Ever wondered what it really takes to build a successful podcast? In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on the highs, lows, surprises, and lessons learned from years behind the microphone.

We're joined by the team behind the Lunchador Podcast Network to talk about how podcasting has evolved, what it takes to grow a show, and why building a community matters just as much as creating great content. From navigating changing trends and technology to finding your voice and staying consistent, we explore the realities of podcasting from people who have lived it.

Whether you're thinking about starting a podcast, already have one, or simply enjoy hearing the stories behind successful creative businesses, this conversation offers valuable insights, practical advice, and plenty of real-world experience.

In This Episode, We Discuss:

• What it actually takes to launch and sustain a podcast over the long term
• How podcasting has changed over the years and why adaptability is essential
• The role community plays in growing an engaged and loyal audience
• Why consistency and marketing are often the keys to podcast success
• Behind-the-scenes realities of producing quality content
• The story of the Lunchador Podcast Network and its growth within the Rochester creative community
• Lessons learned from years of supporting podcasters and creators

This episode is packed with honest conversation, practical takeaways, and encouragement for anyone looking to use their voice to connect, educate, entertain, or grow a business.

Resources Mentioned:

• lunchador.org
• lunchadorpodcast
• anomalypresents.com
• bossyroc.com
• uniontavenrseabreeze.com
• marshallstreetbarandgrill.com
• salenas.com

Organizations and Projects Mentioned:

• Lunchador Podcast Network
• Representation in Cinema
• Food About Town
• Anomaly Presents
• Mind of Magnus
• Plants and Beats

Mentioned in this episode:

Joe Bean Roasters

Use promo code Lunchador for 15% off your order! https://shop.joebeanroasters.com

Lunchador Podcast Network

Check out all of the shows on the Lunchador Network at lunchador.org!

Foreign.

Welcome back to another episode of Getting Real with Bossy, the podcast that talks to you about what it's actually like to be a business owner.

We are your hosts, Kelly Bush and Kelly Metriz.

And we are doing something a little different today.

So I'm pretty excited about this, but I literally can't think because there's so much bourbon around me.

It's beautiful.

I mean, it's a lot, right?

It's not.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Look to the left.

Oh, no.

I know.

Did you notice I just put my spectacles on?

Yeah, that's full front to back.

I could see further.

So we are here at the Lunchadore Podcast Network studios interviewing today the founders.

But again, bourbon.

So I'm just gonna start with what do you think of the Kings County?

Cause I'm seeing that and nobody really knows it here.

And I'm curious cause I also have it as well.

I find it very intrigu.

So this is one of the high proof releases from about, I think like three, four years ago.

So the reason I bought it was I was judging spirits in a competition.

One of the local ones that's charity based.

They did a lot of work with interval and other things like that.

So I was judging in that competition and that ended up winning one of the gold medals.

So it's small barrel, high proof.

It has a lot of those dark flavors of longer age things, but it's pretty hot.

Yeah.

But for a young like two year bourbon and probably a 15 gallon barrel or 20 gallon barrel, it still has a lot of depth and it's shockingly balanced for a young one.

So I like it for what it is.

Right.

Not for what it's not.

I like that answer.

I think that's a very fair description.

It's not optimal, but I think it's an interesting.

I like my collection to be a talking point.

Yeah.

And a tasting point where somebody can.

We can sit and taste bourbon or taste rye and do here's basic.

Here's this.

Here's what this tastes like when something's in a small barrel.

Future episode.

Oh, I'm ready.

I was just at a rum tasting last week, a Mexican rums.

And I was like, what does this smell like?

And I was freaking out.

Oh, yeah.

I couldn't put a name to it.

And someone down the table was like, oh, it's provolone and pickle brine.

It was so on point.

I was like, that's what it is.

My mind was blown.

But I'm the person that can't but you, you're like, there's charcoal in this.

I'm like, oh, I can totally taste it.

Because agave is hard to taste in of itself.

And rum is a full step of weirdness beyond agave.

I love it because it's so out of bounds.

Bourbon in the end kind of tastes the same.

There's good and bad ones.

We gotta go.

I. Kelly's over.

No, I hear what you're saying.

I do.

At some point, it's gonna be stone Fruits and char and caramel and vanilla in refinement and complexity and all these things that are amazing.

But rum can be.

Oh, this one tastes like uncured cedar and also smells like dry aged meat and rotting bananas.

And I love it.

Interesting.

And this has been Spirits Corner with Bossy.

So we are actually here for a reason.

Sorry.

What do you expect, B?

I'm only human.

I'll send pictures, guys.

You'll understand what I'm talking about.

Let's start.

Introduce yourselves.

Tell us, Tell us who you are.

Hi, I'm Chris Lindstrom.

I'm one of the co founders of the Lunch Ator podcast network.

Also the host of Food About Town podcast for now over 10, 12 years.

And I also do.

I consulted on a brewery that opened recently and I'm just a deep lover of food and drink.

And then I produce a whole bunch of the shows on the Lunchadore podcast network.

I'm Matt Austin.

I am the other founder of the Lunchadore podcast network.

I am the host of the Anomaly Presents podcast, which is going on eight years now, I think.

Holy cow.

Yeah, right.

And the film festival.

I work on the film festival.

One of the organizers for that.

Also going into its eighth year.

Holy cow.

Great.

It's wild.

I can't believe that.

And I am Lunchador's resident basement goblin.

I do a lot of the production stuff and I like that term, the behind the scenes stuff.

It is very literal.

I do all of my work in my basement in the cinder blocks and spiderwebs.

So everything you hear all the ads and stuff.

The dulcet town.

So you hear on that.

It's all spider powered spider power.

Just in time too, because that's coming out next month.

Ooh, I'm looking forward to that.

Absolutely.

So anyways, yeah, so started a podcast.

Okay.

So I. I planned on asking you about starting a podcast network, but I didn't realize both of your shows have been on so long.

And I'm trying to think back of the first time I heard of a podcast.

There's this weird.

I don't my age or what I can't decipher.

Like I think it was pre pandemic, but I don't think it was right.

But it was like six years ago.

I feel like for me it's like, oh, I wanna be nerdy about something on my walk today.

And it was just very, very specific things.

But it was certainly within the last six years.

And you guys have been doing this for so long.

There's something about.

I think Matt and I are both, you know, we come from radio Nerdery.

That's.

Yeah.

And Matt has a deep history.

So I'll let him go into it first.

Cause I'm way after him.

So.

Radio is exactly where I started.

So I got hooked on.

There was that genre of shock jock or guy talk radio years ago.

I was probably way too young to be listening to it, but I was listening to it and I decided to go to school for radio, which was awesome.

Except it was at the same time that Spotify hit.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So a friend of mine went and got a job and it was a literal toilet station in Utica, meaning it was one room, the board and then you swivel and the bathroom was there.

Well, it's convenient.

It's great.

And he was working 3am to 7am on Mondays and Wednesdays making 8 cents an hour.

You could not live.

So I was like, yeah, so I guess we're not doing radio.

But I was still fascinated by the genre.

I'm trying to think of the first podcast I really latched onto.

Nerdist is probably.

Yeah, so that was.

That was pretty early on.

So as kind of a tech nerd, you know, especially more then I was trying to listen to radio at work and I couldn't listen live.

Cause it was, you know, drive time 6 to 10am So I would find places to download the radio show semi legally.

Meaning not legally at all.

Sure, sure.

I was like, how does that work?

It doesn't.

So I found it, I downloaded it and figured out a way to upload it to a podcast application.

Just so you could listen to it.

Just so I could listen to it, you know, that day or later.

And the first shows I started picking up were early podcast things as well.

And that was.

Adam Carolla was pretty early.

Okay.

Not that we speak of him nowadays, but you know, he was pretty early.

I listened to that he was the.

Er, Joe Rogan at that point.

Yeah.

So it was, it was him.

It was this American life, which, the first time I heard it, I'm like, I hate this.

I hated it.

I thought it was twee.

I thought it was way too precious for its own good.

It is so precious.

Yeah, I love that show.

And then I heard an episode that completely changed how I thought about it.

And then I went back and listened to every episode in the history of the show, back to the mid-90s or whatever it was, because I just got hooked with storytelling.

And then it was shows like the Moth that were fairly early storytelling shows.

And that's what got me really hooked into it, was the relationships between radio show hosts.

And then how do you tell a story and how do you.

How do you not control an audience, but how do you capture an audience's attention?

Through pacing, through storytelling, through getting people engaged with their nerdery, their passions.

That's.

That's the thing that hooked me and made me want to start doing it myself.

I think that makes sense too.

I think we see so many, especially since the Pandemic began, so many podcasts coming out now, they don't often make it past that 6 to 10 mark, or 10 episode mark.

But you're really coming to it from such a.

Such an educational, scientific.

Just.

It makes sense as to why, because I feel like back then it was very difficult to say, I am an expert in this thing, I'm going to put it on the radio, Spotify, whatever network you're doing, and people are going to want to listen to this.

I think that was back then that just.

I. I couldn't even imagine having that kind of confidence in the things that I wanted to talk about.

Well, it was also a time where, I mean, think about the tech too.

Oh, sure.

I'll be honest.

Anomaly is my third or fourth attempt at having something stick because I was trying to do live Internet radio for a while too, which is a whole different.

My brain just stopped.

Live Internet radio?

Yeah.

Is it like video?

So it was not video.

It was basically you go on a website, you click a button and then you're live on the Internet.

And then there's a website you can click on and there's different stations.

Like this is a talk station, this is a music station or whatever.

Okay.

It's pre modern streaming, it's pre live streaming and stuff like that.

It was like the proto streaming was that.

Yeah, it was live.

365 Was the one I.

And it was exactly that.

You'd go on the website and it was a bunch of different people doing different things.

I have a friend that did it for like 10 years.

He just finished doing it.

Yeah.

So to talk about just the tech.

So that was.

That was one direction you could go.

When I started recording, I slapped my phone.

IPhone on a table, recorded a voice message.

And so there weren't really.

There was high.

Honestly, that's how we started.

And we started, what, three years ago?

Four.

Four.

Four seasons.

But yeah, it was 24 years ago.

2022.

I have no idea what.

What year it is.

But yeah, we.

And that wasn't that long ago.

We had a phone on a table.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's.

It is a.

It is a start.

That's the great thing is you can just start.

Those episodes are still there, right?

Yeah.

I went and listened to a couple of my early ones.

Bad idea.

Don't do it.

Not good.

But I think about the tech at the time.

So this is when blogs mattered.

So I was writing on my own website and I looked at some of the views.

Oh, geez.

I was getting thousands of views on just like restaurant reviews and opening posts and things like the food truck rodeos.

Cause I was going to all of them every time and writing about them.

And you get so much traffic even compared to now.

It's.

But the first time I had to figure out how to host my own podcast.

So I had my own website and my own WordPress website.

I uploaded the thing.

I ran my own RSS server off of my own WordPress site.

That is so deep.

And also hate word process to be able to do that.

That's what I had to do.

Because hosting at the time was either you're a professional professional or it doesn't exist.

So I had to the in between.

Yeah.

So you had to find and learn all that stuff from forums and all that stuff.

It was the wild west of this.

Those things at that point.

So that's where that was when I was doing it was learning how to host my own show on WordPress.

Luckily for us, podcasting, it was just after that all rolled out and it was actually affordable for folks because I started podcasting.

I was doing Magnus show.

We were doing Mind of Magnus at Rochester Free Radio.

Love that show.

I loved it.

It was so much fun.

And then we did a podcast version of it for a little while.

So we had a podcast service and that's kind of where we learned how to do that piece of it.

And then it gave way to Anomaly and we've been kind of doing that.

And then Magnus.

I'm so glad he brought that back and he's doing it again because I love that show so much.

I just love him.

We should have him on again.

The absolute best.

He's such a genuine guy.

And those kind of conversations are the ones that I just adore, where I don't have to think for an entire hour and I just read and react with somebody across the table from me.

What a joy.

Like it's.

It's so easy.

It is.

And I have to say it.

Cause I give him credit every single time we do anything about the network.

Magnus is the reason Lunchador exists at a certain point.

Chris and I probably wouldn't have met without mind of Magnus.

Yeah.

There was an episode, he came in, he introduced Chris and I. Chris had that Japanese gin that I still think about.

What is it?

10 Years later?

Do you still have it?

Ooh, I don't know if I have any right now.

It was the Nika Coffee gin with Yuzu in it, which I love Yuzu.

Yuzu so much.

But it's one of the best gins you can buy on the market.

And we're plugging so much in this show.

Oh, all the time.

This is plugged in.

So many sponsors coming our way.

So Magnus.

So yeah, Magnus in the way introduced us because I was a guest on his show and we were just chatting and Matt was in the producer.

I was sitting in the booth.

I was the booth gremlin.

I was like, yeah, you got to say Goblin.

You got out of the cellar.

Were there spiders?

Almost definitely.

Almost definitely.

Yeah.

It was Hungerford before it became hu.

But yeah, yeah.

Well, thank you, Magnus.

Yeah, yeah.

Shout out to Magnus.

Well then it makes a lot of sense that the network was in your future for all that you've had to overcome.

Self taught for a lot of these things.

Both of you kind of growing up in podcast world before it really became what it is today.

So it seems to me a natural transition because of who you both are to want to help other people be successful in this.

In this area.

Yeah, for us it was kind of a.

We kind of slow rolled, like starting a thing.

Yeah, yeah, we had.

Because you were kind of starting going down the direction.

Yeah, a little bit.

A little bit.

We had a collective of four or five different shows.

Just kind of a group of friends and then food about town.

Chris kind of jumped on and then we started to kind of blow it.

Out a little bit.

We started to think about what we could actually do to Grow it and kind of have some.

I don't want to say meaning behind it because there's absolutely the meaning behind the five shows that we had.

I love those guys dearly.

Absolutely.

But meaning behind the growth, like meaning behind it.

There's an intentionality to it where there wasn't before.

And I think it.

So what I'll say is my nerdery has no chill.

I have no.

I have very little chill with everything I do.

Yeah, that's Matt resigned in the other chair.

I have little chill with everything I do.

And if I'm doing it, I really want to.

I want to see what we can do with it.

Yeah.

It doesn't mean I'm going to be the best at executing every moment of it, but I want to have an intentionality behind what we do.

And part of it was driven by the thing I was doing before we started this, which was I was running a restaurant service, working with almost exclusively small minority owned restaurants called Curate and Nominate.

And I loved it so much.

But it was very mission driven, not profit driven.

And that was the.

That was the mentality I wanted to take into the next thing that I did.

Because that one I kind of burned out on.

Cause we had a team of, you know, five people, but all of the other people had harder schedules than I did.

Kids, other things.

Kelly was late today.

Thanks, kids.

So I ended up doing.

I was.

And they're aware of the situation.

I was doing 80 to 90% of the work.

I was booking all the restaurants.

I was picking every food up.

I was driving it to the place.

I was organizing the pickup locations, organizing, making the list, doing all that stuff.

And I just couldn't brute force it to where I know we needed to go to make it survive.

Because that roller coaster, as you two very well know of, oh, the weather's too nice, or the weather's too bad.

Or you talk to your friends like, oh, everybody's doing bad right now.

It doesn't matter what I do.

Everybody's doing.

I love that one.

Because then I'm like, shit, that's even worse.

You must wish you could just tell me what I was doing wrong.

Well, I heard that when I talked to my friends who are running the businesses.

They're like, yeah, it's just bad.

Yeah.

I'm like, why are our sales bad?

They're like, oh, everybody's sales are bad right now.

I'm like, oh, geez, how do I then I have to work with institutions.

I have to build up essentially a catering wing.

I'm like, nope, you have to.

Well, you don't have to.

Plenty of people have businesses they begin.

That they don't have a passion for.

Yeah.

But I think at this table, everything we do is, you know, you want to feel good about it.

I don't want to put that.

It takes so much time and energy and also money, but time and energy to do anything.

Yeah.

If you're not passionate.

I don't know how people go to work that they hate.

I don't either.

It's.

Well, they get money and they.

My cousin calls them the Golden Handcuffs.

And I'm like, I get it if you're at a certain rate of success, but for me, personally, I'm not that person.

I've never been that person that I can do something I'm not behind.

Right.

Well.

And I think I'll also say that there's a.

There's this balance of.

And I've chosen one side of that balance, which is I have a day job that facilitates everything else I do, which means that we.

It's.

It's kind of a luxury, but we have the benefit of being able to.

We do everything.

Values first.

Right.

Yeah.

I go back to.

I'm going to bring them up again.

Nerdist.

That Chris Hardwick wrote a book about this whole thing, and it was exactly that.

The Golden Handcuffs.

He's like, well, if you hate your day job, think of it as.

Your life is a mall.

Yes.

You know, and your day job is.

This was when malls were a thing.

Right.

So you have the anchor store, your Sears or JCPenney or whatever.

And then you have all those weird little Ninja Star stores and all that other stuff.

They're there because we have those anchor stores.

We can afford to have that because we have these little.

So that's kind of how I look at it.

Sure.

That's the passion is this.

I go and do the other thing to pay for this, you know, and to be able to facilitate how many different shows we have now.

Yeah, I think we're.

That's a great question.

That was next on the list.

Yeah, I think we're at.

Depending.

It's, you know, things go in and out, ebbs and flip.

So I think we're at about 12 right now with two about to officially launch.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because we had one launch recently on the network with Rob Bell.

He's part of behind the Glass.

Also is.

Works at a nonprofit, but he's a photographer.

And he also makes lo fi music.

It's been very.

It's been very fun.

So doing behind the glass, it ends up being less about photography specifically.

It ends up being more of people who don't think of themselves as artists that get to tell their story about why they do a creative thing.

Which to me is completely fascinating because somebody.

I say it all the time.

I don't think of myself as a creative person with this.

I'm a craftsperson.

Right.

I believe in the craft of doing these things, and I care really hard about it.

But I don't think of myself as a creative person.

I think it's a craft.

We have framing people on to talk about making custom frames for things.

And they consider themselves craftspeople.

Some people might think of it as a creative pursuit.

I just love that discussion about what is art?

Are you an artist?

Capital A artist.

Are you a lowercase artist?

Does it matter?

Right.

And you literally curated this Room of Spirits.

You curated all of these wires to do what they're.

There's a couple wires in here.

Right?

The art.

I think art looks like a lot of different things.

Yeah.

And I think that people don't like to admit what we're good at.

No.

And we think we're taking away from other people's pursuits if we say the wrong thing.

I think that you're an artist and you guys are creating this podcast at work, and you're probably intentionally putting together different people on the network.

I gotta say, I love that people have come and asked to join such a thing.

I never thought it would happen.

And it is such a cool thing when it does.

It's thrilling.

And it's just to hear people's passions.

And I think that's what was calcified through this whole process is I was coming in, I want to just work with people I want to work with.

And we still.

That's part of our core is, you know, nobody on the network signs a contract beyond, you want to work with us still.

Cool.

Keep going.

If you don't want to work with us anymore.

Cool.

See you later.

Have a great time.

We don't own any of the shows, and we want it that way for what we're doing.

But I think the best thing that the best thing about doing this now is, and this is what I tell people is it's not about the network.

It's not about the shows.

I get to help people get their voices out there that they might not have been able to do it without the assistance.

Cause this is hard.

It's hard doing it on your own with no support.

It's really difficult.

And, man, I just love that ability to help somebody get their voice out there.

And I'll bring up one specifically I've been able to work with.

I think you've had Jackie McGriff on before.

I really love Jackie, who I was thinking of.

Jackie's the best and, like her project.

She's a bossy member.

Oh, she's awesome.

She also was on our show, but it was unfortunately super time crunch, so I want to have her on again.

Oh, she would love that because she's doing so many cool things right now.

And her Representation in Cinema show, she's trying so hard.

She's working so hard at it and having these amazing conversations, and every time one happens, I learn something I didn't know before.

Yeah, they're incredible.

It's one of my favorite movie podcasts out there because it's so in depth and so well researched.

Her guests are brilliant.

It's.

Yeah, she's getting guests from all over the country, too.

It's just phenomenal.

And I get to sit here and make that show sound great.

Yeah, what a luxury.

Also, people get to come to me.

I don't have to go anywhere.

What a delight.

And I think that show came from an interaction on Twitter, didn't it?

What?

It was just.

Yeah.

Jackie was like, I want to do a podcast.

How do we do that?

And then somebody tagged us and went, hey, you should talk to.

Wow.

And we were like, yeah, hell, yeah.

Hang with Jackie.

Yes, for sure.

Let's do that.

And talk about movies and talk about movies.

Right?

Why aren't we doing that?

I'm pretty sure we interviewed her about an entirely different topic and ended up talking about the Oscars because she was.

Doing headshots and stuff.

I mean, she still is.

I mean, amazing photographer.

If you need somebody to do your headshots or other things.

She's the best, right?

Man, I still use the ones I got from her all the time.

That's my best.

I still use the tips that she's given me.

I remember an event we did, the Valentine's Day event.

She's like, and I'm just gonna take pictures.

And I was, I know how to stand now.

Does that look like a buffoon?

What do I do with my hands?

But yeah, one, yeah.

She's amazing.

I think she just has.

I just want one quick thing if she's listening.

Just the way she connects with people.

I just did a job fair at East Irantic Way High School.

And she was in the same line as I was, and somebody was like, what does she do there?

What doesn't she do?

And her.

There was not a moment where there was not a line of young people.

And just her ability to engage with anyone at any age, at any time is just incredible.

Love you, Jackie.

Yeah.

Such a beautiful soul.

Yeah.

But any on podcast stuff aside from Jackie?

Because we could all talk about Jackie all day.

Of course.

I'm having all kinds of Jackie esque, you know, talking points now, so I'm trying to shift back.

Sorry.

What do you think is the.

The cap.

What is your goal?

What is your cap number?

What do you hope to do with the podcast network?

I mean, I don't know if there's a cap number.

I think it's.

We're probably close to it right now, just as far as what we can handle between the two of us, but I think there's a growth there as far as getting our voices out into the community more.

Yeah, there's always that.

There's always more listeners.

Right.

So that's been.

I think the goal and the challenge at the same time is how do we get more ears on the product, if we want to call it.

Oh, my God.

And everything's so Internet based and the algorithms all suck and everything's constantly changing and AI and trying to get your.

Getting seen anywhere is so hard.

We've been playing with the different clips, trying to get those in Instagram reels, trying to get some.

Some kind of big.

Have you tried the Tick Tock yet?

We have not done the tick Tock yet.

Yeah.

The next thing we got to be on the Tick tock.

I'm almost 50, so that scares me.

51 This year and I do not want to learn the Tick Tock.

I can Instagram reels, I feel like is like it's fine.

It's.

It does the job.

Leave it to you young people in your 40s.

Well, I'm only 48 this year because I thought I was 49, but yay, the TikTok.

Up until the pod, we're growing our podcast and trying to get more listeners and more engagement.

But with the restaurant, TikTok was never a concern because it's essentially worldwide, you know, and if I go viral on TikTok, it's not gonna get me business necessarily.

We actually went viral at Knox.

We had a small bump.

Yeah.

You know, we had some people that came in from out of town that had never heard of us before, but it wasn't.

And it was off Something stupid.

It always is.

But it's not like you're putting all this work in for that one hit you might get, and you're not going to get a big bump in business.

But now that we are doing something that's worldwide, I'm like, oh, crap, do I have to learn TikTok?

Yeah.

I've gotten away with it all these years where I just.

I have the best of TikTok.

I have a group chat that sends me all of the best TikTok reels that are out there.

A curated TikTok is amazing, and I.

Think TikTok's amazing because everything I see on it is perfect for my taste.

Yeah, I.

You know, I. I do see the value in it.

And when I see, you know, I see how people are doing, doing TikTok locally now, and I'm like, man, I lost generations of time doing all that stuff because I. I just love the deep nerdery of trying to really understand how things work, understand food deeply, and what is good, what is bad, what is history, what is culture.

Yeah.

And it's.

That's the stuff that bothers me.

And I know I can't short clip those things.

Right.

But I also know that that's the only way for me to grow what I'm doing and where I'm going.

So I'm going to be doing more of that this year for the network, for Food About Town.

The big project I do want to do, assuming I can figure out how to do it and not drive myself insane, is go to every place on a street.

Okay.

Every place excepting maybe one on the street.

Because I don't want to give them any support or business whatsoever.

Stay in those values.

Yes.

Those are the kind of ideas that bounce around in my head.

And then it's like, how do I edit it?

How do I record it?

Do I need the stupid glasses with the camera in it to be able to do it?

Oh, I'm a big picture person.

I'm like, I got this audio and it's gonna.

And I have.

I'm like, who are my little picture people?

I'm like, kelly, how are we gonna do this?

Yeah, that's kind of like where we end up, too.

Basement Gremlin.

Yeah.

So Kelly comes in with the episode organized, and I'm like, let's just chat.

Let's do it.

Two.

Both are important.

So before we go to break.

So I'm producing our episode, so we're gonna go to break.

But that's like the absolute thing that happens the Most when to bring Jackie back into the picture.

When she comes in and I see a script that she wrote, I've seen pages, I'm like, that is more prep than I've done for anything over the last five plus years of doing interviews.

Does that give you anxiety when you.

See that I'm anxious thinking about it?

It does a little bit.

Because my favorite thing is listening to the hitch in somebody's voice and grabbing that thread and diving in is, I used to prep more, and now I don't because I found I don't like prepping.

One, I don't like doing it.

I don't like writing.

And two, you do it enough, you have confidence that, hey, we're just going to make it work.

And most of the time, it's pretty damn good.

Sometimes people like to talk more, and that's okay, too.

That's okay.

So I'm gonna show.

I'm gonna throw it to break, and we'll be right back with more bossier.

All right, well, welcome back to Getting Real with Bossy.

I would like to talk to you guys about something a little tricky.

You've been doing this 12, eight years, respectively.

You've seen a lot of things come and go, and I kind of want to talk about that in a little bit.

Like some.

A lot of the changes, we've kind of hit on that with the pandemic.

All of a sudden, everybody wants to do a podcast.

It's not just coming from, you know, radio shows, going to podcasts.

What happens when you have somebody come to you, whether it's for the network or just because they know that you guys are experts in your field.

Because you are, whether you're artist or however, craftsman, whatever you want to call it, you're experts.

You're fucking exper.

In your field.

Slow clap.

What happens.

You've been doing this.

When somebody comes to you with an idea and you just know.

You just know.

It's just this is this.

There's probably not going to be an audience for this.

Or.

Or.

Or what do you do?

I mean, it's.

I. I don't want to say it's happened a couple times, but it may have.

So usually what ends up happening is you get a pretty good idea within that first couple minutes.

If there's.

If there's meat on the boat.

And then you see if there's any way you can kind of shape it.

I'm thinking of one in particular where we're like, that's an interesting idea, but, you know, I think you've Got maybe three or four episodes in this.

That would be something, but there's not a lot of room there, so what else would you do?

And then you kind of see it fall apart.

You're like, well, here's what I suggest.

Take this and see if you can make 12 different episodes out of it.

See if you can figure out that kind of thing.

What would you say for 12 hours worth of content?

What are you going to write out a script?

How does this work?

Who are you interviewing?

And then you kind of see the person and you can see how much they're dedicated to the idea at a certain point.

Sure.

Tell me if I'm speaking in turn.

No, absolutely.

You kind of see how dedicated they are to the idea and how dedicated they are to kind of adapting that to what the medium is.

Because it sounds gross to call it that, but it really is.

There's certain things that you have to do to make this work.

For better or for worse.

Yeah.

I mean, there's skills you have to build.

There's the consistency.

And I'll say for my show, that's the thing I'm worst at because I'm producing all the other things.

I sacrifice my own show more than I would like to say that I do because I'm producing six other shows actively here in the studio.

But I'd say the thing that hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways where, you know, pretty close.

I'm not bringing up anybody specifically, because they're all people we actually really enjoy.

Yeah.

Is, yes, this might work for one or two, but what if you had to do it twice a month, forever?

How many people do you have in your network to be able to do this?

You know, do you.

Are you able to just yammer by yourself or with a partner and do that interminably?

Right.

Just, hey, Matt and I can sit and talk for hours and never ever have to stop.

Right, right.

And we can do that for hours and hours and hours if we wanted to.

And same thing with you, too.

When somebody comes in with, oh, I want to do this very niche thing.

And that's great.

But what after the first six, when you don't know what else to talk about, how deep can you mind this?

And what I've come to recently is specific but general, or general but specific.

You can't just be one or the other unless you're great at being general.

But you have to be great.

You have to know how to control your audience.

You have to have amazing chemistry with your co host and your Guests, you need to be able to flex on any topic at any moment.

Then you're a morning radio show.

I was hesitant to say that.

It's one of two things.

Your morning radio or your Magnus.

I was going to bring up Magnus.

He's general but specific.

Yes.

And those people are so rare.

I would be a perfect second banana for that.

I could not carry it the way that you would carry it or that Magnus would.

That's kind of why I do what I do.

Right.

And I love.

I.

So I did Fringe previews for Rochester and Pittsburgh.

I did zero prep before the episodes, and I would book them back to back to back to back with no prep and just go.

I loved it.

Loved it.

Because I don't.

I just.

I'm happy to go and do it.

That's.

It takes a lot of time behind the stick to get to that point.

It's not natural, it's not free all that well.

And if the person you're talking to sucks, that's a lot of editing.

We've had a couple of episodes where I'm like, oh, my God, this is like pulling teeth.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to edit for so long.

Right.

And also, how do you save it in.

In the moment so you don't have to edit later?

It's really hard.

And even if you're really good, sometimes you still lose it and you can't make something good out of it.

Right.

It happens.

It sucks.

It feels terrible.

What I'll say, you know, general but specific.

Specific but general.

Something in between where you don't have to be wedded to one thing.

We had somebody who's probably coming on the network.

They had a very specific idea, and it was part of their journey.

So it means a lot to them.

And I love that.

Right.

But I'm like, it's going to be really hard to do this every other week forever.

Right.

And now, you know, had some time.

I'm like, hey, I'm still interested.

You want to talk again?

You know, feel free to come over.

Let's talk.

And now it became general but specific.

Okay.

I'm like, okay, now this is something we can pursue.

Or something has to be universal, not specific.

So universal is different than general.

I'll bring up Rob Bell as a great example.

So he was doing essentially just a lo fi music radio show, an hour of Almost, I'd say 90 plus percent music that he produced himself.

Amazing stuff.

Delightful.

It's brilliant.

It's one.

It's awesome.

And what I told Matt, I want him to change the format.

This is.

Yeah, this is where my soul is.

Someone who engages the creative mind.

I'm like, please don't change it.

It's perfect.

It's great.

I highly recommend go listen to Plants and Beats.

It's incredible.

It's maybe my favorite podcast going right now.

Yeah.

So I was like.

And Chris goes, well, we're going to change the format.

It's going to become more of an interview thing, and then it's just going to be interstitial with the music and stuff.

And I was like, don't change it.

It's so good the way it is.

It is so good.

And then it was a month or two later, and Rob is coming on the network, and we're doing a class, and Rob is on the panel with us, and we're talking, and Rob is like, so I'm doing Plants and Beats, and I've been doing it, and it's 90% music, and making that much music is killing me.

And I went, I am so sorry for advocating for you to keep doing that.

I had no idea that was taking that out of you.

Please change your format, because More Rob is more good for everybody.

Let's make it so you don't want.

To burn him out.

No.

But, yeah, it's one of those things where I was such a huge fan of what he was doing.

I didn't want to, please don't grow out of the box that I like you in.

And he's been doing it.

He's got a couple of them, and they're incredible.

Yeah, it's.

And he's having real conversations with people, tying it to a specific plant during the episode, and then he adds music in between and after.

That's all his original stuff.

It's such a unique show.

And the first thing when he brought it to me is like, I love the music thing.

I was playing for my mom.

I showed it to Matt, and they loved it.

And I'm like, I don't think there's any way you can do this forever without quitting your job and doing this full time.

And I love what you're doing.

I want you to keep doing it.

And I also want more of you as a person in there because you're such a genuine interviewer.

So, you know, to call him out specifically, we worked with him on that to dial that in.

And now I think, you know, we've recorded three of the new Style Man.

The first one was just me and him talking about, you know, how we sacrifice ourselves first when anybody else needs Anything or life happens, we'll sacrifice our health, we'll sacrifice our mental health.

We'll sacrifice anything before we take care of ourselves.

We're the first ones that get thrown away.

That was the conversation.

I like the way that you stated that.

The first ones to get thrown away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

40 Minutes he and I talked.

We had a real conversation.

It was amazing.

But we're just.

We're just two buddies talking.

But we didn't hold back.

Right.

It was awesome.

Then he had conversations with Narada Rai.

He's a local photographer, does a whole bunch of things, but they are buddies.

And they had the conversation about freelancing and all that stuff and how hard it is and how brutal it is, but it was also full of so much joy.

And I'm seeing where this can go now, and I'm so excited and I'm glad we had that difficult conversation.

So all that to be said with that long divergence, I think it's a conversation and sometimes you need to make a complete thought out of what you want to do.

Right.

It's not just an idea.

It needs to be a complete thought.

That outside perspective of this is great, but.

Right.

And I think what you said too, that's perfect.

You know, 12 hours.

Can you do this for 12 hours?

I have a question.

We talked about what you're looking for in a podcast, and it's, you know, probably aligns with what is successful and what's out there that right now and what people want to hear.

What do you think that people are doing wrong?

I mean, I'll speak for myself.

I am.

I'm doing wrong with not being consistent.

That's huge.

And using the mark, doing the marketing.

So inconsistent.

And not doing the marketing.

That's the thing.

The easiest thing about doing this whole podcast thing is recording an episode.

It's by far the easiest thing.

Booking a guest, being consistent, following up, doing the social media, doing the video clips, going on lives, doing all that nonsense.

That's the work.

Recording an episode.

That's my favorite thing.

It's so easy.

It's literally my favorite thing that I do.

Yeah, it's so easy to do that or produce.

For me, producing is easy.

Like while we're having this conversation, oh,.

You've been working this whole time.

I want to know what all these buttons are.

Oh, I'm ready.

I'm video switching while we're talking.

So this is relaxing to me.

I was wondering what that box was because you kept touching it and I'm like, what is that?

I got to ask later.

So this is relaxing to me.

Oh, my God.

He has another two.

There's a. Yeah, it's one down there.

I keep saying.

So for the listeners.

I thought that was a chair.

No.

Yeah, because we're at a very large table, and I thought it was just like a chair back.

A third chair over there.

It's a.

It's a screen.

Yeah.

So like this.

And that's a.

By the way, the lighting in here is way too good.

I've really worked on it.

And, you know, part of.

Part of what you do, learning this whole thing is somebody mentioned sometimes it's not about.

It's.

They're trying to make you feel bad.

I'm gonna bring Jackie up again.

I didn't have enough lighting for her skin tone.

She brought her own light to make her look better.

I'm like, that's embarrassing for me.

And it should be right.

I should feel a little bit bad.

But you don't know what you don't know.

And she never made me feel bad on purpose, but I did, and it was right.

So I learned how to dial these lights in better and to get these brighter so it can.

So I can balance darker skin tones in the room.

Now, that's really important, especially as we have a wide range of diverse guests.

I need to be able to respect them by lighting them decently.

Not the best.

I don't have infinite dollars.

I'm trying.

But that's part of the whole thing is we want to respect our guests.

We want to be involved in that.

Now I've lost the train of what the question was, what people do wrong.

So lighting.

Yes.

So lighting, consistency, marketing consistency, all that stuff, that's the work.

Recording's easy.

The follow up is hard, too.

The way we talk about business, often with Bossy, you do that thing that you're really passionate about, and then you realize if you know you're an HR manager, if you have employees, you're an accountant.

All of those other things go into it.

This is its own business.

This is exactly it.

Those are the things that are going to be the tough thing, because that's the not fun part, but that's the part that keeps it going.

You mean it's not just making good food and then everything works out just fine with no other effort?

But I think it kind of goes back to, you know, there are so many people that would go in and say, I've got this idea.

And I would listen to these professionals blow the smoke, and I'm like, oh, my God, no.

So that's why I wanted to commend you for that, you know, 12 hour thing.

But also realizing if you're going to do it and you want it to become something, not just your own ego project, it's a business, you have to treat it like a business.

And there are a lot of other things that go into it that you're just not going to be prepared for and you're going to have to put the time in to learn it.

You know, it's also like there's, I think there's, it's not just resignation to not being big.

There's an acceptance to saying, hey, we're maybe we're never going to sell.

We're never going to be huge, but can we make a difference in our small seed community of Rochester, of our circle and the circle beyond us and the circle beyond us, can we make something more positive?

Can we make something that's helping people?

Yes.

You know, I don't think we're going to make the biggest difference.

We're not going to have a giant staff.

I don't have an advertising team.

I'm working, I'm trying and it's hard.

But we just want to do something good and that's okay.

Yeah.

If we can draw an extra five people into a business or to a behind the glass opening or something like that, I feel like we've really done that's success set out to do.

Yeah, we don't need that huge of a platform.

We're two guys sitting in a dining room or in a basement, like so.

And also part of what you learn is, oh, we did cross advertising on connections for a month.

Like, oh, well, the podcast listenership isn't that different.

It's more than us as a combination, but it's not that much more.

It's not an order of magnitude more.

It's a little bit more.

Twice as much total.

And he's been doing that on the most visible public radio station for a long time.

It's the most important public radio show in our area by far.

And the podcast version of that gets double what we get in a month.

And it's really not that much more.

It's a conversation we've had with Paulie too, because he said the same thing.

He's like, our podcasts are doing what, what radio shows do now.

Yeah.

You know, just driving around radio shows, whatever CMF does for their morning show.

He's like, our podcasts do about the same.

Right.

It mind blowing that we're.

It's at that Level.

But yeah.

And it goes back to what you were saying.

Everybody's got their own algorithm.

Everybody's got their own little culture in their pocket.

Yeah.

So everything is so divided.

So it's just grabbing those.

Grabbing those ears and trying to get them to do the things.

Well, the nice thing about the algorithm, I hate the algorithm.

I hate the advertising.

I hate the trying to figure it out, because it's always changing.

But anyways, I'm literally in the middle of that right now outside of here.

But the nice part about it is that when you hit the people that want to listen to you and you grab that, like, then you're in their algorithm.

Right.

And you stay in their algorithm, so you're getting that super niche connection because they do, like, things like what you're doing.

They do like what you said about this, and they started.

You know what I mean?

So you're not just throwing spaghetti at a wall, even though it feels like that.

It's.

The people you get are there.

Right.

When I was doing Magnus's show, we had Chuck Schaefer, the artist, and we were talking about the same thing, and it was, how do you get a bigger audience?

He's like, you don't need a bigger audience.

If you find 1,000 people, that'll give you $10.

That's just as good as 100,000 people giving you a dollar.

It's the same thing.

You just have to find your people.

But I think that's kind of the thing that I really enjoy about Lunchador, is that we're finding our own people, not just to be on the network, but when you run into somebody on the street and they're like, hey, I listened to that thing.

Thing about whatever movie Cats.

I listened to your podcast episode about Cats.

The play, the musical, or the animal, the terrible movie.

Oh, I forgot.

It is a movie.

Yeah.

The movie with Taylor Swift.

Yeah, yeah.

So it was unhinged.

We went to see it at the theater and immediately recorded one afterward, and somebody came up, and I listened to that, and I just want to tell you.

And I'm like, you listen to.

I had somebody at work come up to me randomly.

Were you hosting that show?

Yeah, that's part of our network or producing that show.

Because some of the shows I produce, I'm like, 20% on Mike some.

I'm zero.

You heard him.

Oh, yeah, that was my cousin.

What a Small World.

That.

Oh, somebody's cousin was on one of our shows, and now he knows about what we do, and maybe he mentions that to somebody.

Else.

And it's just that personal connection does end up mattering.

It matters to the people who come in, and it matters to the people that listen.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

I love it.

I think that's a. I think that's a good tie up.

Yeah.

So too.

I don't know if you have random ideas.

We also can do random talk on anything you want.

That was so sweet.

Rapid fire.

Ooh.

Lightning round.

Lightning round.

What's Kelly be so happy we don't have sound effects because I would be pushing those buttons all day.

I'm buying one of these as soon as we.

So food wise.

Ooh, Garbage plates.

Overrated or properly rated.

I'm gonna let Matt go first on that.

I'm edging towards overrated at this point only because that's the only thing anybody ever mentions about this city.

So annoying.

I think that's why I'll say overrated.

It's not that I don't like them.

It's that.

That if we're known for that thing, I'm not sure we should be known for anything when it comes to the.

Amazing things about this city.

Right.

I'm not sure.

But I'm not sure we should be known for one specific thing.

Yes.

The garbage plate.

Because it's our.

Our local abomination.

Like so many.

Every city has their local abomination.

It's Instagramable, right?

Yeah.

It's just.

It was.

It's been around for a hundred years, but it just happened to fit the Internet.

Yeah.

And I get why it all works.

And hey, I love what the red wings do.

Plates night and all.

That is amazing.

Right.

And I love that people embrace it, but it's not.

I don't think it tells an amazing story.

Right.

Is that a culinary story?

The apocryphal story's cute.

But every town has their apocryphal story that's like 10% true or 20% true about.

Oh, the college kids that go in and ask for a plate of garbage.

You know, the whole.

Every town has that.

So overrated.

I want to pop in really quick.

I make a killer vegan garbage plate.

Ooh.

And if I knew this was to come up, I would have brought you some.

Ooh, I'm excited.

I'll have to come try it.

Yeah.

I think Rochester's got a pretty amazing food scene, and it'd be nice for them to especially.

The diverse scene is my passion, man.

Our Puerto Rican scene is unbelievable.

The Jamaican scene is why I love.

If you go up Clinton, you're going to hit everything.

That's the best.

I'm going to be your roadie.

I'll just carry your.

Oh, it'll be so much fun.

All right, Pivot in the film festival because it's not food.

What is the craziest thing that you've ever experienced at the film festival?

Oh, this is a fun story.

So we screened a film.

What was the name of it?

Sound of Silence.

I want to say it was.

It's a Japanese film about a man who falls in love with an ASMR model on YouTube.

And it's twisted.

It's a great movie.

It's wild.

So the whole thing is weird.

So we do intros for every movie.

So Megan Murphy, who's on the Anomaly Podcast, has been on a bunch of podcasts on Lunchadore, for our intro, did 10 minutes of live ASMR on the stage at the Little.

She didn't realize how long 10 minutes was.

It's a long time to have to do asmr.

So to be fair, I'm pretty sure if you add it up throughout the week, my kids do it for 10 minutes.

Yeah.

Everything's well and everything's off the Internet.

ASMR.

ASMR.

That's why I started laughing so hard.

I was like, please don't say those letters.

It's like, six, seven.

I'm like, just don't even say them.

That's exactly what Meg was doing.

So.

So we're doing the whole thing, and everybody loads into the movie.

They watch the movie and everything.

The movie ends, and one of the people in the audience, Kenya, comes up to us and goes, hey, I think the actress was in the theater.

We went, what actress?

Are you serious?

She's like, yeah, the lead actress from that movie was in the theater.

She's here.

But you didn't know.

You're kidding.

Yeah, no idea.

So she came in maybe about 10 minutes late.

It was her and her gentleman, a gentleman, I think, think was her interpreter, walked in, bought tickets online completely unannounced, just walked in, scanned their tickets, walked in, watched the movie, and then that was it.

She popped up, was about to leave, just unannounced, completely apropos of nothing.

Just came to the movie from Tokyo.

I was gonna say.

Was she nearby?

Wow, from Tokyo.

From Tokyo.

It wasn't.

Yeah, she was.

She made a stop.

I think she was going to New York for a layover.

It was not even 24 hours.

All right, so she came to Rochester, went to Little to see this movie, and almost walked out Completely unannounced, unseen, until Kenya spotted her and went, hey, she's here.

So we went and lost our minds.

Because when in a million years would you think that would happen?

So this poor woman now gets attacked by the nine of us.

Nine of you that don't speak her language.

Not at all.

So, yeah, just this motley crew of people just like, oh, my God, you're here.

Grabbing every piece of merchandise we have and just dumping it on her.

Everything we could possibly give her.

She was the sweetest person in the world.

And it's beautiful though, that she came, she came.

And then we gave her all the swag and everything.

And then we all followed her on Instagram because of course you would.

Right.

And later on, she's in her hotel room, she's got her hat and her T shirt on.

Oh, that is the sweetest thing.

So, yeah, that's the wildest thing that's ever happened at Anomaly.

See, I thought you might have mentioned some of the movies that I'm like, I can't believe that somebody made this.

Our first year at Anomaly, when we were at the cinema, we screened a film called In Fabric.

I love that movie.

In Fabric is wonderful, but there's a scene and a woman ends up getting a merkin.

So the entire screen at the cinema is just full stop of this merkin.

So 30 by 60 screen of just merkin.

We walked.

Three people paid to be there and they walked.

Yeah, we walked three people on that one.

Oh, my God, that's amazing.

And that's what we knew.

We.

It made it.

Yeah.

If you're not pissing people off, you're doing it wrong.

I love that because I actually have a poster on my wall.

It's the picture of the twister with the sharks in it over the water that he put in a thing and then underneath it is a quote that someone else gave me that said, anytime you think that your idea is crazy, just remember somebody walked into a room full of producers and was like, I want to make a film about sharks in a tornado.

And not only did they say yes to that once, it's got like five or six.

I say, there's six now.

Yeah.

So nothing you want to do is crazy.

Yeah.

And what I will say as like the person who's attended all of the Anomaly film festivals, is that all the work that that whole crew did from the first one to now, and you know, the chaos behind the scenes and everything else that I know about but the guests don't, is what an amazingly run festival.

It really is.

And how after seven years, they're an overnight success.

An overnight success.

True.

Seven years.

Rebooted three times.

Yeah.

Because we started and then it was.

And then we had to move venues from the cinema to the little that was our next in person one.

And then we moved from the back of the little up front.

So it's been a whole.

Yeah.

So seven years, they're an overnight success.

And now they are one of the more prominent non major city genre festivals in the country.

And now people are coming to them.

But it's seven years of all the work and the passion and the drive that now they're an overnight success.

And people are like, oh, yeah, you guys.

Yeah, this is obvious.

You guys were gonna make it.

Totally.

You never doubted yourself.

Not for a minute.

Not for a minute.

And we never had any of those conversations.

But to see that now and to see where it's gotten to is just a testament to just a bunch of nerds that really care about what they do, which doves tails with what we.

With what we love to do with Lunchador.

Look at me wrapping things up.

I know.

I was like, you're just putting this in a perfect little box.

You're such a good producer.

I'm really proud of the whole team for doing that work and making something special happen for Rochester because it's just.

It's a special place for the people that need it.

Thanks, man.

Yeah.

Come hang out.

It's November 11th to the 15th.

I'll be there.

I hope everybody comes this year.

It's gonna be fun.

Yeah, I will put it on my calendar.

Yes.

If you want to come, let me know.

I'll make sure you have tickets waiting for you.

Definitely.

Oh, so any.

Anything else?

I mean, we've.

We've done the thing, I think.

I think so.

Just one last thing.

Is everything salvageable or are there episodes that you've done where you've thought, this is never going to see the light of day?

I.

We have multiple.

There's.

There's a lot.

Yeah, there's.

There's some where I will be okay with it.

I might not be thrilled, but it was okay.

I have thrown a couple away.

Not many, but I've thrown a couple away that I just.

I don't either there was a mistake and it wasn't listenable, or in the end, I don't think the guests put on their.

Their best face.

And I've had to rerecord a couple with them.

You know, you might blame the tack, you might blame something else, but I just didn't feel like they were in the right headspace.

We've had a few of those happen where they just weren't in the right headspace to do an episode.

And we had to.

We canned that one.

And I've done that a few times.

And it's not because it was fundamentally bad.

It's just I don't think this is right for what you wanted to.

Where you wanted to be as a person, as a guest.

And I think it's.

You want to be thoughtful of them.

Just because they showed up doesn't mean that you have to put it out.

I think that's a valuable thing to say.

Just to say no sometimes is you don't need to tell them no.

And I'm not sure this turned out the way we either of us wanted it to.

I've done that with episodes of my own show.

No guests, just for whatever reason.

It wasn't what we want to put out.

And going back to your statement about being a craftsperson, it just didn't meet the standards.

They were like, yeah, we'll do something else one other day.

Yeah, you know, we'll try again.

Yeah.

What do you think about this episode?

This is a keeper.

This has been a delight, I was gonna say.

And that's why you're experts.

But now that's really why you're experts.

But knowing that and being able to recognize that is why you.

Why you are experts at what you do.

Well, we appreciate that very much.

Well, thank you guys for having us in your studio and for joining our show today.

Thank you for having us.

This has been so fun.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of urban.

We could make that happen.

I think we should do this again.

I would love to.

And if anybody else wants to listen to any of the shows on the Lunchadore podcast network, you can go to lunchadore.org to check it out.

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