#24 - How to Start a Podcast in 2025
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Auto-generated transcriptGenerated automatically from the audio and formatted for reading. Nothing has been reworded, so expect the odd mis-hearing, and no speaker names.
Welcome back to Curiosity Class, the podcast where we breakdown complex topics into easy to understand ideas and bite sized pieces. My name is Jeff Albaum and I've been a curious person my entire life. Inspired by Albert Einstein's quote, If you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. We aim to make learning accessible and engaging. On this show, we're going to bring you experts from various fields ranging from personal finance to physics to help you understand everything from 401(k)s to how airplanes fly. So let's dive in and satisfy our curiosity together.
What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Curiosity Class. Today's episode is gonna be all about how to start a podcast. I feel like in 2025, everyone has a podcast. Depending on where you live in Austin, it is a very big thing. There's like apartment complexes with podcast, like recording studios as an amenity, which is wild and super cool. But when I tell people that I have a podcast, the kind of a mixed review and mixed range of reactions, a lot of which is, oh, that's cool. I've always wanted to do 1. I just didn't, you know, I don't know how to do it right.
So the goal of this episode is to just show a, a basic introduction of like, what are the things you actually need in order to start and create a podcast in 2025? Spoiler alert, not a lot. So let's dive in here and get started. So first let's talk about equipment. A couple things. You need basically just a microphone. You can use headphone microphones like Airpods or or wired microphones. The thing is it's it kind of messes up the sound. It's not very good quality. You can get a pretty good microphone on Amazon for like anywhere from 20 to $50.00.
So and then you kind of have this, it sounds really good and it has like studio quality sound. So that's definitely a worth the investment. I also wanted to show some of the softwares that I use. If anyone has any questions on these or comments or or ways to improve for me because I'm always looking to improve as well, please let me know. But this is kind of my text stack and the things that I use. So I'm going to share my screen and walk you through what I use. OK, so this is Riverside. This is a software that I use to do a lot of recording and editing.
In fact, all of the recording and editing. So it allows you to send a link to guests. It allows you to hit the actual record button. It gives you the output that it gives you is pretty cool. It gives you like full on audio and video tracks for each guest. So if there's if there's multiple guests, each guest has their own audio and video track for editing, which makes it really easy to edit in the future. They have a lot of plans and and pricing in tier structures. So I'm not going to go through that today. You can just click on their website to figure that out.
But I've been very happy with them. They're they're very solid. I think they're fairly well regarded in the industry. And they recently started hosting, which hosting is kind of the next step you need for a podcast. So once you've recorded your episode and you, you don't have to use Riverside. You can use zoom, you can use Google meet, you can use Loom. Like anything that you want to record a call or a recording with you or your guest is gonna be great. I happen to choose Riverside. It's, I found it's fairly cost effective and does a really good job.
So, yeah, you by no means have to use Riverside, but this is the one that I use. And I think a lot of other podcasts and shows use it. And I think they're, it seems like from a layman's perspective, they've been doing a really good job of constantly improving. So, you know, it's always nice when the company that you pay money to is using that revenue to grow and make themselves better, make the product better. So I felt that as a, as a user, you know, I'd recommend if anyone wants to start a podcast, this is a great one. They have a free a free tier to try it out and it's pretty cool.
So I like it a lot. So that's Riverside and basically once you finish your podcast, once you have the episode ready to go, you got to edit it, right? So the cool thing about Riverside is they have a built in editor. And when I started Curiosity Class, I knew nothing about editing videos. I'd never done it before. I had no background or experience. I actually didn't start off using Riverside editor. I used iMovie, which was fine to get going. It's very intuitive and very easy to learn. The issue with that was it was really hard to, it took a lot of space on my computer because what I was doing, I was recording these kind of long high quality videos, right?
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So these video files were fairly big. It's like 5 gigabytes an episode up to I would download them onto my laptop, import them to iMovie, edit them and then export them as either MP fours or MP3 files depending on if it was where it was being uploaded to. And so like it was a 5 GB download and then a five GB like export. So that was 10 gigabytes basically of data per episode and it just wasn't sustainable for my laptop. So what I started doing, and this has been super helpful, is Riverside has a built in editor that I've been using to edit the shows within Riverside.
So I should never download the actual episode. So the file size is always fairly small. I don't have the files on my computer. It's all stored in the cloud through Riverside. So that's also very fairly helpful. Versus if you do Zoom or something, you will have to actually download the file, edit it, etcetera, and then export it out and then upload it to wherever you're going to upload it to. So from there, once you have your, your podcast episode, you've done your editing, etcetera, Now you have to it's called hosting, which I'm going to try to explain what it is.
And then like I'm going to ask chess GPT to explain it better. But my understanding of hosting is like, where does your podcast live? Like where in the cloud does it live? Like who is who is hosting it by I I think you can probably think of it similarly to like what server is hosting your domain name? Maybe I I don't know, like if you own a domain name, like who's hosting that? Maybe it's like cloud fair or AWI don't know. I actually don't know what that means exactly, but you have to have it hosted somewhere. And so Riverside just introduced you can host through Riverside, which is interesting.
And I actually have not tried that yet, but what I use is called Spotify for creators. So this is what it looks like. It's pretty easy. This is curiosity class. These are the numbers boom, 540 streams is pretty cool. These are the numbers 540 streams. I'm actually very happy with that. Like 500 people, over 500 people have listened to an episode, which is like, I don't know, I think that's mind blowing and I don't take that for granted. So I'm very grateful for every every listen. But so this is Spotify for creator. So when you want to go to make a new episode, all you hit is new episode and you're gonna upload the audio or video and you add in the details of the episode.
So I have to select a file, which I don't have. But then you just like write the episode description and you hit publish and then it shows up on Spotify whenever you want. So it's it's like radically simple in 2025. And Spotify for creators is free, by the way. So this is a free service. Riverside is paid, but besides that, like there's no, I think Riverside is like 20 bucks a month, $26 a month. So not nothing, but like basically the cost of, of a Netflix subscription. And then you too can have a podcast, which I think is so cool. So that is kind of a long Oh, I wanted to show.
I want to ask ChatGPT what, what hosting actually is? What does podcast hosting actually mean? I think it's this one, yeah. OK, so a pot this for those of you listening, this says a podcast hosting platform provider stores your audio files so listeners can stream download them, generates your RSS feed, the link that connects your show to Spotify, Apple, etcetera. Handles distribution automatically pushes new episodes out everywhere, often provides analytics and monetization tools. Examples include Buzz, Sprout, Libsyn, Spotify for podcasters, Anchor now merged into Spotify.
OK, cool. So that that's actually quite helpful. That's the other cool thing about I think all of these platforms now is so with Spotify for Creators, although it's called Spotify for Creators, when I publish a podcast episode, it goes to both Spotify and Apple Music and Amazon Music and think like iHeartRadio or something. So it's on all those platforms even though I've only published it via Spotify for Creator. So that's a cool thing. And you can connect. It's called your RSS feed and this is what it's talking about here. It's the link that connects your shows to multiple different like actual outputs and platforms.
So that is a behind the scenes look into how to make a podcast in 2025. I hope you guys like this. If you have any questions or comments or any suggestions, please let me know. If you have any interest in starting a podcast, please reach out to me. I'd love to help you get started. And thank you as always for your time and I look forward to seeing you next time. Bye everybody.