If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite podcast is made or thought about starting one of your own, this episode of the Open at Intel podcast is for you.
In this lively conversation recorded at KubeCon, host Katherine Druckman chats with Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo, the prolific podcasters behind the Changelog podcast network. Get a peek behind the scenes of Changelog as the three discuss managing the many unsung facets of podcast production, preparing for interviews, helping guests feel confident, and more.
Listen to the full episode here. This conversation has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
Katherine Druckman: Tell us about your podcast network and how you got started.
Adam Stacoviak: I was working in software on the front end and was working with a couple people that produced a podcast. This is back in 2005, in the early days of podcasting. The cohost had to stop hosting, and I was asked to host. I said sure, and the rest is history in a way. Eventually, we started a consultancy together and that podcast became an asset of the business. Through some change, my cohost left the business, so I kept doing the podcast and eventually evolved the idea into The Web 2.0 Show. We talked to lots of people, like Mint.com at the earliest of days. The GitHub founders were on that show three months after GitHub’s inception.
Katherine Druckman: How many shows do you have?
Jerod Santo: Changelog is the big one. That has three flavors. There’s a news component on Mondays, interviews on Wednesdays, and a talk show on Friday, which has recurring guests and topical conversations.
Katherine Druckman: I know you also have Practical AI.
Jerod Santo: That’s a big hit. We have JS Party. That's all about web development. We have Go Time, which is about the Go programming language, systems programming, etcetera. We have Founders Talk, which is Adam’s show. It’s one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. We also have Ship It, which is our cloud, DevOps, getting-things-into-production-and-seeing-what-happens show.
Katherine Druckman: How many hosts do you have under your umbrella? You can’t possibly do all this by yourselves.
Jerod Santo: We have a couple of panel shows. JS Party and Go Time are both community-oriented panel discussions. I’m one of the panelists on JS Party, but neither one of us is on Go Time. Each show has about six or eight rotating hosts, and episodes have anywhere between one and three hosts on it with guests. Practical AI and Ship It have hosts, and we work with them to produce the show. So that’s our posse—probably like 12ish people.
The Unglamorous Side of Podcasting
Katherine Druckman: There’s a trend of companies wanting to start a podcast and thinking it’s easy, but podcasters know it’s not just hanging out and having conversations—there’s a lot of research and post-production. For all the people out there thinking about starting a podcast, how much time would you say you spend doing things like researching topics and recruiting guests?
Jerod Santo: We’ve had the pleasure of being able to turn it into a business, so it’s easier now to do that work. We have support. We also don’t have other things to do. But the answer is constant. You’re constantly scheduling. You’re constantly trying to see what’s interesting—because one of the things we do is help people understand what’s interesting and why. That’s why a lot of people come to us. You have to keep up with all that stuff. Scheduling a podcast is a constant thing.
Katherine Druckman: You also need broad knowledge. You may not need deep knowledge, but you need to know a little bit about everything. How do you prepare?
Adam Stacoviak: Just humbleness, honestly. We approach things through the lens of being an impostor. We tend to be the imposter for our audience in a way. Because our show is so broad, we can’t know everything about everything, but we can use our experience to understand areas where we’re not deep. And then we just ask questions. Learn their story. In most cases, the guest shares their story, and as they begin to share it, obvious patterns begin to emerge that you can apply to pretty much every conversation.
Katherine Druckman: We’re in the privileged position of being able to constantly gather information from people who are really excited about their areas of expertise. What are you most excited about in all you’ve heard from people from all over the open source world?
Jerod Santo: I realized I geek out on open source licensing stuff, more so than our audience. I just enjoy the thought processes that go into it. I’m still a layman in the area, but those conversations fascinate me. Then in the craft of software, I really enjoy talking with people who’ve been in the trenches, writing code for many years, about how they do what they do and the way they go about making decisions, designing their software—that’s really where I end up camping out.
Adam Stacoviak: I came for the software but I stayed for the people. I get excited about somebody else’s story—learning about it, helping them realize where they could go, sometimes dreaming with them and giving them a path because they’re just so close to their problems that they can’t quite see the holistic picture. I also love business. I love the journey of going from zero to one—and what it takes to get there—and then from one to two. How do you have an idea, incept it, build a story around it, build a company around it, build a team around it, get people to invest in it, and then actually provide product market fit and value to customers?
Putting Guests at Ease
Katherine Druckman: You’ve been doing this for so many years it probably comes naturally to you, but it doesn’t necessarily come naturally to your guests. How do you help people along?
Adam Stacoviak: I feel like our answer is logical. We’re just people being people with people. During our preconversation before the show, we tell guests, “This is the show. We’re just like this.” And they relax because it’s not us throwing questions at them or grilling them on X, Y, and Z. It’s just a conversation between people who are geeking out about software and what it takes to create good software and good community—all the things that are involved in open source, like being a maintainer, a contributor, a community member.
Jerod Santo: At a more practical level, we have a process that we take people through. It starts with a guest guide. We’ve rewritten it and rewritten it. The first thing is making sure they know exactly what to expect and how they can prepare themselves. We say certain things to relax them—for instance, “This is not live. This will be professionally edited. If you screw up, no big deal, you can start over and our editor is amazing. He listens to every word we say and he’s going to make us all sound way smarter than we are.” I think saying stuff like that helps people realize they’re in good hands. Then we start talking to them about things that have nothing to do with the show—we usually start by asking what they had for breakfast because anybody can talk about that. And it’s good for a sound check. Then we ask if there’s anything in particular that they want to make sure we talk about, or anything that's off limits—the standard stuff to let people feel at ease and hopefully forget that they’re being recorded.
The Power of the Pod
Katherine Druckman: Is there anything else you wanted to share?
Adam Stacoviak: Podcasting is awesome. Keep doing it. Find stories, share them, get people to listen. Do what you can to find somebody who is less known and help them become more known or find someone who has a story and can’t quite articulate it, and then help them articulate it. There’s so much power in that. You have the power to help people find new people across the globe. We can connect anywhere.
Katherine Druckman: I like it. Open source is about people, it’s about community. Podcasting is too.
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About the Author
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she’s a longtime champion of open source and open standards.