Justin's brain

What's the minimum viable podcast publishing experience? I decided to test this out by recording it in Voice Memos on a walk home (with plane and truck noise included). Feels like if you can record a show quickly on your phone and just hit "publish" on it, you're far more likely to actually hit publish.

This episode is the experiment itself: after I was done recording this voice memo, I just handed it to Claude to clean up the audio, write the notes, and publish it using Transistor's MCP.

A lot of my feelings on this are inspired by Caleb Porzio, who has a really minimal workflow for recording his show, Notes on Work. And then yesterday, my friend Chris Enns decided to try publishing a podcast episode every day.

Chapters
(00:00) The friction in publishing
(01:26) Caleb Porzio and Chris Enns
(02:56) Testing the easiest thing

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What is Justin's brain?

Hi, I'm Justin Jackson. Here, I'm sharing brief thoughts on building a better life, bootstrapping, improving society, growing older in tech, being a dad...

Justin Jackson:

I've been thinking a lot about how podcasts get recorded and published and just how much friction there is in the process. I'm recording this right now on voice memos on my phone while I walk home. There's lots of background noise right now. There's plane in the background. But the idea is, really how what's the minimal viable podcast recording experience?

Justin Jackson:

And can I record a podcast on my phone when I get an idea, save it, and then instantly publish it to Transistor without a lot of extra friction and steps? And this is gonna be the experiment because I'm gonna just take this recording after, and I think just throw it into Claude with the Claude skill and just have it normalize the audio, remove the noise in the background like that truck that's going by me, and publish it with a title and description and everything on my podcast. And a lot of this is inspired by my friend, Caleb Porzio, who has the notes on work podcast, which I think is brilliant. He just, like, sits down, hits record, and publishes it all in, like, very few steps. And then my friend Chris Enns is trying to record and publish a podcast episode a day.

Justin Jackson:

And it's like, that's a big undertaking. How do you do that? Not burn out. And I think a lot of it is just like when you need to be sitting at your desk with a nice microphone and the nice editing tools and then go through the whole process of editing it and doing all the steps you need to do to get it into transistor and give it a title and give it a description, generate a transcription. Like, is there a easier, simpler, minimal process where you can just have some thoughts, record them into your iPhone while you're walking home from work, and and publish them without a bunch of little steps, little paper cuts that just make it less likely you're gonna publish a podcast episode that frequently.

Justin Jackson:

So this is me recording in yeah. On my walk home, we'll see how good this ends up being, but I just wanted to force myself to just do, like, what's the easiest thing and see if, you know, the automation gods at Claude and, you know, the MCP server, have a transistor, if we can make this all easy. So I'm gonna hit stop recording and see what happens when I put this into Claude.