That podcast’s guest might be the show’s sponsor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would the host of a podcast pay a guest to appear? It might be the converse. An article by Ashley Carman on pages 13 and 14 in the August 8, 2022 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek is titled A podcast’s guest might be the show’s sponsor. You can read an online version from August 3, 2022 titled Podcast guests are paying up to $50,000 to appear on popular shows, which says:

 

“Welcome to the golden era of pay-for-play podcasting, when guests pay handsomely to be interviewed for an entire episode. In exchange, the host gets some revenue, fills out the programming calendar, and might bag a future advertiser.”

 

Radio shows also have to fill out their calendars. Back on November 5, 2014 I blogged about Coast to Coast AM – A conversation piece for insomniacs. They have to come up with four hours of content each night, and usually do so by getting authors of recent books to appear.

 

The image was assembled using a mic in hand and a wad of cash from Openclipart.

 

Podcasts about public speaking that you might want to follow

At Feedspot on January 22, 2020 there was an article by Anuj Agarwal titled Top 25 public speaking podcasts you must follow in 2020. But it only listed 22 podcasts, and the only one I  recognized was Fred Miller’s No Sweat Public Speaking!

I easily thought of three more he had missed though. First, there is the Toastmasters Podcast hosted by Bo Bennett, Ryan Levesque and Greg Gazin – which currently has 153 episodes. Second, there is Speak + Deliver by Rich Hopkins, which has over a hundred episodes. Third, from right here in Boise, there is AlejAndro Anistasio’s One Hand Speaks, which has ~143 episodes. Then I thought further and also remembered Michelle Mazur’s Rebel Rising Podcast.  

I detest being told what I must follow. And, I don’t listen to very many podcasts. When I go for a walk with an iPod in my coat pocket, I more often listen to NPR radio or to a CD of recorded music. Generally I’d rather read a blog post than listen to a podcast.  

George gives his cousin ‘a hand’

AlejAndro Anastasio has a web site titled One Hand Speaks. On November 14, 2017 I blogged about listening to his podcast. Starting on January 1st of this year he is writing 40 blogs about his 30 podcasts. To celebrate that I have a one-handed story to tell him and you from four decades ago.

Back in the seventies (1972 – 1978) I was a medic in the Air Force Reserve. For the last year I worked one weekend a month in the hospital at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base near Detroit. On a Saturday morning in early summer both the Tactical Hospital unit I belonged to and the corresponding Air National Guard unit were sharing that same old red brick hospital building.

That Air Guard was doing a disaster exercise. Back on September 11, 2012 I blogged about Disasters and triage. Now, it is very hard to make an exercise seem real. You need to shake people out of their mindset that This Isn’t Real – It’s Only a Drill.

In that blog post I mentioned an exercise I’d gone through in tech school down in Texas. They set the scene up as a plane crash after sundown – in a cow pasture outside of Burkburnett. We got dropped off the back of a truck and told to run over a hill. There was a broken fuselage lit only by burning jet fuel. A bunch of ‘victims’ were made up with realistic looking prefabricated rubber wounds or burns – a branch of special effects known as moulage. Some were moaning, and others were screaming. It smelled, sounded, and looked real.

But how would you make your ‘disaster’ seem real on a sunlit morning? One of the guardsmen had a teen-aged cousin I will call George. His right arm stopped above the elbow. George came out to Selfridge with his cousin. He had volunteered to be the first ‘victim’ the medics would encounter. George wore a tank top and shorts, and they made his right arm up as a fresh amputation. It looked startlingly real, so it worked beautifully.

His cousin took George around the hospital to show my reserve unit their makeup masterpiece. George was grinning from ear to ear. He said this had been more fun than he’d ever had on Halloween.  

The military ambulance image came from Wikimedia Commons.

  

The joy of listening to podcasts

Audio podcasts are one way of getting information about a topic like public speaking. They can fit into your day when you are spending a half hour walking or doing other exercises. Recently I have been listening to AlejAndro Anastasio’s One Hand Speaks podcast. His latest  (27th) one is on Talking TED Talk with an X. In it he discusses both speaking and coaching. This year AlejAndro is Vice President - Membership for St. Al’s Toastmasters Club here in Boise. (I’m Vice President – Public Relations). His previous podcast talked about going to the semifinals of the 2014 Toastmasters World Championship in Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia.

  

There are other podcasts about public speaking, like the Toastmasters Podcast, Lisa B. Marshall’s The Public Speaker Quick and Dirty Tips, and Fred E. Miller’s No Sweat Public Speaking! Podcast.

I sometimes listen to podcasts from a couple of radio shows - ON BEING with Krista Tippett, and BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music.

Eight years ago I got an iMac to replace my vintage PC (rather than accept having to use Windows 7). Then I got a little iPod Nano that painlessly synced with iTunes on the iMac. My 2012 Honda Fit has a jack inside the glove box for plugging the iPod into the radio, so it’s easy for me to take my music and podcasts along in the car.