Dan Delgado started his first audio project in 2006. It was his take on a talk radio show, focused on entertainment news. He called it Radio Dan, and broadcast it through some public radio stations as well as online and, eventually, as a podcast. 

Radio Dan was something like podcasting grad school. There, Dan learned how to produce audio and how to host and be an on-air presence. And it also became an incubator: his next show, The Industry, actually started as a segment on Radio Dan. One day, he told a story he was obsessed with from Hollywood history. Later, his brother told him that he’d enjoyed it, and Dan thought…well, what if that was the show? He considered it for a year before dropping the first episode of The Industry in 2018.

We talked to Dan about having to be obsessed with your work, his love of Descript’s audiograms, and trying out new production styles, among other things. This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

The Industry is a very different show than anything you’d done before. How did you start prepping for it?

It’s the kind of show that I didn’t really know how to do until I just started to do it.

I was listening to the podcasting starter kit of This American Life and Radiolab—those first podcasts that people have a tendency to get into. I loved how those sounded, that narrative style. And that's something that I wanted to do. I loved movies, so doing a podcast about overlooked film history felt like, okay, this is where I can lock in. 

I have a Google Doc with, I don't know, 60 story ideas on it. The way things work for me, and I think a lot of people are this way—an idea will pop into your head, and if it sits around long enough, you'll do it. I'll spend a lot of time just looking up things online and if something’s like, I need to know more about that. Oh, that sounds like a story, it might become an episode, or its own show.

Everything I do is a short season, because it's got to be ideas that I really love. It's hard for me to work on something that I'm not interested in, because I'm the kind of person who will just stare out the window and daydream about the thing that I am interested in.

How did you teach yourself to write scripts?

Let's just take one that I did. I had this movie I did an episode on, called The Blue Bird. No one's ever heard of it; it’s from the 1970s. If I put it on for you, you would ask me to turn it off 20 minutes in. But what's interesting about it is that it was a co-production between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. 

So I said, okay, well, the first thing I need to do is, I need to learn more about this. I'm going to research everything that I can. I read books. And then the other thing that I have to do is to see, okay, who is around who either knows a lot about this topic, or was alive when it happened and was there? I’ll find people who were in that particular film, worked on that particular film.

If I can interview eight people for one episode, I will. And then we pare those interviews down. We only take what's good. I'll talk to somebody for an hour, and then I’ll take  eight minutes of what they said.

Your story can change. That's what I love about the interviews as opposed to if I was just telling you the story—there's a number of podcasts that do that. But what I find is that the interview can change the direction of your story. There's always some redirect that happens when somebody tells me something that's not in an old newspaper article, or was not in a book. 

So you're gonna do your interviews, and then you're gonna write your script based on your research and your interviews, and you're gonna try to tie it together and make it make sense. And then you're gonna edit that all together. 

Sometimes I'm just writing so I can attach this quote to the next quote, and just fill it between them. And sometimes you're trying to summarize what somebody is saying because I can say it faster than they did. This way, we can move ahead and we can move the story forward. 

And then tell me more about the production process.

After I've gone ahead and I've gotten my tape, I've pulled all my quotes and I've written my script, I go into my closet and I record, just like a real good podcaster. Then it's time for what I call the assembly. I take everything that I have and I open up my DAW—I use Hindenberg. It's almost like you're putting together a puzzle. You’re layering in piece by piece. 

A lot of times when you're doing that you also come up with other ideas. I'm doing another series right now, called Stories My Brother Used To Tell, and that is completely different. I'm trying to kind of overproduce, right? I'm trying to put my production very much in your face. 

It's a series about my older brother, Eric, and his ridiculous stories. Every episode he’s talking about some terrible car. As I'm listening to this, I'm like, what can I add to this as I'm doing that edit? As I'm editing in Descript, I have a Google Doc open, and I'm typing add this here, add this here, which is very different from The Industry. 

But maybe when I get back to it, maybe it will work that way. Maybe I'll say, okay, kitchen sink, throw everything in it. Sound design the crap out of this thing.

I love to hear that you’re using Descript! Where does that come in the process?

Oh man, I love Descript. When I was first doing The Industry, I was still using Audacity. And so Audacity is wonderful—it is a fantastic program, especially if you’re just starting in podcasting. But there is a better way.

Descript makes it so much easier to pull quotes. Once you have that transcript in front of you, you can just read it. I can remember a particular quote and find it, and just pull that quote right out.

I also use it to get rid of the filler words. I'm not crazy about getting rid of all of them; you gotta leave a few in. But I love Descript for that.  

My new favorite thing about Descript is the audiograms. I've been doing them for my stories. I might even be making too many, but it’s so fun to do.

‎That’s a perfect transition to my next question, which is if or how you use social media to promote the show.

For The Industry, I have a handshake deal with a magazine called Movie Maker Magazine. I put things on social media, and then they have a much bigger following than I do, so they will retweet things and publicize it a little bit. That's always very nice. 

But I'm doing this other series where it's like, Hey, here's a podcast about some dude you don't know who's telling some stories from 40 years ago. It really does feel like starting at square one.

Posting things like audiograms I do think helps a little bit. I also feel like newsletters, like podcast newsletters that do recommendations, those are really wonderful. I've been sending it to every newsletter that I can find. When I have a new season of The Industry, I will start pestering everybody who has a newsletter. 

I'm also a big believer in promo swaps or feed drops. I will feed drop anything, pretty much, into The Industry. I am not precious about my feed. 

And then what are some ways you’ve tried to maintain listenership, or build community with listeners? I’m thinking of things like Facebook or Discord groups, just for example. 

I'm the worst when it comes to that. The absolute worst. I'm a member of several Discords and I last visited them…probably over a year ago. I'm the worst Discord user. Oh my goodness. 

I hear that. It’s hard to do everything! Sometimes it’s like, do I want to spend my time making the show the best it can be? Or do I want to let the show be pretty good, and use that time on moderating a Discord or whatever it is?

I mean, yeah, that kind of sums it up. It's kind of enough. And it's also kind of not enough. Because it's like—I know that I could do more. I spend a lot of time thinking, is there something else that I could do? Is there like some sort of advertising lottery that I could win that would put my stuff all over the place? I spend a lot of time thinking about that, or looking up a million different newsletters. How do I crack into this one? How do I crack into this one without having to spend anything? 

How do you monetize the show?

I have a link on the website that’s like, buy me a coffee. It works a lot more than you would guess. I do get some advertising thrown my way from the magazine, Movie Maker. Having that relationship does help out. 

I'm doing all of my shows, and I have a side job of editing podcasts for a local company where I live here in South Florida. But I still have a regular day job.

How do you make time for all of it?

You just have a certain amount of determination. It’s like I was saying earlier—sometimes, the idea gets into your head and won't go away.  

So I do what I have to in order to get it out. If that means after I finish my day job, I'm going to spend a couple of hours at night editing, fine. I’ll do interviews kind of whenever someone wants to schedule them. 

And then there's always the weekends. You have to be okay with your entire weekend off from your regular job, spending it on this other job. But if you love it, it doesn't feel like a job. When I'm in those moods and it feels like I get into a zone, and I feel like I'm being creative, that's always exciting for me. Making the time for that is actually a pleasure. 

What does your technical setup look like?

Oh my goodness. Everybody has a cooler microphone than I do, I just want to be clear. I use a Samson Q4. I like it because it's small, and it has an on/off button. 

Here's something that I use that I absolutely love, which is a new thing. And I'm not trying to be a shill, but using Descript, now I get to use SquadCast, which I did not have access to before. 

There’s been a real evolution of my interviews. 2006 Dan, doing his little dinky radio show, I was recording audio from a cordless telephone. But at the time, people didn’t know what Skype was. 

What advice do you have for someone who wants to start a podcast?

Have a plan. Have a plan as to what your podcast is. I always get the impression that some people are going to start their podcast and be like, hey, it's me and it's this other person and we're going to turn the mics on and the magic will just happen.

It’s better if you actually have a plan, even if your plan is simply, these are the topics that we're going to discuss. We're going to do topic A, and then we're going to do B, and then we're going to do C, and then we're going to wrap it up. 

Think about who your podcast is going to be for. Who is your listener? What are you going to actually say? There should always be a very simple little map of what every episode is going to be about.