You're listening to Podcast Insider hosted by Mike Dell, Todd Cochran, and Mackenzie Bennett from the Blueberry team, bringing you weekly insights, advice, and insider tips and tricks to help you start, grow, and thrive through podcasting with all the support of your team here at Blueberry Podcasting.

Welcome.

Let's dive in.

So, today, I've got Vern Hume from, well, tell you tell me about your podcast, Vern.

Sure.

No problem.

The podcast is called Makeshift Stories.

It is a science fiction podcast, all original content.

Comes out once a month.

Used to come out twice a month, but that was a little too much work to write everything and produce it, so I've had to back off a bit.

My family wanted to see me now and then.

Yeah.

That's always a good idea for sure.

And, Yeah.

I I know you've been with us for quite a while, and, you're using all the stuff.

You got, you got our, PowerPress plug in on a website that we host.

So, yeah, that, that probably works out pretty well, pretty stable.

Well, I yeah.

It it's it's way better than the one I was hosting by myself, which is a little flaky and always required updating.

And I eventually just got tired of updating it and, you know, putting in new plugins, just to make sure the thing wouldn't get hacked.

So I want to turn that over to you people and focus on the creation of the podcast instead, and it's been awesome since I've done that.

Yeah.

That's what we always try to do around here is make make things, so we worry about the tech and you worry about the the production.

So what what got you into podcasting to begin with?

Interesting story.

I don't, I always loved listening to radio dramas, growing up as a kid.

And in fact, I had built a crystal radio set.

And after my parents told me I was supposed to go to sleep, I couldn't go to sleep.

So I would stick on the headset and find a radio drama and listen to it until I fell asleep.

That so I've always liked the audio medium for storytelling.

And lo and behold, you know, after the turn of the century and and we got into the twenty first century, I listened to my first podcast, and the idea kinda came into my head.

Well, I could tell stories through podcasts.

So that's kind of where it started, back in 02/2008.

And at that point, I was doing stories for kids.

So the podcast would had a young adult, tinge to it.

Since then, it's moved away from that.

It's more adult, but it has always kept a clean rating.

That's always important to me, so anyone at any age could, listen to these stories.

So So that's kind of where I started out, and it's I don't know how many years has that been now.

That's Yeah.

I was just looking there.

You're you're, somewhere north of 300 episodes, I think.

Yep.

Yeah.

About 312 episodes right now, and continuing to go.

I've cut back a bit.

I had for about four years in the center there.

I was doing two episodes a month.

That was to help keep the audience engaged, but it was a little hard on me.

And I didn't think the quality of the writing and production was was there, so I backed off of that recently.

It also gives me time to work on a book, which I am working on a book now because I've decided after writing all those episodes, maybe I could put those skills to use someplace else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Writing a book is, it's challenging.

I know, for sure.

And, we we have a little bit of a product that'll, it'll help you distribute the audio version of your book.

So when you're ready, let us know.

Well, I intend to I intend to finish it.

I keep telling the editor, she keeps asking me, you know, what's your deadline?

And I say, well, I wanna get this done before I die.

And I've kind of left it open, but, you know, my hope is to get it done before I die.

So Well, with a goal like that, you you know, even if you don't get it done, you won't care about it then.

That's true.

But, yeah, it's, it's great.

We we, selected you as the podcaster of the month here at Blueberry for August 2025.

Oh, Cathy from our marketing team, likes to reach out to people that she finds interesting.

So, you you're it.

Well, well, thank you.

I'm really I'm really, you know, pleased, to be podcaster of the month.

It's it's fabulous.

One of the things I don't really have time to do and I don't really have the skills to do is to kind of promote the podcast.

So so far, the audience has grown organically, word-of-mouth.

They have been podcaster of the month is just an amazing opportunity for the podcast.

So thank you.

Yeah.

Well, I sampled, one of your older episodes, and, it's it's very well done.

I have to say, let's get a little geeky.

What what do you use for, your recording setup?

Anything special?

Well, okay.

I cheated a little.

My my son was an audio engineer at one point, so he kind of advised me on the setup.

So, you know, we had it started all in a room untreated, and it was horrible.

You know, couple couple years in, he got me kind of obsessed, with audio equipment.

So I love microphones.

What can I say?

I have a big collection of microphones now because of that.

Yeah.

We're both So, yeah, everything.

For my own voice, I I have a ribbon mic that I like using, mostly because I have a lot of mouth noise usually.

And the ribbon mic is quite insensitive, particularly in the higher frequencies, so I don't have to clean all that out.

And it's just a nice warm mic.

Yeah.

So the setup is, it's got a little portable booth I set up.

You know, I get my narrator to go down and into the booth because it's easier that way.

I cannot I don't hear what they're saying.

I only hear what's coming through the mic.

Mhmm.

Runs into an RME interface.

The mic itself depends on the, it would depend on the narrator.

So, I use the standard mic that I think everyone uses quite a bit with, you know, s m seven b.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And then I have right now.

Yeah.

So it's the one I'm using today too.

Then I tend I try to match the mic to the, to the narrator.

So it again, it depends which narrator is.

It runs through the runs actually, it doesn't run straight into my interface.

I have a little universal audio, preamp.

I run it through that and kinda warm it up Yeah.

Because it's a tube amp.

Right?

You know, we get all this wonderful crystal clear audio, and the first thing we wanna do is, like, muddy it back up so it's warmer.

Yeah.

That's you know, a lot of lot of podcasters, turn into gear heads about, microphones, and, you know, I've got a drawer full of microphones here and same idea.

Well, I'd always go to, I'd always go out, and anytime there's a sale on a mic, I'd pick one up.

So I have a closet full of these, right now.

So you you use, different people voicing this.

Mhmm.

Okay.

Very good.

Do you have, like, a a a normal bunch of different people that do it?

Or Yeah.

Yes.

I do.

They're they're friends.

Well, the first, first narrator, I used to like, the really old ones, I used to do myself.

I don't particularly like my voice, and I'm not a great reader.

So the first person that I got who wasn't myself to narrate was my, son's friend and Mitchell.

And Mitchell narrated from episode 100 to about 260.

So he was the voice of the podcast for a long time.

Then Mitchell moved away.

And in the last two years, I've been just using two friends, who come in and narrate for me once once a month.

Yeah.

Very nice.

That's that's even better.

You don't have to do it yourself if you don't want to.

Well, yeah, it, again, focus on the production and on the, writing as opposed to, you know, having to perform it each time.

And, also, you get just get sick of the, the story as you're writing it and readdining it and listening to it and then hearing yourself say it.

You know, at at a certain point, it's like, no.

Somebody else should be should be doing this.

So, yeah, I have two regular, narrators right now, Kathleen and Steve.

They're family friends.

Again, they're not professional narrators, so there's a fair amount of cleanup, on their recordings.

But, I just allow for that in the production schedule.

Yeah.

Well, that's great.

Yeah.

I I used to have a daily show, and I would have, guest hosts on certain days.

And so, you know, like, I had one one guy that was every Tuesday and another one that was every Friday, you know, that kind of thing.

Plus, I'd drag my wife in here and have her do it.

You know?

So I I've I've tried that.

That doesn't, you know, my partner here doesn't really like doing narration, so I've had to look a little bit further afield.

I had my son try it once, and, he doesn't he he wasn't too keen on it.

But, yeah, the real the real thing is the problem, I actually, is when you start listening to this stuff is you start hearing things in the recording that I'm sure most people wouldn't hear that just drive you nuts.

So I I I've gone down the rabbit hole a bit sometimes where I'm going through and cleaning up things that I don't know if people would really hear, but I just can't stand them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the way it goes.

You know, I said in I've I've edited really, really heavy on certain ones, and and nowadays, it's kind of, yeah, whatever happened happened.

It's fine.

We'll just run it.

You know?

But, with this podcast, we have, an editing team that, well, actually, Kate.

She goes in and cleans us up, makes us sound smarter.

So, that's a good thing.

That's awesome.

And, you know, certainly, I can use a little bit of editing.

And I Yeah.

So that's great.

Yeah.

But, you know, the you know, I always tell, you know, new podcasters, don't over edit.

You know?

Don't you know, breathing is normal for humans, and it sounds weird if you take it all out.

You know?

And, you know, people say once in a while, and that's okay.

Yeah.

No.

That that's true.

I think what I got, obsessed with, was I was comparing the podcast to audiobooks.

Oh.

And, you know, they they I know they really heavily edit their their content and process it.

So, when I'd listened to the two, originally, my goal was, well, I, you know, I want to have a similar kind of quality.

You know?

So I would take out umms and, would take out, well, a lot of the breaths, but I'd reduce them manually Mhmm.

And go in and take out manually cut out mouth clicks.

I'll tell you, the thing that saved my life, I don't know if it's okay to mention a product on here.

Sure.

Sure.

Oh, okay.

It is, iZotope RX, 11.

It's the current version, but it's iZotope RX.

It's a postproduction audio tool.

And, basically, it's like Photoshop for sound.

Oh, nice.

Nice.

Yeah.

You can go in you can go in and and locate that little bump on the mic stand.

You can see the frequencies, of it, and you can literally take a paintbrush and get rid of it.

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

I I use a similar thing from Adobe.

It's Audition.

Right.

And, that does similar things, but I I don't even know 10% of how it all works.

But, you know, it can it can do a lot of things.

And, you know, we have a automated one, our media mastering, which can go in and, you know, level everybody up to to the same level if there's more than one person on the mic.

Or if you turn away from the mic or something, it's pretty good at that.

And but it doesn't really edit anything out, per se.

And Yeah.

A lot of tools.

Always good to hear about another tool.

I've never heard of that one, so I'll have to check that out.

Yep.

It'll it's, it has some well, late these days, like everything, it has some AI settings in it.

So it will assess your audio track and go through and automatically remove and level things.

I still have wanna go through and hear the whole thing because sometimes it makes a mistake.

It'll take something out that shouldn't be go out or, it'll miss things.

So when because I have to go through it anyway, I've just taken to doing it manually.

So, you know, go through, see a see a pop on the mic, you know, close-up or something, and, you know, just go in and paint it out.

Yeah.

That would that, that works.

It's always handy to have those kinda editing tools if you're gonna get in there and edit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For sure.

You know, like I said, I've tried, you know, a bunch of them and, you know, you know, either editing tools or these magic things.

You know, like Auphonic is one that we use Right.

Yeah.

And, you know, they have a lot of a lot more power than than we usually use for that.

And they're getting they're getting better all the time.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I think when I started, there wasn't really any audio gear, that was specifically made for podcasting.

You know?

So I would go down to the, music local music place and buy stuff and and sort of use it.

I've been amazed to see how far that whole industry has flipped around and started building gear specifically for podcasting, which is great.

Yeah.

Hey.

I'm running a, RodeCaster, which is specifically built for podcasting.

Although, I know some broadcasters that use it now.

So but it's a it's a, you know, kind of an all in one mixing board, recorder.

You know?

Right.

Right.

It has sound effects and all that stuff, and, you know, it's just amazing what's available now.

You know?

I started twenty years ago, and, you know, back then, you know, we were hand coding RSS feeds and and, you know, recording on whatever you could get a hold of to make sound.

You know?

Remember FeedBurner?

Oh, I certainly do.

Yeah.

That's where I started.

Yep.

So we, we we made a replacement for FeedBurner here at Blueberry.

And that's what I moved over to it and got rid of FeedBurner as soon as I could.

But, yeah, that's there wasn't a lot of information that just seemed to pop up.

But, unfortunately, I bought all my gear before all of this, newer audio stuff came out for podcasters.

So it's like, you know, just old studio gear that I have sitting around.

Yeah.

But it all still works.

You know?

I got a whole stack of it in my garage.

You know?

Yeah.

I know.

Roadcaster was available when I started.

That's all I woulda got.

I wouldn't have bothered with all the other stuff.

You know?

Me too.

Absolutely.

I wouldn't I wouldn't have the the closet full of gear.

But, yeah.

So, tell tell me a little bit about the content of your stories.

I mean, are is it pretty varied?

Well, yeah, just right across the board.

So the most recent one is about a senior who has to go into assisted living.

And, basically, it's an assisted living place run by robots.

So, you know Wow.

Yeah.

You know?

But it is sci fi.

You know?

You gotta you gotta, you know, keep it in that genre.

And, Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's one.

So it goes right across the board.

I tend to write what I'd call near future fiction rather than, like, space operas and that.

So these are things that are set somewhere into the future.

I never put a date because, you know, who's gonna be right about when any of this stuff will happen or even if it does.

Right.

And it focuses on the characters and how they adapt.

A lot of the themes are around, how humans interact with technology and how technology is affecting, humans in their lives.

Yes.

That's that's coming a lot faster than we think.

Oh, yeah.

So stuff.

And The AI has featured in in quite a few episodes, and I try, yeah, I try to make sure that not all about AI.

But, you know, sometimes there's just so much interesting stuff happening Yeah.

That yeah.

Oh, it's hard.

One nice thing, you know, about podcasting is that, you know, you can you you can format the thing however you want to.

And, you know, I think coming very soon, if not already, is, people are gonna be looking for authentic humans on their podcast rather than AI voices.

Yeah.

No.

No.

That's true.

I mean, everything can be, generated, the rating.

Everything can you know?

So it's just content.

But that's really weird if if the whole thing is AI generated, including the the initial writing.

Hopefully, that day will not come too soon, but you never know.

And then, yeah, you're right.

What will happen is that, having an authentic human, will have a higher value than anything else machine generated content.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a place for it as well.

I I listen to a a daily news thing that it's you know, the the AI picks the three stories at once and then records it and puts it on a podcast feed, and, you know, it's somewhat interesting, and you find stuff that you you never would have found.

But, you know, it's not like listening to you or I or or your narrators, actually reading something or, you know, speaking it in you know?

There's just something something real about that where, with the AI generated stuff, you know, believe me, we use a lot of AI now for for, you know, cleaning up grammar and stuff and writing and, you know, that kind of thing, and it's really good at that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you gotta get it to quit saying, in conclusion, That seems to be the the thing that always ends, an article or something that you want them to rewrite.

But, anyway, it is interesting.

Well, you know, my son's in, into well, he switched careers.

He's into computer science now.

So, he's kind of, you know, telling me that you gotta learn how to use it.

And that's the way the future is to use it as a tool, not to replace what you're doing.

So, you know, use it to enhance what you're doing.

Yep.

And and, you know, like, we use it now for, transcripts Oh, yeah.

Of podcast.

You know?

The our current transcript engine is AI powered, and it, it does a really good job, even can suggest, you know, what what you wanna write for your show notes and just all kinds of things.

And and, you know, if you use it for what it's intended for, I think it's good.

You know, if you overuse it, it could be bad.

I don't know.

You know?

And as my boss, Todd always likes to say, he goes, we're we're using the worst AI that we're gonna use right now.

That's that's true.

It's only we're designing it's only gonna get better.

Yeah.

So we definitely, you know, just, use it, learn how it works, and, then you can sorta, you know, just, you know, take take from it what you want, just like any technology.

You know?

You know, I find a lot of lot of people are are hooked on their phones, you know, because they do too much with it.

Yeah.

Well, I had a I I last month, I did a a flash fiction story, which is a story on 2,000 words or under.

Mhmm.

I usually don't do many of that.

In fact, that was the first one I did, but I did it on AI.

And so it was about a a programmer who got kicked out of their job, creates an AI to go through all the interview process, and it gets them a job, that they're not qualified for.

So I won't do a giveaway at the end, but, you know That sounds like a good one.

Yeah.

Which I could see happening.

Right?

You know?

Like, going through an interview process, why why go through all the preliminary interviews when, eventually, you're talking to machines anyway?

Get a machine to represent you.

Interesting.

I have to listen to that one.

Very, very good.

Yep.

It's called no eye in the AI.

It's I think it was out in June or July.

So it's only it's only six or seven minutes long.

It's not it's quite short.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, definitely, you should, I'm talking to the listeners here.

You should do go check out makeshiftstories.com.

And, you know, Vern's got, like I said, about 300 episodes there, maybe a little more.

And, yeah, and anything any advice you would give to a prospective podcaster?

I always like to ask that question.

You have to be persistent.

Don't get too crazy with your download numbers, and think about the reason you're doing the podcast.

Who is your audience?

Are you reaching them, are you getting something back from it?

Like, I think I think if you, focus too much on trying to get a hit podcast, like, a deal with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of downloads, It can be quite discouraging.

It's better to focus on your content and who you're trying to talk to, and then let the podcast grow organically.

Yeah.

A lot of people obsess on their stats, and and it's just not productive for the first little bit anyway.

I mean, you wanna keep an eye on them, make sure you're getting any you know, getting somewhere, but, yeah, you don't need to, you know, you don't need to watch it minute by minute to it'll drive you nuts.

Yeah.

And one of the one of the things that was, has always been wonderful about podcasting, and I think it's one of the reasons I got interested in it, is it does allow you to reach a distributed audience that has a very niche interest.

And so that you know, that's wonderful.

So if the audience if there's a thousand people in the world that are interested in your subject matter and you can get a podcast going for that group and you gather, you know, whatever number of them, to listen to your podcast, that you know, that's awesome.

It's a success.

Yeah.

You know?

And and success is measured differently by different people.

You know?

That's that's the other thing.

You know?

Just, you know, having having a gazillion listeners and selling ads and all this stuff is not everybody's goal.

No.

No.

No.

I sort of fell down that rabbit hole a little a couple of years ago, and I was running some ads and that on on that and was part of a podcast network for a while.

But after that network closed down, I had to make the choice about what I was gonna do with the podcast, and I decided, no.

I I'm not interested in chasing ads and and downloads, and I'd rather focus on learning how to write better and reaching the people who are interested in what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Well, looks like you're doing a great job.

And, again, congratulations on being our podcaster of the month.

And to the audience, please go check out Verne's show over at makeshiftstories.com.

Catch us next week for yet another episode of Podcast Insider.

Thanks, Vern.

Thanks for joining us.

Come back next week.

And in the meantime, head to podcastinsider.com for more information, to subscribe, share, and read our show notes.

To Check out our latest suite of services and learn how Blueberry can help you leverage your podcast.

Visit blueberry.com.

That's Blueberry without the e's.

We couldn't afford the e's.