#52 - BUCKLE UP: 2024 Podcast Adjustments and Vision

And we're officially 18 hours away from 2024.

Welcome to the Talk to People Podcast.

My name is Chris Miller.

If you've never been here before, it's so great to have you if you've been here for the past, what, 51 episodes.

This is episode 52.

If every episode were a penny, we would be two pennies over having a half dollar.

If each episode were a week, we'd be officially at a year, a year, which is what we've done.

We took last week off because it was Christmas, and we were in Oklahoma hanging out.

But tonight, tomorrow's New Year's Eve, and I had to, had to, had to get a podcast out to talk about 2023, but more importantly, talk about 2024.

So where should we start?

First off, I have my whiteboard here.

I know many of you are listeners, but I also know some of you are watchers.

And something that I want to get better at in 2024 is to teach.

I started my professional career as a public speaking teacher in North Carolina, and it was one of the coolest jobs that I've had.

I got to work with students week one till week 16 and see social confidence firsthand.

And to be there to help them along that journey was eye-opening, but it taught me that personality, you may have the most beautiful personality, but if you're nervous, it doesn't shine through.

So we need to think about social confidence and how to be a better speaker.

So I want to be a little bit better at teaching in 2024.

So let's talk about the year 2024.

I feel really rusty.

I'm just going to say this straight up.

I've taken, I've done like three takes trying to start this podcast.

I think potentially it's because I haven't recorded it in a couple of weeks.

Also, I feel a bit tired, but it took me a lot longer than it should have taken me just to set this little studio up.

But whenever you create content, one of the things that nags at you is perfectionism.

You want it to be perfect.

So I was looking at the snapshot of the last video I made here, the reviving third places, and I was trying to match everything.

Like, how do I get the chair matched up directly and make sure the whiteboard's being filmed and what it ends up in is actually not creating anything because you're so worried about making sure you hit this arbitrary mark that you've set.

And the funniest thing about content creation is you work all this time to meet this arbitrary mark and then you release it, if you ultimately do release it.

Hopefully you release it and you're like, oh, I want to make sure it hits this mark.

And nobody was waiting on it.

With the podcast, it's a bit different because we've developed a relationship and we're kind of like a community.

So we know Mondays, Talk to People Podcast episode.

But for a lot of people, they are holding off creating that video or writing that article or publishing their pictures.

And the truth is nobody knows you're about to do it and nobody's waiting on it.

So you literally have to publish it and you have to keep publishing and getting better and better and better and fighting for eyeballs before you're thinking about an audience.

So that's a bit of a tangent, but I say that as a moment of transparency, just say, I struggle with perfectionism to even get this thing rolling.

And this is take number four, but I'm going with it.

I haven't, I've yet to get this far in a take.

So I'd hate to have to start over again.

But I want to talk to you all about 2024, because 2023 has been a really cool year.

It brought us here.

The podcast was A Baby, A 2023 Baby.

On December 31st of 2022, the first episode dropped.

And it's funny because it wasn't supposed to drop on December 31st.

It was actually supposed to drop on January 1st, but I didn't know how long it would take before from uploading an episode to publishing, because this is my very first episode.

So I was like, okay, well, I'm going to make sure I upload it the day before that day.

That way I don't miss launch.

But if you look at all of the records, it's like Talk to People Podcast uploaded on December 31st.

And I'm like, oh, man, I was going for everything 2023, but we got out 50, officially 51.

This is number 52 episodes out, and it's been a ton of fun.

The podcast has definitely evolved and changed.

It's gone from a podcast all about, like, if you look at the website in the bottom left, it says conversations about love, pain, fear, and exploring the nuances of humanity, which I love.

And then it went to talking about how life is better when you talk to people, and went to social connection and social connection for young adults.

All of these evolutions are super important to me because it's taken me a while to even get to the first one.

And I feel like the more we do, the closer we get to what the call that's nagging on me, and then to where my individual gifts and talents are going to make the most impact.

So you have to fish around a lot, right?

Throw everything around.

They say there's two different ways you can go about any creative journey.

You have the architect, and what the architect does is they lay a blueprint.

So I've never really been a part of architecture, but what I do know is that a blueprint essentially tells you where everything goes down to specific measurements.

So one bedroom goes here, and a living room goes here, and this door is three feet wide, eight feet tall.

I'm sure those measurements are a bit off, and we're going to put a 16-foot Christmas tree over here.

So the blueprint is everything you're going to do down to a science.

But then you have another strategy, and that is the archaeologist.

And what the archaeologist does is they show up to a place that doesn't have a blueprint.

Actually, it's never been trotted on before.

So rather than having a complete plan, their plan gets created whenever they start putting their hands in the soil and getting their hands dirty.

So they may find one thing, and they're like, Oh, look at this.

It looks like a baseball, right?

But then they look a little more, and they find a little cannon piece, and like, Oh, wait, maybe this was a boresight.

Or then they find a spoon, and they're like, Oh, actually, this may have been a community center way back in the day.

You know, like going through and finding these different things, and then ultimately at the end, you decide what it is.

So with any creative journey, you can either be like, Oh, I need to have a blueprint before I start.

I want to know exactly what I want to do.

I want to know how I'm going to do it, the values, the impact I'm going to make.

Or you could be an archaeologist and say, I'm just going to start.

And whatever I find by digging up in the soil, that's going to be what I run with.

So this whole project, I have mostly had an archaeologist cap on.

I knew I wanted to do a podcast, and I knew I wanted to talk to people.

But other than that, it's like, well, Chris, figure it out.

But the only way to figure it out is to have movement.

And one of the best things that I've learned recently, this is a good 2023 revelation, is that the best way to pivot is when you're in motion.

So a lot of us, we don't pivot because we're not in motion or we get nervous, like, shoot, this may not work.

So I probably shouldn't even start it.

But if you ever try to turn a car that's not moving, then you're gonna go insane because you can't do it, right?

You have to have either forwards or backwards motion.

And backwards motion is really important too.

Like if something screws up and it goes completely awry and we find ourselves in this morose state, this thing we wanted to do, it didn't do it.

Well, we're gonna go backward, but as we go backward, we can also change gears.

We can go a different way, decide, hey, whenever we go forward again, let's try something different.

So this has definitely been an archeologist approach.

Part of me, part of me, part of me wanted to be the architect and have everything planned out.

But that's just not my style.

And I know it is some people's style, but it's not mine.

I have people very close to me who are incredibly organized and have all of their, like just spatial organization, but also trying to think, like psychic organization ability to keep their thoughts on a kind of like graph paper.

Like, okay, here's what we're going to do now.

Here's what we're going to do then.

But that's not me.

So I decided, like, hey, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to go for it.

It makes me think of whenever I was at Wake Forest, one of the professors I worked with, this brilliant professor, super funny, incredible teacher, awesome, hutzpah.

She'd say, these students, they just want everything handed to them, but I make sure that they don't.

She was hilarious.

She would not have a lesson plan, but she'd show up.

She'd fill the class out, and there'd be a great class 50 minutes later.

Or she'd have a loose lesson plan and do something completely different.

It drove some people wild, but to me, it was encouraging.

Like, okay, we have this high caliber professor who's making an impact in students' lives, and she's not worried about having a lesson plan.

And I'm sure, the funny thing is, I'm sure she was super worried, but when each class arrived, she didn't have one.

So she learned how to make the best of it.

I know part of that could be enabling not planning well, but at the same time, you got to work with what you got.

So I was going to be an archaeologist, and I want to talk to you a little bit about how 2024, a little blueprint that I have, but mainly what this is going to be is some adjustments I'll be making with the podcast.

So let's get started.

So for 2024, some adjustments I'll be making with the podcast are, number one, I'm going to start including virtual conversations.

Initially, I wanted the first year of the podcast to be completely, completely in person.

The reason why is, I think, the most impactful, efficient, and effective way to build social support is to do it in person.

I think virtual is great.

It gives us access, but it's a bit deceiving.

Having constant access, we feel like we know things that we really don't.

I was reading about this in a book that I'll show you later, but it was talking about how, kind of like social discourse and how different sides of the political party will be like, oh, all Republicans like this, or all Democrats are like this.

And we can go on Twitter, and we can look at what different Democrats or different Republicans are tweeting.

And then we kind of feel like we know.

We know what they're thinking.

We know what they're doing.

When truthfully, we definitely don't.

We know about one person and what they chose to share on their phone with everybody else that is on Twitter.

So it's a bit deceiving.

I think in person, if you want to become the best communicator that you could possibly be, you need to be in person.

You need to be able to see when people are uncomfortable and they turn away or if they laugh.

You can recognize things in person that you can't pick up virtually.

So I think in person, also another thing about in person is all the studies that talk about rewards versus costs whenever it comes to like energy and fulfillment.

They show that in person interaction is at the top of rewards.

And when you get pretty good at it and you're talking with people that you're comfortable with, it's at the bottom of energy expenditure.

But if you are talking with someone on Zoom, even if you know them pretty well, I have to make sure I don't interrupt you.

Like your internet may be laggy or we may be waiting, and we actually expend more energy over Zoom than we do in person.

So that's fascinating.

But in person was kind of the move for me.

Something I talked a little bit about was how near the end of the year, I had a harder time finding guests.

And it was two part.

One was we were moving, so my studio location was in quicksand, it was sinking within, it was also being built up at the same time, not being built up as fast because we had a new house with a new layout.

The second was my focus with the podcast was changing a bit.

So it was creating a little dissonance between the guests that I was thinking about within the podcast vision.

I wanted to lean more into the social connection side, yet some of the guests that I was thinking about, it would have been more of a profile, essentially.

Here's someone interesting.

Let's talk about their life.

So there was some dissonance there.

And when you combine that with the friction of having to find good guests, having to plan everything, making sure that you have a good studio to record in, it got pretty inconvenient.

And out of everything that I've learned, whenever it comes to any type of creative project that is not your job, once inconvenience starts to settle in and once friction grows, the likelihood that you abort mission starts to shoot through the roof.

So I talked a little bit about, I think in the previous episode or episode 50, about how I had a hard time.

There were moments where I was like, should I stop doing the podcast?

Because I was in like employment limbo and trying to figure out money.

And then I was trying to build a business, but then trying to look for a job.

And we had stuff happening with our family.

So the podcast was really important to me, but there was questions, should I abort mission, exit stage left, and not do that?

But I didn't want to do that ultimately.

And I'm going to be here for the foreseeable future.

But in-person guests were hard.

So virtual, what that will allow me to do is talk to people around the whole entire world.

I just had a Zoom call with someone who was in New Zealand.

And being able to talk to people around the whole world, one, that's pretty cool.

Two, I could still stay in the niche of social connection and not be limited to like geographical barriers.

Another thing is that having to set up the studio and all of that, it's going to be, it's going to have a little less friction.

I can have a bit more automation without booking guests and the guest intake process.

So it's definitely different than that in-person rewards vibe, but I do think it's going to be a good pivot because I'm still going to have in-person episodes.

It's just now I'm incorporating virtual episodes.

So some of the episodes in the coming future are going to be conversations.

Number two is I'm going to have solo episodes and it's not going to be like something special.

Like, oh, hey, we're doing a special series and it's going to be a solo episode.

It's just going to be a part of the portfolio.

There is, okay, I had to make sure I was recording.

There are things that I want to explore, and I feel like the best way to explore them is to do it like with the camera, the microphone, and start talking.

I think writing and talking are two of the best ways to express thought.

So I'll talk a little bit about my personal adjustments.

Writing is in there.

But for the podcast, I will have solo episodes.

They are going to be lumped in.

It's not going to be like, oh, hey, this is special.

It's just part of the process, solo episodes.

Those popped off.

They did well in 2023.

I had fun with them, and I think that we could have a lot more fun with solo episodes as well.

So we'll have virtual conversations, in-person conversations, and solo episodes.

Another big adjustment is that I'm going to be changing the structure of the release schedule to biweekly.

So this means we will no longer have a consistent routine of weekly episodes on Monday morning.

Now, the consistent structure will be every two weeks.

So when I say that, there are still going to be bonus episodes that are thrown in that will happen potentially each week.

Maybe I go every other week, every other week, every other week, and then there's a bonus episode with the weeks in between.

I just am switching up the structure to have bi-weekly because I want to get more into the YouTube world and just posting video podcasts to YouTube.

It's not going to work on their platform.

YouTube is going to be, I'm going to be creating seven to ten minute videos, exploring different concepts.

I'm going to have a bit more video editing.

It's going to have a catchy hook.

It's going to have more of a established outline structure.

And there's going to be overlays, the catchy title thumbnail.

So I can't pull.

What I've been doing is pulling my video podcasts and just posting them on YouTube, which works for people who want to watch the podcast, but it's not going to generate new traffic and it's not going to help the podcast or me as a thought leader grow in that space.

So what I'm going to be doing in 2024 is every two weeks, consistently, there's going to be a podcast.

For the week that there isn't a podcast, I'll be publishing a YouTube video.

So keep an eye out.

If you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel, do it.

You can find it at Talk to Chris Miller, or you can look up Talk to People Podcast.

That YouTube channel is going to be there.

So every other week, I'm going to have a podcast.

For the weeks that I don't have a podcast, I'm going to have a YouTube video.

We will no longer have Monday morning every week Talk to People Podcast episodes.

But there will be every other week Talk to People Podcast episodes, and every now and then there will be bonus episodes.

We will have virtual conversations, in-person conversations, and solo episodes.

So that's a lot about 2024.

I'm so proud of all of you for sticking with me through 2023.

It was a really cool moment of time, and I think it's going to grow.

I think by pivoting for the time being to once every two weeks, it's going to create a bit more freedom and space for me to one, create better quality, but two, kind of establish myself a bit more in the world that I want to be in long term.

I think the potential for YouTube is off the charts.

There is no one doing what I'm doing on YouTube.

So it would be remiss of me if I squandered this opportunity.

I need to be a good steward of this resource.

I need to learn how to make good videos.

I need to work with people in my life who are, who already are YouTubers, learn from them, do my research, and create content that's going to help young adults improve in social connection.

It will change the world.

So I'm going to do that, and I'm super excited to be here, meeting with you all every two weeks.

Share the podcast, do it as much as you can.

2024 will be an awesome year for the show.

Me personally, just for fun, I'll tell you some things that I'm going to switch up.

I have individual adjustments.

Number one is I'm going to be writing more.

Everything that I've learned, I've learned that.

Not everything that I've learned, I've learned that.

Recently, I've learned a lot about the importance of writing.

The brain is funny.

We can have thought that we'll think of.

And it's the subconscious manifesting itself to the conscience.

I've heard, who was it?

Simon Sinek talked about how our subconscious is like 10 acres.

Imagine 10 acres.

But our conscience brain is conscious.

I have a hard time with that word.

That brain is like one mile.

So whenever we're thinking, we can think of a few things, but then maybe we start playing ping pong or in the shower or walking the dog, and we start thinking of all this stuff.

Like, where was that at?

Whenever I was at the vision board or whenever I was planning.

Well, it's part of the subconscious.

It's part of the 10-acre plot, and it pops up every now and then.

But what writing does is it forces us to explore that, but it also lets us go through the one-acre plot that we do have and kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, take out the good bits.

So writing helps us think.

I also think writing is going to help the content out a ton because I'm going to get sharper with the concepts I want to talk about, and I'm going to be more clear and have more of a logical progression with what I want to share.

It's also going to help me with my storytelling.

So I'm going to write 1,000 words per day.

I wrote 500 yesterday, so I have to write 1,500 today.

We'll have to figure out how to do that and when to do that.

But I'm going to be writing on my newsletter.

If you haven't subscribed, the newsletter is called The Social Fitness Lab.

You can find it on my personal website, talktochrismiller.com.

So I'll be writing on that.

I'll be posting on LinkedIn, potentially Twitter.

Twitter's always been hard, but it seems pretty rewarding.

So I'll have to navigate that.

But I'll be writing more.

Also, I love sugar.

I'm a major sweet tooth.

I absolutely love gummies.

Whenever I say I love gummies, people say like edibles, like THC gummies.

I'm like, no.

The word gummy has been hijacked in the past few years.

The dispensaries hijacked the word gummies, and I want it back.

Whenever I am talking about gummies, I'm talking about trolley peach rings.

I'm talking about Haribo, gummy bears, the sour octopi from trolley, the trolley, the sour crawlers.

Like, that's what I'm talking about.

And I love that stuff.

But the more that I learn about glucose, the more I learn it's really not that good for us.

So I'm not completely abstaining from sugar, but what I'm going to do is whenever I eat sugar, I'm going to have a protein source with me.

So earlier today, I was eating Swedish fish in Sour Patch Kids, and I had some almonds with me because I've learned that if you eat sugar with a protein source, your body breaks it down differently, and it's not as bad.

It's still not the best, but it's not as bad.

Another thing is I've been vegging out with screens.

I reduce.

I feel like I've gotten better, like I deleted TikTok.

I try not to use my phone whenever I'm in the bathroom.

This is a little rule I have with myself.

So I know I'm not the only one.

You probably do it.

When we go sit on the toilet, we take our phone.

It's like we plant ourselves, and we're sitting there, we're going poop, we're scrolling on our phone, and we end up being on the toilet probably longer than we would have.

And then two, it doesn't really help us.

Maybe we can catch up on something.

But if we spend that time going inward, thinking about, okay, how's the day going, or focusing on having the best poop in our life, it's going to long-term be best.

So I'm going to try and veg out a little less, but instead the adjustment will be playing with Sunny, so playing with the dog more.

Think that'll be good.

And then the last thing, it's just being more confident.

Well, I have one other thing, and that's the business.

I really want to grow a business in 2024.

That is going to be, personally, my biggest focus is to build the Capture Connection Studios, the studio that it's podcast production, audio and video for organizations to help connect them to their audience.

So that is my focus.

Build this business.

I want to be able to provide for my family, but also I love the entrepreneurial journey, and I think it could go really well.

We just have to go for it.

So 2024 is going to be the year of the business.

So check out Capture Connection Studios if you know of an organization who potentially would want to podcast, I'd love to help them out.

Maybe they don't know they need a podcast, but you know me and you know them, and you want to kind of connect us, and I can talk to them about the importance of connection.

So that's my kind of mojo, my sweet spot, and we're going to make it happen.

So 2024 is going to be the year of the business for me.

There's a lot to share, but we've kind of spent like 60 hours together this whole entire year, and we're going to spend more hours together next year.

So I will land this plane and say, 2023 has been such a blast.

2024 has been even better.

I am thinking about this community that listens to the podcast, that contributes to the stuff, that will write in, that will send me messages, that people who have never, ever contacted me, yet you're here and you're spending your time listening to the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm thinking of you.

I'm praying gratitude for you.

Thankfulness, thankfulness, thankfulness, thankfulness.

And whatever adjustments that you're making in 2024, there's, I was reading in the Bible today and it said, it's in the Psalms.

It's like, where the blessing of the Lord is, there's life forevermore.

So I just pray that whatever that thing is that's going to improve you and help get you closer to fulfilling your purpose and living out your dream, that we just say there's blessing there, there's life forevermore, that you have an awesome time partying, partying.

This is going to come out on Jan 1.

So you have an awesome time partying.

And other than that, it's so great to have you here.

Have such a blast.

2024 will be an awesome year.

The next episode is coming out in two weeks.

Two weeks.

Not one, but two.

And it will be a blast.

I love you all.

As always, we'll see you next time, folks.