, “Okay, so what do other people do now at this very first step?” Just learn from other people. You have to learn from other people’s mistakes. You have to learn from other people who have gone before you. It’s way easier than just reaching through in the dark by yourself, but don’t learn from people who are already at step six and you’re at step one, because it’s that form of putting off step one.

There’s no way to skip the first five steps of creating a podcast. There’s no way at all. You don’t need to learn it all. By the end of this, by the time you are a year and a hundred episodes into your podcast, you will know as much as I do about podcasting, but you don’t need to know everything that I know about podcasting right now.

I guess that’s the main concept of just-in-time. You still have to learn all of the steps, just not right now.

Jerod Morris: Right. Because what happens is, people overcomplicate it. This leads into the second part of this main topic, is if someone who’s new is trying to learn everything that you know about podcasting after a year right now, there’s going to be stuff they don’t even really understand the context for, so they may put the information into their head, but it’s not really knowledge that they can use, which is what’s important. That just overcomplicates the entire process.

This whole idea about people overcomplicating a podcast, especially podcast course makers, I don’t even remember when we said this. I know it was during one of the sessions, and we said this to each other and kind of chuckled a little bit, because I think sometimes course makers, as we are, and even people running shows, teaching people about podcasting, we can overcomplicate it sometimes, too, by trying to transfer everything at once to everybody.

Why Just-In-Time Learning, Combined with a Commitment to Simplicity, Common Sense, and Taking the Next Step, Is the Path to a Prosperous Podcasting Future

Jerod Morris: We want people to know everything that we know, but it’s important to remember that concept of just-in-time learning — that you don’t, you shouldn’t know everything that we know. You shouldn’t, if you’re in your sixth week, you shouldn’t know, like you said, everything that someone 18 weeks in knows.

What do you need to know to take the next step? Are you creating your artwork? What do you need to know to do that? Move on, gain that information, really internalize it, use it, and then you can move forward and add the next thing, and you build your knowledge brick by brick rather than overcomplicating it by learning it when you’re not ready for it.

That’s the main idea of this show, this episode, is to understand this concept of just-in-time learning and put it into practice so that you’re not overcomplicating things, so that you’re not overwhelming yourself, and so that you always remember that the most important step is the next one, not the next 10. It’s just the next one. Taking that step in a positive direction, and then taking another one, gaining whatever information you need at that time, and then taking the next one.

I think it would really help people, again, focus on the content and focus on the audience, one step at a time, by not overcomplicating things and not overwhelming things. Because too many shows stall or never start in the first place because of that.

Jonny Nastor: Well said. I think we wrapped that up just in time.

Jerod Morris: So you’re saying we shouldn’t overcomplicate it by continuing to talk about it? Badum ching!

Let’s go to our listener question.

And this week’s listener questions is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, which is the all-in-one hosted solution to help you facilitate digital business online. Whatever your digital business is, the Rainmaker Platform helps you create your content, get all the technology stuff out of the way, and remove those headaches. Just create your content, connect with your audience, build your membership site, launch your product, get the technology part out of the way. That’s what the Rainmaker Platform facilitates. I’m using it on all of my sites.

Jonny, you use it. The thing about the Rainmaker Platform, if you have a question about whether it’s the right platform for you, you don’t really have to guess because you can take a 14-day free trial. Just go to RainmakerPlatform.com. You can see what is in the plans. You can take the free trial. You have 14 days. Check it out. I think you’ll find that a lot of time that you spend on updates, on worrying about security, on trying to put the mishmash of plugins together to get you the configuration that you need, that’s all taken care of with Rainmaker.

Again, don’t overcomplicate it. Focus on your content, focus on your audience. That’s what Rainmaker allows you to do.

Listener Question: How Do You Gracefully End an Interview That Isn’t Going Well?

Jerod Morris: This week’s listener question — Jonny, we’re actually going to take a question from one of The Showrunner Huddles that we did inside of The Showrunner Podcasting Course. Every other week, we get everybody together, we do a Huddle, and we answer people’s question. Geoff Reese, one of the course members, runs the show Wake Up Your Why, which I highly recommend people go check out. It’s a really good show. He does some terrific interviews on there. He asked us a question for the Huddle. I thought you gave a great answer to this, and it’s something I think a lot of people wonder, so I wanted to bring that to the show, to this episode of The Showrunner.

What Geoff asked is, in your response, Jonny, to takeaways from Podcast Movement 2015 regarding interviews, you said that you’d be more forthright in stopping an interview if it wasn’t going well. As Geoff said, he hasn’t had that happen yet, but maybe he will. I think a lot of people who do interviews think about this or may face this.

How exactly would you go about doing that? If an interview just isn’t going well, and you feel like you need to stop it. What would be some indicators of needing to do that, and what might you actually say? How would that go? Maybe we can create an awkward situation and do a little roleplay, and you can stop the interview that you’re doing with me.

Jonny Nastor: Could I stop right now?

Jerod Morris: “Jerod, this really isn’t going well. You’re rambling and not getting to the point, and my audience doesn’t need this.”

Jonny Nastor: It’s always hard to recreate an answer.

Jerod Morris: But that’s the theme of the show, so why would we stop now?

Jonny Nastor: The ultimate thing was that I will learn to be more forthright and less Canadian, I think was the essence of what we got out of my answer. This idea came from the guy’s name that I can never remember.

Jerod Morris: Jordan Harbinger.

Jonny Nastor: Jordan Harbinger of Art of Charm. He talked about doing interviews and the idea of making your guest take your platform, your audience, and your show as seriously as you do. If they don’t, and if they fail to do that, then just stopping the interview, which I’ve talked about before.
I get people to sign off on a waiver that says either because of my lack of being engaged in the conversation or yours as the guest, my audience does expect a certain level of something in the conversation, a certain level of engagement, and if that’s not there, then I have the right to not publish your podcast episode without telling you. It’s something I’ve been using for a long time, and that already does allow the guest to step up their game a bit.

Jordan takes it to another level, and he said something really clever and really smart, which was, “Your audience who’s on the end of your show listening doesn’t have a voice. They don’t have a voice in this conversation that you are having with your guest, and you have to be your audience’s voice.”

So if the conversation isn’t going the way you want it to, isn’t getting to answer the questions that your audience is trying to ask through you, because you are their voice, then there’s no value to your audience, and they’re going to stop listening. If they stop listening, they’re probably not going to come back.

You have to value the fact that you are their voice, and you have to stand up for your audience more than you have to stand up for this guest. I understand, because I went through this probably the first 90 episodes. I’m only just now realizing this about my show, and I should have realized it a lot sooner, and I hope to pass it on to you, that you should, too, is that it’s hard at the very beginning.

You think that your guest is doing you a huge favor by coming on your show. Yes, in a way, they are, but they’re doing it selfishly. They’re doing it, really, to get in front of your audience.

Even if your audience is 10 people at this point, they want those 10 people to hopefully bring some of them over to their audience and eventually sell them something and make some money off them. That’s the whole reason. It’s selfish. They’re not there to be friends with you. They’re not there just to be nice and to generously donate their time to you.

They’re literally trying to use your platform to attract your audience. You have to appreciate that, and you have to appreciate the power of your platform, even if it’s not what you think is massive yet. We’re never going to think our platforms are big enough no matter what. It’s just the way it is.

You do have to appreciate that that’s why they’re there, and since they’re there, and as Jordan says, since they’re there, and they’re already spending their time, he gives basically my disclaimer that I give that they have to sign off on at the beginning. He says that to them right before he hits ‘record.’

He just tells them, “This is what’s going to happen. I’m going to expect this from you, this from you, this from you. If I don’t get those things, I will stop the interview once. I’ll try and remind you to do it again. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just stop the interview at any point. I’ll delete it. You go your way. I go mine. Totally fine.”

He’s like, “You can actually hear them sit up in their seat straight and turn off any noises, their phone in the background, and they want to focus,” because if they’re already going to waste their time, or what would be a waste of time if it doesn’t get published, that half hour or 45 minutes or an hour with you, they’re already dedicating that time to you. They don’t want to dedicate that time to you to have it deleted. They want to do it to also have access to your audience, and they will take you seriously, but they’ll only take you as seriously as you take yourself.

Be willing to be awkward and tell your guest these things, and then to also tell them and remind them halfway through if you need to. I’m promising to do this from now on. Luckily, I haven’t had to do it yet since I’ve made this declaratory statement, but here we go.

Jerod Morris: What if you have a co-host, and you’ve done 21 shows with him, and an episode isn’t going well? Same thing?

Jonny Nastor: That’s a good question. That’s a really good question.

Jerod Morris: A hypothetical question.

Jonny Nastor: Hypothetical, of course.

Jerod Morris: Just asking.

Jonny Nastor: It’s a whole different topic. We’ll maybe cover this one in the next episode.

Jerod Morris: We will. We will. All right, let’s do some podcast recommendations. We’re doing podcast recommendations differently now, so come back after this quick musical interlude, and we’ll tell you how we’re doing podcast recommendations in the near future.

Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed that brief musical interlude.

Jonny Nastor: Music’s good.

Jerod Morris: It was good, wasn’t it?

Jonny Nastor: That was good.

Podcast Recommendation of the Week — with a New Twist

Jerod Morris: That was good. That was really good. Okay, so we’re going to do podcast recommendations a little bit differently. For however many straight episodes, both Jonny and I have been recommending a single podcast to you, and hopefully recommending it for a very specific reason. That was our goal when we started the podcast recommendations.

Well, at some point, you’re probably going to start thinking, “Wait a minute. Jerod’s running five shows, Jonny’s doing a show with three episodes a week, they’re doing a course. How can they possibly actually listen to this many podcasts to recommend?” And you’re right.

Frankly, we’ve kind of come to the end of the podcasts that we really listen to and can recommend without just kind of pulling a name out of a hat, and we don’t want to do that. We want our recommendations to mean something.

Plus, Jonny and I now have the privilege inside of The Showrunner Podcasting Course to be exposed to some great new shows and to some enthusiastic new showrunners who are a lot like you listening right now. People who, maybe you’ve been running a show for a while, maybe you’re thinking about running a show, and these people who were in the course with us were right there where you are, just as a Showrunner listener to start.

We have decided, for the foreseeable future, to use this spot, this podcast recommendation spot, for some of the people that we hand-select from the course to recommend their show to you, to basically give you a pitch for their show, for why you should listen to it.

I’m really excited about this, both for the opportunity that it gives the people inside the course to expose their show to new audiences, and for the opportunity that it gives you to find out about really cool, new, interesting shows that may not always be showing up on the front page of iTunes or in the top of the charts, but that are shows that, if it’s your cup of tea, if it’s your type of topic, that you should really give a chance to, because we know these showrunners. We’ve worked with these people, and we know that they’re putting their heart and soul into these shows and producing high-quality content.

We’re going to start that this week, and the very first recommendation is from Melissa Dinwiddie, who runs the show Live Creative Now. This is a show that has been a fixture in New and Noteworthy basically ever since Melissa launched her show. I mean, it’s doing really well.

One of the things I love about Melissa’s show is it’s got great titles, great headlines. One episodes is just called ‘I Screwed Up.’ Another one is called ‘How to Deal with the Fear of Rejection (or You Are Your Own Cake).’ ‘Avoiding Distractions the Professional Chef’s Gravy Way.’ Just titles that are obtuse, almost, in a way, but they’re intriguing and really make you want to listen.

That’s one element I like of this, but forget what I like about it. Here is what Melissa says about her own show and why you should give Live Creative Now a listen.

Melissa: My name is Melissa Dinwiddie, and my podcast is Live Creative Now. I am on a mission to empower you to find and feed your creative hungers because creative expression is not just for professionals. It’s one of the fastest routes to happiness and self-fulfillment for all of us.

Not only will you feel more alive, but it’s how you change the world. But a lot gets in the way: fear, self-doubt, time, distractions, resistance. Live Creative Now podcast is practical tips and inspiration for how to hurdle past all of that and get on with your creative joy. Find out more at LiveCreativeNow.com.

Jerod Morris: Jonny, I just realized that I hijacked that entire prefacing of the new podcast recommendations.

Jonny Nastor: I was wondering. I was kind of like …

Jerod Morris: Sorry.

Jonny Nastor: “Wow, she gets a double recommendation.” Like, basically you just did the recommendation, and then you play her repeating you.

Jerod Morris: You know, I know. It’s a transition.

Jonny Nastor: “We should just go straight to the podcast recommendation,” and it’s the person introducing their own show like they recorded.

Jerod Morris: I just get excited. In the future, we will.

Jonny Nastor: I know, I know.

Jerod Morris: Okay. In the future we will. Sorry, my enthusiasm got the best of me.

Jonny Nastor: I thought it was great. That’s why I thought I’d let you roll with it, but since you brought it up.

Jerod Morris: The call to action for this episode, of course, is listen to Melissa’s show, but also make sure that you go to Showrunner.FM, and join the email list. If you haven’t, if you’re not on the email list yet, you’ll get our content series, The 4 Essential Elements of a Remarkable Podcast, which is foundational curriculum for what we talk about here on The Showrunner.

So we highly recommend that you do that, and that way we’ll also be able to send you updates when we have exciting new Showrunner events like our weekly Wednesday episodes and other fun things that come about.

I think that’s everything for this episode, Mr. Nastor. It’s been a fun one, as always.

Jonny Nastor: It has.

Jerod Morris: Thank you. Can I level with the audience here real quick, for all those who have listened to the end?

Jonny Nastor: Sure. Can you level with me, too, at the same time?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I’m going to level with you, too. This has been a difficult episode to do because of some of the audio issues that we were running into earlier that have persisted throughout this episode. I figure we should let people in on kind of what those are and how we’re trying to overcome them. Again, for whatever reason, there’s something wrong with the connection to where when you’re talking, like as we went through this episode, it got worse, and I could hear maybe half of what you were saying.

Jonny Nastor: I bet you they’re out there listening, and they’re probably wishing they had the same problem. “I wish only heard about half of what Jon said, because half of it was pretty good, and the other half was kind of like, ‘all right, I get it Jon. I get it.’”

Jerod Morris: We should let people know, one of the ways that we’re overcoming this, because we’re doing this on Skype, is both of us are recording locally. If we were recording the actual Skype version of this interview, there’s no way that we could use it.

But the fact that I’m recording directly into GarageBand, and you’re recording directly into GarageBand, and we can merge these files, allows us to do that. We’ve been getting much better quality since we started doing that, so for people who can — and again, this gets really hard when you’re doing an interview show with someone who is a podcaster and who you record with regularly — anytime where it is feasible to record locally, it’s really a good idea, and it can help you.

We’re up against it a little bit. Since we’re both off the week that this episode comes out, we had to make sure that we had an episode, so we needed to do this recording, and despite your best efforts to fix whatever’s going on with your connection, it didn’t happen, so we fought through it and were able to record locally. So we got through it.

Just a tip to folks out there, sometimes it isn’t perfect, and you have to get your episode done, and you’ve got to fight through a little bit of audio nonsense that we’ve been fighting today, but again, that date’s coming up. You’ve got to get a good episode out there, and so anyway …

Jonny Nastor: Also, if you are just at the stage of coming up with a title and a format for your show, completely disregard all of this. You will deal with this part when you get there.

Jerod Morris: Ah. That’s that just-in-time learning.

Jonny Nastor: That’s just-in-time learning.

Jerod Morris: That’s a great way to end this episode. We’ll talk to you all next week.

That really was brutal.