How to Make a Chat Show Podcast, With Josh Janssen & Tommy Jackett, Creators of 'The Daily Talk Show'

Created in 2018, The Daily Talk Show is "a conversation sometimes worth recording" with mates Tommy Jackett and Josh Janssen. Each weekday, Tommy and Josh chat about life, creativity, business and relationships — big questions and banter, with regular visits from guests and friends of the show. This is The Daily Talk Show: a promise to be there for you every weekday.

After 100 episodes of the podcast, Josh and Tommy decided to bring their skills together with a new production company, BIG MEDIA COMPANY.

Josh has 15 years’ experience in content production. He’s worked for a national drivetime radio show as a Digital Content Producer, worked as a Content Lead for Australian tech company Envato, and has worked extensively with clients through his own production companies.

Tommy has spent over a decade honing his craft in front of the camera and behind the microphone. He’s spent 2 years hosting a breakfast radio show in a town called Shepparton, creating 15 hours of radio per week and over the last 3 years working closely with brands, helping them share their stories through video.

Below, Tommy and Josh tell us about the ins and outs of creating The Daily Talk Show and how to make a super interesting chat show podcast.

THE IDEA

We’re Josh Janssen and Tommy Jackett, two mates — now business partners — who spend around half an hour each day shooting the breeze for our podcast, The Daily Talk Show. Sometimes serious, other times completely ridiculous, we created our podcast as a reason to regularly chat and stay connected. We’ve done over 270 episodes of the show.

With the popularity and growth of remote work, flexible hours and freelancing, we saw our friends and fellow business owners craving social interactions. A place to escape, to be challenged and to learn a new perspective. Sometimes it’s just the two of us, other times we’re joined by guests and friends of the show.

Having both worked in traditional media, including radio, we saw the limitations of appealing to the masses and producing homogenised content – being safe, inoffensive and appealing to media executives selling the status-quo. The Daily Talk Show is our commitment to producing original content, five days a week. A place to experiment, to connect and to grow as creators.

THE PROCESS: CONVERSATIONS

What makes a great, free flowing conversation? Producing The Daily Talk Show is an exploration of exactly that. Ideas are important, chemistry helps, but the biggest factor of being an effective conversationalist is your curiosity.

Curiosity in the world, in your co-host’s stories, in perspectives other than your own. To ask ‘Why do I think this way?’ and being willing to be wrong (whilst people listen on).

When you’re okay with being wrong, it becomes easier to be honest. ‘Honesty above looking good’ makes for more entertaining and relatable conversations.

THE PROCESS:  PLANNING

We use a project management tool called Asana to organise ideas we want to bring to the show. (We pay for Asana, but were using the free software Trello previously and recommend it for anyone after a free solution). We both have a column with individual cards. They have phrases, words, and sometimes links to help prompt us when doing the show. We drag around three cards each to the ‘today’ column, which we reference on our laptops during the show. Sometimes we get to the stories, sometimes we don’t need them at all.

THE PROCESS: RECORDING

A couple of microphones into a recorder. Drag it into basic software. Add a limiter. We now use the RØDECaster Pro console, which means we don’t need to worry about compression in post-production. To celebrate our one year anniversary of doing the show, we decided to film every episode going forward. This adds a few more steps.

THE PROCESS: NO EDITS REQUIRED

That’s right, we don’t edit the show at all. Thanks to the long format of podcasts, you have time to elaborate, to backtrack and evolve your thinking as people listen in. The ‘ummms’ the ‘ahhhs’ and the ‘I probably shouldn’t have said that’ are all part of the show.

To create a show five days a week, we don’t have time to edit. We don’t have the energy, either, to analyse the offensive things we might have said or to remember where in the timecode we sounded stupid.

We have faith in the format. Our tagline is “A conversation sometimes worth recording”. It’s a way to help us not overbake the whole thing.

THE HARDEST PART?

The hardest part has changed over time. At the start, it was hard to stay consistent. As we do the show five days a week, we’d have to coordinate schedules, which meant a lot of early mornings and late evenings.

Now, showing up each day is easy as we work together. The hard bit is adding other elements like video, social media and listener feedback into the podcast without getting distracted from the core content of the show.

Entries to My RØDE Cast are open now and close at midday (AEST) March 12, 2019. Find out more about the comp and The Daily Talk Show below:

https://www.rode.com/myrodecas

https://www.thedailytalkshow.com/

https://www.facebook.com/TheDailyTS/

https://www.instagram.com/thedailytalkshow/

https://twitter.com/TheDailyTS