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Post Rapture Looting Interview Now Available
by Noah Lugeons
Haven’t even had a chance to listen to it myself yet, but I wanted to make good on my promise to link it ASAP. Just got home and this was my second thing I did. The first one wasn’t exactly legal, so we won’t be going into any details on that…
You can, of course, find the Post Rapture Looting Podcast on iTunes, and, if you’re a fan of humor and irreverence from an atheist perspective, you should probably just go ahead and subscribe. But it you don’t have time for that, you can also hear the interview by clicking here.
My Best/Worst Interview
by Noah Lugeons
Famous last words: “What could possibly go wrong?”
So I recorded my first Skype interview last night. Well, actually, I technically neglected to record my first Skype interview last night, but we’ll get to that.
I’ve been a long time fan or the Reasonable Doubts podcast and after hearing that on the upcoming episode, co-host Justin Schieber would be debating someone on the existence of God, I got it in my head that I should invite Justin on the Scathing Atheist to discuss the merits and techniques of publicly debating theists. Seemed like an interesting topic and he was certainly qualified to opine on it.
Now, I’m sure there’s probably a way that this is usually done, by I don’t know it. So I just sent the dude a tweet telling him I wanted to interview him about debating theists. Much to my surprise, within an hour he’d tweeted me back to confirm. Not only that, but he said he’d be available to do it that night.
To be honest, I was a bit nervous. I wasn’t really prepared and I’d never recorded a Skype interview before. Seems simple enough, but when it came down to it, it was a bit trickier than I expected. I got Heath on Skype and we experimented a bit until I found the perfect setup to get good sound quality on the recording.
By the time we got all the technical issues sorted out, I only had about an hour to prep for the actual interview. I wrote out some questions, tried to predict his answers, did a little online research to fill in my intro and whatnot and before I knew it, it was time to call him.
And, like the loss of my virginity, it was a huge build up and a horrible disappointment. Turns out that we just couldn’t get a good Skype connection. Every time we’d get going, he would cut out or I would cut out and I’d end up with 45 seconds of me trying to get him to hear my question or I’d get half of a really thoughtful response. After half an hour of trying to get it to work and a disastrous attempt to hook my rig up for a phone interview, we decided to call it a night and try again the following day.
The following night comes and I set my whole rig up again. Keep in mind that there’s an easy way to record a Skype call, but you get terrible sound quality. To maximize the quality, I was using two microphones (a condenser mic that Justin would be listening to me on and a dynamic mic that I would be using for the show sound), a mixer and a digital recorder so that my computer didn’t have the added labor of the call. In other words, I’ve got a lot of shit hooked to a lot of other shit to make this all work well.
I said a quick atheist prayer over my computer (“fucking work this time! Amen”) and I called in again.
Luckily, this time everything went smooth. We had a good connection, and though I stumbled a bit through my first few questions, eventually I got my shit together and came off as somewhat-professional-ish. Justin was extraordinarily thoughtful and introspective and despite a few of my rookie mistakes, it was a really phenomenal interview. I was really excited to get such quality content for my first Skype interview. And then I glanced down at my rig and saw the blinking red light on my digital recorder. It’s the “record standby” light.
This is the stupidest mistake I possibly could have made. I remembered to hook the computer through the tape in on the mixer. I remembered to hit the “Add Tape to Main” button. I remembered to adjust the levels on the digital recorder to match the ones on the mixer. I remembered to reset my audio output from the condenser mic so that I could hear Justin. I remembered to shut down all the ancillary programs on my computer. I remembered all my questions, all my follow ups and all of my jokes. I remembered to split the stereo tracks so I’d have separate tracks to record both of our voices. And I forgot to hit the goddamn record button.
I seriously forgot to push fucking record. I couldn’t believe it. We were 9/10ths of the way through a really good interview with really good content and I hadn’t recorded a lick of it. Talk about rookie mistakes. I was so embarrassed at that point that I actually considered not saying a word and then telling Justin a few days later that my computer crashed and I lost the file.
But I couldn’t do that. I had to let him know. If nothing else, I had to salvage what I could from the time we had left. I had to bite the bullet and tell him that just what a stupid mistake I’d made.
“Can I make a terrible admission, here, Justin?”
“Sure…” he answered dubiously.
“I’ve somehow failed to record a big chunk of this. I don’t know if I forgot to reset the timer on this thing or what, but I’ve missed a huge chunk of the interview” I explained. It wasn’t exactly true, but I wasn’t quite ready to admit that I just forgot to hit the fucking record button. I wanted to seem inept, but I didn’t want to seem like an idiot.
“Oh no!” he replied, mirroring my exact feeling.
“I know, we had such great stuff here, too,” I lamented.
“Well, you know what,” he says calmly, “I’ve got a program here that auto-records all my Skype calls so if you want, I can send you the audio.”
You can only imagine my relief. Sure, it wouldn’t be the same audio quality as what I would have gotten if I’d been less stupid, but at least the interview was saved and all the good content wouldn’t be lost. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been kicking myself in the ass all night and all morning as well over it, but in the end it all worked out. Heck, he even did a bunch of the post-production for me before sending along the file.
I’ll be airing this interview on March 28th (Episode 6: The Zombie Jesus Edition) and I’m laying the groundwork now for the subpar audio quality in it. The end he was recording wasn’t really the end I was hoping to use, but despite a few issues with the sound, it’s a phenomenal interview and Justin’s insights will undoubtedly raise the IQ of the show about 25 points or so.
Hopefully I’ve learned this the hard way now and I’ll go all the way through the checklist next time, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this that I can pass on to other novice podcasters (other than “ALWAYS HIT THE FUCKING RECORD BUTTON!”) it’s that if you’re new to the whole interview thing, try to pick an interviewee who’s really good at it.
Post Rapture Looting Podcast Interview
by Noah Lugeons
I think the thing that has amazed me most since we started doing this podcast is how incredibly friendly and welcoming the atheist community has been. I’ve gotten encouraging emails and tweets from prominent atheists that I greatly admire, help from other atheist podcasters from around the globe, audio clips from complete strangers eager to help, listeners going above and beyond to assist with the research and heartwarming messages from complete strangers that urge us on. And that’s after only 4 episodes.
Case in point is an email I got the other day from Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast. It’s a podcast two friends started almost two years ago amid the hubbub of Harold Kamping’s famed doomed-day kerfuffle. It’s a biweekly podcast where they discuss news items of interest to atheists, bring on guests and go on occasional vulgar tirades about the frustrating side-effects of religion. But it’s nothing like our show. It’s a completely different length and everything.
Apparently Carl had happened upon our show on iTunes and liked it. In a friendly effort to help promote our podcast, he invited Heath and I to appear on his show to do an interview about the Scathing Atheist. We were understandably excited for the opportunity but, I have to admit, a little nervous as well. This would be the first time I’ve ever been interviewed, and even though I appear on an atheist podcast quite regularly of late, we script our show pretty extensively so the interview format was something totally new to me.
Luckily, Carl and his co-host Ben are old pros at it by this point and within minutes we were conversing like old friends. It was a lot of fun, we laughed a lot and we managed to sneak a few important topics in amid a morass of really off color jokes about eating babies, penetrating sheep, multiple-penis-fellatio and bear rape. I shit you not, those are all in the interview. And if that doesn’t have you ready to download it, I can’t imagine what would.
No word yet on when the interview will air, but as soon as we have a date, we’ll tweet the shit out of it.
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Update [3/11]: Spoke with Carl the other day. He told me the interview should be available on Saturday the 16th. Between now and then you can hear Carl and Ben interviewing David Silverman about the American Atheists 50th Anniversary Convention in Austin. That’s available at their feed now.
Episode 3 is Available!
It only took us two episodes to run off a pope. I can’t wait to see what we’ll get from this one. Definitely one of our 3 best episodes of all time, but if you don’t believe me, check it out. You can, of course, find us in iTunes, but if you want to cut out the middle man and listen to it right now, you can just click here.
A Review on a Review
by Noah Lugeons
It’s funny how the bad reviews stick with you so much more than the good ones. I’ve really been overwhelmed by how much feedback we’ve gotten on our young podcast. It would appear that after only 2 episodes we’ve already found something of an audience.
On the whole, the feedback has been very positive and I thank everyone who’s taken the time to offer advice, corrections and (best of all) flattering praise. But like I said, the negative tends to stick with you a bit more than the positive.
With that, I turn to a review on Podcast Mouth, which I won’t be linking to for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post. Let me clear, though, the reason I’m not linking to it has nothing to do with the fact that it was a scathingly negative review (and it really was). The reviewer actually said I sound like a “more smug and more scripted Dennis Miller”, which I can’t imagine taking as a compliment.
But the chief concerns he brought up were with the sound quality of the show, specifically with the interview portion of the program. And I really can’t take issue with any of the complaints he had. As the show’s producer (as well as it’s writer and host), I’m very aware that the sound quality is not where it should be.
And the kind of negative criticism that really hurts is the kind that’s true. I dug around on his site a bit afterward. To be honest I was hoping to find that he hated everything or thrashed a podcast I really liked, but much to my dismay it turned out that he was actually a very witty and impartial critic. He was clearly just getting started, as there were only a handful of reviews on his site, but they were all measured, intelligent and comprehensive.
So I left a response to his review saying fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou where I thanked him for writing a thorough and thoughtful (and dare I say quite clever) review and I humbly agreed with what he had to say about the quality of the sound in our show. I offered a bit of an excuse, but it was a flimsy one.
The fact is that I really didn’t expect the show to find an audience so quickly. I haven’t promoted it at all (except to list it with iTunes, Blubrry, etc.) and I expected that we would have a few episodes to figure things out before anyone was really hearing our mistakes. As soon as I saw that people were actually listening to the program, my first thought was that I was in dire need of better equipment.
So tonight I made a major step forward in that department. Like I said, I agree with the reviewer that the quality is sub-par and if so many people are going to take the time to listen to the show, I owe them the best quality recording I can produce. Unfortunately all the new equipment will likely arrive a day late to come into play for the next episode (and the blizzard that just descended on New England certainly isn’t helping), but by episode 4 our loyal listeners will notice a marked improvement in the overall sound of the show. And I thank them in advance for sticking with us during our show’s infancy.
So just to wrap up the story, I went back to the review site tonight to see if the critic had responded to my comment. Unfortunately the site was unavailable. Turns out that like me, he didn’t think anyone was listening just yet and my comment must have caught him by surprise. It’s currently listed as private.
I’ll keep an eye on it and when he’s up and running I’ll share the link. Like I said, he had some good reviews and at the very least, he lit a fire under my ass to upgrade my rig.
Podcast Reboot
It worked for Batman, James Bond and Star Trek so we figured we’d give it a try ourselves. The podcast has been revitalized and reissued with a brand new episode one. It will be available on all the major platforms within a few days, but if you’d like to beat the crowds, you can subscribe by pointing your pod-catching software here.
The format is new, with 30 minute biweekly shows and, depending on the response, we’ll keep ourselves open to upping it to weekly shows.
Of course, if you just can’t wait, you can listen to the podcast here:
The Scathing Atheist 