The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are your thoughts on that general topic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Thank you for being a guinea pig.

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: How noble of you.

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

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

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

Jonny Nastor: We have a main topic?

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: That’s incredible.

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

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

Jonny Nastor: Okay.

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

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

Jerod Morris: Most of the time we do.

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

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonny Nastor: Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

All we tend to do as human beings is procrastinate by, “But I don’t