Episode 385 - 4 Years Later - Martial Arts Radio Update
On today's episode, Jeremy talks about how whistlekick Martial Arts Radio have been over the last four years.
4 Years Later - Martial Arts Radio Update - Episode 385
whistlekick Martial Arts Radio has been giving you the best podcast for four years already. On this episode, Jeremy talks about how the ride has been since he started the show all by himself with a few of his friends and what the future looks like as we are about to step into episode 400. Listen to find out more!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download here.Jeremy Lesniak:Hello everyone, welcome. this is whistlekickmartialartsradio episode 385. today, I'm going to give you a behind-the-scenes look, give you some updates on what's going on with this show and hopefully you find it interesting. my name is Jeremy Lesniak, I'm you your host, I’m the founder at whistlekick and I love martial arts, absolutely love martial arts, I’ve been doing it all of my life that ultimately led to this company and this show and truly I feel blessed I get to talk you twice a week, and I get to talk to guests and honestly, it's just made my life better. I'm a very fortunate person, I remember that daily. if you want to check out the shows you can find it at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com or find the products that we make at whistlekick.com. if you check out those products, don't forget use the code, podcast15 gets you 15% off and we've got a lot more than product whistlekick.com, we've got our projects that were involved in and you can check out all of those, almost everything else free. so check it out share it with people, help us help the martial arts.as I was contemplating what to talk about for today's episode, I realized how close we are to episode 400. here is a 385 you know at 15 more episodes, two a week, you know, we're talking about a couple months until episode 400 airs. and not that there's really anything special in the grand scheme about 100 level episode, but they're time for me for reflection, what's going on in the last hundred episodes for us 100 episodes is just about a year. and while I have no problem sharing what goes on with this show, I thought that I might you'll be explicit about that and really tell you what happens behind the scenes and give you some the updates and compare and contrast early episodes to what's going on now. when I started the show it was just me. it was me with an idea and a $25 headset and I reached out to a number of friends and said hey I wanna do this podcast what do you think? can you help me out? and they did. and if you take a look the first five episodes are actually with people that I know very closely who all happen to practice tae kwon do and that was some of the early feedback that we received was are all these people tae kwon do people? and of course if you take a look through what's going on with more recent episodes, you'll see that we've branched out tremendously. we've had folks from all over the world, all sorts of styles, ages experiences, it's really been a very diverse set of people who've come on the show and I appreciate that, that's always been a goal for the show and I think that we can say they were checking a box. rather than a $25 headset now I use a pretty high level microphone and got this big fancy arm hangs on the back of the desk and we have a wonderful audio engineer who does so much more than that so, shout out to Julius. I've mentioned him on the show several times, he does an actually wonderful job and frees me up to spend time working on other things and recently we brought on someone else. so I want to shout at Lessie who has been helping over the last few weeks to schedule guests and what I love about that is that it gives a little bit more, how do I want to say it, there's another perspective. it's not just my opinion on who would make a good guest. I've always asked for listeners to submit guest suggestions because that means it's not just my ideas of who belongs on the show but it includes all of you well, now we've got Lessie, offering up her suggestions and helping me get those folks scheduled and it's freed up some of my time which makes it much easier for me. because let's face it I don't want to have one episode in the can ready to go so to speak, I like to have in a 4 to 6 weeks ready to go and guests seem to come in waves sometimes we'll have three or four people scheduled within a week and then it might be three weeks before someone else schedules. and this helps to stabilize things and it take some of the stress off me so I really appreciate it she's been doing a great job.when I consider early episodes to now, I'm aware that my interview style has changed a little bit and I'd like to say I have gotten better. hopefully those of you that have been around a while feel the same way, not only have I always been working to improve the quality of this show by bringing on the best guests as possible and improving the audio quality and the show notes, but I personally have tried to get better. I will often reflect back on episodes consider how I could do things little bit differently, it was a bit of a martial arts element in there right? you review what you've done, try to get better. honestly I rarely listen to full episodes because I was there and to listen to it again means that the listen to my own voice which most of us know how frustrating and how annoying your own voice on recording often is. the show deftly receives more feedback than it used to whether it's on YouTube or emails directly to me. my favorite way of of getting feedback honestly is still on the show notes at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com because there, other people get to read it. once in a while we end up with a conversation. not usually. Honestly I wish there was more that, I wish we had more kinda chatter more back channel sort of conversation. there some of it that happens at the podcast group what is that called whistlekickmartialartsradio behind the scenes, there's a link from the website. but I don’t know. I wish there was more back-and-forth among past guests and friends of the show and all that. I will say that it is weird to me that I bump into people and they describe themselves as fans of the show and I'm not sure how to handle that. I don't know. people are surprised to learn that I consider myself an introvert you know I live 3 miles up a dirt road in the woods there's a reason I chose the live here. I love people, I love martial arts, martial artists and I love talking about it but I tend to be a quiet guy when I'm on my own. and to bump into someone who says they they enjoy the show they enjoy what I do eight still haven't fully wrapped my brain around how I'm supposed to respond that. I say thank you and that I appreciate and that's that's the truth, I do appreciate everyone's time and everyone support but I don't know if they're expecting more. I don't know that I can offer more. hopefully I don’t get to the point people are asking for autographs that would be super weird. I don’t know if I can handle it.but there are two things that have come out of the show that I am quite proud of and the first one is that I've heard from multiple people who had train in the past and taken a break and chose to at least according to their words to resume their martial arts training because of the show. I never would've imagined that that would've happened when I started this show, let alone have it happen multiple times. I want to say it's, I don’t know, I get an email like that every few months so it's been for almost 4 years. as I recording this it will be four years and a week and so maybe today is the better time to record this rather than some kind of episode 400 thing. I'm still considering what will do for episode 400, it won't be like the last couple years I know that. and then the second thing that I'm really proud of are the connections that I've been able to make or provide for other martial artists. the number of friends that I see commenting in, on each other social media posts, people that I know met each other because of this show, because of whistlekick, because of my connections to them. that really makes me happy because I know that the more we're connected to other martial artists the harder it is to leave martial arts, the more we're gonna get out of martial arts, the more we further it. and those are the goals those have always been the goals of whistlekick is to advance martial arts. and so I look at a project like Martial Journal something that came out of initially my friendship with Sensei Jaredd Wilson of Marshall Thoughts, said we've got something here let's do something with these friendships these connections. and over the last year plus he and I don't even think it's been a year and 1/2, we've produced tons of content to the point where honestly Marshall Journal has more traffic to the website than martial arts radio. I know the listeners to the show are more passionate, more diehard you know, I can see that in the numbers because you know it's easy to stumble on a webpage and not immerse yourself in it, but when you listen to a podcast you tend to listen to a podcast. when I look at whistlekick, when I look at the successes we've had the challenges, I'll be honest the failures, the things that have gone well, have not gone well. in every iteration every possible shift and variant of whistlekick and what it could look like, it's built around this show. this shows the core to everything that we do and while it does not drive much in the way of sales and I'll be honest that's disappointing to me. I had expected that there would be a stronger correlation between the show and selling product that doesn't mean that it's a failure or it's not worthwhile. this is the single biggest marketing aspect to whistlekick it's the single biggest expense for whistlekick but it's also the driver of so much of what we do. it forces me to consider martial arts in a way that I wouldn't otherwise. it allows me to connect with people all over the world from all different backgrounds about their martial arts which in turn reaches others and it offers the ability. it gives me the platform and the at times the responsibility of chronicling the stories of some of our aging martial artist. we had to guess pass away and I look at those episodes and I feel Fortunate, blessed that I was able to capture their stories no I'm not the only one to gets to speak with people. but if I fast forward 10-20 years, if I fast-forward beyond my own life these episodes will be here. these stories from these people will be chronicled and a lot of the folks that we talk to, these aren’t people who are going to make videos of what they've done. most of them by definition are not the best of the best of the best in terms of notoriety or competitive success, everyone that comes on the show has a story and those stories tend to be relatable regardless of who they are. so that having the platform to capture those stories for hopefully eternity, really means a lot to me and I get to be along for the ride. I've said often I'm just a guy who was lucky enough to come up with this idea and put a lot of work into it. truth be told anyone could have done this but I'm the one that did it. and now we see other martial arts podcast popping up and that makes me really happy. because I don't pretend that this formatter my voice or my interview style are appealing to everyone. just as I want to see more martial arts television and more martial arts movies and more written content, I want more martial arts podcasts. the more of them out there the more people will find martial arts podcast in general. the more people find martial arts the more people stick around with their training. and it will force me to stay at the top of my game. I want to remain the top martial arts podcast and I’ll work hard to make sure that we do. I like the challenge.So for those of you who have been listening for a while, I thank you. those of you that might be newer to the show, I thank you just as much because as I've said many, many times without listeners I would just be some crazy guy talking to a microphone so thank you for your time, your support and if there's something that the show has done for you let us know. let us know on social media we are @whistlekick all over the place. let us note the show notes whistlekickmartialartsradio.com this is episode 385. if you don't want to share publicly you can email me. Jeremy at whistlekick.com thank you for continually giving me the opportunity to speak to you about martial arts because it's made my life so much better. until next time. train hard, smile, and have a great day.