Introducing Nerd Sh!t

Let's get this out of the way in the beginning. This is not a blog that has anything do with my books, my writing tips/tricks, or my publishing journey. This is about a new podcast that I co-host with one of my children that we lovingly named "Nerd Sh!t".

Of my 4 kids, my 2nd son and I share a number of interests. I share interests with all of my kids whether its football, gaming, whatever, but this son and I tend to spend a great deal of time discussing these things. He lives next door to us and we find ourselves continually bonding over our shared interests as we have done for the last several years.

It is a great relationship that we have and I love that he and I can talk about interests that we both enjoy.

While engaged in a conversation about if John Wick is considered a hero or not, we came to the conclusion that it might be interesting to record our conversations, especially since we seem to have them damn near daily, about such topics and turn it into a podcast. Neither of us have ever hosted a podcast or even participated in many but know that they are sources of great entertainment and information for others.

For the next few days we set about discussing topics, organization, recording requirements, scheduling, and various other bits of details for our idea. I offered several names but once the words "nerd shit" were uttered as the summation of the show's premise that was the only name the show could have.

A few days later and we had a logo

I'm not a professional digital artist but this design worked for us and that's the design we went with.

From there it was just a matter of recording our first episode, or so we thought.

We found a day that we were both at home and spent a few hours locked in my office recording, re-recording, adjusting, listening, and critiquing our efforts. At one point we even ran to the store to buy a different microphone because we didn't feel the mic I had (which wasn't a cheap mic to begin with) was giving us the full quality we wanted.

A few hours later and we had an entire episode recorded. It wasn't perfect, still isn't, but it was done. All we thought we had left to do was some basic editing to add our pre-recorded intro and outro before posting it to our Buzzsprout account for distribution.

Well, as it turns out, there was more the distribution than either of us knew.

I spent the majority of the day managing our RSS feed between Buzzsprout and other common podcast hosting services like Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM, and more. Some integrations were pretty easy but some took me a few tries to get right or some time for their internal review processes to complete.

It was a bit more involved than either of us had expected but by the end of the day, our podcast was live and distributed to the public. And a quick tweak to our website and the podcast was even ready to stream there.

The final challenge in distribution was getting the audio file converted and uploaded to our YouTube channel since YouTube is for videos and not just audio. Eventually, we managed to get that done too.

All that is left to do now is grow our listener base and produce more episodes. We have several episodes planned, included an unboxing episode for the new Magic the Gathering set that drops soon.

If anyone is curious to learn about the show or listen to episodes, you can always learn about the show on our website and listen to our podcasts from your favorite service by searching "Nerd Sh!t". And be sure to follow our podcast page on Facebook to keep up to date on when new episodes drop, upcoming topics and guests, or just general info about the show.