And then he gets this pitch to him.

This is Scott Johnson and my show is called What Was That Like? Each episode is a conversation with someone who's been through something extremely unusual like an alligator attack or they were crushed by a falling tree or they survived a mass shooting, things like that.

The guest just comes on the show and tells all the details of what happened.

And I create the show here in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, but it's got listeners in like 130 countries all around the world.

And really, you don't even have to listen to the show to know what kinds of stories I'm looking for.

All you have to do is scan the episode titles and you'd see episodes like Sue's Parachute Didn't Open, Chris Survived a Home Invasion, Jeff's Arm Was Torn Off.

But for some publicists, even that is too much work.

How to

Now, she does episodes that are good, but you really do have to talk to them ahead of time, don't you?

Oh, yeah.

We always do a pre-chat.

And if they've written a book, I definitely read the book.

And I'm yeah, I'm kind of obsessive about having notes and having the total story arc in front of me as I'm talking to them, because one of the reasons is these people that I talk to normally don't get interviewed.

They're not public figures.

They're just a regular person who had this, you know, they went skydiving and the parachute didn't open or they got attacked by a monkey or, you know, things like that.

How do you get those, Scott? Do you have to get special permission to use those?

And so I thought I wouldn't get any responses when I made the question of the month, how do you measure your success that's not downloads? And instead of not getting any responses, I got a ton, and some of them are very unique, like this one from my buddy Scott Johnson.

Hi, Dave.

Scott Johnson here.

This is one of those times when I heard your request for the question of the month replies, and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I'm gonna do that." But of course, life happens, and I didn't get around to it, and it was your email on the night before the deadline that served as a reminder, so here I am.

Let's go back to Scott.

My podcast is my full-time job, and the download numbers are something I have to keep track of, but I definitely measure success in other ways.

And one of those is, how does my show have a real-life effect on my listeners? And over the past eight years, roughly 260 episodes, I've had some wonderful examples of that.

One of my earliest episodes was with a man who had donated a kidney to a stranger.