Alastair McDermott:
Today’s episode is going to be a super practical approach. It’s actually a coaching call that I’m gonna record live with Brendan. And we’re gonna talk about setting up a live stream to make it as effective as possible. And also talking about how a live stream can be used in conjunction with a podcast. And so that’s what we’re gonna get into next. Brendan, thank you so much for coming on the show and volunteering to be a guinea pig for a live coaching call. I really appreciate that.
Brendan McAdams:
Oh, my pleasure. Looking forward to it.
Alastair McDermott:
Cool, and you know, I just want to explain a little bit about some of the mechanics of what we’re doing today so that people who are watching or listening to this know what’s going on. So I’m actually recording this live and we’re going to later on take this recording and broadcasted as a live broadcast. And now one of the reasons why I’m recording it live rather than just live broadcasting straight away is because I want to screen share and show you my live broadcast studio. And I can’t do that if I’m actually using it. So in order to be able to share my screen and show you some of that, I can’t actually use it. So that’s why we’re using a different tool. And I’ve also been playing around a little bit. I just played an intro live in Riverside, which is the tool that we’re using here. I played a little video intro show you that how that might be done if you’re doing that and to you know to experiment play around and that’s actually the first time I’ve ever done it that way. One of the cool things about doing that is it avoids you having to do editing later and yet still puts your actual like your third party voiceover it puts it into the audio on the video. So okay so that’s just a little bit of context. Brendan, can you, you know, as a long time listener, you know, I rarely introduce guests on the podcast in kind of like in depth, but I just want you to give us a quick overview. So the listener has or the viewer has context of who you are and what you what you’re doing.
Brendan McAdams:
Thanks, Alastair. In particular, right now, for the context of this program, I have a startup called Expertscape with another business partner and it identifies and objectively ranks medical experts by specific topic. And as one of the things we’re looking to do, we’re going to kind of make more of a strategic effort in social media and content development. And one of the things we want to do is have a program around live streaming for physicians. And because we identify a lot of experts, I can get experts on the program. And I want to be able to find a way to do that in some kind of very compelling way that I can, then you know like we’ve talked about, chunk little clips and allow those to be shared by the experts and by the academic medical centers where they work. So that’s my interest in. in this conversation.
Alastair McDermott:
Cool. And apart from that, you’re also an expert in sales, right?
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, so I do some sales coaching and I do some classes and training for early stage startups and we’re focusing on sales and early customer acquisition, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
Cool, okay,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
so that’s some context for what we’re gonna do. And so I’m gonna let you drive a lot of this call through your questions
Brendan McAdams:
Sure.
Alastair McDermott:
and. If we if we screen share, just for anybody who’s listening to the audio only version, if we do screen share, I’m going to tell you that I’m screen sharing. There is a link to a YouTube version of this in wherever you’re listening to this and your podcast player. But I’m also going to do my best to describe what’s on the screen so that you don’t actually need to watch the screen share if you don’t have access to it. So, OK, so let’s start out. I gave you a little bit of homework on our last call around kind of planning, kind of planning your content target audience. So
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
I asked you like about your goals,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
who your goal is that you’re trying to reach. Is there like a primary maybe a secondary audience? Do you have that target market? What do they care about? What are the topics you’re going to cover? And then things like what the format might look like. So you know is it interview format? Is it solo format? Is it
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
hybrid? Is it something
Brendan McAdams:
yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
else?
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
And then as the last part of that talking about the mechanics of it in terms of like what’s the title, do you have cover art and all of that kind of thing.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
And I know you have a ton of questions. So let’s see if we can try and make this really practical but do it in a way that makes logical sense for the listener as well.
Brendan McAdams:
Sure.
Alastair McDermott:
So where do you want to start? What’s the most pressing thing that’s on your mind?
Brendan McAdams:
Well, so for me, my audience, my primary audience is going to be physicians. And then secondarily, my audience is the people at academic medical centers that are not physicians, particularly marketing people. They’re the ones that promote the hospitals. And so those are the people whose attention I want to get and who I want to be aware of the program. I want to have the other one of my big concerns is that The live stream that I do has to be high quality. It has to be something that
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
people look at and they go, oh, this is well produced. It’s gotta be, it’s gotta look crisp and clean. And people are not gonna come to listen to the show because of me. They’re gonna come to the show because of the people I have on. I’m gonna have a lot of, the guests that I’m gonna have on are world-class physicians and scientists from all aspects of medicine and science and so I want to be able to have them on and create like compelling moments that I can then use that they can share and their academic medical centers can share. So having a high quality program is really important to me and the other thing I think is I’m going to try and keep it very short, 15 minute kind of a program and the title of it is This Week in Expert Medicine. And so a big thing for me is how can I do this in some way that’s automatic and that’s easy for the physicians that I’m going to interview and that looks good. So for example I’m looking at my, I’m filming this on a laptop and I’m immediately thinking I need to get a better camera. Things
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
like that.
Alastair McDermott:
That helps a lot. Okay, so there’s a few different ways we can go, a few different places we can start. Let’s just first start with the title, okay? So when you’re talking about this week in expert medicine…
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
That to me sounds like this is a news program because it’s this week. So it’s something that is relevant if I listen to it that week, but nobody goes back and listens to reruns of news shows from a month ago or three months ago or six months ago. It’s not relevant
Brendan McAdams:
Okay.
Alastair McDermott:
anymore. So there’s something there where news is important and… by calling it news or by implying that it’s news, you’re saying this is something you should be checking out right now because you don’t wanna miss out. But there’s also the implication that this is not relevant next week. And so it’s not evergreen. So
Brendan McAdams:
crap.
Alastair McDermott:
that is something to think about because
Brendan McAdams:
No, that’s it.
Alastair McDermott:
it’s
Brendan McAdams:
No,
Alastair McDermott:
really…
Brendan McAdams:
that’s really yeah. All right. We’ll have to change it. That’s
Alastair McDermott:
Ha
Brendan McAdams:
a
Alastair McDermott:
ha.
Brendan McAdams:
that’s a yeah. I had not I and you know, I even tested this with several people
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
and yeah, that’s an excellent point.
Alastair McDermott:
Because if you’ve got something that where it implies that it’s evergreen, and it’s something I really try and do with my show,
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
is make it evergreen so that somebody in three or five years time, maybe, maybe 10 years time, who knows, is listening and goes back and binge listens to my show, that almost everything, and I think that this is the case, almost everything that’s covered is relevant. Now there are some mentions of tools and websites and platforms and things like that, but most of the topics are gonna be evergreen. So I’m just wondering what that might look like for you. So that’s
Brendan McAdams:
Oh
Alastair McDermott:
just
Brendan McAdams:
no,
Alastair McDermott:
something and
Brendan McAdams:
I’m already thinking about how to change the table.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, so we can dig into that a little bit more or we can move on and talk about some of the other more practical
Brendan McAdams:
Oh, no,
Alastair McDermott:
stuff if you
Brendan McAdams:
we
Alastair McDermott:
wanna
Brendan McAdams:
can
Alastair McDermott:
do that.
Brendan McAdams:
move on, because
Alastair McDermott:
Okay.
Brendan McAdams:
I get that loud and clear. That’s a good catch.
Alastair McDermott:
Okay, all right, so next thing just in terms of quality, right, so I have said this before. And I’m just going to broken record it because I think it’s so important to repeat
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
it and repeat it and
Brendan McAdams:
yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
repeat it.
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
So if your audio and video quality are good, then you are seen as smarter, that your work is more important and you’re seen as more likable. If your audio and video are poor, you’re seen as less likable, less smart and that your
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
work is less important. So it is absolutely crucial to have good audio and video. And so like and that comes from Professor Norbert Schwartz from the University of Southern California, who I had on my podcast. about a year and a half ago. And so, and this is something I had a little rant with Douglas Burdett on his podcast again recently, the marketing book podcast. Like I actually got this from him because I heard about that study. But like this is really crucial. And in fact, I think that this doesn’t just apply to live streams and podcasts and things like that. Anybody who’s working remotely. So if you’re talking to other people, be they your teammates or sales calls or whatever you’re doing, the best AV that you can afford. And
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
so I think that’s really crucial. So what we’re talking about then is, in terms of quality, we’re talking about the content quality. So that’s the content, like that’s the actual things that you’re talking about. Like what we’re talking about right now, hopefully somebody out there listening or watching this thinks that this is useful tips and advice for them. Like that’s the quality part. Then there is the audio quality and the video quality. And I say them in that order audio quality is way more important than the video quality, even for video, even if you’re putting stuff on YouTube. Your video quality, people will accept and put up with and tolerate poor video with good audio, but
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
not the other way around. If the audio was bad, they’ll just go to the next video. And so again, I think it goes to the best that you can afford. within what your circumstances are. And now I like, so I’ve got like a $1000 camera and a $500 microphone. Actually, it’s probably a little bit more than that. But you don’t have to have that. But what I do suggest is that you get, you know, like the top of the range where your every year budget is right now, and then commit to upgrading it later. There are certain. Like the jump from going from $20 to $50 is huge. The jump from going to $50 to $500 is not as big.
Brendan McAdams:
Mm-hmm.
Alastair McDermott:
And so
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
you don’t have to break the bank to do this, but like there are certain things, and I’m gonna link in the show notes for this, I’m gonna send this to you. I’m gonna link a podcasting equipment list. And when I say podcasting equipment, I’m talking about cameras are in there as well. But there are certain things that I recommend. Like for example, I recommend that you get a dynamic range microphone rather than a condenser. microphone and for anybody who’s not familiar with those terms there is effectively two different types of technologies in microphones that we use and condenser mics are better quality microphones that pick up everything and that makes so that they’re really great if you’re in a sound-treated recording studio. But if you’re in a home office, like the vast majority of people who are doing podcasting, who are listening or watching this, if you’re in a home office, you don’t want a microphone that picks up everything. You want a microphone that picks up your voice that’s close to it and nothing else. And so that’s why I recommend Dynamic Range Microphone. And so the one that I’m using here is a top of the line one called a Shure SM7B, which is really, really common. You see it in all the top podcasts. There are lots of other ones and I’ll list the ones that I recommend. I do recommend that you spend maybe 100, 200 dollars and for convenience I would say get it. Start off with a USB microphone. There are other types. The other type of connector is XLR and I don’t recommend that you jump straight into that unless you really want to go kind of dive deep into the techie side of things. But if you get an XLR microphone by another piece of equipment as well. So, okay, that’s the most technical I’m gonna get about that. So, in terms of cameras, anything, there’s a lot of, like there’s a lot of different webcams out there. Effectively, the bigger the lens, the better the picture is gonna be. If you want a depth of field effect, which is where your background is a little bit more blurred and that’s done with the camera, then you’re going to need to spend more. You’re going to need to get a DSLR or a mirrorless camera like I have. And so I’ve got one which is the Sony A6100, and then I bought a separate lens for that as well. And again, that gets expensive if you want to go to that extreme, but you don’t have to go to that extreme. You can just buy, for example, the best Logitech webcam that you can get. end of that. It’s going to be pretty damn good. There are like there’s a company called Elgato who do streaming, particularly streaming for gamers, but all of their stuff is also good enough and more than good enough for most business users as well. And so the Elgato webcams are all really good as well. So that’s in terms of some of those quality issues in terms of getting good equipment. But one of the things about good video is lighting. In fact, lighting is probably as important, if not more important, than the actual camera. So you need to have good, good lighting on you. And so in the room that I’m in right now, I have one, two, three, four, five lights and a skylight. And I’ve got a window that’s blocked. So I’ve blocked off my window with a with a with a blackout blind because I because it’s too glaring. The light that’s coming in from there. And then I’m controlling the light that’s in here with kind of soft, soft up lights that I’m using. And none of those are shining really directly on me. about filling the room rather than being directly on me. Now I know that I could actually improve the lighting in here, but it’s pretty good as it is right now. So that’s just some of the kind of the things to think about. So just to recap, the audio is gonna be way more important than video. So good microphone. If you can get a top level. top level camera, go for it. Setting up the type of camera that I talked about. That once you go once you go into the kind of like the extreme high levels of quality. things get a little bit more technical. So for example, the camera that I’ve got has a fake battery in it. And out of the bottom of that fake battery comes a wire that goes and plugs into a USB port just for power. Because that means then that I don’t need to charge a battery and plug it into my camera and keep changing the battery in it. So it’s got this fake battery unit and then it’s plugged. It’s got a wire that’s pulling the video feed off that. And that’s plugging into a USB Device that takes in the video from the camera and converts it into like a webcam type feed So there are those things as well if you want to go up to there and that’s why I say If if you don’t want to go to that step then just buy the best webcam that you know USB webcam that you can use and sort out your lighting and you know think about your background and things like that a little bit as well and that you can go to the top level camera later then once you get comfortable with streaming and you’re doing it all the time. Does that answer the questions around
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
that?
Brendan McAdams:
it helps, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
Cool. So then the other thing is to think about in terms of quality. So if we’re talking about quality here, we’re talking about content. So the content, like what you’re actually talking about, the content strategy, making sure that it’s relevant for somebody that care about it.
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
And then the other thing is personality is a part of this. Now, this isn’t something that we can control as much, but it is kind of important. And people will… you know, people will resonate and be attracted to people with certain types of personality. And like, for example, a lot of people listen to three hours of Joe Rogan talking. And so obviously, personality is part of that. I like it can’t just be about his guests and things like that. So so and he may not be your cup of tea, but, you know, like having a personality and displaying that, like if you look at any famous TV, like they literally call them personalities, you know. So the personality, something to think about how like you know like I’m not an actual performer and so I like I think about okay like How can I be authentic, but maybe try and bring in a little bit more entertainment into the way that I talk to people or talk about people or, you know, just have a think about it. I don’t really have an answer to that, but I just I want to I want to address that your content quality, your personality, your audio, your video and your lighting all go into this thing that we call quality, you know, so that
Brendan McAdams:
That’s,
Alastair McDermott:
up.
Brendan McAdams:
yeah, that is, that’s good that you bring that up. That is one area where I don’t think I’m gonna have a big problem in the sense that, like, I have a high degree of competence that every guest I have on the show will be a lot smarter than I am. So, I’m leveraging that as part of the
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah.
Brendan McAdams:
entertainment value of this, and that is, these. These folks are going to be talking about things that I basically don’t understand in a lot of cases or understand it only at rudimentary level. And so for me, it’s sort of a way to kind of allow them to A, be the smart person in the room and explain things in a way that others can understand them. And so because hopefully it gets to the point where it’s useful enough that these people are talking about things that will get consumers, they’ll get patients to attend and listen in. You know, if someone is diagnosed with lung cancer and I’ve got a lung cancer expert on, they may find that show and that episode and like, oh, Dr. So-and-so and talking about this and they may find that very useful. So that’s a good observation, but thanks.
Alastair McDermott:
Awesome. Now just before we leave quality and you just reminded me and something that you did before the show, I don’t know if you did it deliberately. You must look at your camera or something. I think you lifted your camera up, your laptop up so that your camera was higher.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
It is important when you’re live streaming and it’s particularly important when you’re recording video for an audience to watch later. It’s really important that you try and look at the camera and that your eyes are fairly close to the camera lens in terms of height. And so because you don’t want to give people the up the nostril shot be too far down on the screen you want to be kind of centered on the screen with your head almost near the top of the screen so if somebody is watching the video of this they’ll see that like my eyes are almost in the center of the picture and actually they should be up a little bit higher for the picture in terms of the picture frame i’m actually i’m showing a little bit too much i probably need to like raise my chair slightly or drop my camera slightly now i can’t drop my camera anymore so you know you do have physical constraints in your setup but you want to be looking down the lens as much as possible and in fact over time you’ll train yourself to look at the lens instead of looking at the other person on the screen and that’s it that like that feels to them like they’re making eye contact with you when they’re looking at you on the screen and people watching later will feel that as well and that does make it more of a connection as well because all of these little details go into the difference between good content and bad content particularly for that kind of video
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, oh that’s good. And I do find myself looking at you rather than the camera lens. Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
that’s good.
Alastair McDermott:
yeah. It just comes with practice over time and doing it time and time and time again. And then like one of the things is, so I’ve got two screens that I’ve got here just below the camera lens. And so what I’ll try and do is I’ll try and push the zoom window right up into the center corner of one of the screens so that it’s near the camera. So when I do look down to check this, you know, check for body language and all this kind of body language cues that we look at, that it will… that I’m not looking too far away from the camera. So again, those are only like little minor things, but all of those little minor things together make up, by the way, I know that there are AI tools coming out, Nvidia who make the graphics card that I use have a piece of software that actually changes where your eyes are in the video. And so it makes it so you’re looking at the camera. So they’re like, there’s some crazy stuff like that, but for now, just try and train yourself. So that’s, okay. I want to make this thing totally about the physical setup, but I just wanted to talk about that. Oh, and that just reminds me, the last thing about audio quality. If you are in an echoey room, then… What happens is the echo comes back on the audio. What you want to do is you want to try and have as many soft surfaces and remove as many hard flat surfaces as possible. So, for example, pulling curtains closed over windows, not having like a huge mirror in the room. I have big deep pile rugs in my office that I bought. And I’m really happy because they’re on brand for color and everything. But the reason I’ve got those is because they work really well as sound
Brendan McAdams:
Cut.
Alastair McDermott:
deadening effect. If you’re looking, if somebody’s looking at this on camera they can see like I’ve got some words like a right behind me I’ve got a I’ve got a whiteboard Google Jam board that’s actually a whiteboard, a digital whiteboard, because I do some training on it sometimes. But all around it are these gray and red tiles they’re actually sound acoustic tiles and actually on that you can you can actually see the reflection above my head you can see some stuff reflected and there’s actually more of those tiles on the wall opposite me and just in front of my face where I’m talking and on the ceiling and behind the camera there is the acoustic foam that you’ll see in radio studios and all of that is contributing to deadening the echo in this room which means that the audio quality is going to be much higher and so if you don’t have all of that and you don’t go to the trouble of putting all that. Some things that you can do is put down rugs. A friend of mine, Megan Doherty, she describes this as the messy teenager’s bedroom. Having clothes and having soft stuff around the room will trap sound waves and stop it echoing back because that’s what you’re trying to do is you don’t want sound waves going from your mouth to the microphone and also bouncing off a wall and coming back to the microphone a few milliseconds later because that’s what And so killing that big echo. And so if you can. So I’m going to click my fingers in the room here. So there’s no echo coming back from that. And so that’s so I’m really happy about that. And you can actually do that yourself and see. Or if you’re not sure, there are some tools. I’m going to link to one of them in the show notes. There are actually tools where you can do recording and it will give you basically an A.I. a score for your audio quality and tell you if it’s good enough or not. So I’ll link to that in the show notes as well, because that’s pretty cool. You can just link up your you go to visit a website access to your microphone and just do a little recording for a second and it’ll say yeah that’s good enough or no you need to work on this so that’s kind of cool as well. Okay I’m really done with the with the audio video quality rant so what’s next?
Brendan McAdams:
So the big thing for me is the format is, the way I’m thinking about the format is like 15 minutes, sort of a program, and it’s a little bit of background on what’s happening in healthcare, or some aspect of some profile of an academic medical center or two and what they’re doing, and then an interview, maybe two interviews, I’m trying to make these interviews very short. These are important people. So I’m trying to get them for five to seven minutes. And then what I want to do is I don’t want them to be live. And this is a fundamental component of a technical challenge that I want to overcome. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re having this conversation. Is I want to be able to record a five to seven minute chat with a physician. And then drop that into the live stream. just like some news program that has a remote correspondent and you drop it in the same way. But I want to make sure A, it looks good and it’s seamless and the quality is good and all that sort of stuff. And then of course we can go into the other kind of the post-production sorts of things but in terms of creating the content that’s the thing that I’m… going to struggle with the most.
Alastair McDermott:
Right, okay. So a few different things going on there. So first of all, yes, that is possible with the existing technology, no problem. So depending on the live stream platform that you’re using, I know you were talking about using potentially Squadcast. I don’t know what facilities they have for live streaming and adding media. Right at the start of this program, I played and embedded a pre-recorded voiceover and video intro. And so you could do the same thing with that. Now the only thing is when you are live… shit happens basically. So you’ve got to be aware that you know sometimes stuff doesn’t work and so when you are live like that I mean it’s not the end of the world you know particularly when you’re starting out and you’re just learning and you don’t have a huge audience it’s not the end of the world if stuff doesn’t work right or you know the you know you start to play the video and you find out afterwards oh the video played fine but the audio didn’t work at all you know all of these kind of things you know you upload a video and it’s the wrong format or you know. just comes from practice and experience, but the key thing is the tools are there to do that. So, and so I would start out in practice. One of the things is the tools that work may work for a 10 second video like I just had, but may not work for a five minute video. So I don’t know, I’ve never used them. I assume that they do.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
But if not, you may need to come up with something else.
Brendan McAdams:
Well, can
Alastair McDermott:
Go ahead.
Brendan McAdams:
I, a quick question on that then. Is there any advantage or disadvantage to recording a live stream, so to speak, and then, but then as soon as it’s done, posting it? I mean, is there any disadvantage to that or?
Alastair McDermott:
Well, so first off, it can be seen as disingenuous. So
Brendan McAdams:
Oh, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
it can be seen as you’re not really being honest in what you’re doing. And that’s why at the very start of this, I’m intending to put this out as a live stream and for obvious reasons, but I did talk about that at the start because I wanted to make sure
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
people understood the context of that. So you wanna be honest about what you’re doing, but, so. if you’re recording it live you can talk about how you this is recorded live and like i don’t think people care all that much for me that going live is not necessarily about the live audience that I get. Now there is an advantage to going live in that most of the social media platforms will prioritize live content over non-live content and so that is a pretty major advantage but personally I don’t care all that much about that part. Big part for me is if I don’t go live, I’m much more likely to procrastinate.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes,
Alastair McDermott:
I
Brendan McAdams:
yes.
Alastair McDermott:
procrastinate terribly about because I say, oh, you know what, actually I should edit that and make this
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
better, remove
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
that. Maybe I should rerecord this, maybe I should do that. When you hit the go live button, it prevents you getting into that procrastination loop and getting locked up. And so that for me is the biggest issue. That’s why I like to do that. And you know, So
Brendan McAdams:
Well,
Alastair McDermott:
I think, yeah, go ahead.
Brendan McAdams:
that’s what prompted this whole conversation is an episode you had three or four weeks ago where you talked about how you create your content and the thing about the live stream idea was the fact that you do it live and you can’t edit it. And so it’s much more authentic and it’s also a time saver and then you go back and take the clip. I mean I thought that was really genius. That’s the sort of stuff that I wanted to… focus on. I don’t know that I need to have it live, although I could imagine doing it as a recorded live for a period of time and then doing it live after you get the hang of it and then just dropping them live immediately once you know that you can drop this clip in and it works and that sort of thing.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, that’s what I did when I started out. I didn’t start live streaming until episode 100. Now I probably could have started a bit earlier than that, but I decided that’s when I was gonna
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
make that change over. And so all before that, up till then, all the episodes were pre-recorded and edited. And so I changed it over to the live stream methodology or process because I wanted to stop procrastinating about doing and publishing video. And that was a major thing for me had recorded at 99% of my episodes up to episode 100 I do have the video for I did record video I just wasn’t publishing it because I was editing the audio and video editing is much more expensive than audio editing because there’s a lot more to it and so it’s just more time consuming and so I was sitting on that and procrastinating and so I just said streaming because then it’s done it’s done people can see and listen to the live stream there have been times where i’ve said something that is like oh you know i probably shouldn’t have said it that way but for the most part i’ve been pretty happy with it and perfectionism will absolutely kill you in this world you know
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
you have to be able to let things go
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
even when it’s not perfect because done is better than perfect so
Brendan McAdams:
Totally.
Alastair McDermott:
um
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
so that’s yeah there is something if you have a specific question lined up for me on what we were just talking about. But I want to come back to the actual content because like this is really crucial. And my question is why would anybody listen to it? Like what’s in it for them? Why should they bother watching or listening to the show? Like what value can they get from it?
Brendan McAdams:
Well, I think that first of all it’s going to be aimed at physicians. And it’s a little bit of a sporadic audience in the sense that I’m going to have different physicians in different areas of different specialties. So on any given program there will be an oncologist or… or some rheumatologist or some ENT person or urologist. And so we’re gonna talk about various different things and what I’m interested in doing is getting doctors to be aware that expertscape exists so that when they need to refer someone or when they need to… consult with another physician, they know that Expertscape is there as a resource. So I’m actually not expecting doctors to come back time and time again to watch or listen to episodes unless they’re just genuinely curious about medicine. The people I’m really interested in getting are the academic medical centers marketing people and saying, oh, they’re mentioning my doc or they’re mentioning my institution. I’m going to take this clip and talk about it. I’m going to share it because it’s my doc and it just so happens to be in an expertscape program but it’s Dr. So and So, it’s Dr. Chueri from Dana Farber and he’s talking about cancer and Dana Farber is going to share this clip in their social media because it’s him. And that’s really all I care about. So I’m not even all that motivated on having a huge YouTube following. I’m more motivated on having… these institutions be aware of the program and take the clips that matter to them and then have them redistributed.
Alastair McDermott:
Mm hmm. Yeah. So.
Brendan McAdams:
It’s a bit of a weird website, Alastair, and I lead by saying, oftentimes, experts scapes out there, I hope you never need to use it. Because people that need it, they’re searching for someone with a serious medical condition and they need help. they
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
need to find someone who’s really knowledgeable about that. So I’m not really looking for repeat business. I’m looking for people to be aware that it exists out there and that it’s, you know, in the event that you need it. Does that make
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
sense?
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, it’s interesting because so the way that I think about that is I think that a non-standard business model, I think that, okay, if we’re to pull this back to just the idea of creating content
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
and live streaming.
Brendan McAdams:
yeah, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
I think that if you can have something where the content is effective simply by virtue of creating the content without
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
even considering the audience. Now I think that we should consider the audience and I think that’s really important to consider
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
the audience. But if you can be successful even if almost nobody watches it, I won’t say nobody but almost nobody. like that’s incredibly powerful because then you don’t need to worry about that distribution part and the growth part which is really hard
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and so this is where I really like the idea where people can interview. And I was just talking to a new client of mine last night about this, where you can talk to an interview, your ideal clients. And so we’re just discussing a podcast where he’s going to interview CEOs in his target industry. And so even if nobody ever listened to that podcast, the CEOs, he’s now built a relationship with them and built some trust with them by talking to them. Now, of course, it would be good to build an audience for that as well.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
And I think that you
Brendan McAdams:
yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
should do.
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
And obviously, you know, you get more eyeballs or ear listens. You want
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
to call
Brendan McAdams:
right, right.
Alastair McDermott:
that. But if you can make it work without having to worry too much about the audience, then that’s good. And that’s one of the things in kind of like in the B2B sector, small numbers are powerful. You don’t need to you don’t need to have huge numbers. So it depends on your business model. So, yeah. So in this scenario, I think that’s really interesting that you can do it that way. So, again, I would just. I would just think about the actual content and making it as useful as possible, both for the physician who you’re interviewing or the specialist that you’re interviewing and for someone who’s potentially listening to it. But it sounds to me like what you could be doing is you could be helping them by creating these by interviewing them and creating this content. You’re actually helping them to create some like build their personal brand
Brendan McAdams:
Absolutely.
Alastair McDermott:
on you know through
Brendan McAdams:
Oh
Alastair McDermott:
your
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
website.
Brendan McAdams:
Oh yeah, there’s no question they’re excited. I have no trouble getting experts on the program. I won’t
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
have any. I mean, first of all, they’re almost universally fantastic people. I mean, I get, I’m just impressed at how generous they are with their time and how talented they are. And these are people at the very top of the medical world. I mean, that are just… really, really knowledgeable, state of the art kind of… And so it’s fun to talk to them, because they just have very interesting things to say, and they’re very committed to their work. And so I just get a lot out of it, just having the chance to talk to them. And so it’s sort of a way to give back, and to highlight, and to profile them, and just say, you know, because these people dedicated just a ton of time and effort and energy to… you know, in some cases, very rare diseases and, you know, you know, with very little recognition, that sort of thing. So, yeah, that’s, but I think, but their academic medical centers will take that, the marketing people will take that and hopefully will run with it. And they will too in some cases. They have their own Twitter accounts and so forth. And they’ve got fans, you know, in certain Facebook groups, they go crazy for their doctors. They just love them. And so Facebook groups will pick it up and run with it. That’s where I think it could get some traction.
Alastair McDermott:
Cool, that’s really interesting. I’m just ruminating on the possibilities and coming back to the title maybe a little
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
bit.
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
I’m just wondering about the actual things that you’re interviewing them about. I’m just wondering how you can get some story into that, asking them about, are there specific stories that they can tell you? Maybe success stories of some kind, maybe a difficult scenario or a difficult treatment that worked out well in the end. that you know. like so for example if you look Eeyore and all these hospital drama shows like people love those people eat that up they love that kind of you know the tension the drama and hopefully the win at the end
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and so I’m just wondering like we certainly have enough negativity in the world so I think that maybe not focusing on the negative one so much but like some of those the positive stories
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and so it could be like you know some kind of you know, experts, medical success stories. And that’s a terrible title, but some kind of variation or version of that. So that’s just something to think about. And stories make for really great podcasts. And this is something that I’m trying to work more into my own. And I haven’t done a great job of it so far, but I’m trying to bring story more into my content because
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
I know a lot of my content is educational and there wasn’t really a hell of a lot of story.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
any of the stuff that we talked about so far, except your story of what you’re doing, which I guess is important and that’s maybe that’s insightful that that’s the story here. But yeah, so I think that what you talk about and ask them about and I think those because it’s really short. Those questions, you need to have pre-planned those questions
Brendan McAdams:
Yes,
Alastair McDermott:
and
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
put a lot of thought into them and maybe do a test run a few times with them and it will evolve and get better over time like anything does. So yeah, so
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
yeah, so how are you thinking now about the format and the questions?
Brendan McAdams:
Well this has got me thinking a little bit more about the fact that maybe I could just do…it’s really just an interview. And I could…I mean I’m trying to be cognizant of their time. So I want to go 5 to 7 minutes because I don’t want to take up a lot of their time but they’re often much more willing to spend time with me. So I might be able to make the interview a little bit longer and just make the show almost entirely. the interview. So I suppose the kind of questions I would aim towards would be two types. So the story I think is a good idea. I wrote a book on sales and the feedback I got from most people on it was I really like the stories. The stories were the best part. And I get that because the stories allow you to kind of connect and they resonate. You kind of can apply them. I think whatever the concept is, the story allows you to kind of apply it to a real world situation. So stories would be one aspect, and then the other is, what are they seeing in their space that’s important to note? Like what are they working on, or what are they excited by, or some aspect of medicine that’s applicable to them? talk about what they’re working on. Because it is partly an opportunity for them to talk about success or things that they’re working on. And they can use this for a number of reasons. They can use it to recruit clinical trials patients or researchers or collaborators or patients, that sort of thing. Those are the kind of two areas where I’d see the questions going.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, I think that if you make this, like I think you said in your in your pre notes, you said celebrate the accomplishments.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
And I think if you can make it about that, make it about just celebrating the person that you’re talking to and helping them to highlight some of the really cool stuff that they’ve done and the really great, you know, the like something that’s happened since the pandemic and all of that is people are more aware. I think of the work that first responders and all of those types of people, everybody in the emergency and medical services, like the tough, hard work that they do. Sometimes in scenarios where they’re not really getting all that well paid for it as well.
Brendan McAdams:
Right, right.
Alastair McDermott:
Supporting and celebrating them, I think is something that people could easily get behind. making it interesting for the listener or watcher so that they get something out of it because it seems to me because like often I think about education versus entertainment and that kind of split and I think that this could potentially be mostly towards the entertainment side of things. So this is a really interesting story and you could sneak some education in there but I would be thinking more about getting the stories from them and making
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
it really fascinating. But that story can still be something that positions them and celebrates them
Brendan McAdams:
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
as the expert.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
So you’re still getting the value that you wanted for. that but now the value that you’re giving the person who’s consuming this now makes more sense
Brendan McAdams:
Yes. Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
does that does that make sense to you
Brendan McAdams:
Oh yeah, well the thing is that would appeal as much to the marketing people as it would, well that would appeal to the marketing folks in particular because then that’s something that they’re much more inclined to share with their audience, with their audiences because they’re really after referring physicians and patients. A story that’s consumable, that’s understandable by patients would be much more attractive. It would resonate. As opposed to someone talking about the latest cancer treatment.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, because that to me sounds like it would appeal to their peers.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
And… There is a value in that if you’re, you know, depending on what you’re doing and who you’re trying to attract. But I think that maybe that’s a harder sell for me. Whereas you could definitely reach a broader consumer audience with some
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
of those other stories. And that’s where things can actually go viral. And you know, I’m like, I’m not really into the whole concept of going viral. Great if it happens, but you know, it’s very hard to actually make it happen.
Brendan McAdams:
Right, right, right.
Alastair McDermott:
And but if but certainly if you are making entertaining interesting story based dramatic content,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
which
Brendan McAdams:
yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
is what those kind of stories would be,
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
if you’re making that and putting that out in a consistent basis, I think you will you will grow a larger audience because of the nature of that more entertaining nature of the content.
Brendan McAdams:
That’s
Alastair McDermott:
So
Brendan McAdams:
good, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
now I think that at the start, I think that what will happen is you’ll get better interviewing people. The people who you’re interviewing as well, some of them will be great at telling those stories and some won’t be as good.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
That’s not that’s nature as well.
Brendan McAdams:
Right.
Alastair McDermott:
So to come back to the format then because you were initially talking about it being hybrid where you have a an interview with them with an expert physician on some aspect of the medicine or innovation and so I think what we’re talking about now is we’re talking about actually talking to them about their success stories
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
and more about the story and by the way they can still sneak in some of the technical medical details
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
and the innovations
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and things in there as well but maybe pitch that to a more consumer audience and then you were also talking about profiling maybe hospitals or other news and updates so how do you feel about that now is that still in the cards or are you changing how you think about that?
Brendan McAdams:
That’s interesting. I think I’m still going to mention something. One of the interesting things about academic medical centers is they like profiling the hospital. They’re not all that great about profiling the physician. It’s
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
a little bit like… They want to market the institution or the department. They don’t want to profile individual doctors because that doctor might go to a different hospital. It’s a
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah.
Brendan McAdams:
little bit like,
Alastair McDermott:
Lawyers and law firms and yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
yeah, exactly,
Alastair McDermott:
happens
Brendan McAdams:
the same,
Alastair McDermott:
all the time. Yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
they wanna demonstrate the expertise of the institution because otherwise people may just follow the talent wherever it goes.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes, exactly.
Alastair McDermott:
And
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, so what can you do about that? Or is there something that you can do?
Brendan McAdams:
Well, we now identify and rank hospitals and departments. And so I have an infinite supply of examples where I can talk about Ohio State University Wexner Center and. They happen to be really strong in neurology and they’re working on this and they’re working on that. Just so this weekend, or this is, I just want to give a shout out to what they’re doing here and they ranked highly in all these categories. And every week I could talk about something like that. Just mention that in a clip. And that would be a 45 second sort of a clip and then I’d share it and tag it. And it’d just be like, it’d just be a news thing. And so even if I didn’t interview someone, I could profile some, I could profile their staff. I could list so and so and four or five people on their staff and how they’re all highly ranked and expertscape and blah in these various topics. Kudos to them. Just want a quick shout out and then I could do that for a couple different institutions perhaps. To your point about one of my mantras is don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I’m quite happy to start with a format and then adjust it over time but already I’m kind of narrowing it down to be much more about the interview with just a little bit of reporting on one end or the other.
Alastair McDermott:
One thing that you could do there to integrate both of those is you could, so you could pick, so let’s say there’s a particular institution or hospital that you want to pick
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and then identify a person in there as the interviewee, as the guest. And then during your interview say, hey, one of the things I’m going to mention, you can talk to them in the pre-show about this, you can say, one of the things I’m going to do is I’m going to just mention that your hospital is really highly rated in the area of neurology and I’m gonna call that out I’m just gonna mention that and talk to you briefly about that is that okay and like they’re obviously gonna say yeah so now what you’re doing is you are getting them to talk about the institution on the interview and so you’re getting that content in there without making it a separate piece because my fear is if you make it a separate piece that people will tune in for the bit that they do want and then they’ll ignore that last piece it maybe you could do that. How does that sound?
Brendan McAdams:
Excuse me, that makes sense if I’m talking about the same department, probably. So if I’m talking
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
to a neurologist, then I could mention that your neurology department is highly ranked and blah, blah. You’ve got all these, besides yourself, you’ve got four or five other world-class experts that you’re working with and that sort of thing. It’s probably a little bit less. It probably doesn’t fit quite so well if I’m talking to a neurologist and I mention ophthalmology, for example,
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
or urology.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, so I guess there’s two options there. One is don’t do it, or the other is only do it when there is direct alignment between the guest and the institution. So you could do it separately like you were talking about.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
The only issue for me is that sounds like. That’s almost a separate show or a separate, you know, it’s a separate thing. But you can always bring it in. Like, I know that there are a lot of podcasts out there where they’ll do a news piece
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
and then they’ll have the guest come on. They’ll still they’ll do like a solo segment or something. And sometimes, by the way, the guest is sitting in the background in the aisles waiting to come on and the person is doing the five minute solo part. And, you know, that’s just the way they do their podcasts. And that’s OK. As long as your guests are happy to sit around and wait for that. Or, you know, sometimes they’ll pre record the guest segment. other bit first. But you know and like all of those options are fine but the main thing is I like to have alignment between the different segments so that they’re all still of value to the same audience.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
So that the person who is getting something from the stories is also interested in that last piece. So I don’t know if there’s a way to make it more interesting. you know, if it’s just celebration. You see, if you keep it short, then if… By virtue of it being short, people will tolerate it,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
even if they’re not all that interested because they know that the other parts are coming.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
But
Brendan McAdams:
that is my thinking.
Alastair McDermott:
in YouTube, and this is something where I’m really aware of it, usually in hindsight when I do live streams like this, that maybe we’ve had maybe some parts of this conversation have been much more interesting towards the end of this conversation than at the start. And there was the start section where we talked about the kind of more mechanical stuff. that may be less interesting to some people and they may have just tuned out at that point. And you know, so viewer or audience retention is really important as well. So that’s just something to think about in the mix where and when you talk about things.
Brendan McAdams:
I don’t know what to…
Alastair McDermott:
And this is what happens when you’re live. So.
Brendan McAdams:
It’s a fire alarm. It happened earlier this morning once. I don’t know what, I can’t explain it. Sorry.
Alastair McDermott:
So, and so for anybody who’s wondering, yeah, we are recording live. So and you know, shit happens. So and that’s once you hit go live. You know, that’s life. Okay, so Brandon, we have about five or six minutes left.
Brendan McAdams:
So.
Alastair McDermott:
What else would you like to talk about? What else would be useful for you to discuss about this?
Brendan McAdams:
So the intimidating part for me of this live stream thing is, okay, how do I do the production and this may be a longer conversation but what ingredients do you use? You’re using Riverside, I have Riverside now but with the script and Squadcast coming together, I may use Squadcast. And then from there, how do I… What are the components that… that I would use to post this? Because I want to post it to Instagram or Facebook. And how do I do that? How does one
Alastair McDermott:
Okay,
Brendan McAdams:
launch that?
Alastair McDermott:
so first off, we’re recording here on Riverside, but… Typically I use restream.io, which is a different tool. That’s typically what I use to go live. So that’s like my live studio software.
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
And the reason why we’re doing this in Riverside was that so I can screen share and show you Restream without, because I can’t screen share
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
from within
Brendan McAdams:
right.
Alastair McDermott:
Restream and show it at the same time. So that’s one reason why we did that in case I needed to, and we haven’t done that just yet, but that’s just something to talk about. The other thing is I use everything. So all of the different tools I use, it’s like, you know, you see, like one of my favorite silly movies to sit down and watch is Commando, where Arnie goes nuts, you know, it’s just a great kind of popcorn. You know, you’re you know, you just need something braindead to watch and it’s just fun. But Commando, just like most of those types of kind of action movies, there’s this montage scene where they walk into a room guns, right?
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
But he only takes, like he can’t take everything, he only takes the ones he needs, right? Because you can’t like, you can’t take everything in the room. So that’s kind of the way I think about using tools. There’s you’ve got all these different tools available to you, like use the right one at the right time. So I have a podcast called Accelerating Your Authority, which I’ve got about 20, 25 episodes or so. They’re all short form episodes. And for that podcast, I want it to be really quick turnaround. And so I actually record those on Zoom, even though the quality is lower, because I want it to be super quick turnaround. And I want to reduce as much friction as possible for the person coming on that show. And so I do those calls on Zoom. For the recognized authority mostly I’ll record on Restream because we’ll go live. We’ll just record live on there Previously I used to record on Riverside, which is where I do most of my High quality recordings because it records much higher quality because of the technologies and the ways that it works so Restream and Squadcast are both very similar they’re kind of matches match, sorry Riverside and Squadcast
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
Both do this offline recording on your computer that are also recording the online version and it
Brendan McAdams:
Right.
Alastair McDermott:
uploads. Right.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
So you’re I can see that yours is 99% uploaded and mine is 38% uploaded because I’m on a much slower connection and
Brendan McAdams:
Okay.
Alastair McDermott:
I’ve also got higher quality video. And so those two things mean that my upload is much slower, but it’s recording the super high quality pristine version locally on your computer.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
And so and that’s going to give us a really high quality recording afterwards. The restream version when you go live, the quality is not as high And so that’s a sacrifice that you have to make if you want to use those tools. The advantage of using Restream is when I go into Restream I can add, I think I have like six or seven different channels that I stream to simultaneously. So for example, it streams to my personal LinkedIn page. It streams to my personal Facebook, my business Facebook. It streams to Twitter. It streams to my YouTube and it streams to even to Twitch. And I’m gonna be adding TikTok to that soon when I’m enabled for live streaming on TikTok. So having that’s like, that’s one of the powerful things about live streaming tools is you can just multi-channel live stream to all of these different places.
Brendan McAdams:
So could I record on Riverside and then move it over to Restream and then post everything from there? Is that what you would do?
Alastair McDermott:
You can do that if you want to, yeah. Now, the reason why I personally wouldn’t do that is because then I’m not actually doing it live.
Brendan McAdams:
Right.
Alastair McDermott:
And doing it live is really crucial. I mean, that, again, for that procrastination reason. And also just not to be disingenuous, I think it’s really important to be honest and authentic about what you’re doing. So that’s,
Brendan McAdams:
But
Alastair McDermott:
so.
Brendan McAdams:
for me, in the beginning, I don’t really care about that. I really care about just because I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to basically record it, hit button, hit and send. I’m not going to procrastinate once I get it recorded.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
And so
Alastair McDermott:
yeah.
Brendan McAdams:
I’m not going to go and edit it.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, so perfect. So in that scenario, then you can just so what you do is you go in your in your restream or in any of these live streaming kind of studio tools. What it allows you to do is when you log in, you see yourself, just like you’re on a Zoom call, you see yourself. And you see a spot for a guest and you can get a guest link to give them where they can come on. And what you can do is there’s a go live button. You’re not live until you hit that. there you can add all of your different destinations they call them. That’s all the different places that it streams out to. And the really cool thing I like about Re-Stream is your guests can also add theirs. So they’ve got a little easy button to use where they can log into their LinkedIn or all of their social media as well. So basically you’re just reaching that larger audience. And your attention is a little bit split because it’s kind of getting splintered out to all these different places. So if somebody is watching your Facebook they’re not also going to watch you on LinkedIn. But the cool thing is all of these really small numbers kind of add up, particularly when you’ve got guests streaming to their audience as well. And so what happens is you’re reaching this broader audience. At the end of the stream, when you finish and you hit stop, what happens then is Restream will allow you to download the video that you’ve just recorded and the audio. And in fact, they’ve now changed their setup so that they will give you both separately and the host which is really nice because when you’ve got the two videos separately that’s usually higher quality you can do a little bit more with the editing with that so that’s a really nice tool for that what I found with Riverside is much better for recording and getting that really super high quality recording. I think that there is a facility in here somewhere and we had a little look before we got started today, but I couldn’t find a go live option. I couldn’t find where to turn that on and you know, I didn’t want to mess about with that too much. I just wanted to get started talking to you, but I’ve never actually live streamed from within Riverside, but it is possible to do it somehow. then you can even do it from Zoom as well. You can go live from within Zoom. I think that you can only go live to one platform from Zoom. So I probably wouldn’t bother to do it from there when you’ve got all these better options available. So yeah, so that’s kind of how I feel about all the different options for actually going live.
Brendan McAdams:
So my one thing is because these folks are willing to interview, they’re happy to talk to me but their time is getting them at the right time. For me I probably have to do it as a recorded session. And so I have to record it and then send it out and I sort of want to drop it into a larger format where maybe there’s an intro and me talking for a couple of minutes about so and so and then here’s the interview and then boom and then done. And
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
so… So would I do that with, would I still do that with Restream?
Alastair McDermott:
Well, I mean, you can do. I mean, what you’re effectively doing is you’re creating a larger kind of video production of like you’re creating one single video file that you’re then going
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
to upload and stream from
Brendan McAdams:
right.
Alastair McDermott:
within Restream if you’re going to go that route.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
And so in order to do that, you actually have to produce that initial video. So again, you’re getting dangerously close to the world of video editing at this point.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
So so once you go into it, and I say that because video editing time-consuming and And also the perfectionist tendencies in me start to come out. And that’s why I stay away from it, because once I go there, it’s like, so I want to change this. I want to fix
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
this. I want to move
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
this. And maybe I should rerecord that, actually, you know, and, you know, I’ll get I’ll get all into it. Right. So, for example, if I was going to edit this video, the fire alarm that went off for a couple of seconds earlier, I would definitely go back and cut that out. But, you know, because just to make it more perfect. And then I say, you know, Brennan Koff earlier, I’d go and take that out as well. And then suddenly it would be like, oh, yeah, but you know, the way I talked about the, you know, the rant about quality for too much at the start. And maybe we should have talked about the format stuff at the start and the
Brendan McAdams:
Hehehe
Alastair McDermott:
quality later. So I would swap those around, you know, and suddenly into well, how do you like? Do you have
Brendan McAdams:
Oh
Alastair McDermott:
a segue
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
there? Maybe I’ll record a segue for that. And
Brendan McAdams:
Oh.
Alastair McDermott:
so suddenly it just turns into this whole thing where. It’s like, okay, I just wanted to take out the fire alarm, and suddenly three hours later I look
Brendan McAdams:
Oh
Alastair McDermott:
up
Brendan McAdams:
no,
Alastair McDermott:
and it’s, you know.
Brendan McAdams:
I totally get that. I don’t have quite that level of weakness, that sort of thing. I think I’m going to be much more inclined to get this something out, but I do want to try and, I’m a big fan of simplifying things and trying to make them very simple
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
and as self-contained as possible.
Alastair McDermott:
That’s that’s actually what I was thinking earlier when you were talking about, you know, the two different segments of the show and integrating them in, because I agree. Like keep it as simple as possible. Simplify it as much as you can. I really believe in 80 20, which
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
again, 80 20 is the live stream and record live stream recording, using that, turning that into a podcast and also turning it into content for different channels and then splitting it up and using it in short form as well. And that’s why I really like this mode of content production. But to come back to how does that work for you, you’re talking about having a pre-recorded interview and then adding some stuff around it. That’s okay, but if you can, I would just record it all to tape, live to tape. So just do your intro at the start, like say, you know, Dr. Selensoe. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna talk for about 90 seconds before we get into the interview and I’m just going to basically do some background intro and then I’m gonna introduce you. Is that okay? And you just set that up with them beforehand so they know that’s gonna happen. And then I would just do it recorded all at one go and not try and create that afterwards. That’s
Brendan McAdams:
Can you,
Alastair McDermott:
personally
Brendan McAdams:
can you,
Alastair McDermott:
the way I would do that.
Brendan McAdams:
this gives you an idea how much a neophyte I am on this. But can I do that, record to a certain point, do the interview with him or her, and then hit pause, and then say to him, all right, you can go now, and then hit record, and then start back up again. Can you do that where you can start and stop, or is it,
Alastair McDermott:
Um,
Brendan McAdams:
or is
Alastair McDermott:
you
Brendan McAdams:
it? Ha
Alastair McDermott:
can, hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
ha ha.
Alastair McDermott:
I’m sure that you can, but I don’t, yeah, um, I’m sure it’s possible in some way. I haven’t done it and we need to like look into the tools a bit more to see, but…
Brendan McAdams:
I’ll play off the play around with that.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
I’m sure it could be done. Again, I think if you can just do that all in one take and say, look, you know, I know they’re busy people, though. That’s the only thing. So if you can, yeah, it really depends how like the question for me is how much value are you and your audience getting from those segments? And that’s the thing that I really would think about. So,
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
does it contribute to your business goals? Does it contribute to your to the to the value that the audience is getting?
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
And maybe it does. Like, you know, when you talk about, you know, promoting the institutions, the hospitals, things like that. Maybe it does. So, and if it does, then maybe there’s a way to do that. But yeah,
Brendan McAdams:
Couple,
Alastair McDermott:
I think that you’d have to experiment with that a bit. Does that answer the question?
Brendan McAdams:
yeah it does, it does. Quick question on live streams, since they’re not really live for me in the beginning,
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
and I’m not gonna advertise them as live in the beginning, it’s like a podcast for me. Do I wanna stack three or four up and then launch with three or four in the podcast? You know, in the, or do I start with one and then I just have to crank them out every week?
Alastair McDermott:
Mm hmm. I mean, it’s OK just to start and just go.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
If you are doing it and if you are multipurposing this and making this also into a podcast and if you’re doing that, by the way, you can refer to it as a show, which is a nice generic word that can mean podcast or a live stream or YouTube
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
show. You know, it’s so you can say welcome to the show. But so you can. So I like if you particularly for podcasts. Podcasts are I think podcast can be a great engine for all of the content creation because Once it becomes like a podcast is a very easy thing for people to understand So if you say if you say to a physician look I want to I have a podcast and live stream where or I have a live podcast where I interview physicians and Medical experts they will understand what you mean by I’m going on a podcast. It’s very clear to them. You don’t need to explain It’s like yeah it’s podcast interview and I’m gonna ask you about X, you know? And so that’s one thing I like about podcasts. The other is once you’ve got a podcast schedule… people can start to build their routine around it. They know something’s going to come out. And it’s also it’s also a motivator for you to just make sure you always get that content out on time and on schedule. So it just means like for me, every Monday morning, 6 1 a.m., there’s a podcast episode out. That’s it. I haven’t missed one yet. I did have to put out a like a little stubby episode one time, but I still got something out that morning. And, you know, so. Like that’s just the consistency that I didn’t have when I didn’t have the podcast. Like I didn’t have that consistency when I was making any other type of content. So the podcast forces consistency. It’s easy for people to understand. And also it’s just another distribution channel. And so if you are doing a podcast, yeah, I do like to have something there so that if people discover it, they can go back and binge listen and kind of
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, okay.
Alastair McDermott:
see them stacked up. So particularly if you’ve got short form podcasts, if you could stack up like three, four or five of them, that would be cool. So it really depends on what the length is as well. If they’re longer, you probably don’t need as many.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
But to
Brendan McAdams:
yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
have something there for people that like when you launch a podcast, as far as I understand, maybe that’s changed, but Apple used to give you a little boost, particularly at the start in Apple podcasts. iTunes is one of the most important platforms for discovery for people
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
finding you
Brendan McAdams:
right.
Alastair McDermott:
and they used to give a boost for the first two weeks in terms of promoting new stuff so that people could check it out. And
Brendan McAdams:
Okay.
Alastair McDermott:
so you want to take advantage of that by actually having something for people to listen to.
Brendan McAdams:
Okay. And then where do you host these things? Like for my podcast I have a pod page is
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
what I use for my personal, my business podcast. Is there a software platform you would recommend as opposed
Alastair McDermott:
So
Brendan McAdams:
to having a website, a particular website?
Alastair McDermott:
my thinking on podcast hosting is first of all, you should pay for it. If you’re not paying
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
for it, then you’re the product. So make sure you’re paying for it. Don’t use free podcast hosting. I. I would tend more towards the larger providers than the smaller providers because I want my stuff still to be around in five years time. And so I would tend maybe towards the larger companies. And then after that, it’s just a question of, do I know anybody else who’s using it? Are they comfortable with it? Have I got something already? And so I would always look to the one that you’re using already because you’re familiar with the platform and it just reduces some friction. So if you’re happy with PodKit page for your existing platform and it’s doing all the things that you need, then go with that. podcast.co for three of my podcasts and then I’ve got another one on one called Bcast and the one that’s on Bcast is just because I got a deal a lifetime deal for a podcast hosting on AppSumo and so I just I just picked it up because it was cheap and I said I’ll probably use that at some point so there’s like there’s options out there for things like that you can change your podcast hosting later it’s just a bit of a pain to do it but you can do it and Yeah, so if you’re happy with it, go with it. The one that you’re using already. And if you want to change, yeah, I can send you on and put in the show notes here. I can put on some recommendations. Again, I would tend towards the larger companies just because I want to know that it’s going to be around in a few years time. And I I’ve had some bad experience in the website world with a smaller website provider who went out of business suddenly and that effectively cost me a holiday. because I needed to move all of these things over. So now I’m a little bit wary about the smaller providers
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah,
Alastair McDermott:
for that kind of thing.
Brendan McAdams:
that makes sense. I could go on and on, so I don’t know how much more time we have.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah, so look, we’re just coming up to 1.13. So what are, let me ask, I’ve got a little bit more time, but I also don’t want to make this super long. So
Brendan McAdams:
Sure.
Alastair McDermott:
let’s go three or four more minutes. What are the other things that’s in the back of your head about like what’s priority here?
Brendan McAdams:
Well, I think we’ve answered a lot of my questions. The one thing I have left that I think the one priority question for me is I like the idea of being able to create the clips that come from the episode. So any advice as to how to do that? You mentioned in one of the previous episodes about how to frame a question so that you person’s comment makes sense or it
Alastair McDermott:
Mm-hmm.
Brendan McAdams:
kind of gels. What advice do you have for creating those clips that can turn into shorts?
Alastair McDermott:
Okay, so this depends on whether you want to be on screen as talent as well. or if you just want your guest. So in the scenario where I personally in my business, I just want my guest on screen. I don’t want me
Brendan McAdams:
Same,
Alastair McDermott:
asking the question,
Brendan McAdams:
same,
Alastair McDermott:
right?
Brendan McAdams:
yep,
Alastair McDermott:
In
Brendan McAdams:
same.
Alastair McDermott:
that scenario, then I would remind them at the start in the green room before we go live, I would say, look, when I ask you a question, it’s really great for the video quality. If you can just recap the question or answer the question in such a way that they don’t need to listen to the question again. So if somebody starts their answer by saying, yeah, that’s a great question, I think the best way to do that is, then you can’t use that without the question because there’s no context.
Brendan McAdams:
Yes.
Alastair McDermott:
Whereas if they say, that’s a great question, I think the best way to approach blah, blah. And then so you can cut that out. You know, they’ve included the question in the answer.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
I think the best way to do X. So you can say, look, and then. That also comes with practice and so it’s really hard to train a guest in how to do that in 30 seconds before the interview. But it can be useful just as a reminder to somebody and some people will get it. Now I am working with people over time and over the course of months where I’m interviewing the same people over and over again about different questions. And so I can see a progression where they’re improving as they, you know, the second, third, fourth time I talk to them, So it’s a question of just making sure that the answer that they give is standalone. And then the other thing that I say to people particularly is I watch the length of the answer. And it depends on what tool that you’re using. But you can like so I have a series of questions that I ask people. And so for my 10, 15 minutes, those short form interviews. I have maybe 8 to 11 questions that I typically ask. Now some people will take one of those questions and they’ll answer it in five or six minutes. And another person will answer that same question in 30 seconds. And it’s really hard to know which the person is beforehand. And so I say to people, look, continue to talk about this. You don’t need to give me a really tight, concise answer. You can continue to talk and expand on this. And interpret the question as you like in order to make it more interesting for the person who’s listening. have thoughts on this you don’t need to make it really super concise like we’re not going for concise here because we can edit it later we can cut it out later we can just take the first part so yeah so that’s the way I approach that part does that does that help
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, it does. That does. Oh, and then on the back end, from a technical standpoint, how do you identify those clips?
Alastair McDermott:
Right,
Brendan McAdams:
How are you doing that?
Alastair McDermott:
so there’s two ways you can do it. One is use AI, the other is don’t use AI.
Brendan McAdams:
Okay.
Alastair McDermott:
So there are some tools like Opus.pro and various other tools, I can’t remember the other ones offhand, where they will take videos and they will automatically identify, make best guess. What I’ve found is that right now they’re just not good enough for identifying the best clips. But… AI as it is right now is currently the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only ever going to improve. And so I would imagine that those tools will improve dramatically. So. So that’s one thing in the future will be usable. So for me right now, I have a, the way that we do it, I have a pretty extensive process and I’ll just explain a little bit of this and I know that you saw a little bit of this before and
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
you were pretty intrigued by it. So just to…
Brendan McAdams:
I mentioned to a buddy of mine, and he said, I’d buy that.
Alastair McDermott:
Yeah. So right. So so the way that I do it, so we have the process that we follow. We have several people who work on the clips. And so I’m just going to look for my editing notes and pull it up here. So let me see. I’m just going to screen share. So yeah. So now we’re going well over that. We’re going to be 130
Brendan McAdams:
Oh, I don’t
Alastair McDermott:
or
Brendan McAdams:
mean,
Alastair McDermott:
something.
Brendan McAdams:
I’m sorry, you mean…
Alastair McDermott:
No, it’s fine. It’s fine. I’m OK if you are. So right. So I’m sharing a Google Doc. And in this Google Doc, the title is T.R.A. for the Reconnaissance Authority, Video Clips Editing Notes 1.5. Now, this is effectively an SOP document that I’ve created for from my VA and from my team who do the video editing. And so the goal is to make short video clips from an input video, which is usually an interview. And so
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah, this is very
Alastair McDermott:
in
Brendan McAdams:
cool.
Alastair McDermott:
this. This this SOP document, I don’t want to share the whole thing because I don’t want to give away like the whole the whole cake to everybody. But
Brendan McAdams:
No, I get it.
Alastair McDermott:
I want to I want to like I’ll go through just a little bit and I am screen sharing here. There’s three roles that we have. We have a project manager, we have a content manager, we’ve got a video editor and the project manager basically manages the whole process start to finish. The content manager is a person who has some skills in identifying the clips and in actually creating the. titles which is something that we use AI to help with and then the video editor basically just does the editing and the production based on what the content manager identifies and tells them to do and then the inputs that we have to this whole process are the long form interview and then from that long form interview we also create a transcript and so the transcript is usually an automated transcript from a tool like Otter.ai and there’s loads of other ways that you can get transcripts, descript and all of these other tools will look
Brendan McAdams:
Sure.
Alastair McDermott:
great. And then we also have brand guidelines. So that’s like the colors and fonts and things like that. And then we used to have video end cards, but now actually we have, we just have a call to action, which is on screen all the time. And then we have a spreadsheet which helps us to track all of these. And this is an image that shouldn’t be there. And so the output then are the short video clips. and these are usually 40 seconds to 59 seconds. I don’t want to go over that 60 second mark because I want to make this something that I can use on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram,
Brendan McAdams:
Twitter, yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
Twitter, TikTok. I want it to be able
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah.
Alastair McDermott:
to go on all the channels and anything else, X, Blue Sky, all of those different channels. And then… We in this document that I’m showing on screen, I’m just showing that I’ve got some examples of what the output video should look like.
Brendan McAdams:
Yep.
Alastair McDermott:
And then the SOP then goes through step by step how we create that. And so in the process that we have, our project manager kicks off the whole thing and manages the whole thing and they give to the content manager. They give the long form video, they give the transcript, the brand guidelines and anything else that’s needed. The content manager then takes that and starts to identify the clips. And I will just give you a little bit of the detail. here. When they’re looking for the clips, they’re looking for several things. So they’re looking for actionable advice, recommendations or tips. They’re looking for repeated key phrases or important ideas. They’re looking for surprising or unexpected answers. Something that where somebody says, wow, that’s really interesting, or I didn’t realize that. And then they’re looking for stories or personal experience. So somebody sharing a journey. And again, those make for great clips. And then they’re looking for interesting facts or statistics, and then more, a more generic, strong or impactful answers. So those are the specific things that the content manager is looking for. Now, my content manager is going through the transcript. Some people prefer to watch the video. particularly if they’re editing it or something, you know, if you’re editing. But typically the way my team work, they go through the transcripts.
Brendan McAdams:
Yeah. Yep. That’s cool. That’s clever. Yeah. Oh, say that again? Can you say that again for me? Oh, that’s good. That’s good. Oh yeah, I see that, yeah. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. This is great. Yeah, that’s great. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right, right, right. That’s good. Well, this is good. No, this is really good. This is what I was, well, I could keep going, but this has been hugely helpful. I mean, just in terms of understanding the, yes. Yeah, no, I think it’s good. No, I appreciate it. This has been fantastic. I really, I love the conversation. And it was like I said, what promoted, what motivated me was the previous, one of the previous podcasts, we got into your methodology and I thought, oh, this is what I needed. This is what I need to focus on. So this is excellent. Well, don’t. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yes, that’s exactly right. Well, don’t look for this week in expert medicine. Very good. Yeah, that’s a big help. Thank you, man. So this is going great. Thanks Alistair, see you man, bye.
