Podcasts about ryan not

Cinema Drive remembers Guy Fawkes Day and Love Your Red Hair Day with a couple of movies that have nothing in common but November 5! (Kinda!) There's so much disparity between these two admirably alliterative flicks that it was too much fun for Jason and Ryan NOT to get into both.The Deep Question: What is a movie watching experience that changed your enjoyment of a film, for better or for worse?This Week's Features:Pretty in Pink (1986)V for Vendetta (2005)

THURSDAY HR 1 Monsters in a mood? Oh the latest in pretty girl problems The list of problems with Ryan Not even trying Russ now feeling a way about Mario Lopez Oscar De la Hoya abs

Welcome to the newest episode of The Cloud Pod podcast - where the forecast is always cloudy! Ryan, Jonathan, and Matt are your hosts this week as we discuss all things cloud, including updates to Terraform, pricing updates in GCP SCC, AWS Blueprint, DMS Serverless, and Snowball - as well as all the discussion on Microsoft quantum safe computing and ethical AI you could possibly want!  A big thanks to this week's sponsor: Foghorn Consulting, provides top-notch cloud and DevOps engineers to the world's most innovative companies. Initiatives stalled because you have trouble hiring?  Foghorn can be burning down your DevOps and Cloud backlogs as soon as next week.

What if you release the idea that you had for the life that you or others expected for yourself? Doing what lights you up will conquer any expectations without even meaning to and is ultimately the best way to be kind to yourself. Ryan Cwick, our guest for EP58's Wise Walk, likes to take on the world with the intention of spreading love and kindness. He doesn't back down from a challenge, and I admire how he views the world. We both share the mindset that it's important to do what lights you up. On our Wise Walk, Ryan and I talk about how a shock in life provides freedom to explore something new. Why there is not an optimal sequence to life, and how to recreate life at any point. We discuss the balance of giving to others and giving to yourself.  We share our thoughts and create space for you to reflect on these Wise Walk questions and more: Where can you shock yourself so you can fully connect to experiences that light you up? In what ways can you offer help or give on a day-to-day basis? If you give up something (because it no longer makes your heart happy), what will you choose instead to align with what will light you up? On the True Stride podcast, we take a Wise Walk to slow down and check our reality. True Stride is that feeling you get when you're aligned in your heart with all that you do, and you feel energized and happy with each and every step that you take. I'm your host, Mary Tess Rooney, and I connect with Ryan Cwick on this episode. You definitely want to listen!! Ryan Cwick says he fulfilled lots of odd jobs in his journey and stumbled into personal development. Ryan contributes to the world through his experiences as a travel enthusiast and an industrial engineer interested in solar energy. He operates as a Travel Coach through TripsWithCwick and gives back to communities by raising money through social media challenges. He organizes his spontaneous ideas into meaningful events that inspire change. The things that light us up actually make an impact in the world, whether the impact is directly or indirectly connected to our efforts. Tune in to hear ways to: Explore the thread of our True Stride through different aspects of life Intentionally follow our heart Break the norms and habits we grew accustomed to that no longer serve us Join this inspiring community to uncover a new sense of freedom, and be sure to follow Ryan as he continues to spread his bright light and Heart Value with others.   In this episode: [00:23] - Welcome to the show! [02:05] - Mary Tess talks about her thoughts on the feedback from Striders as everyone pursues their own path. [04:04] - Ryan Cwick says that making others smile is what lights him up. [05:50] - What led to Ryan's sudden move across the country, and how did this move alter his life? [07:51] - Ryan talks about the influence a series of miscellaneous jobs had on his perspective of communication and growth. [09:53] - This social media challenge inspired Ryan to explore the intersection of work, interests, and service to others. [12:15] - Ryan thinks it's imperative for people to break the norms they are accustomed to in everyday life. [14:16] - Mary Tess and Ryan discuss how having time to pause gives people space to explore and seek new things. [16:00] - What happens when life doesn't go as planned? Mary Tess speaks on her own personal experience of life taking a turn from what she once envisioned and how she chose to recreate life. [17:44] - Enjoy the present while still challenging the next level of the future.  [19:54] - In the future, Ryan says he is looking to be more involved with the nonprofit and solar industries. [21:50] - Ryan recalls the funny reason his third give-back Venmo challenge almost didn't happen. [24:16] - This moment made Ryan realize how he could amplify his impact with intention. [27:02] - Ryan says the Venmo challenge is not about the dollar amount, but the way the challenge can be a symbol of hope. [28:57] - How many challenges did Ryan complete thus far? [31:35] - Ryan says he began to focus on providing value to others as he understood himself more and more. [33:19] - Mary Tess and Ryan discuss the balance of giving to others and giving to yourself. [36:06] - Ryan shares his favorite aspects of Heart Value by Mary Tess, such as action steps for awareness. [38:09] - Mary Tess emphasizes the change she noticed once she found ways to implement insights she learned. Ryan points out the trap of ruminating on “How to do it”. [40:46] - Listen to Ryan reminisce about his “Forrest Gump” challenge to raise money and highlight exercise. [43:24] - Where did the Forrest Gump part come into play for Ryan's challenge? [46:18] - Look around and seek those moments where you can help or give. [48:51] - Where can you shock yourself to give yourself the freedom to explore? [51:27] - Ryan says seeing others spreading love and kindness brings him joy. [53:05] - Thank you for listening!   Memorable Quotes: “When a stranger pays a kindness unexpectedly, there is something about that exchange of energy that charges you differently.” - Mary Tess “Once I turned that corner of when I was shocked, and I opened my awareness to everything that I was doing, it really focused me on doing more for others.” - Ryan “Not everything has to happen overnight. We set ourselves up for success so much more when we are kind to ourselves.” - Mary Tess “You see the stuff you do everyday without thinking about it. It's so ingrained in you, you can't see it. When you do see it, that might be a great opportunity to shock yourself and start doing something different.” - Ryan   Links and Resources: Mary Tess Rooney Email Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram   Ryan Cwick LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok

We Introduced ourselves w/ the Question: Would you rather live where it only snows or the temperature never falls below 100 degrees? Ryan: where the temp never falls below 100. I have island genes and can’t stand the cold. Lee: definitely where the temp never falls below 100 since I break out into hives when I’m exposed to cold for any length of time. It super sucks. Also I’m used to 100+ temps, I live in Texas! Tanea: I’d prefer to live where temp never falls below 100. It would be like living in Thailand again. Aaron: Only Yankee in the group. I’ll deal with the snow. What are your primary ways that you communicate with students about assignments, expectations, and other important details? Lee: verbally, Canvas, announcements in Canvas, sometimes I use Skyward mass emails, also my daily schedule board (digital and analog) Tanea: Canvas, announcements, and email, and in class reminders Ryan: verbally, Canvas, emails, and the BAND app. For my community college students, I use Google Voice so that they can text me, since I’m an off-campus adjunct without office hours. Aaron: Mostly through google classroom & shared planning docs + weekly preview videos. I also make in-class announcements and have weekly zoom office hours. Do you have any guidelines so you are not answering questions 24/7? Do you communicate these to your students? Tanea: No, I encourage kids to ask questions and get clarification often. I’m not sure this is effective, but I encourage it. I’m actually working with some other teachers to examine the process for different departments. Ryan: Not really. I’d rather them ask their question and get an answer than just guess. Generally I don’t answer emails on the weekend, but if it’s a pressing question that can’t wait, I don’t mind answering Lee: absolutely. You have to set boundaries or you are working 24/7. I tell kids during school hours, I’m really good about answering emails, usually immediately. But once I leave the building, I don’t check my email, and I don’t check it until Sunday night. So if it’s urgent, it won’t get seen until the next day or Monday if it comes over the weekend. Aaron: I carry my phone when I am awake so If I get a student message, I just reply. I’m not very firm with guidelines. How much and in what ways do you communicate directly with parents? Ryan: I communicate with parents quite often, especially with IEP students. My preferred method is via email so that I have a written record of what I said, but I also use the BAND app (again, so that I have a written record of what I said). Everything gets logged in our student information system so that administration can see how much contact I’ve made. Lee: not gonna lie, this is something I have always struggled with. But I do contact parents when kids are failing, and that’s not often. I usually email and when I can’t get a hold of them that way, or they ask for a phone conference, I’ll call them. If I catch your kid engaged in academic dishonesty, I contact you, ALWAYS. I also try to send positive notes to parents about their kids because I think it’s just as important that parents hear about the good things their kids do or how awesome their kids are to have in class. Tanea: I answer their direct questions, do PTC, meet the teacher night, etc. Every now and again you have to reach out to parents via email about grades, but not often. Aaron: This is a weak spot for me as well. I don’t want to escalate things too quickly when a kid is struggling. I usually contact councilors or special educators first to see if there is a broader issue going on, and then proceed from there. We would love feedback! DM or Tweet @lifeoftheschool and share your thoughts. Credits: Please subscribe to Life Of The School on your podcast player of choice! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LOTS Music by: https://exmagicians.bandcamp.com/ Show Notes at Lifeoftheschool.org Follow us on twitter @lifeoftheschool

Today, Jon asks how to determine what your SEM budget should be...and Ryan explains why the answer may actually be to have no budget at all For all your digital marketing needs: https://www.logicalposition.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Jon: It's a common question that I hear quite a bit. "How much should I be budgeting for search engine marketing and how do I even forecast what I should be spending?" Well, securing the SEM budgets is always a challenge, right? So when you do spend on search engine marketing, you want to ensure that you reach your performance goals, but there are countless traps and ways to actually overspend or even underspend on your search engine marketing budget. And even if you follow all the best practices, you could still end up with some inefficiencies, so correctly addressing the ways to misspend requires paid search experts to consistently monitor campaign performance and budget spend. And also they need to have a pulse on what the company is trying to accomplish. So luckily for us, we have access to Ryan and he has access to 6,500 search engine marketing budgets to learn from. So today we're going to talk about ad word budgets and how to forecast what your brand should be spending and how to ensure you don't overspend or underspend. So, Ryan welcome. Ryan: Thanks, Jon. It's a big one. This topic is constantly top of mind for CFOs and there's constant tension, I think, between marketing teams and finance teams over budgets. And for me personally, it's one of my favorite topics and also my least favorite topics, just because of all the tension around it. It's my favorite because almost every company needs to be educated in how to forecast and plan budgets. But it's also my least favorite because it's always an uphill battle with changing the opinions of business owners, executives, finance teams, even marketing teams that don't understand forecasting and budgeting. It's a difficult conversation to have, but I'm happy we're going to be diving into this and hopefully doing some education. Hopefully making people think about what they're doing and how they can be maybe looking at SEM forecasting a little bit differently. Jon: Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to being educated on this. This is a topic that we were chatting before we started recording, and you have some unique perspectives on this that I've never even given thought to. So. Ryan: We both have [inaudible 00:02:32] all kinds of things, Jon. It's great to be able to do this with you, but when this topic came up in our sequence of things we're going to be talking about it. I get all hot and bothered and excited and adrenaline starts flowing and I talk fast. So bear with me, but very similar to how you get when somebody's got a discount email pop up on a site is how I get when somebody tells me what their budget is X number of dollars a month. And don't overspend. It's just, I'm on a personal mission to eliminate SCM budgeting for 99.9% of the population. It just doesn't make sense for most companies. Jon: So explain that to me, I'm interested to learn more. Why is that? Well, Ryan: we get into the conversation because finance people want to see what numbers are going to be and understanding what's going to be coming in and out of accounts. And so it's for the last a hundred years of CFO's doing work to prepare bank accounts. Marketing has been a line item on the P and L that they've paid attention to and set goals around on how much are we going to spend? What are we going to do? How much are we putting into magazines and newspapers and TV ads and billboards? So it's understandable, but SEM is in a very unique position that it's not a normal P and L line item. Let me just use an example because here's what normally happens. Finance meeting, all right, the owner is, "What the heck," gets all red in the face. "What the heck is this $350,000 charge for Google last month? You know, we need to cut that down because our retailers are selling less of our product. We need to save money. And you know, if we go into a COVID time, we've got to control all of our money and keep it from going out so we're not spending $350,000 on Google anymore. Every month, a marketing team, we need to cut a hundred thousand dollars of that." Marketing team reaches out to the logical position says, "Hey, yeah, our wholesale channel is down because nobody's shopping in stores. So we need to cut a hundred thousand dollars of our marketing budget on Google." And that I get it, logically it passes the make sense test that you're going to take that hundred thousand dollars from Google and move it to the bottom line of profit. So you can cover the missing profit from some retailers that aren't selling product. Jon: Right. They're looking at it purely as an expense line item. Ryan: Exactly. Which again, conceptually makes sense. What isn't considered in that is that $350,000 drove 1.3 million of top line revenue, 10,000 new to brand customers, and also had an impact on two million organic direct traffic revenue. And so cutting that hundred thousand dollars, most likely won't even save that company money. It'll probably cost them revenue and profit because it's not going to be driving as much top line revenue. And many times in the past, if you cut a hundred thousand dollars of billboards, you may not actually feel an impact in the business at all over the next month, depending on what you're selling, depending on what the billboard's mentioning, but it simply does move that hundred thousand dollars to the bottom line. And that again, logically makes sense. But with SEM, it doesn't operate like a historical marketing channel. It is driving so many other things that impact the business. And so because of that, it is somewhat complicated to explain that to a business owner over a phone call or, "Hey, we've got five minutes with the exec team. Let's tell them why we need to be spending on SEM." For most businesses, I'll add, will start with the crazy notion that you should not have a budget for paid search. It should be, "Nope. You are going to set your goals and going to spend. And if you can spend more, you are going to take it if you're hitting your goals." Jon: Okay. So it's not an expense line item. It's an investment. Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Okay. Ryan: If you're printing money with an investment, is there any reason you wouldn't continue printing money? And the general answer is, "Well, no, if I put a dollar in and I get $10 back, I'm going to go find a bunch more dollars. There's no limit to the number of dollars I can be spending. Because I could take that $10 that I just printed and put it back in and it prints a hundred and I take it out and it prints a thousand." The asterisk to this, which we will touch on probably a little later is it does make sense to forecast sales from SEM, potentially based on historical data for inventory or production. And that's where it does get kind of like a sliding scale on what we can spend based on the inventory we have. And I've got a couple of examples on that. Jon: So if you're not budgeting the spend, should you be looking at the back end is what you're saying. You should be budgeting the return on that adspend and what that's going to be in revenue. So you're saying, "I want to make a million dollars. What does the adspend take to hit a million dollars?" Ryan: Maybe? But the reality is, is I challenge companies to, yes, you're going to look at this, after the fact on a PNL, as a line item, but in the month itself, the spend on SEM actually doesn't have an impact on cash. Therefore it's not necessarily a normal P and L line item. So easy math example, you're going to spend a hundred dollars on paid search on Monday. Great. You set up your Google Ads account. You've got your credit card on there. You spend a hundred dollars on your credit card on Google. It drives $500 of revenue. Okay? That hundred dollars that you spent on Google Ads doesn't even hit your card until you spend 500. So it's still just in Google system. You spent in essence, at that point, fake money, it didn't hit anything. It's just a Google system, but that $500 that you processed on your website is real money. And that's going to hit your account as soon as your merchant processor will send it to you. So let's just say easy math. It's going to hit you on Wednesday 48 hours later. So every day you're going to spend a hundred dollars to get 500, your credit card's not going to get built from Google until end of day Friday, when you hit the $500 billing threshold from Google. And by that time you've already collected $500 on Wednesday, $500 on Thursday, $500 on Friday, that's hit your bank account minus the processing fee. But we will ignore that for this example, you've got $1,500 in your bank account. Your credit card has only been hit for $500. If you are like me and you're [inaudible 00:08:29] this, I pay my credit card once a month. And I pay off the entire balance on ever pay interest. And that credit card bill is probably not due until the 14th of the next month. Let's say this was the first of the month. So you've got 45 day float on that hundred dollars you spent on Monday. And by that time you've already collected money. And if you're not losing money, which ideally you're not, but you're actually making money, then it's a money printing machine that actually doesn't cost you any money. You have, in theory, an unlimited amount of money, as long as you're at least breaking even just from a cash perspective, right? And your credit card limit, obviously. Jon: So it's no longer about SEM budget forecasting. It's around the laws of SEM cash flow. Ryan: Not every business has unlimited inventory. So you might be able to spend a hundred thousand dollars tomorrow to generate a hundred thousand and $1 of profit in your business. But if you don't have the inventory to back that up, then you do have problems. And we have some clients right now that are struggling to get inventory from China for their production. I think one company has a hundred containers en route from China they're just waiting on to be able to sell and they can flip a switch, and that inventory is almost going to be gone immediately. It's crazy, the demand for their products. So from that perspective saying, "All right, we have this much inventory coming. We want to sell it." And maybe that becomes the conversation around, okay. Based on the historical data of what we've been able to sell, what we've been able to spend, what's the return on adspend goal that we need to be at to sell that much inventory? So again, this is getting somewhat complicated math, but I'll try to boil it down simple. Let's say in my brands, for example, I will spend down to break even to acquire a new customer at any point in time, because I'm competitive. I would love to put my competitors out of business because I think my product is better. My service is better, but break even is fine for me because it doesn't hit the cash. I'm getting new customers. And I have a lifetime value. If, for example, I all of a sudden had a... And this happened, I think in April we had a production hiccup. And so I knew that I was going to run out of inventory if I kept spending down to break even on like, let's make it up the 20th of April. So I said, "Okay, all right, marketing, we're actually going to raise our return on adspend goal because I need to throttle down sales because I can't run out of inventory on the 20th. I have to be able to get to the 30th before I can get my inventory back in." And so that's the strategy I use. I didn't care what we spent, as long as it wasn't losing money. I still, I said, "All right, instead of breaking even, and we're going to get a 2.5 X because based on the historical data, we think that's where my sales special is going to be." So that took some guessing and manipulation on daily sales totals. And we had to watch it pretty carefully. But once we hit inventory levels again, I was right back to pushing aggressively to sell an inventory. Jon: Yeah, that definitely makes sense. So there's other factors you need to be thinking about here and inventory sounds like is a big one for sure. Then that could be the more delimiter than what you should be spending or what the budget would be for SEM. Jon: Let me ask you this as a little divergence, but how do you get leadership on board with this type of mindset? Right? Because if you go in most financial folks would probably understand that return on investment spend, but maybe if leadership and finance is still looking at all of this as a budget line item, that's only on the expense column. How do you recommend people approach this conversation? Obviously there's simple math, just like writing it out, might help, but have you have found any tips and tricks for how to approach leadership about something like this? Ryan: It's difficult again, going into this conversation about money is always... I don't think there's any conversation around money that becomes easy, except, "Hey, I want to give you a million dollars." That's pretty easy. I'd be like, "Yeah. Okay, great. I'm in." The longer an organization has been looking at marketing on Google or Microsoft Ads as a line item that they forecast and budget annually, the more difficult it's going to be to change the minds of the team that's been doing that. We've worked in some billion dollar organizations that said, "All right, last year we did X number of dollars on our website and we expect a 10% growth. Therefore we're going to take our marketing budget for paid search, which was 10% of that total. And then we're going to add 10% to it again. So there's your budget. Go do it. Divide it up by the quarter that you think the revenue is going to come in and four quarters higher, therefore it gets 42% of the budget." And then they work down into the week and have even daily budgets. Those organizations are going to be much more difficult because they're bigger, their CFO, they were publicly traded. So they had to report numbers to shareholders and forecast what their expenses were going to be. And because SEM is an expense you report to shareholders, if that expense was a hundred percent higher than you told them it was going to be last month, they may not be happy because they're not understanding what's that top line number that it was driving. So you have to have it correlate really, really well saying, "Hey, we spent a hundred percent more, but we actually drove over a hundred [inaudible 00:13:53] more revenue." It's going to make them excited. But the group that's doing the conference call with the shareholders may not understand that and be able to break it out in that much detail, especially if it's a multibillion dollar organization and the website is a small piece of that overall business, which it was at the point we were working with them. It's challenging. So my advice is to try to chip away at certain aspects of it over time, being able to show, "Hey, when we spent more at this level, we got more, it was a direct correlation." And I like to use impression share showing potential like, "Hey, there's a potential there in impression share. We used absolute impression share at the top, which means you're in position one on Google and top impression show, which means you're just above the search results," to kind of give an indicator if there's a room to push. And then I also like to talk about what we refer to an internally as the Halo Effect. I don't think that's an official term, but if it does become an official term, you heard it here first. Paid search, specifically shopping in eCommerce has a large impact on organic traffic and direct traffic. And in fact, if you look in Analytics and you get lost in Attribution, sometimes it's hell, sometimes it's heaven, but you can get lost all over an Attribution. You will find out that the more you spend on Google Shopping, the more your organic traffic increases, the more organic sales you get. And you can look at assisted conversions to see that if you label your campaigns appropriately, you can see generally on non TM shopping campaigns, which is non trademark people, just looking for your product and service, and don't know you as a brand yet for that product or service, you will see assisted conversions generally higher than attributed last click conversions in Google Analytics. And so it's having a disproportionate influence on driving sales through other channels, and it is driving sales to its accredited channel. And so showing them that, showing them, "Hey, this says have a large impact. If you just cut it, you're not just cutting the results that you're seeing from the SEM budget. You're cutting results you're seeing in other channels as well." And so in some companies, this is unfortunate, but if you cut Google Shopping, your SEO team, all of a sudden is going to look worse without them doing anything wrong. They just happen to have the organic traffic drop because of Google Shopping not spending as much money. So it's a very complicated web picture as we continue to shop more and more online, it's only going to get more complicated and intertwined, but at least helping them understand some of that first, even before you get to the, "What are we going to spend," budget. Jon: Yeah. It's almost like we, as an industry, need a one sheet for executives on how to explain this simply for them, because I think there's a so much education that goes into this. And I think half the job of marketing ends up being internal education, which is really just reduces effectiveness. I mean, we fight that all the time with conversion optimization ecomm and marketing teams, they're all a hundred percent on board and understand the return on the spend on optimization. But then you look at a high level executive and they say something like, "Well, but you know, we just had our best month ever. Why would we need to optimize?" Ryan: No, exactly. We're constantly in education mode in what we do. And I actually had this conversation with Google last week because they're really internally pushing for more automation within Google to control a lot of the inner workings of Google, which is not bad for many companies, but they want to move agencies into more of an advisor role and helping companies grow by educating them on digital marketing, which I think is a great goal. I said that, "Well, the problem you're going to experience with that though, is you've got a bunch of, let's just say 24 to 30 year olds in digital marketing that have never owned a business that are trying to educate business owners on growth strategies for their brand. And they probably just don't have the experience to be educating at a high level why these companies should be investing in marketing." And it's scale yet, I just don't think we have the expertise as an industry to be advising people that have grown hundred million dollar brands on how they should continue growing. Jon: And the barrier to entry with marketing roles is typically pretty low, right? Ryan: Yup. Jon: It's something where there is a lot of people in the industry, but there's few experts. And you start doing something like that with all of the junior folks who are just getting into it, and you're going to end up with some big problems. So let me ask you this, Ryan. What are some ad word budget management solutions that kind of help you maybe just prevent yourself from even under spending? Because I think we've determined today, most companies under spend, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: Because they're not focusing on the right metrics around this, but I know you're talking about a lot of these tool sets that Google's coming out with. I know we've talked about them on this podcast before how I've even been personally kind of put through the ringer by using automation tools through Google. So what are your thoughts just on the AdWords budget management solutions that are out there? Ryan: Generally, I don't like them, but when I'm talking to business owners about controlling budgets, the first thing I tell them is, "Look, you're going to have flexibility, regardless." If you're rigid on your goals, you're either leaving money on the table or you're wasting money. You can't dictate search volume across the entire United States, for example, for your product or service, but what you can do is decide, "Okay, here's what my goals are. Let's make sure that we're at least meeting those. And if we have a little bit more we spent, that's probably okay, as long as we get the goals, if we under spend it's okay, because the search demand wasn't there." Google at its core is a demand capture. People are searching for a product. You put it in front of them because you have that product. There are pieces of Google that can be demand creation, but by and large, it is demand capture. And so build flexibility into your model. But then this is another thing I have to educate a lot of businesses on as well. A big education piece is aligning your marketing goals with your business goals. So often those are not going in the same direction. So you have a marketing team. That's been given a goal and they're rowing in direction to achieve that goal because they have incentives and bonuses in place to hit those goals. And then you have an executive or a business owner that's driving or paddling the boat in a different direction because of their goals. And if they're not aligned, you have a lot of tension and issues because there's going to be frustration from the executive team. "Why isn't marketing giving me the results I want? We set this wonderful goal and they achieved it, but it didn't have the impact I wanted it to." So you start with, what's your business goal? Do you want to grow? Even beyond that, do you have an exit strategy as an owner? Do you have shareholders? You have to hit certain metrics as a business to be successful and make them happy? And then after you've set that you say, "Okay, how can my marketing team utilize the SEM channel to help hit that goal?" And let's set incentives around that rather than what a lot of companies do is well, "We had an agency five years ago tell us that we should be getting it for X or you know, 10 years ago, we were highly profitable on Google Ads. I want to be highly profitable still." And don't pay attention to the changes or evolution of digital marketing over the last decade that has made your 10 X profit goal spending 50 grand a month, not possible at this point, based on what your site's converting at or all these other things you could be doing or should be doing. So it's goal alignment build in flexibility and then monitor it. It's not something you just set it, forget it, let the marketing team just do it. Like I'm in marketing, I have brands, I still daily track everything. It's all about the data. Like I want to know what's happening in my business regularly. I don't let it go on autopilot. Sometimes I want to, but I don't. And just in be involved as a business owner, you have to have an understanding of what it's trying to do. Jon: This is great because I think if I could summarize a little bit of my learnings from the conversation today, it's you shouldn't have a budget, you should have a goal, right? So look at the other end of the spend, not the front end, but the back end. Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: And then you really need to work on educating your team internally and the executives, if it's not your money that you're spending, because that way, you're making sure that they understand the return on the investment there. And then from there it's really an inventory challenge perhaps on how much you could spend. And you could really look at this as a cashflow machine. And that's how this should be looked at, perhaps is what's that cashflow equation? How are you getting that money before it's even truly spent? And how can you reinvest that up until you have no inventory left or you have an inventory problem. And then from there, there's no real way to kind of put something on autopilot here. They just don't work that well. You don't want to look at your marketing channels as equal. You really want to play at these different points of the acquisition funnel as you've mentioned. Did I miss anything on that? Ryan: Well, there's a couple of points. I think people should just pay attention to as well. There are circumstances where some companies intentionally lose money on the initial order from a customer. They have high lifetime value, they have a competitive space where it's necessary to even compete. They're going to lose money on the first order, beauty, skincare, that is often the case. Jon: That's still the cashflow formula. You're just stretching it out, right? Ryan: You can't spend unlimited money because it does actually cost you money to get that customer. And so you have to look at, from a finance perspective, how much money do I have in the bank? I can't spend endlessly if I'm losing money on the first order, if I'm breaking even or profitability, you can usually spend endlessly, but then it's also saying, "Okay, what's my diminishing return, and is there a better place for that investment?" Yeah. Diminishing returns is I'm losing money to spend. So maybe I stopped spending here on Google because I know that I can get this money losing return on Facebook or Instagram which is actually better. And so that's where forecasting probably has a bigger impact. And we've had those conversations with businesses about lifetime value. And there's some complex math formulas around it, but it can be done. But then when you're looking at moving budgets, there are some automated tools that brands love looking at. I mean, brands really do love tools that have great graphics and sliding things you can move around and makes it look like you're just doing amazing. And there's one that I really don't like. And it says, "We're looking at your Facebook spend and your Google and Microsoft spend. And if Facebook is at a five X and Google is at a three X, Oh, we're just going to move money from Google over to Facebook and keep spending until they're kind of at equilibrium," because that totally makes sense if you're just looking at math and numbers, but what most brands miss is that those budgets are accomplishing very different things. And so you have to look at them differently and not necessarily move budget from one to the other, just because a return on adspend goal makes sense like, "Oh, I'm printing all this money on Facebook and I may be breaking even on Google." It should be looked at differently. So generally avoid tools that just automatically move budget to the best performing things. Because for most businesses that doesn't make sense. Jon: I think that's a great point to end on today. And I think we've packed so much into 30 minutes here. I really appreciate you as always Ryan educating me on and helping me change my point of view on this, as I definitely came in thinking of SEM as an expense line item and you need to budget and have a forecast around that. And you've definitely shifted my thinking completely around, which is awesome. Ryan: One less business owner to educate. I love it. Jon: Boom. All right. Well hopefully a few other got educated today by listening to this and we'll continue to spread the word. So thank you Ryan. Ryan: Thanks Jon.

Jon explores the nuances of CRO and explains why it can be so difficult to take a DIY approach with it. He also offers a few tips for those just starting out to improve your CRO without spending a whole lot. [The Mom Test book]: (https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742/ref=sr11) For more CRO help visit The Good: https://thegood.com/ TRANSCRIPT: Ryan: Hello, Jon. Jon: Hey, Ryan. How are you today? Ryan: I am doing well. Excited to get educated today by you, on some areas that I have very little knowledge. It's exciting, the world of CRO. When you see the results on my side... I get to see the results of what you do, but I don't conceptually understand it well. So today, I really wanted to dive into the weeds with you about conversion rate optimization, and help our listeners get a better understanding of just what you're going to need to do to help execute some CRO. And then, as we live in this DIY world... I can't tell you how many Pinterest things I see, or YouTube things I see, that I try to execute, and it just, God, doesn't quite turn out the way I want to. Especially when I'm cooking, all the recipes I find on Pinterest, just man, the pictures look so great and then my finished product is not great. Ryan: I own a few businesses. Logical Position does a lot of advising on best practices in improving conversion rates, but I wouldn't call what I do on my own sites or what we do at LP to kind of advise clients as conversion rate optimization. So from your perspective, as an expert in CRO, isn't it easy to just watch a YouTube video or find a Pinterest article on CRO and just do something and watch the conversion rate on your site increase? Jon: Well, I think that, just like anything else, right... Like you mentioned Pinterest or YouTube videos, how many times did you watch these videos and it had not turn out like you had wanted, right? Ryan: Yeah, most of the time. Jon: Yeah. I think, it's probably not too dissimilar. Now, look, there's a lot that somebody can do on their own to help improve their conversion rates. Is that technically and truly full conversion rate optimization? No, of course not. But there's a lot that people can do out there, and should be doing, and should be thinking about. I think that... Look, is it easy to do everything yourself? No. Could you focus on one or two areas and do very well? Yeah, maybe. Jon: But I think the biggest challenge I have, is we see this all the time at The Good. People come to us and they say, "Hey, I have one staff member I hired who's a conversion optimization specialist, but it's just not moving the needle in the way that I would like. We're not seeing the return on that salary spend or that contractor spend." The problem is that, and we've proven this out over 11 years now, you really need to have a team with a whole bunch of specialists, and it's impossible for one person to be expert in all of the areas that you need for conversion optimization. Ryan: What I'm kind of understanding is there is a conceptual difference between CRO, or conversion rate optimization, and, maybe what I would call CRI, conversion rate improvement. They're not necessarily the same thing. I can [inaudible 00:03:21] can change a button and improve our conversion rate, but that's not actually conversion rate optimization. Jon: I think we just came up with a new term and I love it, CRI versus CRO. That's awesome. Thank you, Ryan. Okay. Yes. Now, here's how you can do improvements, go out and get these tool sets that all talk about doing an optimization or improving your conversion rate. There's tools out there that can help improve your conversion rate, but they're not going to get to the level that a customized program with a team of experts can do for you. So you think about all those tools like Privy, or there's Hotjar, or Crazy Egg, or... I could go on and on, right? There's tons of these tools out there that each provide a little nugget of conversion rate improvement, but they're not truly doing full optimization, right? Jon: If you're really going to optimize anything, it needs to be a scientific process of optimization. It's not just a make these changes and you're done. It needs to be the ongoing iterative improvements where you're making incremental gains, month over month, that compound and grow. That's where the big numbers are going to happen and the massive results are. I mean, you look at this and maybe this might feel daunting to the entrepreneur who's doing a $100,000 on their site right now. But Amazon has a team, a massive team. Last I heard, it was well over a hundred, doing nothing but optimizing the Amazon experience. Ryan: Holy smokes. Jon: So you think about that, and you're like, "Man, I'm at a huge disadvantage here." But the reality is, they're looking at every little data point. That team has a wide range of people doing different items, you have data scientists to analyze all the data coming back. You have test developers to build out all the tests. You have conversion strategists who can help you to better understand what should be tested. You have experts in user testing, those people who speak to your consumers and understand how to get information out of their heads about what they're thinking. Jon: So you have all of these other types of roles that exist that can combine, be like the Avengers, right? But individually, if you just have the Hulk out there or... I'm not a huge comic book guy. Maybe I'm mixing up my worlds here. But, I would say individually, they're not going to be as great as they would be all together. Ryan: Interesting. So almost in putting it in terms I can quickly relate to would be PPC optimization. You can know conceptually that I really do need to be putting negative keywords into my account to eliminate some waste, but there's a lot more to that, and there's a lot more specialist in the die that I operate in so often. But also, as I'm looking at all the accounts we work in, the way we operate is very different on somebody that sells $50,000 CNC machines versus a five-dollar mug on their website. Jon: Exactly. We talked about this a little bit at one of our recent episodes, where I was interviewing you and I admitted to how I had a button checked in our ads account and it cost me $2,000 that I didn't need to spend. Ryan: That was a fun one. Jon: Right. But here's the thing, I thought I was doing the right thing by letting Google manage that. And it just kept bidding me up, bidding me up, bidding me up until I spent all this money. Where an expert who's in it every day would know, "Hey, on the surface level, I get why you would want Google to own that and optimize that for you. But the reality here, is there's a much better path ahead if you have experience here." I think that's where it really comes in, is having that experience and it means that you can rely on the tool, right, and you could just have a whole bunch of tools. The challenge is going to be, that you're not going to see the gains that you would if you work with somebody who does nothing but optimization and has a team centered around that. Jon: Think of it this way. I spent 2,000 extra dollars I didn't need to spend because I misused the tool, right? I could have spent that $2,000 with an expert who maybe could have generated me an extra $5,000. That would have been a massive return on my investment, by making the investment there, as opposed to clicking a button that I was trying to take the cheap way out, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I guess, in the e-commerce space, we have some very major players like Amazon, a hundred people or more on their conversion rate optimization team. Shopify has a million businesses utilizing their platform. And I assume, again that's an assumption so nobody quote me, but I assume they have an internal CRO team to a degree, because the more conversions they get, the more people use Shopify and the more money they make on the payment processing. Ryan: So with all of these major platforms having so much influence, do you ever think it's possible that we fast forward five years and all of us just are so trained in Amazon and clicking this to get this, or Shopify clicking this to get this, that it's almost standard like across e-com. Like checkout, I expect this, I do this, and there's very little optimization beyond that. Jon: I hope that we get to that point, I don't think we will. Now, here's why I hope, because... I've mentioned this book a hundred times, that's called Don't Make Me Think, right? The whole premise is that we have conventions as internet users that we've become akin to that we know and we like, and it makes the internet easier to use if everybody follows those conventions, so I don't have to think about it, right? Anytime you change that convention, you're making the user of your site think. And that delays them converting. It makes them frustrated. They bounce. They leave. They desert, whatever you want to call it. Jon: I hope we get to the point where there's a standard here, but I can promise you we never will. Now, here's why, they can standardize things like checkout, right? Shopify has done a wonderful job with this and this is where their optimization team internally would come in, where they are optimizing the checkout experience. However, if you go to a Shopify site and they have a custom theme and it's branded, you wouldn't even know it's on Shopify until you got to that checkout and then you know it's a Shopify checkout, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: And here's the thing... So there is so much to optimize beyond that. We're never in on the internet. And I hope we get to the point where things are standardized, but I never hope we get to the point where the internet just becomes this big gray area of everything being the same. Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Then it's not going to be cool. We're taking the branding out of the internet, which is part of what makes it really fun, is to go to a brand's website and get a feel for that brand, have an understanding of what their value proposition is. I hope we don't get to something where every website is just black text on white screen, with blue links, and the navs all look exactly the same, et cetera. I do think it's important that some things are standardized and some usability aspects of websites are standardized. I think that's important and we're making strides to that, but there's always going to be that brand pool. And it's going to be a push against that standard experience that makes people think a little bit. Jon: I really don't know how the experience, if you will, is going to be that much better over time. But I do think, if you're a small shop and you're using a BigCommerce or a Shopify, yes, use their default checkouts because they're pretty good. But you're going to get to a point where you're noticing some checkout cart abandonment, and you want to improve those metrics. And at that point, you're going to want to start to optimize those a little bit. That's when you move up to something like Shopify Plus, where you're paying a little more every month, but you get the ability to customize your checkout. And then you can start adding in some additional tools, you can start looking at moving some fields around, asking for less information if you're not using it or don't need it. Jon: And then on BigCommerce, one of the big things about BigCommerce is the customization that you can do with the platform. So their checkout, out of the box, if you're a BigCommerce subscriber, you can alter that, which is great. It gives you a rope to kind of hurt yourself with a little bit there. But in time, it can... If you're a smaller brand, you want to start using some of these tools, you have that capability. Ryan: For some of those bigger companies on BigCommerce, you can use something like a Bolt that is really focused on one thing only, and that's streamlining that process. Jon: I'm glad you brought up Bolt, because that's a great example of how they can take something that we just spent five minutes discussing as a standardized experience, and they've made it better. That's a great example, where there's always going to be room for improvement. How bolt has even done that, is they focused on reducing risk, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: So you're able to ask less information of the consumer, than you would on the standard Shopify checkout. That means you're going to convert higher, but you don't have to eat the risk of the fraudulent transactions as part of that, right? So you have options. And I think that there's always going to be room for improvement, I really do. Ryan: Well, I think it's also at this exact juncture to remind people, as I constantly had to be reminded, that conversion rate optimization is not checkout optimization. There is every step before, and I think this was a couple episodes ago, and a couple of steps after the fact of checkout, that conversion rate optimization plays. Jon: Yeah. [Crosstalk 00:13:39]... Ryan: So, often we as e-com companies and business owners focus, "Oh, I got to get people to check out, and then it's done." [inaudible 00:13:45] is over. But there's that huge process. Jon: Right. Yeah. We've talked about this a few times where... What happens when somebody gets to your site? What's their intention when they're there? All the way through what happens after they check out, how do you optimize post purchase checkout? And I think there's so much that can be done there. Again, very likely that it will never end in opportunities for optimization here. Ryan: Not every company is in a position to be able to start the full CRO agency or hire enough people to fully optimize their entire funnel of conversion, before and after giving the business money. Are there certain areas of CRO, outside of maybe just getting a Privy or a Hotjar or any of those other tools, that they can be doing something that would get them going towards official CRO? Like you've got to be able to grow the brand into a size to be able to afford a CRO agency or employees. So outside of just the tools, what... Is there AB test they can be doing? I mean, what does that look like for the e-commerce business owner doing a hundred thousand a year? Jon: Well, I think that most likely, you're not going to want to even dive as deep as doing something like AB testing, because you don't have enough traffic to prove those out, it's not going to be a good return on your time or funds investment. Jon: Now, what I would recommend here is two-fold. One, start tracking some data. This is not complicated, but it will help you later just to have more timeline of data. Go into Google Analytics, turn on things like enhanced e-commerce, set up some additional dashboards. Just Google e-commerce analytics dashboards, you'll find a bunch of great ways to set that up so you start tracking some good data, okay? There's a easy checklist to follow there. Jon: Now, other thing is start tracking user engagement. How do I mean that? Well, go sign up for Hotjar, it's $9, right, per month. Just sign up, go, and what you can do is you can start understanding how people are engaging with the content of your site. And I promise you, if you just spend one hour a week reviewing that data, you will learn where challenges are on your site, with things that you think you can do yourself that will improve conversion rates. Jon: Are you going to see massive gains? No, but I think if you're in the situation where you have more time than you have money, as you're growing your business and you're starting out, spending that hour to better understand your consumers yourself will help you find a better product-market fit, it will help you to improve your website overall. And as you continue to grow, you're already building that culture within yourself and your company with your team, as it grows, of understanding how consumers use your website and what data you should be looking at. Jon: If you just go out and you start talking to consumers, take a laptop, go to your local mall, or, I don't care, bar, doesn't really matter. Wherever your consumers hang out, right? Go to the coffee shop. Sit at the Starbucks and just say, "Hey, can I buy you a coffee, if you give me five minutes of your time, while they make your coffee. You're just going to be standing there anyways. I'll buy you a coffee. While they make it, I want you to use my website. I'm going to ask you to complete a task, and I'm just going to watch you do that. I just want you to tell me what you're thinking as you go through those steps." You will be amazed at what you learn. And all it takes is five, 10 minutes of someone's time and the cost of a coffee. So anybody of any size can do this. Jon: Now, you don't have to just be there all day, either. Do this for a couple hours. Get under 10 participants, and I promise you, you will walk away with a laundry list of improvements that you can make to your website. So if you don't- Ryan: It's almost like gorilla marketing in its purest form. Like, "You've never heard of my business before, I'm going to buy you a coffee and you're going to see it." Jon: Yeah. You're not trying to sell them anything, right? You're just trying to understand how they're using your website so that you can take that data and improve. The idea here is that you're getting an understanding of somebody who is a new to file customer, somebody who's never been to your website before. You're walking away with an understanding of what their first impressions of your site and the experience on your site. So the navigation, the funnel, how they find the right products, what they think of the content, right? All of those things are what you're looking for. You're not necessarily saying, "Hey, I want to introduce you to my business, so you buy something," because then they're not going to really have a great understanding. Jon: Now, there's an amazing book out there. It's called The Mom Test. You can get it on Amazon. It's 20 bucks or something. It's amazing. The Mom Test, we'll have our producer put it in the show notes. The Mom Test, it's got a pink cover, it looks like it's a not really helpful book, but I will promise you that it is amazing. The whole thing about this book, is that it gives you an outline of how to ask the right questions about your product and your website to get customer feedback, so that you're not asking them leading questions, that they're only going to give you positive feedback. Jon: So why is it called The Mom Test? Because this should be questions that you can ask your mom where you're going to get good feedback, not where you're going to get the mom feedback of, "Oh, honey, that website is awesome. Yeah, of course it's beautiful, you built it. This is the most usable website I've ever had." No. You want somebody, even your mom, to give you the best feedback about how to improve your product and what they actually think. That's where it gets important. So asking the right question is really the key here, but that's something that 150 page book can teach you, and you're not going to be expert right away. But again, going back to where we started this conversation, that is just one small item that you need to learn and master out of the whole range of conversion optimization. That's why it gets really hard to do CRO versus CRI. Ryan: We have to trademark that. Nobody think. I want to go back, really quick though, to a point you made about traffic being too low for CRO, because I know you have this conversation constantly. And then I get to talk to some of these people because their traffic's too low for CRO. But it crosses the minds of most business owners, as they're starting up, "Hey, I'm getting traffic to my site. And it's converting at," I'm going to make it up "1%. If I just made that go from 1% to 2%, I would double my revenue and I didn't even have to work on increasing traffic, which may be is a struggle for me or I've got really big competitors." Ryan: All that is true, but sometimes that time and energy should probably be spent more on getting, maybe, more appropriate traffic or figuring out what traffic is coming and is not converting. But how do you have that conversation on the front end? Because I usually get it from you, at least, after you've already had some kind of conversation around, you just need more traffic. What insights would you give to people in that scenario? Jon: Well, I think, there's a couple of things you have to really consider before you're going to deep dive into optimization. The first is, have you found product-market fit, right? So is anybody, A, interested in your product and, B, are they going to buy it because it's solving a pain they actually have? It's one thing to get people to your site, but if the product isn't really hitting with the market, then you are going to waste your money. You can optimize and have the best funnel and the best site ever, but if it's really just not something people want or need, then you've wasted your money, right? So that's the first thing. Jon: Now, a great way to determine that and the way that I usually determine it, because it's really quick and it's something most people know if they're running or managing an e-com site, is number of unique monthly users to your site. Because here's the thing, if you've generated enough traffic, that means people are interested. And if you're able to drive traffic with ads, where you're spending at a sustainable level, that means people have a pain point and they're actually willing to click on an ad to solve that pain. That kind of proves it out, right? Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jon: Now, what's that level? I generally want to see about 50,000 unique users per month before you're going to start doing true optimization. That's actually a pretty low number. It might feel like a mountain for some people, but if you've gotten to 50,000 per month... I mean, think about that, that's 12,500 per week, it's really not that many, right? Jon: The idea here is that you are able to drive enough people to your site, that you can start making scientifically-backed decisions. That's really where you're going to find those gains because you're no longer relying on what you think is best, or those 10 people you interviewed at Starbucks. Now, you're starting to get in mass enough data that you can prove stuff out to where it's statistically relevant. Ryan: That's a great insight, I think, on just a number, but also, I think, on market fit. I talked to so many startup businesses throughout the course of my day, weeks, months, but so many entrepreneurs come up with a really cool product that they just love, but unfortunately they have no idea who their market is or who they really think is going to buy. They have an idea like, "Oh, I really thought this company was going to buy it." But if you've created a product that hasn't existed before, nobody's searching for it. Or they're maybe searching for a problem, but getting a shopping ad to show appropriately, that image may not solve or cause them to take that click. So it becomes a much deeper conversation of, what are you going to do to get this into market? Not necessarily start by optimizing your site. It's, you've got to really find that fit, whether you go to social, whether you go to Google for that, whether you go to retail for that. Jon: Yep. That's exactly it. Conversion optimization is usually step two, right? So first step is... I would say step zero, is find product-market fit, right? Then step one is drive traffic. Then step two is, once you've proven those out, you want to start getting a higher ROAS or return on ad spend. At that point, that's when conversion optimization can help get you to that next level. And I say this all the time, Ryan, when... Jon: We have dozens of clients that share both Logical Position and The Good as partners and vendors. What we find, and I say this all the time, is when you have a company like LP that can really drive qualified traffic and you have a company like The Good that can help you convert that traffic at a high level, it is like adding fuel to a fire because it just accelerates things. And it really starts to show that you can start making a living off of your website, or take it to that next level that you never thought was possible. Jon: That's really where the gains can come in is, at that level, after you found product-market fit, you're driving some traffic, now you really want to take it to the next level. And then it becomes this great circle of, "Hey, you got your conversion rate up. Now, you have more money to spend on driving more traffic. And then you take that funds from the sales you're getting there, you reinvest it in additional optimization." You just keep going in that circle and it continues to compound that growth over time. Ryan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It makes entrepreneurs, startups, even existing business owners nervous when you start talking about paying for traffic, but the value there, even if you're doing that to get to the point where you can use CRO, is you get the insight into the intent of that visitor. If you're just focusing on organic traffic, that's great by the way. We've already mentioned in this podcast before, there is no such thing as free traffic. You're going to pay for all of it in time, money, energy. But when you're using Google Analytics, you don't get the insight of what did they actually search when they came to my site, when they came through an organic link, or they came direct to my site. I don't know how they got... I don't know why they got my link, or they knew my website. Ryan: But if they're using paid search, you get all this really cool data of saying, "Hey, they searched specifically for this, clicked on my ad, went exactly to this page where I sent them, and they either took the action I wanted or didn't." So I can get a lot more of those insights. And you can even get... If you are paying for it, because obviously Google is a for-profit organization, if you do pay for clicks on Google Ads, you can use Google search console to connect Google Analytics and Google Ads, and you will actually get the search queries on your organic traffic, and see how that is operating and what that search intent is, and where you're ranking. That'll actually give you real average ranking for an organic query. Phenomenal data. But again, you have to pay for it by utilizing the Google Ads platform. Ryan: So some business owners out there that are listening, you do have to take the leap and actually pay for some traffic to get some of these insights that let you figure out where your market fit may be or may not be. And it becomes exciting, but also challenging. And so I will put an asterisk by that, that Google does have a great product for starting up and getting your business going. A lot of their smart campaigns, smart shopping can be very powerful to get a business up and running on Google shopping, unfortunately, you don't get that search query data. That becomes problematic when you're really trying to figure out your intent or what you're actually showing for on Google that is becoming so valuable and why your business is growing. So just be aware of that, that you may actually have to do some more manual work in there, but, man, there's a lot of opportunity. Jon: I didn't even know about that one. So now, I don't have to get the... What is that message that shows up in Google Analytics now? It always says something about like not found or... Ryan: Not provided. Jon: Thank you. Yeah. Ryan: That came about 10 years ago. It was great for Google because you're forcing people to pay for it, I get it. That data does exist though, you just have to pay. Jon: Yep. Well, that's good to know. Ryan, this has been a great conversation. Are there any other questions that I can answer for you on how to do CRO DIY? Ryan: No, I've just got to go get some things on my website so I can get to the level that I can pay you to take my CRO to the next level. Jon: Well, I know you and I know you've already found product-market fit on all of these, so drive that traffic, which you're expert at, and then I can come back and help you convert, and we can go from there. Ryan: Yeah. Thanks for enlightening me and helping me figure out some of these details of CRO that I didn't know, so that I'm not just doing CRI all the time. Jon: Go trademark that right away. Ryan: Thanks, Jon. Jon: Thanks, Ryan.

Autobot City is jacked! Megatron: Their defenses are broken! Let the slaughter begin!! Devastator: Not a scratch?! Throws a wall!! Daniel: Killed in the face?! Ryan: Not everything works and you'll probably just fail! Incendiary rounds! Voice actors: Gregg Berger as Grimlock! Peter Renaday ... doesn't speak?! Optimus Prime and the Dinobots arrive just in time!!! All this, plus the team compares Scramble City to the Oscar-caliber movie DEATHBED as they cover minute 19 of Transformers: The Movie!

My guest this week is professional audio engineer Ryan Monette. Ryan graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Music Production & Engineering. For the last 4.5 years he's been the Post-Production Audio Engineer on staff at Elevation Church, in Charlotte, NC, where he mixes their global TV show, and has many other responsibilities (boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, etc.). You may have heard some of his work, as he sound-designed and mixed the opener video for the Circles conference for the past two years. He even had his own podcast for a short while (TheQueuecast.com). I asked Ryan to come on the show to share his journey towards becoming a professional audio engineer (a job that I've always wanted), and to get him to share some tips for anyone interested in working in audio/video professionally. Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins: Think long term and dream big. If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone. Take advantage of free online courses to learn more about audio engineering. Get started with whatever you have. Your mix may sound completely different in a different environment, so listen with different headphones/speakers in different locations. Master the basics and keep going back to them. If you're mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent. When mixing, always use a reference track. Show Notes Aaron: You graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in music production and engineering. For the last five years, you've been the post production audio engineer for Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. You have a lot of jobs there: boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, and you mix their global TV show. Do you mix that live? Ryan: Not necessarily. We can get into that later. There's a process for that. Aaron: Some of the creative people here might have heard of some of your work. You sound designed and mixed the opening videos for the past two years of Circles Conference, which I was at. Have you been there for the past two years? Ryan: I haven't been personally, no. I have wanted to go. I love it from afar, and I want to go in person. Aaron: I wanted you to come on this show because when I first got started, I had dreams of being a professional audio engineer. I thought, “How cool would it be to work in audio and get paid for it? That'd be awesome!” I fell backwards into it by doing podcast editing as a hobby first, then for money, then I met Sean McCabe and ended up working for him full time. I edit podcasts and help out with a ton of other stuff. I asked you to come on the show to share your advice for anyone who's interested in working in audio/video professionally, and to talk about how you got there yourself. So tell me a little bit about how you got into audio. When did you first realize that this was something you wanted to do? Ryan's Journey to Becoming a Professional Audio Engineer Ryan: I love listening to your podcast, Aaron, and what I love about it is I feel like you and I have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds. You're a musician, a drummer, and I'm also a musician. I play several things. My primary instrument is bass, but along with that, I started on piano. I picked up bass, and with the bass I picked up guitar. I took some drum lessons here and there as well. I sing as well. I dabbled in a little bit of everything. I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. I'm okay at a lot of things, but I'm not superb at one thing. Anyway, right around junior high or high school, I started playing the bass. I started playing in little bands here and there. When it came time for college, I had no clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I loved music. Aaron: Same here! Ryan: I was living in Las Vegas at the time, so I decided, well, everyone has to have that college experience, and I didn't want to go to college in the same city, so I decided that I needed that “being away from home” experience. I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. I took your basic, general classes, not knowing what I wanted to do. At this time, for my high school graduation, I had received a graduation present of a Macbook Pro. With that, of course, you get the wonderful iLife suite, including Garageband. As a musician, a whole new world was opened up to me. When I was in a band in high school, I was the gear head—I loved the PA and putting cables together. I was drawn to that. Once I had this Macbook Pro with Garageband and I had my bass and my guitar in my dorm, I was like, “I can create music!” I figured out how to work it and record myself. I bought a USB microphone, and that world was opened up. When I was there, I had a friend, and her brother went to this school where all they learned about was music. I was like, “Wait, you can do that? You can go to school for just music?” That's how I found out about Berklee School of Music. I applied, and you have to audition as well. I applied and auditioned, and the first time I tried, I actually didn't get into the music school I wanted to go to. Aaron: This sparks something in my mind. I feel like I might have read an article about Berklee or looked into it and thought, “No, they're really strict on who they accept, based on your performance.” That was intimidating to me at the time, because I never felt like I was that good of a drummer. Ryan: It was intimidating for me, too. Clearly, I wasn't up to par. Aaron: Yet you went for it. That's more than a lot of people would do. Ryan: Yeah. After I finished my first year at UNR, I moved back to Vegas and went to UNLV, the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I took all music classes, forgetting the general ed stuff you need to get a degree. I took all music classes—music theory, because I had never had actual music theory classes, so I thought I needed that. With that, there were some audio classes that I took as well. I was like, “Hey, I like this audio thing.” At the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I had my first exposure to a formal audio class, where I learned all the proper techniques. Later on that year, I applied and auditioned again for Berklee. I got accepted, and the next year, I moved to Boston and went to Berklee for about three and a half years. Then I graduated. When I went to Berklee, the only thing that drew me as a major was Music Production and Engineering. I naturally loved the gear side of things. I fell in love with recording. I was like, “This is what I want to do.” Aaron: You got to spend three and a half years there, studying and learning? Ryan: It is non-stop, 24/7, music, audio, and to be honest, I miss being in that environment so much. Aaron: That sounds fantastic. I always love setting aside time to take online classes, read books, and listen to interviews about audio. Think Long-Term Aaron: You were drawn to the audio engineering stuff, and then you graduated. Ryan: I can remember a specific time in my life, and I'm pretty sure it was my last semester at Berklee. They went by semesters instead of years. It was in one of my capstone classes. Our instructor asked us the typical, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question. Aaron: I love that question now. I hated it when I was 22. ** Think long term and dream big** Aaron: Plan out where you want to be, because if you can envision it, then you can figure out how to get there. But you have to start by saying, “I want to do this thing someday.” For me, it was, “I want to do work from a laptop. How do I get there?” Now I'm there. So you were 22 and someone asked you, “Ryan, where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in five years?” Ryan: At that moment, I was trying to figure that out, naturally, as you do when you're approaching the end of college. While I was at Berklee, I loved music. I loved recording music, but my absolute favorite class—they only had one of them, but it was the class I yearned for, that I wanted to take and put in all these extra hours for—was audio for visual media, audio for video. By far, that was my favorite class. The whole class, we were working toward our final project. You choose a five to seven minute clip from a well known movie, and all the audio is completely stripped. You have to recreate everything. That's all the dialogue, all the foley, all the ambient background, all the hard effects, and so on. You have to connect with a film scoring student there at Berklee, and they have to provide the score. I absolutely loved every aspect of that project and the process. When it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life, it was between audio engineering at a recording studio, working at Disney as an Imagineer, or doing audio at a church. I have always been involved with church, playing on worship teams and whatnot, so I also saw myself doing audio for a church. Long story short, I was really privileged to dip my feet in all of those things after college. After I graduated, I moved back to Las Vegas. Eventually, I found an incredible recording studio, probably one of the top two recording studios in Las Vegas, and I landed an internship. First Audio Engineering Jobs Ryan: I say “internship” loosely, because your typical studio internship is all the stereotypical grunt work—taking out the trash, doing the coffee, and whatnot. I showed up, and they were like, “You went to Berklee? Berklee guys are cool. Here, hop in this session and help us out.” It was open to me, thrown at me, and next thing I knew, I was assisting on sessions with huge clients, I won't name drop. Aaron: You can drop a couple of names if you want. Ryan: I had a pretty fun time helping out with a session with the famous engineer Eddie Kramer, who is engineering for Carlos Santana. Aaron: Dang, man! That's awesome. Ryan: That was pretty incredible. But while I was there, I had this gut feeling inside of me saying, “This isn't it.” Aaron: It's fine, but it's not quite right? Ryan: I could see myself staying there and working my way up, but it didn't feel right. A few months after I realized that I didn't want to stay at the studio, I applied and was offered a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I packed my bags, moved to Orlando, and I was working as a stage technician at the Epcot park. There, they found out that I was an audio guy, so they pushed me toward the live audio side of things. I was mixing shows and bands at Epcot and what was at the time Downtown Disney, now Disney Springs, area. Same thing. Almost as soon as I got there, the same gut feeling came in. I was like, “This isn't it. I'm more of a studio engineer. I definitely don't want to do live stuff.” Although I love Disney, it just wasn't sitting right. I was only there three months before the next great opportunity came up, which is where I am right now. One of my friends told me about a job opening for this church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Elevation Church. I had actually been following them because of their podcast. At the time, I was kind of like, “I've got a job, whatever.” For some reason, I ended up on their website, looking at the job. I was reading, and I was like, “Wait a minute, they're looking for someone to do audio for video. That's what I really want to do!” On a whim, I threw out my resume. Next thing you know, I've been here going on five years. Aaron: Did you mention that you were a podcast listener when you sent in your resume? Ryan: Yeah. Aaron: The connections you can make through podcasting is really incredible. Ryan: It is. And I've been working there for 5 years now. How to Get Into Audio Engineering Aaron: I want to jump into what you do at your job at Elevation, but let's pause and do a section on what advice you would tell someone who's wanting to get started. I wrote a couple of things down here. I think it's hilarious that you got a Macbook and your first microphone was a USB microphone. Ryan: Which was the Blue Snowball, by the way. Aaron: That's the worst microphone! Ryan: I had no idea how to use it, either. If I find some of the earliest recordings I did, there are times I'm clipping to the max, square waves. Aaron: Probably bad mic technique, too. But hey; it got you started! If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone. Any USB mics will work for getting started. I like the Blue Yeti, but it's like $100. The ATR-2100 is fine, too. You just have to get something that can record some audio and start playing with it. Start playing with Garageband. Start playing with the free programs. Learn how to enable recording on a track, how to set your input device to the microphone, how to set your output device to wherever your headphones are plugged into, whether that's your mic or your computer. It took me so long to figure that stuff out. I was like, “Why can't I hear the audio in my headphones? What is going on?” Ryan: Same here. Aaron: You have to set input and output, then you have to record enable or do the input monitoring, all that stuff. But start with the USB microphone. Take some basic classes. There are so many great online classes. If you don't have any money at all, if you're super broke like I was when I started, watch some free YouTube videos. Read a book. Ryan: If you go to Coursera.org, they're a website where you can pay to take online courses and get certifications and whatnot, but they also offer free online courses. They even offer free online courses from Berklee. I've seen a music production class there. I've taken a free online song writing class. Check out free online courses, because they can be a pool of incredible knowledge. I took a photography class on there. Coursera is a great place. They're great if you want to take free online courses. Aaron: There are places where you can learn all this stuff. You just have to invest some time. You really just have to start: Don't wait until you have $500 for an interface and $200 for some professional headphones and microphone. Whether you want to start a podcast, start recording audio for a video, or record and mix a demo for a band, start doing something. Stop spending all your time thinking about how you can't do anything because you don't have certain gear or you're not in the right place. You'll learn as you do, especially in audio. You're going to make a ton of mistakes. Ryan: That's how you learn, though! That's one of the most valuable things I've learned in life. You learn from your mistakes. Aaron: You don't really learn when everything goes well. Just Start Aaron: Any other advice you would give somebody, thinking back on how you got to where you are right now? Ryan: Honestly, you hit the nail on the head with “just start.” It's as simple and cliche as Nike, “Just do it.” There is always going to be the next latest craze, the gear, and we've all been susceptible to that. We say, “Oh, well, I could do this if I had X.” It starts with the drive and determination, wanting to do it. There's knowledge out there everywhere. You just have to dig for it. Chances are, you have at least something you can start with. Record something on your phone. Aaron: I have a friend who makes some awesome music on his iPhone. Ryan: Oh, totally. It's as simple as getting an adapter. You can plug your guitar or whatever into your phone. Aaron: Kids these days have it so easy! Ryan: You have Garageband on your phone. I remember when I was figuring this out in high school, and we actually had a four track tape recorder. That was my first start. Get started with whatever you have. Aaron: What kind of stuff do you do at the church? What's your day to day life like? Are you there every day, or is it just a couple of days a week? Ryan: Oh no, I'm definitely there every day. It has been a whirlwind for sure. In the past five years, I have probably played every audio role that there is to be played here. My main thing now is audio for broadcasts, pretty much anything that leaves the church. Our biggest output is the sermon, which goes to a lot of places. It also goes in the TV episode, which we talked about, which goes locally, nationally, and, I believe, globally as well. That's a lot of what I've done. We also create a lot of films, short films, for our worship experiences, anything you can imagine that's video and audio related. Audio post production, like we talk about. I'm constantly on video shoots using field recorders, the boom op, anything you can think of. Audio for video, I've done it. The Gear Ryan Uses Aaron: Let's talk about your gear a little bit. What kind of stuff are you using most in everyday life? I'll do a quick recap: I have the Shure Beta 87A Mic as my main podcasting microphone. It's attached to a Scarlett 18i20 USB Interface (update: I'm now using my Zoom H6 exclusively), which is plugged into a quadcore iMac that's a couple years old. Nothing super fancy, but I'm really happy with where I am. I remember wanting all this stuff back in 2011, thinking how awesome it would be to have it. I have a Zoom H6 portable recorder and a couple of SM58 microphones. I've been pairing down my gear collection because I'm planning on moving in the spring. What kind of stuff are you working with? I use Logic Pro X for editing, and then Izotope iZotope RX 5 for cleaning up background noise or fixing clipping. What about you? What's your day to day favorite gear? Ryan: We use a lot. There's a bunch of gear for field recording and then in my office, which is where I'm at right now. I'll start with my office. Right now, I'm talking into my personal mic, which is a Rode NT1A. It's very affordable. The Rode NT1A is a nice beginner mic which works and sounds great, and I use it for a lot of voiceover projects. Aaron: I like those mics. Ryan: I'm talking into that right now. We also use the Shure SM7B. We have a nice Neumann that we'll use for bigger projects. We like to use Universal Audio Interfaces, so I've got one of those. They're great. They're rock solid. You really can't beat them. At our main recording/editing audio work station, we use Pro Tools. That's very standard, and I've been using that for years and years. I use a lot of plugins. I use a lot of the Waves Plugins. I do use RX as well, and that's the bulk of it. I do a lot of processing, depending on the project. I have a really huge sound library for if I'm doing narrative pieces that involve sound design, sound effects. I have a great app called Audio Finder, which a lot of electronic musicians use to help them find sounds. I use it to help me find sounds. It's a nice way to catalogue sounds if you're a sound designer or anything like that. You can basically tag all these audio files with meta data, and you can search for sounds by their title. Or, if you type in a word in the search bar, it can pull up things based off the the metadata. If you have notes on something, it can find it. Audio Finder is a great way to find sounds. I have some other things in here. I have the Artist Mix Controller made by Avid. I use those if I'm automating stuff. I use those a lot, actually, when I'm mixing the sermons. I do a lot of automation for that. If I'm mixing a piece with a music bed or something, I like to automate the music by hand. It feels more natural, as opposed to clicking and making little dots. That's the bulk of it here in the office. All of our audio engineers have a nice pair of Focal monitors. I also have another set of monitors I built myself. When I mix TV episodes, I have an output routed to a TV here in my office so I can hear how it translates on TV speakers. Recording Audio for Video Ryan: On the front end of things, if we're doing shoots for videos, we use Sound Devices field recorders. We have three different models: the Sound Devices 788T 8 Channel Recorder, a 702 2 Channel Recorder, and then a 633 6 Channel Recorder. That last one is one of their newer models, which is great. Sound Devices are steep in price, but they are rock solid. One of the most trustworthy, well known field recorder brands on the market. That's what you'll see on pretty much every big budget shoot in some way. I do a lot of freelance on the side, which gives me the opportunity EPK shoots or BTS shoots for, recently, a show on HBO called Outcast. Aaron: Outcast? I've been seeing that (I watch Westworld). Ryan: I'm pretty sure it's the same writers or producers or something. I know it's the same writer as The Walking Dead. They shoot here in North Carolina, so with a local production company, we've done some interviews with some of the cast and crew. It's been really neat to be on set and see what they're using. It's cool to see how similar their world is to what we're doing day to day, just with more money and more resources. It's the same thing. Most of their audio guys have some sort of Sound Devices. A lot of them use the 788 as a backup recording rig, and they've got larger multitrack recorders as well, that are also made by Sound Devices. Sound Devices is a great brand. They're crazy expensive, but when you buy that, you know you've basically got it for life. Aaron: Yeah, I'm looking at the Sound Devices 788T SSD 8 Channel Portable Solid State Audio Recorder. It's almost $7,000. I love that! So fancy. Ryan: That SSD does have an internal hard drive. Ours has a hard drive as well, so it's great, because it has the internal hard drive, but you can also use CF cards. You can record on two different mediums. In case something runs out of space, you have it in two places. Aaron: This is super professional stuff. Ryan: Yeah. It is. It's top of the line. Aaron: Fantastic. For all the rest of you, just go with the Zoom H4N or the H6. Ryan: Hey, we do have a Zoom H4N, and we do use that every now and then. Before I came on staff, our first field recorder was the Zoom H4N. Aaron: If I could start over and go back to before I had any kind of interface at all, I think I would buy myself an H4N or an H6. Not only are they portable field recorders so you can walk around with them—they have little stereo condensor mics on them—but they work as audio interfaces, too. You can plug it into your computer with a USB cable and record straight to your computer if you do any kind of podcasting or stuff like that. It's good for the price. Otherwise, the little two channel interfaces are great. They're about $100 for a good one, but they aren't portable. You can't take them to a show or out to a video shoot the way you can an H4N or an H6 or something. Ryan: Speaking of Zoom, they've recently come into the more professional field recording market. About a year ago, they releases the F8, I believe, which is an 8 channel field recorder with 8 mic pres. It's $999 for something very comparable to a Sound Device. It's not quite as high-fidelity, but for anyone starting out, you're really not going to notice the difference. Mixing On Expensive Headphones or Monitors Aaron: I was going to ask you this earlier. You mentioned that you had Focal monitors. Did you listen to the episode I did a few episodes back where I talked about mixing on headphones (Episode 69: Do You Need Expensive Headphones to Mix a Podcast?)? Ryan: Yes, I did. Aaron: I mix on $10 Panasonics. What do you think about that? You can be totally honest with me. You can tell me that it's a stupid idea or that it's okay. Ryan: I agree to a certain extent. I agree that you should be listening to what you're making on whatever the majority of people are going to be listening to it on. For a lot of audio engineers mixing music, that's iPod earbuds, those standard earbuds you get. Something like that. When I mix TV, I have an output routed to a TV in my office, so I can hear it on TV speakers. I do also believe in mixing on something with some sort of higher fidelity type of monitoring environment, whether that's nicer speakers or nicer headphones. Naturally, you're going to hear things differently. The main thing to take away is how things translate. If you're listening to something on one source and you make it sound good there, that's great, but in a different environment, it may sound completely different. iPhone earbuds may not have the bass that a car stereo has. You want to hear how it translates from one thing to another. That's why it's good to at least listen to it on two different sources and not just narrow yourself down to one cruddy thing. That's good in theory, but again, the key takeaway is translation. Aaron: Maybe it's a little bit different for me and I can get away with it because of the consistency of the microphones and the recording environment set we use. Ryan: Yeah, totally. Aaron: I think if I was doing more stuff like you are, with videos and clients and all that kind of stuff, I would absolutely be using my higher fidelity headphones. Ryan: Very true. The bulk of your work is dialogue, podcasts. Aaron: Yeah, that's really it. Just dudes talking into a microphone. Ryan: Yeah. I have done a lot of work here where I'm working in a small studio, but a lot of my mixes have played in auditoriums and arenas. If you're working on projects like music or film that have different audio frequencies and spectrums, remember that sound will be perceived differently in different places. Aaron: How do you even test for that? Ryan: Here, I at least have a sense of how our auditorium sounds, so I've trained my ear to hear in advance and understand how it's going to translate. For something like when we did a live recording in the biggest arena here in Charlotte, we had a video opener piece. I was on point for mixing that, so basically, I had to work with tech and production to find a time after setup where I can bring my session, copy it onto a laptop, and play it through the PA. Then I can make any final mix tweaks there in the auditorium or the arena. I perfected it in my studio, and any small tweaks I was able to do in that actual environment. Granted, a lot of the times, we may not have that luxury. There are also great plugins you can buy that simulate different monitoring environments, like Sonarworks. If you have certain pairs of headphones, you can tell the program, “I have these headphones, now make my mix sound like it's coming through these headphones or these speakers,” so you can hear how it might translate. In that program, they have a final output like the Beats headphones. You can hear how it might sound on there, super bass heavy. Aaron: I hear they're getting better, but I still have never bought any Beats headphones. I probably should (just for testing purposes). Ryan: There are definitely programs out there to help you see how things translate to different monitors. On Location Gear Ryan: We were talking about the gear we use for on location recording. Sound Devices would be our main recorders. For our mics, we use Schoeps. It's a shotgun microphone, so it's a narrow polar pattern with good off axis rejection. Schoeps is a great brand. Again, you'll see this on professional movie sets. That's the mic we use. We have some Sennheiser shotguns as well, the ME66, we have a couple of those, which is more their entry shotgun mics. Recently, I rented some of the MKH416. Aaron: I would like one of those. The Sennheiser 416 is well known as the classic TV shotgun mic, right? Ryan: Exactly. I rented those out because I wanted to try it out for that reason. The Schoeps is very good and very well known on set as well, but so is the 416. I rented it to try it out. It's a trusted mic that a lot of people use for these professional things, and it doesn't really break the bank for what it is. Aaron: They're like $1,000, I think. Ryan: Yeah, and it sounded great. Aaron: The next mic I get is either going to be that or the Rode NTG 3. Ryan: I've heard a lot of great things about that. I haven't tried one myself. Aaron: That's the shotgun mics we shot my podcasting courses with. Ryan: Yeah, I know that Sean uses that for all of his videos. Aaron: I'm excited about getting to go work with those (I'm moving to San Antonio in March or April). Master the Basics Aaron: That's a pretty good run through of your gear. I'm sure you could keep going and discuss a lot more, but I don't think we need to go into that. It seems like you guys are at a super professional, high quality. You have made big investments in professional gear, which is fantastic. I encourage everyone to strive for that, to aim for that, but like we said earlier, use what you have right now. I don't have anything close to what you guys have, but I'm still doing my podcast. I'm doing the best I can with what I have. Ryan: It still sounds great. Aaron: Thanks! It's mostly just knowing how to set gain levels and not having a noisy room. It's crazy how far the basics will get you— everything else is just icing on the cake. I've been watching this video course called Zen and the Art of Work, which I really recommend to everybody. It's mindfulness training mixed with productivity training, which is such a great combination. In this course, he says, “So many of the masters continually revisit the basics.” Mastery is staying on a path. It's not reaching some final goal, it's more about being with the work and investing in getting better, but also revisiting the basics. He was talking about playing piano. He was like, “A lot of times, I just start by touching the keys, pressing the keys, and then doing basic scales over and over again.” It's true. When you get so good at the basics that you don't have to think about it, that's when you start to expand and get to that level where people say, “Wow, you're so good at that. How did you get so good?” You're like, “That was just doing the basics. It's not anything fancy.” It's so important to master the basics and keep going back to them. Learning More Aaron: What's next for you? How do you invest in yourself and improve? Or are you working so much that you always have more learning opportunities? Do you buy books or courses or follow any websites to learn more about this audio stuff? Ryan: Honestly? We had a shift at work to where my role has shifted to mainly just broadcasts. That has enabled me to have a little bit more flexibility and free time, so I've been doing a lot more freelance work. That's great, because it energizes me and keeps me engaged. It keeps me from routine. Routine is great. I love routine, that's very much my personality, but freelance work keeps things interesting. For me, it's all about where and how I can get inspired and constantly feeding that. It's about feeding my desire for creativity. We're all creatives. We like to create. We were designed to be creators, really. Everything I try to do is about how I can become a better creator and what I can create next. It's about finding things that inspire me, really. We touched lightly on a few of the resources that I like, things I've learned and places I've picked things up. If you're interested in audio for post production, there are a couple of great books by Ric Viers. I have two books by him that are really great. The first one is The Sound Effects Bible, and it's not just sound effects in there. He talks about everything from gear to microphones, basics, setting proper gains, compression, some mixing techniques, etc. He also has The Location Sound Bible. There are a lot of similarities, but there's also a lot of talk about gear, shotgun mics, lop mics, recorders, and then he also dives into some of the basics when it comes to mixing, proper gain staging, and so on. Those are a really great pool of knowledge in book form. There are a lot of other books out there, but I have found those two to be really helpful. Other than that, when it comes to audio for video, it's a very small, niche field. There isn't a crazy amount of stuff out there, like there might be for mixing music. For that, you've got tons. You've got Pensado's Place, all these people on YouTube putting out channels on mixing, mixing from home, mixing on a budget, etc. There's plenty of that. Aaron: Graham Cochrane and Joe Gilder are pretty awesome resources for anyone who wants to start a home studio. Ryan: YouTube can be a pool of knowledge for anything and everything, too. You have to dig a little bit and do some searching. On the inspiration side, for me, since I love audio for video, Sound Works Collection is a great place. They'll do mini videos interviewing the sound people that did sound for X movie. Whether it was the last Harry Potter or anything and everything, big budget films, they'll sit down with the recording people, the sound designers, the mixers… It's really cool, because they'll show footage of them doing stuff on location or the foley artists. It's cool to see their process. For me, that helps me stay inspired. It gives me ideas to do other things. They have a podcast as well, and that's great. The videos can be kind of short, maybe 10 minutes or so, but the podcast will go on at length, talking to the audio guys who have made sound for videos possible. It will also be music composers for movies as well. That's really great. I found that great not only as inspiration, but to know what and how audio professionals for big budget films get inside their minds, how they're thinking, and what their process looks like. It's neat to see stuff about sound engineers for big movies and realize that we're not so different. Dealing With a Broad Loudness Spectrum (Dynamics) Aaron: I have a nerdy question here. This is about normalizing and compression, I think. Aiya had asked, “I'm so torn about normalizing sound clips. If I'm working on a longer project in segments, would it be better to adjust my peaks manually for the sake of consistency? It's for a video project.” I'm hearing that there are differences in video volumes. How do you deal with that? Do you do compression? Do you do automation for the different parts? How do you deal with dynamics? Ryan: It depends on the project. I'll talk about how I would mix a sermon, because that's very dynamic. Our pastor will go from whispering, holding his handheld mic close to his stomach, to screaming, holding the microphone, cupping the capsule. Power and respect to him, because it creates a certain atmosphere, which has a powerful effect. That's what I'm dealing with on a weekly basis. That dynamic range is tremendous. Keep in mind, this is going to TV eventually. TV has very strict restrictions. It's not so much on level, but on perceived level. There's a difference between what you see meter and what you're hearing. I can talk at length about that, too. Aaron: Could you give us a super short version? I'm kind of aware of that, but since I just mix in Logic, I'm not sure how to measure it. Is there a way to measure it in Logic? Do you know? Is there a plugin you use? Ryan: I use a plugin from Waves. It's a loudness meter, and its just that. It has a lot of presets, so I'll use the TV standard preset. I'll use it for ATSE85, and I'll use it for a dialogue bus. They've also got one for a master bus. The standard right there is your average level around -24 dB LUFS, so that's full scale. If you have a classic meters, your peak would be zero, so that would average metering right around -10. At least for TV, I've got a hard limiter at -10 dB, to where nothing can go above that. The difference between levels on a meter vs. perceived loudness is the differences between what we hear and the actual energy. In our TV program, we'll have the sermon, but we'll also have a talking heads segments, which is dialogue and a music bed. We'll also go into segments where they'll go into worship from our live album, which had been mixed and mastered as an album. That thing is slammed. If you look at the wave form, it's a sausage. If I'm setting all that by the meters alone and they're all hitting -10, it may look right, but if I look at my loudness meter, that worship segment is going to be off the charts. There's so much more content in there. There's so much going on with all the different frequency ranges as opposed to a dialogue track, which is a narrow field in the frequency spectrum. That's the gist of it. When it comes to my technique for controlling dynamics, for something like mixing a sermon, if I'm going down my plugin chain, the first thing I naturally have is a high pass filter. I'm rolling off those unnecessary lows that are hogging energy. The next thing I'll do is use a compressor, and I'll set the attack to right in the middle, so not fast or slow, and I'll have the release time at fast. We don't want to hear it pumping, letting go. That's catching my peaks. It's not doing a crazy amount, but it kind of is. That's helping do a lot of the bulk compression. Before anything really hits the compressor, I will go through, and as I work my way through the mix, I will clip gain the wave form, so that, say, if he's whispering somewhere, I might keep that, depending on how I have my compressor set. Then, if we go up to a part where he's screaming and my wave form is huge, I will take that down and create those nodes, those dots in the wave form, and drag the actual clip volume down, that gain down. That way, it's not going into the compressor at this high gain level. It's hitting the compressor evenly as the rest of it would. That way, it's not driving the compressor crazy. Then I'll go through and do some EQ and DSing and whatnot. I might add some more compressors in there, just to grab some of those little things coming through. After that, it's subtle, just smoothing it out. Aaron: It is a little bit of both. If she has access to an audio editing program—I don't know what she's using for editing. If you can put a compressor on the track, do that. It's not exactly the same, but I did a YouTube video about how I process podcast vocals, and it's very similar. For podcast vocals, I start with a Logic noise removal plugin. Ryan: I actually have my noise suppressor, and I'll use that later on down in my signal chain. My way of thinking is that if I've got all this compression going on, the compression is narrowing that dynamic range, so it's bringing up that noise floor. I tend to do my noise suppression after the bulk of that compression, because the noise floor is higher and it's easier to work on a supressor. If that makes sense. Aaron: I've thought a lot about whether you should do the noise removal before or after you add a bunch of gain with a compressor or something, and I can't think of a good reason that it matters. You can take out the noise before you add a bunch of gain, or you can add a bunch of gain and take out the noise afterwards. Which is better? I don't know. Anyways, after the noise removal plugin, I put an EQ with a high pass filter, a peak compressor, an RMS or an average level compressor, and then a limiter. Ryan: Like I mentioned earlier, before I had my long-winded answer, it also depends on what it is you're mixing—whether it's music, or a podcast, or something for film. When it comes to dialogue for film, you want it to sound as natural as possible, but you also want to be able to hear if someone is whispering. When it comes to that, I'll still use a compressor, but it will be very, very light. If there's anything I need to do to meet loudness, that I will automate the volume on my dialogue bus. I'll bring that up. That way, it sounds a little bit more natural, instead of solely relying on a compressor to do all the work for you. Aaron: That makes sense. For podcasts, if I notice that there's a section where someone was talking much quieter, like if a guest backed away and talked like that for four or five minutes and then went back to the normal distance from the microphone, in Logic, I'll turn that into its own clip. I make a cut on either side of the quiet part, and then, in Logic, you can double click on it and change gain by hitting Control G. Then you can add 3, 4, or 5 dB to it. That works out pretty well. If it's every five seconds or I have to do it more than five or six times in an episode, I won't do the clip gain changes, I'll just use a compressor. Look at the overall audio file and see if there are long stretches where you can use automation to change the gain, or change the clip gain. Common Audio Mistakes Podcasters Make Ryan: You asked a question that I think would be good to talk about in regards to podcasting. You had asked, “What do you like about podcasts? What common mistakes do you hear people make?” Initially, I read this and thought, “I don't know,” but I spent some time thinking about it. This is great, because it piggybacks off the loudness thing. A lot of the mistakes that I hear when it comes to podcasts in regards to audio is the levels and loudness aspect. I'll listen to some podcasts that sound great, and I'll put on another podcast where the whole thing is super quiet. Then they start laughing, and it's really loud. There are some, like mine, where they have a music bed underneath the entire thing, and then sometimes the music bed is so quiet that you hardly know it's there. You're like, “What the heck is that noise in the background?” Sometimes, it's the opposite. Sometimes, the music bed is way too loud. That's a few of the things I've noticed. A lot of the fixes relate to what we just talked about. It helps to have knowledge of levels and perceived loudness. If you're mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent. One of the biggest things I can recommend for anyone mixing anything, whether it's music, movies, a podcast, is the importance of having a reference track. Aaron: Yeah, I don't talk about that enough. Ryan: That is huge. Professional audio engineers who mix platinum records still do this. They will pull in a track from a different song that is mixed well and is mixed how they want theirs to sound, and they'll have it muted in their session. When they want to have a reference to listen to or train their ear, they'll un-mute it, and they'll go, “Oh, okay.” I'm sure you've done the same thing as me, where you'll be so involved in a mix, you're in it, and you think it sounds great, and then maybe you go away. You go home, sleep, and maybe you come back, and you open it up and you go, “Woah! What was I thinking!” You can get so involved in it that the blinders go up. You get tunnel vision, and you're not aware to some things. It's good to have a reference track or get an outsider's opinion on a mix. The main takeaway here is the reference track. That would help with anything, whether it's the timbre, how you're EQing, or the loudness. You pull in their track and it's far louder than yours, and you automatically know that you need to do something about it. Aaron: That's a great idea. You can kind of do this before or after. You go through and you edit your whole podcast, get everything set up the way you want, create an extra track, and then find a podcast that sounds really good—This American Life or pretty much anything by NPR—download an episode, drop it into your editing program, and play it, mute it, and see what the difference is. Maybe you need to add some gain with an adaptive limiter or with a compressor, or maybe you can tell that your track sounds way sharper or harsher. Are there are too many high frequencies or too much bass compared to your reference track? You can adjust those things. I'm so glad you mentioned that. I've never thought of that before, and that's such a good idea. Ryan: It's one of those things you don't think of much, but once you do it, you're like, “Oh my gosh!” It's really eye opening and really helpful. You can find Ryan online at ryanmonette.com, and follow him on Twitter @RyanMonette.

My guest this week is professional audio engineer Ryan Monette. Ryan graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in Music Production & Engineering. For the last 4.5 years he's been the Post-Production Audio Engineer on staff at Elevation Church, in Charlotte, NC, where he mixes their global TV show, and has many other responsibilities (boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, etc.). You may have heard some of his work, as he sound-designed and mixed the opener video for the Circles conference for the past two years. He even had his own podcast for a short while (TheQueuecast.com). I asked Ryan to come on the show to share his journey towards becoming a professional audio engineer (a job that I've always wanted), and to get him to share some tips for anyone interested in working in audio/video professionally.Highlights, Takeaways & Quick Wins:Think long term and dream big.If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone.Take advantage of free online courses to learn more about audio engineering.Get started with whatever you have.Your mix may sound completely different in a different environment, so listen with different headphones/speakers in different locations.Master the basics and keep going back to them.If you’re mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent.When mixing, always use a reference track.Show NotesAaron: You graduated from Berklee College of Music with a degree in music production and engineering. For the last five years, you’ve been the post production audio engineer for Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. You have a lot of jobs there: boom operator, field recorder, sound designer, audio editor, and you mix their global TV show. Do you mix that live?Ryan: Not necessarily. We can get into that later. There’s a process for that.Aaron: Some of the creative people here might have heard of some of your work. You sound designed and mixed the opening videos for the past two years of Circles Conference, which I was at. Have you been there for the past two years?Ryan: I haven’t been personally, no. I have wanted to go. I love it from afar, and I want to go in person.Aaron: I wanted you to come on this show because when I first got started, I had dreams of being a professional audio engineer. I thought, “How cool would it be to work in audio and get paid for it? That’d be awesome!”I fell backwards into it by doing podcast editing as a hobby first, then for money, then I met Sean McCabe and ended up working for him full time. I edit podcasts and help out with a ton of other stuff. I asked you to come on the show to share your advice for anyone who’s interested in working in audio/video professionally, and to talk about how you got there yourself. So tell me a little bit about how you got into audio. When did you first realize that this was something you wanted to do?Ryan’s Journey to Becoming a Professional Audio EngineerRyan: I love listening to your podcast, Aaron, and what I love about it is I feel like you and I have a lot of similarities in our backgrounds. You’re a musician, a drummer, and I’m also a musician. I play several things. My primary instrument is bass, but along with that, I started on piano. I picked up bass, and with the bass I picked up guitar. I took some drum lessons here and there as well.I sing as well. I dabbled in a little bit of everything. I’m kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. I’m okay at a lot of things, but I’m not superb at one thing. Anyway, right around junior high or high school, I started playing the bass. I started playing in little bands here and there. When it came time for college, I had no clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I loved music.Aaron: Same here!Ryan: I was living in Las Vegas at the time, so I decided, well, everyone has to have that college experience, and I didn’t want to go to college in the same city, so I decided that I needed that “being away from home” experience. I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. I took your basic, general classes, not knowing what I wanted to do. At this time, for my high school graduation, I had received a graduation present of a Macbook Pro.With that, of course, you get the wonderful iLife suite, including Garageband. As a musician, a whole new world was opened up to me. When I was in a band in high school, I was the gear head—I loved the PA and putting cables together.I was drawn to that. Once I had this Macbook Pro with Garageband and I had my bass and my guitar in my dorm, I was like, “I can create music!” I figured out how to work it and record myself. I bought a USB microphone, and that world was opened up. When I was there, I had a friend, and her brother went to this school where all they learned about was music. I was like, “Wait, you can do that? You can go to school for just music?”That’s how I found out about Berklee School of Music. I applied, and you have to audition as well. I applied and auditioned, and the first time I tried, I actually didn’t get into the music school I wanted to go to.Aaron: This sparks something in my mind. I feel like I might have read an article about Berklee or looked into it and thought, “No, they’re really strict on who they accept, based on your performance.” That was intimidating to me at the time, because I never felt like I was that good of a drummer.Ryan: It was intimidating for me, too. Clearly, I wasn’t up to par.Aaron: Yet you went for it. That’s more than a lot of people would do.Ryan: Yeah. After I finished my first year at UNR, I moved back to Vegas and went to UNLV, the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I took all music classes, forgetting the general ed stuff you need to get a degree. I took all music classes—music theory, because I had never had actual music theory classes, so I thought I needed that. With that, there were some audio classes that I took as well. I was like, “Hey, I like this audio thing.”At the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I had my first exposure to a formal audio class, where I learned all the proper techniques. Later on that year, I applied and auditioned again for Berklee. I got accepted, and the next year, I moved to Boston and went to Berklee for about three and a half years. Then I graduated. When I went to Berklee, the only thing that drew me as a major was Music Production and Engineering. I naturally loved the gear side of things. I fell in love with recording. I was like, “This is what I want to do.”Aaron: You got to spend three and a half years there, studying and learning?Ryan: It is non-stop, 24/7, music, audio, and to be honest, I miss being in that environment so much.Aaron: That sounds fantastic. I always love setting aside time to take online classes, read books, and listen to interviews about audio.Think Long-TermAaron: You were drawn to the audio engineering stuff, and then you graduated.Ryan: I can remember a specific time in my life, and I’m pretty sure it was my last semester at Berklee. They went by semesters instead of years. It was in one of my capstone classes. Our instructor asked us the typical, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question.Aaron: I love that question now. I hated it when I was 22.** Think long term and dream big**Aaron: Plan out where you want to be, because if you can envision it, then you can figure out how to get there. But you have to start by saying, “I want to do this thing someday.” For me, it was, “I want to do work from a laptop. How do I get there?” Now I’m there. So you were 22 and someone asked you, “Ryan, where do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in five years?”Ryan: At that moment, I was trying to figure that out, naturally, as you do when you’re approaching the end of college. While I was at Berklee, I loved music. I loved recording music, but my absolute favorite class—they only had one of them, but it was the class I yearned for, that I wanted to take and put in all these extra hours for—was audio for visual media, audio for video.By far, that was my favorite class. The whole class, we were working toward our final project. You choose a five to seven minute clip from a well known movie, and all the audio is completely stripped. You have to recreate everything. That’s all the dialogue, all the foley, all the ambient background, all the hard effects, and so on. You have to connect with a film scoring student there at Berklee, and they have to provide the score. I absolutely loved every aspect of that project and the process. When it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life, it was between audio engineering at a recording studio, working at Disney as an Imagineer, or doing audio at a church.I have always been involved with church, playing on worship teams and whatnot, so I also saw myself doing audio for a church. Long story short, I was really privileged to dip my feet in all of those things after college. After I graduated, I moved back to Las Vegas. Eventually, I found an incredible recording studio, probably one of the top two recording studios in Las Vegas, and I landed an internship.First Audio Engineering JobsRyan: I say “internship” loosely, because your typical studio internship is all the stereotypical grunt work—taking out the trash, doing the coffee, and whatnot. I showed up, and they were like, “You went to Berklee? Berklee guys are cool. Here, hop in this session and help us out.” It was open to me, thrown at me, and next thing I knew, I was assisting on sessions with huge clients, I won’t name drop.Aaron: You can drop a couple of names if you want.Ryan: I had a pretty fun time helping out with a session with the famous engineer Eddie Kramer, who is engineering for Carlos Santana.Aaron: Dang, man! That’s awesome.Ryan: That was pretty incredible. But while I was there, I had this gut feeling inside of me saying, “This isn’t it.”Aaron: It’s fine, but it’s not quite right?Ryan: I could see myself staying there and working my way up, but it didn’t feel right. A few months after I realized that I didn’t want to stay at the studio, I applied and was offered a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.I packed my bags, moved to Orlando, and I was working as a stage technician at the Epcot park. There, they found out that I was an audio guy, so they pushed me toward the live audio side of things. I was mixing shows and bands at Epcot and what was at the time Downtown Disney, now Disney Springs, area. Same thing. Almost as soon as I got there, the same gut feeling came in.I was like, “This isn’t it. I’m more of a studio engineer. I definitely don’t want to do live stuff.” Although I love Disney, it just wasn’t sitting right. I was only there three months before the next great opportunity came up, which is where I am right now. One of my friends told me about a job opening for this church in Charlotte, North Carolina, Elevation Church. I had actually been following them because of their podcast.At the time, I was kind of like, “I’ve got a job, whatever.” For some reason, I ended up on their website, looking at the job. I was reading, and I was like, “Wait a minute, they’re looking for someone to do audio for video. That’s what I really want to do!” On a whim, I threw out my resume. Next thing you know, I’ve been here going on five years.Aaron: Did you mention that you were a podcast listener when you sent in your resume?Ryan: Yeah.Aaron: The connections you can make through podcasting is really incredible.Ryan: It is. And I’ve been working there for 5 years now.How to Get Into Audio EngineeringAaron: I want to jump into what you do at your job at Elevation, but let’s pause and do a section on what advice you would tell someone who’s wanting to get started. I wrote a couple of things down here. I think it’s hilarious that you got a Macbook and your first microphone was a USB microphone.Ryan: Which was the Blue Snowball, by the way.Aaron: That’s the worst microphone!Ryan: I had no idea how to use it, either. If I find some of the earliest recordings I did, there are times I’m clipping to the max, square waves.Aaron: Probably bad mic technique, too. But hey; it got you started!If you want to do anything with audio, start by getting a cheap USB microphone.Any USB mics will work for getting started. I like the Blue Yeti, but it’s like $100. The ATR-2100 is fine, too. You just have to get something that can record some audio and start playing with it.Start playing with Garageband. Start playing with the free programs. Learn how to enable recording on a track, how to set your input device to the microphone, how to set your output device to wherever your headphones are plugged into, whether that’s your mic or your computer. It took me so long to figure that stuff out. I was like, “Why can’t I hear the audio in my headphones? What is going on?”Ryan: Same here.Aaron: You have to set input and output, then you have to record enable or do the input monitoring, all that stuff. But start with the USB microphone. Take some basic classes. There are so many great online classes. If you don’t have any money at all, if you’re super broke like I was when I started, watch some free YouTube videos. Read a book.Ryan: If you go to Coursera.org, they’re a website where you can pay to take online courses and get certifications and whatnot, but they also offer free online courses. They even offer free online courses from Berklee. I’ve seen a music production class there. I’ve taken a free online song writing class.Check out free online courses, because they can be a pool of incredible knowledge.I took a photography class on there. Coursera is a great place. They’re great if you want to take free online courses.Aaron: There are places where you can learn all this stuff. You just have to invest some time. You really just have to start: Don’t wait until you have $500 for an interface and $200 for some professional headphones and microphone. Whether you want to start a podcast, start recording audio for a video, or record and mix a demo for a band, start doing something.Stop spending all your time thinking about how you can’t do anything because you don’t have certain gear or you’re not in the right place. You’ll learn as you do, especially in audio. You’re going to make a ton of mistakes.Ryan: That’s how you learn, though! That’s one of the most valuable things I’ve learned in life. You learn from your mistakes.Aaron: You don’t really learn when everything goes well.Just StartAaron: Any other advice you would give somebody, thinking back on how you got to where you are right now?Ryan: Honestly, you hit the nail on the head with “just start.” It’s as simple and cliche as Nike, “Just do it.” There is always going to be the next latest craze, the gear, and we’ve all been susceptible to that. We say, “Oh, well, I could do this if I had X.” It starts with the drive and determination, wanting to do it. There’s knowledge out there everywhere. You just have to dig for it.Chances are, you have at least something you can start with. Record something on your phone.Aaron: I have a friend who makes some awesome music on his iPhone.Ryan: Oh, totally. It’s as simple as getting an adapter. You can plug your guitar or whatever into your phone.Aaron: Kids these days have it so easy!Ryan: You have Garageband on your phone. I remember when I was figuring this out in high school, and we actually had a four track tape recorder. That was my first start. Get started with whatever you have.Aaron: What kind of stuff do you do at the church? What’s your day to day life like? Are you there every day, or is it just a couple of days a week?Ryan: Oh no, I’m definitely there every day. It has been a whirlwind for sure. In the past five years, I have probably played every audio role that there is to be played here. My main thing now is audio for broadcasts, pretty much anything that leaves the church. Our biggest output is the sermon, which goes to a lot of places.It also goes in the TV episode, which we talked about, which goes locally, nationally, and, I believe, globally as well. That’s a lot of what I’ve done. We also create a lot of films, short films, for our worship experiences, anything you can imagine that’s video and audio related. Audio post production, like we talk about. I’m constantly on video shoots using field recorders, the boom op, anything you can think of. Audio for video, I’ve done it.The Gear Ryan UsesAaron: Let’s talk about your gear a little bit. What kind of stuff are you using most in everyday life? I’ll do a quick recap: I have the Shure Beta 87A Mic as my main podcasting microphone. It’s attached to a Scarlett 18i20 USB Interface (update: I’m now using my Zoom H6 exclusively), which is plugged into a quadcore iMac that’s a couple years old.Nothing super fancy, but I’m really happy with where I am. I remember wanting all this stuff back in 2011, thinking how awesome it would be to have it. I have a Zoom H6 portable recorder and a couple of SM58 microphones. I’ve been pairing down my gear collection because I’m planning on moving in the spring.What kind of stuff are you working with? I use Logic Pro X for editing, and then Izotope iZotope RX 5 for cleaning up background noise or fixing clipping. What about you? What’s your day to day favorite gear?Ryan: We use a lot. There’s a bunch of gear for field recording and then in my office, which is where I’m at right now. I’ll start with my office. Right now, I’m talking into my personal mic, which is a Rode NT1A. It’s very affordable.The Rode NT1A is a nice beginner mic which works and sounds great, and I use it for a lot of voiceover projects.Aaron: I like those mics.Ryan: I’m talking into that right now. We also use the Shure SM7B. We have a nice Neumann that we’ll use for bigger projects. We like to use Universal Audio Interfaces, so I’ve got one of those. They’re great. They’re rock solid. You really can’t beat them.At our main recording/editing audio work station, we use Pro Tools. That’s very standard, and I’ve been using that for years and years. I use a lot of plugins. I use a lot of the Waves Plugins. I do use RX as well, and that’s the bulk of it. I do a lot of processing, depending on the project.I have a really huge sound library for if I’m doing narrative pieces that involve sound design, sound effects. I have a great app called Audio Finder, which a lot of electronic musicians use to help them find sounds. I use it to help me find sounds. It’s a nice way to catalogue sounds if you’re a sound designer or anything like that.You can basically tag all these audio files with meta data, and you can search for sounds by their title. Or, if you type in a word in the search bar, it can pull up things based off the the metadata. If you have notes on something, it can find it. Audio Finder is a great way to find sounds.I have some other things in here. I have the Artist Mix Controller made by Avid. I use those if I’m automating stuff. I use those a lot, actually, when I’m mixing the sermons. I do a lot of automation for that. If I’m mixing a piece with a music bed or something, I like to automate the music by hand.It feels more natural, as opposed to clicking and making little dots. That’s the bulk of it here in the office. All of our audio engineers have a nice pair of Focal monitors. I also have another set of monitors I built myself. When I mix TV episodes, I have an output routed to a TV here in my office so I can hear how it translates on TV speakers.Recording Audio for VideoRyan: On the front end of things, if we’re doing shoots for videos, we use Sound Devices field recorders. We have three different models: the Sound Devices 788T 8 Channel Recorder, a 702 2 Channel Recorder, and then a 633 6 Channel Recorder. That last one is one of their newer models, which is great.Sound Devices are steep in price, but they are rock solid.One of the most trustworthy, well known field recorder brands on the market. That’s what you’ll see on pretty much every big budget shoot in some way. I do a lot of freelance on the side, which gives me the opportunity EPK shoots or BTS shoots for, recently, a show on HBO called Outcast.Aaron: Outcast? I’ve been seeing that (I watch Westworld).Ryan: I’m pretty sure it’s the same writers or producers or something. I know it’s the same writer as The Walking Dead. They shoot here in North Carolina, so with a local production company, we’ve done some interviews with some of the cast and crew. It’s been really neat to be on set and see what they’re using. It’s cool to see how similar their world is to what we’re doing day to day, just with more money and more resources.It’s the same thing. Most of their audio guys have some sort of Sound Devices. A lot of them use the 788 as a backup recording rig, and they’ve got larger multitrack recorders as well, that are also made by Sound Devices. Sound Devices is a great brand. They’re crazy expensive, but when you buy that, you know you’ve basically got it for life.Aaron: Yeah, I’m looking at the Sound Devices 788T SSD 8 Channel Portable Solid State Audio Recorder. It’s almost $7,000. I love that! So fancy.Ryan: That SSD does have an internal hard drive. Ours has a hard drive as well, so it’s great, because it has the internal hard drive, but you can also use CF cards. You can record on two different mediums. In case something runs out of space, you have it in two places.Aaron: This is super professional stuff.Ryan: Yeah. It is. It’s top of the line.Aaron: Fantastic. For all the rest of you, just go with the Zoom H4N or the H6.Ryan: Hey, we do have a Zoom H4N, and we do use that every now and then. Before I came on staff, our first field recorder was the Zoom H4N.Aaron: If I could start over and go back to before I had any kind of interface at all, I think I would buy myself an H4N or an H6. Not only are they portable field recorders so you can walk around with them—they have little stereo condensor mics on them—but they work as audio interfaces, too. You can plug it into your computer with a USB cable and record straight to your computer if you do any kind of podcasting or stuff like that.It’s good for the price. Otherwise, the little two channel interfaces are great. They’re about $100 for a good one, but they aren’t portable. You can’t take them to a show or out to a video shoot the way you can an H4N or an H6 or something.Ryan: Speaking of Zoom, they’ve recently come into the more professional field recording market. About a year ago, they releases the F8, I believe, which is an 8 channel field recorder with 8 mic pres. It’s $999 for something very comparable to a Sound Device. It’s not quite as high-fidelity, but for anyone starting out, you’re really not going to notice the difference.Mixing On Expensive Headphones or MonitorsAaron: I was going to ask you this earlier. You mentioned that you had Focal monitors. Did you listen to the episode I did a few episodes back where I talked about mixing on headphones (Episode 69: Do You Need Expensive Headphones to Mix a Podcast?)?Ryan: Yes, I did.Aaron: I mix on $10 Panasonics. What do you think about that? You can be totally honest with me. You can tell me that it’s a stupid idea or that it’s okay.Ryan: I agree to a certain extent. I agree that you should be listening to what you’re making on whatever the majority of people are going to be listening to it on. For a lot of audio engineers mixing music, that’s iPod earbuds, those standard earbuds you get. Something like that. When I mix TV, I have an output routed to a TV in my office, so I can hear it on TV speakers.I do also believe in mixing on something with some sort of higher fidelity type of monitoring environment, whether that’s nicer speakers or nicer headphones. Naturally, you’re going to hear things differently. The main thing to take away is how things translate.If you’re listening to something on one source and you make it sound good there, that’s great, but in a different environment, it may sound completely different.iPhone earbuds may not have the bass that a car stereo has. You want to hear how it translates from one thing to another. That’s why it’s good to at least listen to it on two different sources and not just narrow yourself down to one cruddy thing. That’s good in theory, but again, the key takeaway is translation.Aaron: Maybe it’s a little bit different for me and I can get away with it because of the consistency of the microphones and the recording environment set we use.Ryan: Yeah, totally.Aaron: I think if I was doing more stuff like you are, with videos and clients and all that kind of stuff, I would absolutely be using my higher fidelity headphones.Ryan: Very true. The bulk of your work is dialogue, podcasts.Aaron: Yeah, that’s really it. Just dudes talking into a microphone.Ryan: Yeah. I have done a lot of work here where I’m working in a small studio, but a lot of my mixes have played in auditoriums and arenas.If you’re working on projects like music or film that have different audio frequencies and spectrums, remember that sound will be perceived differently in different places.Aaron: How do you even test for that?Ryan: Here, I at least have a sense of how our auditorium sounds, so I’ve trained my ear to hear in advance and understand how it’s going to translate. For something like when we did a live recording in the biggest arena here in Charlotte, we had a video opener piece. I was on point for mixing that, so basically, I had to work with tech and production to find a time after setup where I can bring my session, copy it onto a laptop, and play it through the PA.Then I can make any final mix tweaks there in the auditorium or the arena. I perfected it in my studio, and any small tweaks I was able to do in that actual environment. Granted, a lot of the times, we may not have that luxury. There are also great plugins you can buy that simulate different monitoring environments, like Sonarworks.If you have certain pairs of headphones, you can tell the program, “I have these headphones, now make my mix sound like it’s coming through these headphones or these speakers,” so you can hear how it might translate. In that program, they have a final output like the Beats headphones. You can hear how it might sound on there, super bass heavy.Aaron: I hear they’re getting better, but I still have never bought any Beats headphones. I probably should (just for testing purposes).Ryan: There are definitely programs out there to help you see how things translate to different monitors.On Location GearRyan: We were talking about the gear we use for on location recording. Sound Devices would be our main recorders. For our mics, we use Schoeps. It’s a shotgun microphone, so it’s a narrow polar pattern with good off axis rejection. Schoeps is a great brand. Again, you’ll see this on professional movie sets.That’s the mic we use. We have some Sennheiser shotguns as well, the ME66, we have a couple of those, which is more their entry shotgun mics. Recently, I rented some of the MKH416.Aaron: I would like one of those. The Sennheiser 416 is well known as the classic TV shotgun mic, right?Ryan: Exactly. I rented those out because I wanted to try it out for that reason. The Schoeps is very good and very well known on set as well, but so is the 416. I rented it to try it out. It’s a trusted mic that a lot of people use for these professional things, and it doesn’t really break the bank for what it is.Aaron: They’re like $1,000, I think.Ryan: Yeah, and it sounded great.Aaron: The next mic I get is either going to be that or the Rode NTG 3.Ryan: I’ve heard a lot of great things about that. I haven’t tried one myself.Aaron: That’s the shotgun mics we shot my podcasting courses with.Ryan: Yeah, I know that Sean uses that for all of his videos.Aaron: I’m excited about getting to go work with those (I’m moving to San Antonio in March or April).Master the BasicsAaron: That’s a pretty good run through of your gear. I’m sure you could keep going and discuss a lot more, but I don’t think we need to go into that. It seems like you guys are at a super professional, high quality. You have made big investments in professional gear, which is fantastic. I encourage everyone to strive for that, to aim for that, but like we said earlier, use what you have right now. I don’t have anything close to what you guys have, but I’m still doing my podcast. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.Ryan: It still sounds great.Aaron: Thanks! It’s mostly just knowing how to set gain levels and not having a noisy room. It’s crazy how far the basics will get you— everything else is just icing on the cake.I’ve been watching this video course called Zen and the Art of Work, which I really recommend to everybody. It’s mindfulness training mixed with productivity training, which is such a great combination.In this course, he says, “So many of the masters continually revisit the basics.” Mastery is staying on a path. It’s not reaching some final goal, it’s more about being with the work and investing in getting better, but also revisiting the basics. He was talking about playing piano. He was like, “A lot of times, I just start by touching the keys, pressing the keys, and then doing basic scales over and over again.”It’s true. When you get so good at the basics that you don’t have to think about it, that’s when you start to expand and get to that level where people say, “Wow, you’re so good at that. How did you get so good?” You’re like, “That was just doing the basics. It’s not anything fancy.”It’s so important to master the basics and keep going back to them.Learning MoreAaron: What’s next for you? How do you invest in yourself and improve? Or are you working so much that you always have more learning opportunities? Do you buy books or courses or follow any websites to learn more about this audio stuff?Ryan: Honestly? We had a shift at work to where my role has shifted to mainly just broadcasts. That has enabled me to have a little bit more flexibility and free time, so I’ve been doing a lot more freelance work. That’s great, because it energizes me and keeps me engaged. It keeps me from routine. Routine is great.I love routine, that’s very much my personality, but freelance work keeps things interesting.For me, it’s all about where and how I can get inspired and constantly feeding that. It’s about feeding my desire for creativity. We’re all creatives. We like to create. We were designed to be creators, really. Everything I try to do is about how I can become a better creator and what I can create next. It’s about finding things that inspire me, really. We touched lightly on a few of the resources that I like, things I’ve learned and places I’ve picked things up.If you’re interested in audio for post production, there are a couple of great books by Ric Viers. I have two books by him that are really great. The first one is The Sound Effects Bible, and it’s not just sound effects in there. He talks about everything from gear to microphones, basics, setting proper gains, compression, some mixing techniques, etc. He also has The Location Sound Bible.There are a lot of similarities, but there’s also a lot of talk about gear, shotgun mics, lop mics, recorders, and then he also dives into some of the basics when it comes to mixing, proper gain staging, and so on. Those are a really great pool of knowledge in book form. There are a lot of other books out there, but I have found those two to be really helpful.Other than that, when it comes to audio for video, it’s a very small, niche field. There isn’t a crazy amount of stuff out there, like there might be for mixing music. For that, you’ve got tons. You’ve got Pensado’s Place, all these people on YouTube putting out channels on mixing, mixing from home, mixing on a budget, etc. There’s plenty of that.Aaron: Graham Cochrane and Joe Gilder are pretty awesome resources for anyone who wants to start a home studio.Ryan: YouTube can be a pool of knowledge for anything and everything, too. You have to dig a little bit and do some searching. On the inspiration side, for me, since I love audio for video, Sound Works Collection is a great place. They’ll do mini videos interviewing the sound people that did sound for X movie. Whether it was the last Harry Potter or anything and everything, big budget films, they’ll sit down with the recording people, the sound designers, the mixers…It’s really cool, because they’ll show footage of them doing stuff on location or the foley artists. It’s cool to see their process. For me, that helps me stay inspired. It gives me ideas to do other things. They have a podcast as well, and that’s great. The videos can be kind of short, maybe 10 minutes or so, but the podcast will go on at length, talking to the audio guys who have made sound for videos possible.It will also be music composers for movies as well. That’s really great. I found that great not only as inspiration, but to know what and how audio professionals for big budget films get inside their minds, how they’re thinking, and what their process looks like.It’s neat to see stuff about sound engineers for big movies and realize that we’re not so different.Dealing With a Broad Loudness Spectrum (Dynamics)Aaron: I have a nerdy question here. This is about normalizing and compression, I think. Aiya had asked, “I’m so torn about normalizing sound clips. If I’m working on a longer project in segments, would it be better to adjust my peaks manually for the sake of consistency? It’s for a video project.” I’m hearing that there are differences in video volumes. How do you deal with that? Do you do compression? Do you do automation for the different parts? How do you deal with dynamics?Ryan: It depends on the project. I’ll talk about how I would mix a sermon, because that’s very dynamic. Our pastor will go from whispering, holding his handheld mic close to his stomach, to screaming, holding the microphone, cupping the capsule. Power and respect to him, because it creates a certain atmosphere, which has a powerful effect. That’s what I’m dealing with on a weekly basis.That dynamic range is tremendous. Keep in mind, this is going to TV eventually. TV has very strict restrictions. It’s not so much on level, but on perceived level. There’s a difference between what you see meter and what you’re hearing. I can talk at length about that, too.Aaron: Could you give us a super short version? I’m kind of aware of that, but since I just mix in Logic, I’m not sure how to measure it. Is there a way to measure it in Logic? Do you know? Is there a plugin you use?Ryan: I use a plugin from Waves. It’s a loudness meter, and its just that. It has a lot of presets, so I’ll use the TV standard preset. I’ll use it for ATSE85, and I’ll use it for a dialogue bus. They’ve also got one for a master bus. The standard right there is your average level around -24 dB LUFS, so that’s full scale. If you have a classic meters, your peak would be zero, so that would average metering right around -10. At least for TV, I’ve got a hard limiter at -10 dB, to where nothing can go above that.The difference between levels on a meter vs. perceived loudness is the differences between what we hear and the actual energy.In our TV program, we’ll have the sermon, but we’ll also have a talking heads segments, which is dialogue and a music bed. We’ll also go into segments where they’ll go into worship from our live album, which had been mixed and mastered as an album. That thing is slammed. If you look at the wave form, it’s a sausage. If I’m setting all that by the meters alone and they’re all hitting -10, it may look right, but if I look at my loudness meter, that worship segment is going to be off the charts.There’s so much more content in there. There’s so much going on with all the different frequency ranges as opposed to a dialogue track, which is a narrow field in the frequency spectrum. That’s the gist of it. When it comes to my technique for controlling dynamics, for something like mixing a sermon, if I’m going down my plugin chain, the first thing I naturally have is a high pass filter. I’m rolling off those unnecessary lows that are hogging energy.The next thing I’ll do is use a compressor, and I’ll set the attack to right in the middle, so not fast or slow, and I’ll have the release time at fast. We don’t want to hear it pumping, letting go. That’s catching my peaks. It’s not doing a crazy amount, but it kind of is. That’s helping do a lot of the bulk compression. Before anything really hits the compressor, I will go through, and as I work my way through the mix, I will clip gain the wave form, so that, say, if he’s whispering somewhere, I might keep that, depending on how I have my compressor set.Then, if we go up to a part where he’s screaming and my wave form is huge, I will take that down and create those nodes, those dots in the wave form, and drag the actual clip volume down, that gain down. That way, it’s not going into the compressor at this high gain level. It’s hitting the compressor evenly as the rest of it would. That way, it’s not driving the compressor crazy. Then I’ll go through and do some EQ and DSing and whatnot. I might add some more compressors in there, just to grab some of those little things coming through. After that, it’s subtle, just smoothing it out.Aaron: It is a little bit of both. If she has access to an audio editing program—I don’t know what she’s using for editing. If you can put a compressor on the track, do that. It’s not exactly the same, but I did a YouTube video about how I process podcast vocals, and it’s very similar. For podcast vocals, I start with a Logic noise removal plugin.Ryan: I actually have my noise suppressor, and I’ll use that later on down in my signal chain. My way of thinking is that if I’ve got all this compression going on, the compression is narrowing that dynamic range, so it’s bringing up that noise floor. I tend to do my noise suppression after the bulk of that compression, because the noise floor is higher and it’s easier to work on a supressor. If that makes sense.Aaron: I’ve thought a lot about whether you should do the noise removal before or after you add a bunch of gain with a compressor or something, and I can’t think of a good reason that it matters. You can take out the noise before you add a bunch of gain, or you can add a bunch of gain and take out the noise afterwards. Which is better? I don’t know. Anyways, after the noise removal plugin, I put an EQ with a high pass filter, a peak compressor, an RMS or an average level compressor, and then a limiter.Ryan: Like I mentioned earlier, before I had my long-winded answer, it also depends on what it is you’re mixing—whether it’s music, or a podcast, or something for film.When it comes to dialogue for film, you want it to sound as natural as possible, but you also want to be able to hear if someone is whispering.When it comes to that, I’ll still use a compressor, but it will be very, very light. If there’s anything I need to do to meet loudness, that I will automate the volume on my dialogue bus. I’ll bring that up. That way, it sounds a little bit more natural, instead of solely relying on a compressor to do all the work for you.Aaron: That makes sense. For podcasts, if I notice that there’s a section where someone was talking much quieter, like if a guest backed away and talked like that for four or five minutes and then went back to the normal distance from the microphone, in Logic, I’ll turn that into its own clip. I make a cut on either side of the quiet part, and then, in Logic, you can double click on it and change gain by hitting Control G. Then you can add 3, 4, or 5 dB to it.That works out pretty well. If it’s every five seconds or I have to do it more than five or six times in an episode, I won’t do the clip gain changes, I’ll just use a compressor.Look at the overall audio file and see if there are long stretches where you can use automation to change the gain, or change the clip gain.Common Audio Mistakes Podcasters MakeRyan: You asked a question that I think would be good to talk about in regards to podcasting. You had asked, “What do you like about podcasts? What common mistakes do you hear people make?” Initially, I read this and thought, “I don’t know,” but I spent some time thinking about it. This is great, because it piggybacks off the loudness thing.A lot of the mistakes that I hear when it comes to podcasts in regards to audio is the levels and loudness aspect. I’ll listen to some podcasts that sound great, and I’ll put on another podcast where the whole thing is super quiet. Then they start laughing, and it’s really loud. There are some, like mine, where they have a music bed underneath the entire thing, and then sometimes the music bed is so quiet that you hardly know it’s there.You’re like, “What the heck is that noise in the background?” Sometimes, it’s the opposite. Sometimes, the music bed is way too loud. That’s a few of the things I’ve noticed. A lot of the fixes relate to what we just talked about. It helps to have knowledge of levels and perceived loudness.If you’re mixing a podcast, make sure your levels are consistent.One of the biggest things I can recommend for anyone mixing anything, whether it’s music, movies, a podcast, is the importance of having a reference track.Aaron: Yeah, I don’t talk about that enough.Ryan: That is huge. Professional audio engineers who mix platinum records still do this. They will pull in a track from a different song that is mixed well and is mixed how they want theirs to sound, and they’ll have it muted in their session. When they want to have a reference to listen to or train their ear, they’ll un-mute it, and they’ll go, “Oh, okay.”I’m sure you’ve done the same thing as me, where you’ll be so involved in a mix, you’re in it, and you think it sounds great, and then maybe you go away. You go home, sleep, and maybe you come back, and you open it up and you go, “Woah! What was I thinking!” You can get so involved in it that the blinders go up. You get tunnel vision, and you’re not aware to some things.It’s good to have a reference track or get an outsider’s opinion on a mix.The main takeaway here is the reference track. That would help with anything, whether it’s the timbre, how you’re EQing, or the loudness. You pull in their track and it’s far louder than yours, and you automatically know that you need to do something about it.Aaron: That’s a great idea. You can kind of do this before or after. You go through and you edit your whole podcast, get everything set up the way you want, create an extra track, and then find a podcast that sounds really good—This American Life or pretty much anything by NPR—download an episode, drop it into your editing program, and play it, mute it, and see what the difference is. Maybe you need to add some gain with an adaptive limiter or with a compressor, or maybe you can tell that your track sounds way sharper or harsher.Are there are too many high frequencies or too much bass compared to your reference track? You can adjust those things. I’m so glad you mentioned that. I’ve never thought of that before, and that’s such a good idea.Ryan: It’s one of those things you don’t think of much, but once you do it, you’re like, “Oh my gosh!” It’s really eye opening and really helpful.You can find Ryan online at ryanmonette.com, and follow him on Twitter @RyanMonette.

Heyang: Every company has its own regulations, even some weird ones. A market executive of a recent job fair in Chongqing has pointed out that nearly 30% of job hoppers quit their former job because they can no longer bear weird company regulations. Guys, are these company rules that weird? Niu Honglin: Well, you gotta say cuz among the five hundred job hunters that intended to change their jobs in Chongqing, 29 percent said they quitted the job because of it. And what are these regulations? Let's make some examples. First, there is a regulation saying that his company would fine employees 20 yuan for every minute they are late. And if you are 5 minutes late, then you will be fined for 100 Yuan.Ryan: I want to jump in on this one. I just want to jump in real quick. I think this one is ethically okay because it is like "This is your job, you should show up when the job starts". But, sometimes, things happen. Like, not every kind of form of transportations is reliable. Maybe there is an accident. So, I think there should be some kind of understanding. It shouldn't be some ultimatum. You should be at least able to make a case. Niu Honglin: And when you are working extra hours everyday, or you are paying a little more. And also there is another one saying that the company would hold a 30-minute-long morning meeting every day, and every employee must shout out "Come on, come on, come on" for ten minutes, loudly.Ryan: I have something to say actually. So San Francesco is a big startups city, and there's actually quite a bit to be said about this. Some of the more successful startups, I know from a personal friend, they do this in the morning to like, get people to like, just let out the stress, and like, get together, and yea, you are being a little crazy, but at the same time, you will be surprised how yelling makes you feel more at peace.Heyang: That is interesting. But, when that is forced upon as a company rule, you have to do, then maybe it is not great for people. Not great for everyone.Niu Honglin: Yea, and if you are doing some exercises to let out your stress, then it is fine. But "Come on, come on" for ten minutes? Really?Heyang: And what about wearing fake eyelashes?Ryan: Oh, that one so good! Heyang: Why is it so good, Ryan?Ryan: Because, okay, so twenty-eight years old Ms. Wan is in charge of operation management in an internet company. Let me break this down real quick for you guys, basically, the office says no office romance and you must have business casual, or business wear. But the weird thing is, if women, women can refuse to put on make-up, but they cannot refuse to put on false eyelashes. They get charged for 20 yuan each for not having it.Heyang: So basically, it is just forcing you to put on make-up because if you don't put on the whole set, and only have those fake eyelashes, you will look like a weirdo, so, isn't it kind of like the company is telling you "You must do that"? But I don't write it on paper! I just say in this way that you have to be coerced to it.Niu Honglin: And for me who really not good at putting her make-up, I am pretty sure if I have to put on fake eyelashes everyday, I will be late and will be charged 20 Yuan every minute. Ryan: Not just that but, guys, this is sexist in a way. You know, what does the guys have to do? This is like something seriously just targeted for women. So, I don't think that is fair at all. I think women should feel free to be as beautiful as they want in the workplace honestly. And guys should just be able to control themselves. So, women shouldn't have to feel like they have to dress down or do certain things, like make-up wise because men in the office might be attracted to them. Guys, you are grown men, like you are going to control yourselves and respect women.Heyang: Yea that is very well said, Ryan. And do you think these company regulations are just plain weird? Do you think it is not humane? Do you think that it is sort of asking too much from the employees? Or do you think the company has the right to do this, it is totally legit, is it good for the operation? Niu Honglin: Well, let say the bosses are not complete idiots, there are must be a story behind every regulation that we see as ridiculous or weird, but I do feel like they are doing the team building thing to ask the employees to do certain stuff. As if they don’t know how to actually to do their jobs, they have to be taught certain things, and that is not what we would do in adult society. Ryan: I won't assume that these guys that own these companies are not Chauvinists and they are not idiots honestly. But, I would assume that some of these come from an area of good, saying like, we want people to yell and get out all their stress before work, we want them to grow together as a good team building, and we don't want them to be late. I can understand those things.Heyang: Yea, so it is actually a fine line. And considering how difficult it is to protect your own workers' rights. In a lot of Chinese companies, I think it is usually the worker, the employee that is at a really vulnerable state. And it seems the only way to protect is to leave your job, according to this story.

【特别感谢热心听友“张仕泓-Sammy”帮忙听写本篇文稿】He Yang: A 12-year old boy in Wenzhou was asked to write an I.O.U. letter to his parents as punishment for secretly spending 9,000 Yuan on mobile games. Is it the right way that the parents used this particular method to encourage the son to learn from his mistakes? And should the game company give that money back to the parents? Is that even possible? Guys, tell me more about the story first. How smart is this guy! Ryan: He is a smart boy, so he is 12 years old, and he is indulging in mobile games. Actually playing this game called Crisis Action, I actually don’t know what that game is, but he spent 9,000 yuan of his parents’ money ($ 1,400) on purchasing weapons to better his equipment in the game. And he paid through Alipay, a company here in China. It’s kind of like middle man using his Mom’s credit card. The mother, upon receiving the strange bills from her credit card company, initially thought it was credit card theft. When the parents found out the truth, they decided to give the child a lesson by making him to write an I.O.U. of 10,000 yuan. So basically, how is the boy gonna pay back his parents? He is going to earn the money back by doing chores, and academically being responsible. So, for dish washing, he gets 10 yuan; for cooking rice, he only gets 5. For mopping, he gets a whopping 20, and for cleaning his room, 10 yuan. (Not bad) And then, really important one, if he gets high marks on a math test, he gets a 100 yuan off his bill. So, actually looking at this, I really like the way the parents handled it. I think it makes him responsible for his actions, and I think it is a good thing because he is also bettering himself and he doesn’t know it. You know, he is gonna be getting good grades. He is going be... having a cleaner life, and he is actually taking care of himself by washing the dishes and cooking the rice. Luo Yu: But have you ever done the computation yourself, all in all the kid has to mop the floor 1,000 times, and get the good academic scores 100 times before he can be cleared of his debts. But according to his father, up to now, this mechanism seems to be working quite well, and the boy has been responding well with the IOU, he behaved very well at home, helping with the family chores all the time, and he is very eager to finish his homework just after the school, so the father said, if the mistake can help the son learn the lessons he made mistakes and form a very good study habit, the money spent was actually worth it. He Yang: That was really interesting, and when I was looking at the story, I felt a million years old, like a dinosaur, well, I live in my cave, so pretty much…you know, I am there anyway, but… yeah… I mean, with this kind of story, you realized that in the old days, in comparison, let’s just do a comparison, kids used to sometimes steal from parents by just taking money out Mom and Dad’s wallet (Yeah) or purse, but now, it’s going to their parents’ Alipay account (It’s going digital) and also erasing his digital foot trail, like deleting the text massage that bank notifies his parents that a transaction has been made. This is stealing from parents, and don't you think a little bit of more heavy-handed way of parenting is kind of needed here? Ryan: Not necessarily, I think, for kids, they are kids, they think they can get away with stuff. All kids get punished, all kids need to learn right and wrong, and they learn from their parents, but it doesn't have to be the whip. Sometimes they can be just incentives like I.O.U.s, and he is maybe learning that, you know, like he can pay this debt off. So Luo Yu said that he has to mop before a thousand times, or get good academic scores 100 times, I don't think that his parents actually gonna say: Okay, you have to do this in a year, (Yeah) if you don't, we’ll selling you. No, it’s like more, just like, hey, now it’s like if I got grounded for getting a bad test in the U.S., I am not be grounded forever, but my parents like grounded like: “when do I get out of being grounded?” They like: “when we decide”, and I think this is only bettering him, he is getting good grades, he is changing his life, he is being socially responsible, you know, cleaning the house, and helping his parents out, and what a great way to solve it, I don't think any violence or any other weird way of parenting would need to come in to play here, and he is leaning his lesson, and nobody is getting hurt. He Yang: Yeah, okay, well, Ryan, you kind of convinced me, certainly I think with the story. That’s really interesting to see how parents are teaching the kids a lesson, and that part I think we did pretty thorough discussion already, but what about this other segment of the story, that now is that possible for kids to steal money from their parents’ online accounts. Luo Yu: Some of the technical giant can definitely do something here. Because according to lawyers, the boy is the minor, so he only has restricted civil capacity, big transaction between a minor and a game company should be carried out with the consent of the minor’s legal representatives or their guardians, and apple, the company, had actually done this in 2014, he reimbursed the parents with 32.5 million U.S. dollars, because a lot of children, just without their parents’ consent, you know, have done this business with apple, and they got reimbursement later. Ryan: I disagree with this, I think, like, you are being a sloppy parent if you are not, like, keeping on top of your kid stealing $ 1,400 from you. It’s not the company’s fault, I sell things, and if I have a no refund policy, I am sorry, no refund, you should like, not let you kid steal the money. I just… (But the kid can get… ) wait wait wait wait…, hold on (Okay, okay) before you jump on me, but I do think there should be a ceiling, okay, so for the amount like 1,400, yes, I agree, it’s a lot, but it’s not outrageous, if it was like a million dollars, of course, something needs to happen, that’s not really durable, and it’s… And the company, should be at least somewhat responsible for catering so much for this one kid, but in this specific circumstance, I think the company should be allowed to keep their transaction. Luo Yu: But the kid has very easy access to get all sorts of their parents’ digital devices, and they get the business done without their parents’ consent, and this is actually not abiding by the law. Ryan: I disagree, his mom is probably lazy and let the Alipay password in some devices. I doubt the kid just magically used a hack in his computer to find the password for his mom’s Alipay account. Watch your password, don't trust your kids. Your kids, they don't know any better. Just make sure, like your finance are away from your kids.He Yang: Okay, that’s actually…Luo Yu: So the best strategy is buy them an iPad without linking their iPad with your credit card.He Yang: Luo Yu, did you take money from Apple, iPad sales could go up. But, yeah, I think I am agree with you, Ryan, in theory but, I’m just imagining one day when me, the cave girl becomes a mom, there is no way I could outpace my son or daughter in the future, you know, in terms of technology, I think this is just gonna be so hard. See there is another challenge for parents that you need to know these stuff, digital payment stuff, and stay ahead of your kid, in order to safeguard your money to some extent?