In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is revealed that the Earth is a supercomputer designed by Deep Thought, the supercomputer that came before it.
“DEEP THOUGHT: I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me. A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate – and yet I will design it for you. A computer which can calculate the question to the Ultimate answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself will form part of its operational matrix. And it shall be called The Earth.”
Good is responding to the commonly held view that a machine could never be as intelligent as a human.
He argues that humans have limitations in intelligence. Ultimately, a machine could be constructed that would match or even exceed a human’s capability.
Good fundamentally believed that computers and their ultra-intelligent machine successors would deliver a benefit to humanity. The opening line of this seminal paper reads:
“The survival of man depends on the early construction of an ultra-intelligent machine.”
In it, he also originated the idea of an “intelligence explosion”:
“Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever.
Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”
So is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy supercomputer Earth docile? According to Ford Prefect it is, “Mostly Harmless.”
If you enjoyed this article, and know where your towel is, you might like this episode of The End of the World by Josh Clark:
And you also might like to join my Hitchhikers appreciation group, Stand Up for Towel Day.
Sally wants selective ovulation, James wants a skull flap. There’s a suggestion from the audience for One Massive Ear and Simon is borrowing from the opossums which could hold the key to saving snakebite victims.
You can playback the sentence you’re reading to correct errors, and it’s possible to download the results as a .vtt file for YouTube.
But I think I’ve just found something better.
The Otter service uses AI to transcribe voice notes. It’s also possible to upload audio files to the program.
The user interface is so much nicer to use.
The playback feature is better, and the accuracy is superior to Google speech to text in the experiments I’ve done so far.
You have to check this out.
If you’re a performer, you might also enjoy the ability to riff into your phone and have an app transcribe the results for future reference.
I’ve just uploaded the voice memo recording of a gig I did in July last year, and Otter has transcribed it for me, for a performance on Friday. Having not thought about the show for six months, I now have a script!
Genius.
If you’re on zoom calls at the moment, Otter will transcribe your meeting notes, with fully searchable results.
Which apps do you use every week to make your show?
Approximately 80% of podcast listening is via Apple podcasts in 2020.
Standard podcast loudness according to Apple should be -19 LUFS for a mono file, and -16 LUFS for a stereo file.
Which is great, if you have ever heard of LUFS. If not, here’s a quick explainer.
What are LUFS?
LUFS stands for Loudness Unit Full Scale. Loudness Units are the unit of measurement used to analyse average loudness over time.
Previous level standards quantified the peak level (the loudest part of your audio, however brief) or the average level of the audio. But LUFS standardises loudness in relation to how we perceive it.
This means that two pieces of audio with the same LUFS measurement should sound equally loud.
Two pieces of audio that register the same LUFS should sound equally loud.
Which means that if you match your podcast audio to -19 LUFS for a mono file, and -16 LUFS for a stereo file, it should sound as loud as other podcasts.
How to adjust loudness
I’m a huge fan of Auphonic, and you can tell auphonic’s production engine to master your audio to -16 LUFS.
Under ‘Audio Algorithms’ you’ll see an option to adjust the Loudness Target
What you’ll get out of Auphonic is a beautifully mastered sound file at the correct loudness for iTunes, and every other podcasting platform.
Levels are smoothed out, compression has made each voice on your podcast easier to listen to, and the whole thing just sounds like a beautiful, bright sound bath.
Delicious.
Let me know what you’re working on, and any questions I can try to help with. I use comments to work out what to write about next.
Level Up Human live at the Barbican. Helen Scales, Vanessa Lowe, Cerys Bradley, Simon Watt, Rachel Wheeley, Robert Hindges and Barbican Life Rewired curator, Jamie Upton
So you’ve spoken to everyone you personally know in your niche. Where do we go from here?
The good news is that the guests you’ve already spoken to can be the keys to your future guests.
It’s a good idea to stay in touch with them, and nurture the relationship you extended by inviting them onto your show.
Help them to share the ideas they’re excited about, and ask them one key question.
“Who in your field of expertise should be famous, but isn’t?”
If they can give you a few names, these are the people it might be worth investigating next.
Use online book sites to research the market
Who’s written a book in your niche? Many online book sites have ‘Customers also viewed/bought’ sections. Start with a book in your niche that you know, and then see what else has been published in the area.
You can go down some fascinating rabbit holes doing this research!
Apps like Blinkist can help you get the gist of entire books in around 10 minutes, so you can make a shortlist of which authors to contact.
Do some market analysis of everyone talking about your niche. Writers, podcasters and YouTubers might be good to invite onto your show, or they may have a laundry list of episodes with relevant guests guesting for you to explore.
You don’t want the exact same guest list as everyone else, but if you do book a guest from another podcast, listen to the episode. Work out what angles haven’t been covered.
Contacting authors, and other experts in your field
Having used up all the personal connections you can, it is sometimes useful to contact an author, or another expert in your field who you have not yet met.
But how to do this? What do you say to entice them onto your show?
Advice from my co-host on Level Up Human, Simon Watt, is:
“Everyone has a website nowadays. Make first contacts friendly but very brief. Be up front about time and budget if you have one.”
Your email or DM, or whatever you deem the most appropriate way to contact the potential guest, should get straight to the point.
Hi [their name],
I’m [your name] from [podcast name]. I’d love to get you on the show for a chat about [topic]. I think it would be really beneficial for our audience who are interested in [subject].
[Let them know where you discovered them.] I just read your book [Name of book] and it helped me personally to understand more about [angle].
If you’d be interested, here’s a Calendly link where you can book a slot that works for you.
Calendly is great, because it eliminates all that back and forth you can get with guests for arranging dates.
Make an email signature with your podcast details and a link to your show for these emails, so your guest can click through and have a look at the work you’ve already done.
Contacting high profile guests
I listened to a podcast episode called ‘How to Get Super High Profile Guests’, with Jordan Harbinger on the Pat Flynn podcast, Smart Passive Income. Here are the key tips.
Be prepared to build your show before you can get a guest to say yes
Seth Godin reportedly says yes to podcast appearances, once the podcast has published its 100th episode. So it’s worth proving to your prospective guests that you’re in this for the long haul. And that you yourself have committed to your show.
Maintain relationships with publicists
If a publicist offers you a guest, chances are that guest won’t be a great fit for your podcast.
But Jordan usually replies to them to say that this guest isn’t great right now, but that he is interested in speaking to… and then he’ll outline the guests he wants for his show.
He says he generally gets a surprised response from the publicists, who I guess are used to getting nothing back from 80% of people they contact.
He’s been offered some guests by publicists who actively try to find people on their books who might suit him better using this method.
“I’m making myself easier to work with, which publicists love, because most people just delete their emails and never reply.
So when you’re polite to them, and you make it easier for them to pitch you, you get more pitches. And yes, you end up passing on more stuff… but you also end up with the occasional Malcolm Gladwell, Kobe Bryant, Chelsea Handler.
Because they like you, they know you’re going to respond, and they know you respond quickly.”
“I’m making myself easier to work with, which publicists love, because most people just delete their emails and never reply.”
Jordan Harbinger
And one final tip:
Be polite and persistent
The ‘father of advertising’, David Ogilvy, has this to say on persistence:
“The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel.”
David Ogilvy
If you’ve made initial contact and they can’t do it, keep in touch with them, it might be possible to ask again later on, perhaps when they’ve a project to plug.
Send them an email every once in a while. Interact with them on social media. Keep asking. Within reason, obv.
You never know when your request might coincide with something they’ve got coming up to talk about. And in the meantime, your audience will have grown.
What have you found particularly helpful for finding guests for your podcast? Drop me a comment and let me know.
One of the questions podcasters ask themselves is, ‘how do I reach more listeners?’
We check stats and tell everyone we know about our podcast. We post every episode to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and risk burnout as our reservoir of creative ways to say the same thing rapidly diminishes.
We investigate social media scheduling apps, and read about content calendars, and gradually lose the will to live.
But maybe there’s a smarter way to do this. In order to reach more listeners, it helps to think about how podcasts are found.
How do people who listen to podcasts find podcasts?
They ask for recommendations (this is why you should tell everyone you know about your show) and they search for podcasts on their favourite subjects.
So the first thing is to make sure that your podcast looks like a podcast about your subject.
The second thing is to make sure you’re listed by places where listeners get their podcasts.
Podcatchers
I moved Level Up Human to Acast in June 2018, and I really like the platform.
Their interface is easy to use, they moved all our episodes from Soundcloud for us, and their stats are pretty comprehensive.
I discovered when I looked into it that 80% of Level Up Human listeners listen via Apple Podcasts.
This means that 80% of our listeners are listening on iPhones. The number of listeners we get through podcatcher services is next to nothing.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t sent our RSS feed to any of them.
:facepalm emoji:
So, if you’re in the same boat, here’s a list of podcatcher services to submit your RSS feed to.
SEO
SEO has got to be one of the most uninspiring acronyms of all time.
It conjours images of slumping over a keyboard for TOO LONG.
Too technical, boring, boring.
SEO is for dudes.
But, it’s just possible that paying attention to how search engines index podcasts might help with discoverability.
After all, since an update last year, Google search results return podcasts now, and one of the ways they do this is by transcribing each episode using AI and machine learning, and picking out keywords.
So this means it might be smart to work out what your show’s keywords are, and maybe say them in your introduction.
If I was Google, I would put more weight in the words used in the first couple of minutes of the show.
If your episode has good SEO, it could show up in searches for a topic you discuss, even if that topic isn’t listed in the show or episode title.
So what can podcasters do to boost Search Engine Optimisation?
Here are a few ideas.
Choose a clear title
Choose a title for your podcast that explains what the podcast is about. If you already have a show title where that isn’t the case, consider adding a subtitle.
For example, I really need to call our show, Level Up Human: redesigning the human body.
2. Write a clear podcast description
There are search functions within Spotify and Apple podcasts. So if people are searching with keywords, make sure you use your keywords in your podcast description.
Not over and over and over again, obv, but at least once.
4. And yes, share on social media
It’s a lovely idea to promote on three or more social media platforms every week, but it’s also exhausting. If you’re a solo podcaster, it’s fine to focus on the one that performs best for you.
It’s possible to create tracking links for use on different social media platforms. Work out which channels perform best for your programme.
‘Urchin Traffic Monitoring’ or UTM is one step beyond the remit of this post, but if of interest let me know in the comments.
What else do you do to boost the discoverability of your show?
Over in the Science Podcasts Facebook group, there has been some discussion of the best biology/ forensics podcasts for high school students. Here are five favourites.
Professional scientist Michelle Campbell-Firak presents true crime. A super high quality, beautifully narrated podcast which will appeal to fans of Serial.
Michelle tells true crime stories, and explains how forensic science contributed to how the crime was solved.
Instagram: @testtubetestimony, including slides of the research papers used in each episode.
Ryan Dalton is a brilliant comedian and presenter of this wonderful podcast, Into The Wild.
Ryan’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious, plus Into The Wild has the best intro music of all time.
Ryan’s recent guests include wildlife filmmakers and presenters, explorers, field biologists, broadcasters, authors and national treasures alike. Don’t miss it.
Botanical Mystery Tour is a podcast about the real science behind plants in popular culture.
Jasmine Leonas and Erica Masini from the Chicago Botanic Garden interview a scientist, horticulturist, or educator at the Garden who dives into the botany behind our favorite stories.
I LOVE this show. Sadly no longer active, but binge the archive for some wonderful botany and plant stories.
We discuss enhanced vision, limb regeneration, gecko hands, super kidneys and re-breathing.
Extracts from the episode, edited for readability are available here.
In the news…
Kate is tickled and baffled by a news story about Microsoft. They have patented to generate cryptocurrency by monitoring people’s brain activity.
Steve’s news story is entitled, ‘Venomous Frogs use Heads as Weapons.’
And Rach’s levelled up human is Bertolt Meyer, a DJ, producer and Professor of Organisational Psychology from Technische Universität Chemnitz who has hacked his prosthetic hand to hook it up to his synth.
The Pitches
Steve wants to borrow the abilities of the Iberian sharp-ribbed newt, a type of salamander which can regenerate limbs and organs.
Kate, on the other hands, thinks the human body should be able to see the polarisation of light
From the audience, we have suggestions including souped up kidneys and gecko hands.
Finally Simon has a suggestion from nature.
Which of our suggestions will make Rachel’s shortlist? Which will win? Listen to find out.
Podcast quality is widely variable. There are some shows I would listen to over watching a multi-billion dollar film. Others are almost unlistenable.
When I start listening to an episode of a new show, there’s a chance it will be on one of the unlistenables.
I’m nervous. I don’t want it it to be that.
There’s an equal chance I’m going to disappear down a rabbit hole listening to everything they’ve published for the last six months, and see a new episode dropping as my personal equivalent of Christmas morning. I’m a bit weird like that.
The point is, it could go either way.
Here’s where show notes can help.
As I stand in my kitchen, speculatively listening to an episode of a podcast I haven’t heard before, I’m looking at the show notes.
Hoping they’ll shed some light on what exactly I’m listening to.
Good show notes can hold the hand of your listener, introducing yourself, sitting them down in a comfy chair, making them a cup of tea.
And it’s worth remembering that whilst podcast listeners likely have an auditory learning style, most people learn visually as well. Your podcast show notes can tell them what your vision for your show is in one sentence.
That’s why our show notes start like this: ‘Level Up Human is a podcast panel show on a mission to redesign the human body.’
Here are some more potential benefits.
Writing show notes improves the SEO of your podcast. Podcasts now show up in Google search results. I’m no SEO expert, but notes sprinkled with keywords must help your podcast show up in relevant searches.
Hook new listeners. Your show notes can provide as much of a hook as the first 60 seconds of your show. Tell us in the first sentence why this episode is worth our time.
Help your fans. Podcast listeners multi-task. They’re not going to take their hands out of the washing up to write down the name of the book you just mentioned. Link to it for them.
Help yourself. It’s much easier to search your back catalogue for a quote or a clip when your show notes tell you what’s in each episode.
Call to action. At the end of every episode, you can ask your listener to support you on Patreon, write a review or join your mailing list. Why not put handy links to these things in the show notes?
Show notes don’t need to be lengthy.
You don’t need to transcribe the whole programme, although there are some podcasters who do this.
If you’re interested in transcription, I highly recommend auphonic’s transcription editor, the smartest way to create podcast transcripts I’ve found so far (drop me a comment if you’ve discovered better.)
It’s important to find a balance between the benefit to you and your listener vs the time it takes to write them.
I’ve been reading James Clear’s brilliant book, Atomic Habits.
In it, he tells the story of the British cycling team, who went from mediocrity to winning everything there was to win at the 2012 London Olympics.
And they did this, says Clear, by improving everything they could think of just by 1%.
They improved the cyclists’ sleeping habits, attitude, gear, clothes, nutrition, even bike storage came under scrutiny.
If you’re reading this and thinking – wasn’t there a doping scandal though – James covers this in the British Cycling Update on his website.
Doping scandals aside, the team were making a million and one improvements on a day-by-day basis, which allowed them to improve exponentially overall.
And you can too.
With small improvements every day, we can reap the benefits of what Team GB’s cycling coach, Dave Brailsford, calls The Aggregation of Marginal Gains.
When you’re writing, podcasting, making the thing you create every day, ask yourself this.
What can I do to make my system 1% better?
Recently, I’ve been trying to put this into practice on my podcast, Level Up Human.
We’re 70 episodes in now, and I’ve been working on the show notes. For the first 50 episodes, we didn’t write any. It wasn’t a huge thing in podcasting.
Then I noticed other shows released extensive show notes every episode. I’ve tried to improve ours by 1% for the last 10 episodes in a row.
Having done this, I also discovered it’s possible to feed your podcast into a Google speech to text translation service, in order to create an edited transcript of the show.
This allows our listeners to get a deeper understanding of the episode. Hopefully, it extends their enjoyment of the show.
This can be applied to multiple aspects of life. If you make a 1% improvement change every day, over time these build into systems that make it easier to succeed.
Clear says in his book,
“The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.” – James Clear
Building routines can lead to exponential growth and improvement.
It takes time, but after a while, these small changes build on one another to allow rapid improvement and growth.
Just don’t expect the returns to show up immediately. You have to keep at it!
I’ve been enjoying the Streaks app recently, which makes it easier to track small habits and build streaks to incorporate them into daily routines.
If you’re a science podcaster or love science podcasts, I run a new facebook group you might like to join.
This means that 80% of our listeners are listening on iPhones. The number of listeners we get through podcatcher services is next to nothing.
