Ancient Worlds and New Chapters with Neil Laird

Blending filmmaking and fiction: Neil Laird is a veteran documentary filmmaker and television executive who rediscovered a new creative spark in midlife through writing fiction. 

In this episode Neil shares his journey from a small steel town in Pennsylvania to directing documentaries for the Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and eventually finding the courage to self-publish his own novels at the age of 50.

Inspired by the fearless reinvention of David Bowie, Neil discusses the transition from the 'tedious' corporate side of television back to the joy of making things up. 

He delves into his Prime Time Travelers series of novels, which blends his deep knowledge of ancient history with satirical takes on the chaos of TV production, and offers inspiring advice for adults looking to reignite their own passions: stop waiting for the stars to align, don't be afraid of the first 'rubbish' draft, and surround yourself with cheerleaders rather than naysayers.

• Finding Inspiration in the Unexpected: Neil recounts how a period of unemployment led him to the New York Public Library, where a chance encounter with a book on ancient history completely shifted his creative trajectory and led to his first documentary on the Great Sphinx.
• The Midlife Creative Shift: Turning 50 served as a catalyst for Neil to explore fiction. Inspired by the fearless innovation of David Bowie, he decided to move beyond the constraints of documentary filmmaking to imagine historical worlds with a fresh coat of paint.
• Blending Expertise with Satire: After struggling to find an agent for a traditional historical novel, Neil found his unique voice by blending his professional background with fiction in his Prime Time Travelers series – a satirical look at a film crew messing up history.
• The Power of Creative Independence: Neil discusses his decision to self-publish, allowing him to maintain creative control over his characters and storylines, including diverse and LGBTQ+ representation that might have been lost in traditional publishing.
• Advice for Aspiring Creatives: Neil emphasises the importance of starting now, surrounding yourself with cheerleaders rather than naysayers, and not being afraid of the inevitable first draft being a load of rubbish.

I would love some financial support to help me to keep making this podcast. Visit buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound

Transcript

Neil Laird: 0:27

But I definitely realized this trajectory is going to take a long time, and working on a bunch of dodgy horror films was not exactly what I wanted to do. And then it kept going. I kept going and going, and I backpacked through Syria and Jordan and Turkey and Israel. But I came back with my head in the clouds thinking, okay, how can I blend my love of filmmaking with this absolute love of the ancient world and travel? I was the suit, as it would be back in New York or la, which is great. Financially, it was wonderful, but creatively, it became rather boring and tedious. Here I am. I'll be 60 this year now, so it's 10 years on from my first novel, and I think I feel more creatively invigorated than I have in decades, probably since I made that Sphinx documentary 30 years ago.

Claire Waite Brown: 1:13

Hi, I'm Claire. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits. This time, I'm chatting with Neil Laird. Hi, Neil. How are you?

Neil Laird: 1:45

I'm lovely, Claire. Thank you for having me.

Claire Waite Brown: 1:47

You're very welcome. Neil, you embraced a new creative outlet in midlife. What form does that take?

Neil Laird: 1:56

I did Indeed. At age 50, I decided to write my first novel, which was something I had no experience of prior. It wasn't like something I was leading up to for a long time. It just sort of hit me and said, oh, I want to do this, and I better do it now because there's a lot more time behind me than ahead of me.

Claire Waite Brown: 2:12

Well, no, if you're going to live to 100, it's about equal, about halfway through. That's my reasoning. Okay, so let's start back at the beginning. What were your creative experiences like as a child? At home, at school, was born and

Neil Laird: 2:27

raised in a small town in western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh, which, even if you don't know where that is on a map, I can promise you it's not a cultural mecca. This is not New York or LA or London or Chicago. You know, a lovely small town where a lot of steel workers. There's mostly the biggest business. And that's what my dad was in. He was a manager of a steel plant. Mom was a English teacher. And I became enamored of movies very early on. I would stay up late and I watching all kind of movies and just that became my escape. I read a lot of books, but it was definitely cinema and particularly the great epics. I love the historical stuff, the David Lean and the Kurosawa and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. I love the sweep of that with that sense of fantasy. So I always kind of knew I wanted to make movies, which of course isn't easy when you're in a small town. I would say that was really my creative outlet. My mother got me into a non profit student program called Pittsburgh Filmmakers. This was the mid-80s or early-80s, I suppose. Now, mind you, this is long before even home cameras were available. So, you know, you get a 16 millimeter and you. And no one would see it except for the six people in the room. But it was a way for me to realize, oh, it's within my grasp to make a film that happened very early.

Claire Waite Brown: 3:43

I was going to say about that, given your description already of your hometown, that going to film school and actually pursuing that wasn't what most people did. So did you have any discouragement? Did anybody kind of persuade you not to be doing it? Or were you just lucky enough to have all encouragement?

Neil Laird: 4:02

I mean, my parents still alive at 91, God bless them. And they always encouraged me. I know my dad would probably kind of rolled his eyes. My brother became an engineer, did quite well. My sister went into pharmaceuticals and did well. And I was the weird middle child that I would take little cameras and walk around my small town of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, taking odd photos of me dressed up, you know, coming out of sewers. And I had a book called the Nonsense Art Book that I would clip things out. So they knew that I was a creative kid and probably a bit stifled in my Western PA environment. So it's probably no surprise when I said I wanted to go to film school. I only found out later. My dad was very encouraging, but I found out later when I finally was making money and he gave me a life insurance policy he took out from me. And he says, I didn't take this out for your two other siblings, but I took it out for you because I figured you wouldn't be able to ever pay for it. But now that you can, here you go, kiddo. He didn't tell me all that stuff behind the scenes that he was worried. He encouraged me, but he certainly was thinking, what the hell is this kid going to do? He's going to end up working at a video store in Greensburg, you know, after he gets his degree.

Claire Waite Brown: 5:05

Yeah, I can understand that reticence Then what does that mean? After high school, how do you go from your hometown to pursue film more educationally or even work wise at that stage?

Neil Laird: 5:22

Certainly in this state, and I assume it's the same as UK and other countries, college became sort of a expected thing. You're a middle class family, you expected to go to college. And the parents were saving for that for all three of us. So it was a question of picking the college that allowed me to pursue that. And I went to a film program at Temple University, which is in Philadelphia, a big state school. And I studied filmmaking there. And that's when I discovered all the art films, the Antonioni and the Bergman and, and the Maya Darren stuff, all that stuff that, that actually really shaped my, my next path, I suppose. But I didn't get any of that as a kid because of course you just didn't have that stuff in a small town. And I've never looked back.

Claire Waite Brown: 6:04

Wonderful experiences. So then did that line you up that so you've gone to film school, off you go, go get the work that you want to do now. Is that how it works?

Neil Laird: 6:14

Well, that's how I thought it worked. I was so freaking naive. You know, you think like, well, I've got a Bachelor's of art from a state school in Pennsylvania, I want to become Martin Scorsese overnight. I'm going to go to New York, which is only 80 miles from Philly, and I'm going to show them this diploma and they're going to say, go off and make Goodfellas. That did not happen. Instead I was the poor schlub holding a walkie talkie on some crappy horror film at two in the morning so they didn't steal the grip truck, you know. And I was happy for that work. Remember I was making like 50 bucks a day, this is the late 80s. And I was really happy for that. And you know, my job was really to make sure that, you know, no thugs came along in downtown Queens or Brooklyn or wherever we were. And what I could do if they did, I have no idea. I was like a 21 year old kid with a walkie talkie. This is even before cell phones. So clearly I'd be toast if they really wanted the, all the lighting gear. But that's how I started. And then of course you become disillusioned. After a while I kind of realized, well, it's gonna be a long climb up the ladder, a lot of rungs. Cause I watched what the director was doing and I wasn't so starry eyed of Thinking, I think I can direct tomorrow. But I definitely realized this trajectory is gonna take a long time. And working on a bunch of dodgy horror films was not exactly what I wanted to do. And then my whole life changed one day, and it really. People talk about seminal moments. You look back and you think, well, bloody hell. That was a total sea change in my life. I was unemployed, Waiteing for the phone not to ring. And this is. You know, you have to go home every day at that point and listen to your answering machine. And a lot of silence. It was never beeping, which means no one was calling me for work. So I had very little money. I was in New York City, the most expensive city in the Americas. And one place I could think of that was air conditioned, I could sit all day was the New York Public Library. And that's where I would kind of hang out and then started reading. And I just read all the great books. I remember reading Dostoevsky and stuff like that. A lot of film books, the history of Kuasawa, the memoirs of Kuasawa, whatever. But then one day, for whatever reason, I remember going into the shelves and I wanted a new book. And instead of going right to fiction, I went left to nonfiction or whatever, and I came to history, which is something you don't get a lot of in a Catholic film school in Western Pennsylvania. You know, our idea of ancient history is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And that's about as. That's about as deep as it goes. But I went all the way to the back of the stacks because I thought, oh, no, nothing about the rise of civilization. And there's this big old dusty tome. I forget the name of it now, but it was about Neolithic man and the cave art. And I picked it up and figured, well, if nothing else, I'll look at the pretty pictures and I'll bring it back tomorrow. I took it back and I opened it and the penny dropped. And it was all about the rise of civilizations. And I became absolutely, unequivocally hooked and enamored of it, and still am. This is like 1990. Here it is, what, 36 years later, and I am still treading the same ground. My whole trajectory in my life changed because I said, I want to go to these places. I want to see these worlds. And I got so sick of working on Toxic Avenger 4 or whatever nonsense I was spending. Spending my days with that I just packed up a duffel bag one time and I had enough money and I started backpacking to the Middle East. I knew I had to see Egypt. Egypt was and remains my happy place. So I started there and went to Cairo and saw the Nile, went to the Valley of the Kings and all those wonderful things. And then it kept going. I kept going and going, and I backpacked through Syria and Jordan and Turkey and Israel. But I came back with my head in the clouds thinking, okay, how can I blend my love of filmmaking with this absolute love of the ancient world and travel? So I went back to film school again, this time in Chicago with a focus on nonfiction film documentary. And I realized, oh, I don't want to be the schlub holding a walkie talkie at two in the morning in Queens. I want to be able to direct it even if the budget is a fraction of what a feature film would be. So I made a thesis film about the Great Sphinx of Egypt because I had some friends, a colleague whose father was on antiquities board, and I used to film school gear. And I went over and talked about how the Sphinx was falling apart and how they're restoring it. And lo and behold, I sold that to television. I sold Discovery Channel. It was my thesis film. I was total. Nobody was 24 years old and was able to sell it to national television. And that's pretty much been doing the same thing ever since.

Claire Waite Brown: 10:37

Wow. Oh, amazing. That's so interesting from where it's come as well that the interest in history comes from being. Being stuck in the library because you're not working and then moving on and on and actually coming back into your filmmaking career. So things kept going from there and you kept doing historical documentaries. Is that how it worked?

Neil Laird: 11:01

Looking back now, we're talking, what, 30 years on? Since then, I've probably have my name on over a thousand hours of television, 150 TV programs, couple Emmys, couple BAFTA nominations. They're not all history and archeology. I've been fortunate that a lot of them are because I was sort of known for that. I traveled to 70 some countries. But I've also done everything from weight loss shows to. I did a game show when I was embedded with the Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, chasing around immigrants that came across the Rio Grande. I did a puppy bowl, which is a strange thing, where they put cute dogs in a ring and they make them run around, look really cute. I've done it all. So, you know, some are great for the resume, others are buried deep on my IMDb page, if they're there at all. But I'm lucky that I was able to sort of curry the experience in the ancient world. And the travel to my benefit. And that's kind of what I'm known for, certainly as I've gotten older. I worked for the networks for a long time, too, as an executive at both National Geographic and discovery for 16 years, executive producer. So working for the network rather than going in the field. So that's why I have so many credits. I was just working on 30, 40 films a year sometimes.

Claire Waite Brown: 12:15

Yeah. So this, to me, sounds like a very creative lifestyle.

Neil Laird: 12:21

I would think so, yes. Yeah.

Claire Waite Brown: 12:23

Yeah. So then let's talk about the fiction writing. Was there something missing that made you think, I want to do that?

Neil Laird: 12:32

Going in the field was great, and living out of suitcase was wonderful for a while. After a while, you get tired of getting dysentery in India for the third time and having to shoot an entire film for $6.50 or whatever. So I was lucky when I got that executive job. And what that means is when you become an EP for the network, you're kind of the buyer rather than the seller. I hire Claire Productions to go out and make that film for me, and I'm your boss of the network, and I give you a bunch of notes and saying, what were you thinking, Claire? Make that better. You know, I like to think it was better than that, but that's, you know, I was the suit, as it would be back in New York or la, which is great. Financially, it was wonderful, but creatively it became rather boring and tedious because after a while, the films weren't mine anymore. I would have my name on there. But the people who really own the films, whose passion was, they're the ones in the field. And I was the guy that would be the gatekeeper for the network. And after about a dozen years, I kind of, you know, kind of got tired, felt that, oh, I'm just sort of like almost like a traffic cop. I'm just. I'm making sure every show looks like a National Geographic show, and that's the stamp that Neil Laird puts on it. It wasn't creative anymore when I did travel, and I travel a lot for on holiday, and then sometimes I'd go in the field. The one thing that I always missed after all these shoots, I've been to Egypt and Italy and Pompeii so many times that I know the ruins, but I wanted to imagine what they look like when they're brand spanking new with a fresh coat of paint. And you can't do that in the documentary world. It has to be the real deal. So I think all that was bubbling under was bubbling under. And I recognize that my creative desires and my creative goals had shifted.

Claire Waite Brown: 14:09

But then why fiction? Because you want to imagine the worlds that these places were back in the day.

Neil Laird: 14:16

Yeah, I wanted to make stuff up.

Claire Waite Brown: 14:18

Okay.

Neil Laird: 14:21

I wouldn't lie a little bit and actually meet Ramsay the Great face to face as opposed to just in the Cairo Museum. And I think I just wanted to try new creative outlets. And so two things happened in 2016 that really got me to write my first novel. And that's when I started writing. One was I turned 50. As we talked about early on, I kind of recognized I've had a good career. But is this all I have? This is all that Neil Laird can do, really. And on the top of that, In January of 2016, my creative hero died. And that was David Bowie. Now I have no creative juices when it comes to music. I have total. I have two left feet, I can't dance or do anything. But what I loved about Bowie, not only was his music was when I read his obituary, I was reminded just how innovative and how fearless the man was. You know, even when he died. His last album, Blackstar, was about dying. He got a whole new band and he was doing experimental jazz and the album before was drum and bass. He was absolutely fearless in what he did. And if he failed, he got up, he dusted himself off and he did it again. And reading that obituary, and of course I had every one of those albums, so I knew it through and through. It just reminded me, if David Bowie can do it 26 times, Neil Laird can do it once. So that coupled with being a 50 year old balding gray haired man was like, all right, Neil, this is the year to frigging do it. So I started writing and of course you write about what you know, When I wrote about ancient Egypt and the first novel was about a case of tomb robbers, which is actually the world's oldest documented court case in history. Tomb robbers that were actually built the Valley of the Kings, they knew how to, how to break into it because they built it. They knew where the booby traps were, they knew where the, the guards were stationed, they knew the soft spot and the hard spot of the rocks that were to chisel. So a bunch of tomb robbers in 1100 BC broke into a tomb and stole all these pharaoh's treasure. And what's great is not for so much for them, but for it is for history. They got caught and there's a court case that survived on papyrus about how they were caught. So I told that Story in fiction. And I was very excited, and I spent the year doing it. But then when it came to selling, I just couldn't get an agent. And a lot of people said, oh, you know, it's a great story, but you're still writing like a screenplay writer or like a documentary filmmaker. You have to write what's unique about Neil Laird. And that's when I realized, well, what is unique about Neil Laird beyond his love of ancient Egypt? Well, he's a TV producer who goes there? So I blended the two, and I made a satire for my next book about a feckless TV crew that's in over their head that time travels to the ancient Egypt, all to win an Emmy, win their time slot, you know, on discovery channel, whatever. The names were changed, of course, and that satirical thing helped me find my voice. So that was called Prime Trime travelers. So now I'm about to release the third in that series. The second was Prime Trime Pompeii, and the third one is Prime Trime Troy. And each time they go back to the ancient world, Egypt, Rome and Greece, the film crew, and they get involved in ancient history to make a film. The caption for all of them is, messing up history one episode at a time.

Claire Waite Brown: 17:27

Brilliant. Brilliant. Once you found that your thing, what your concept was, do you find it easy to write? Do you find the stories come easily, the words come easily? And. And another question, Sorry. Do you do it in a structured way, like, actually, I'm going to sit down and write now, or does it work a different way?

Neil Laird: 17:53

First of all, I'd say in terms of structure, talk to other writers. The question they often ask each other is, are you a plotter or a pantser? I don't know if you've heard that term. A plotter is somebody who outlines it all. A pantser lies by the seat of their pants. I'm very much in that camp. Anytime I write an outline, I forgot that I wrote it, and next day I'm starting from scratch anyways. I don't know where I'm going until I get there. So I just freeform and get it out, knowing that I'm going to come back and revise it six or seven times. Then eventually I find the voice, and then I have a few trusted beta readers early on that will give me the hard criticism that I need. But to answer your first question, I think now that I'm finishing my third book, Prime Time Troy, which is the copy editor right now, that one was much easier to write because I know my characters, I know my voice, I know My style, you know, essentially there's four main characters. There's Jared Plummer, who's a director, Kara, his best friend and camera woman, Ali, the Egyptian sound guy, and Derek Dees, the rather dim witted host with the Indiana Jones hat. And the four of them are in all four books. And each book I focus on a different one of them, and there's a love story in each. Jared and Kara are gay, so I really lean into the LGBTQ and queer stories there, and I've got a lot of great support from the queer readership. They're just happy to have an Indiana Jones character that just happens to be gay. So having my characters and knowing them so well and their sense of humor and who they are, it makes writing it easier and easier because, of course, they're friends already. But I always add a new character, new element, a new story. Troy is different than Pompeii, is different than Egypt, which allows me to hopefully make them feel fresh so it doesn't feel like I'm just creating a carbon copy sequel, which is the last thing I want to do.

Claire Waite Brown: 19:37

Yeah, I understand. You mentioned about the first thing you wrote, and you were writing in that screenwriting style that you didn't get an agent. Was that something that you've then done with the new Neil Laird style? Are you traditionally publishing self publishing? Tell me a bit about that.

Neil Laird: 19:55

I had an agent who was very interested in Prime Trime travelers, the first one, but she didn't like the gay angle. And Kara was a black female, a lesbian. Wondered if, can we change that? To her credit, she was trying to make it marketable of what she thought at the time was. And I just realized early on, it's like in television. I was writing for so long for an audience, for a group of people, for the corporate. And I recognize that traditional publishing is the same way, and I understand that I can't badmouth both because that's where, obviously, the money and that's where the big guns come from. I didn't want to do that. I didn't need to do this for the big cash. I wanted to tell the stories I wanted to tell. So at the end of the day, I just realized what, the hell with it. I'm just going to self publish and write the stories I want with the characters I want. And that has been liberating because I didn't feel like I need to have that same. No footnotes, no standard in practices, no marketing department getting involved. Clearly, you know, there'd be times where I would probably love traditional publishers to Help me market it and to get it out there, it probably might have sold better. I just wrote the books that I want and I'm very happy getting them out there and I'm very pleased with them and I feel like they're all mine now.

Claire Waite Brown: 21:06

That's perfect. Oh, I do hear from a lot of people, people who have self published as well as traditional publishing, but the traditional publishing nowadays still involves you, the author doing a lot of the marketing. I mean, I get a lot of people wanting to be on this podcast because they're marketing their traditionally published book,

Neil Laird: 21:26

which is unfair because of course that's what you think they do for you. And sometimes they do. And I have friends who have agents. The books haven't even come out yet because it's three or four years ahead in advance and the agent leaves and they get lost in the shuffle. And I just don't want to chase after that experience with, with the agent trying to change my voice. It's just, you know, maybe the next one I might do a nonfiction book. If I do, maybe I'll try traditional publishing. But I find it liberating just to tell the story as I want and get them out as I want.

Claire Waite Brown: 21:50

Yeah, no, I completely understand. What about how this impacts on the rest of your life? Not necessarily like what you do every day, but how you feel. How has that enriched your life now? Differently from before.

Neil Laird: 22:08

I don't look back at my TV days. I'm still in the TV days with any kind of like, oh, I wish I would have done this. That was great for now, but here I am. I'll be 60 this year now. So it's 10 years on from my first novel and I think I feel more creatively invigorated than I have in decades. Probably since I made that Sphinx documentary 30 years ago, I really feel like I'm pursuing exactly what I want. It helps now that I'm more financially secure at 60 than I was at 24 or whatever when I made the first film. I still do television. I just got back from Cairo where I did a three week shoot. Next month I do a three week cruise for Fred Olsen cruises out of. Out of Liverpool, where I talk about history in my books and destinations and I talk about my experience behind the scenes of television. So all of these kind of blend together in a way where it's not just the IP isn't just Prime Trime Travelers. The IP is Neil Laird and he has one foot in television, another foot in literature, and a third appendage, whatever that may be in public speaking. And that's kept me very invigorating, very creatively excited, because I never know where I'm gonna go yet. And I get to sort of share my experiences now and be a bit of a mentor to others.

Claire Waite Brown: 23:22

And the travel as well, which has always been important to you.

Neil Laird: 23:26

I have itchy feet. I never stop wanting to travel, even if, you know, I just got back from Cairo and all I want to do is, you know, get on a plane and fly somewhere else, because it's just part of my blood. I'm at my most alive, particularly when I'm in an environment that's a little more difficult. The cruises are, you know, we're dopping by Dubrovnik for half a day, and you have a lovely glass of wine. This is just purely, you know, it's wonderful, but in a way, it's business. But on my own holidays, I want to go to the steppes and, you know, go to Mongolia. I want to see the pyramids of Sudan. And those are the things that still impel me even at my age. I just love to be a little bit out of my depths.

Claire Waite Brown: 24:08

Amazing. I'm going to ask you if you have any thoughts or advice for other people who are curious about or looking to reignite or find a new creative activity for themselves. What are your thoughts on that?

Neil Laird: 24:29

I mean, I could ask a lot of this in my cruises and stuff, because people always have an idea in them. And the thing I always say is, don't wait. Just do it now. And the other thing that in concert with that is, don't be afraid to fail. You will fail at first. Your first draft will be a load of rubbish. Your first film will be embarrassing. You will make egregious mistakes. But you got to learn from that. You have to have thick skin. But if you Waite until the stars align, you will grow old and die. So even if it's just a trip, if you would finally want to see the pyramids after talking about it for 60 years, or you want to write your memoir, do it now. Don't wait for someone to tell you it's okay. Don't listen to other people's advice. There's too many naysayers out there. Surround yourself with people who are going to be your cheerleaders. And you will know soon enough when you tell them that you want to write a novel or you want to go to, like, the Taj Mahal and make a film, and they say, what the hell do you want to do that? You only get sick. Do you know how long. The layover is those are the people you don't want in your life. You want that says, oh my God, that's great. Can I carry your bags? Those are your friends.

Claire Waite Brown: 25:31

Perfect. I love that. Thanks so much for chatting with me today, Neil. Tell us again the names of your books and generally how people can connect with you.

Neil Laird: 25:42

Well, the first one is called Prime Trime Travelers, as followed by Prime Trime Pompeii and then Prime Trime Troy comes out probably this summer, the summer of 26, and they're all on Amazon. So you can do some Neil Laird or Prime Trime Traveler series and any of them will come up. And then you can also go to NeilLaird.com and sign up for my newsletter. Not only is the newsletter about the books and you can get. I mean, if they sign up. I don't know when this airs, but right soon I'll be looking for advanced reader copies for Troy. You can get a free copy of the book if you're willing to give an honest review. I also talk a lot about what it's like to make films, so the newsletter kind of loops you into all that work.

Claire Waite Brown: 26:18

Perfect. Thank you so much, Neil. I've had a super chat.

Neil Laird: 26:22

Absolutely. Pleasure. Thank you for having me on, Claire.

Claire Waite Brown: 26:25

You're welcome. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/creativityfound There's a link in the show notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain, TrueFans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 in Practice,