Thanks a lot for the reply.

> I don't think it's actually the case

Do you mean the editing process isn't what's making me want to stop the show?

For perspective, phrases like sleeve drag aren't even in my vocabulary. I mainly do my best to quickly get rid of filler content without it sounding like there's hard cuts. It's not chasing absolute perfection where I'm zoomed into the waveform so much it looks like an oscilloscope while I hem and haw about there being a 35ms or 50ms pause between 2 words, or agonizing if I should leave an um in there so things don't sound over processed.

Here's a screenshot while editing an episode where the guest was extremely fluent and I didn't have to edit much filler content: https://i.imgur.com/7CBZ1yc.jpg, for context the episode was 90 minutes long but I zoomed into the point where you can see a ~10 minute chunk (normally I'm zoomed in much more while actively editing). This is a best case scenario where I "only" had to do 305 cuts for a 90 minute show. In the worst case scenario it's gone as high as 1,800 cuts for 90 minutes.

I try to keep things organic while being respectful to listeners. All of the cuts you see there are related to removing filler content (umms, ahhs, mouth noises and long pauses). I also remove their dead air when I talk to avoid any of their mic's background noise overlapping my voice since it's all recorded in an uncontrolled environment.

The before and after is pretty staggering even with a fairly minimal amount of filler editing. To be honest I would feel embarrassed posting the unedited version of most episodes.

It's also very interesting because in a way I think posting a much less edited version where I kept all of the filler content in wouldn't save me much time in the end. Not to sound too over confident but I'm really confident in my ability to perform quality assurance of each episode while I'm doing the editing. I haven't listened to a single episode in its final form because I've gone through each sentence and phrase multiple times during the editing process. For example I'll start playing it, hit a cut point, make the cut, rewind a bit and ensure things flow smoothly, then continue onwards.

If I did a much less edited approach I would still need to listen to the show at 2x speed, so no matter what I'm spending 30 minutes listening to 1 raw hour. However I'm also creating timestamped show notes like you see here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/99-a-custom-electron... along the way while editing so I have to pause to write these down.

Basically I would still be spending quite a lot of time to produce things and I don't think I can outsource that because it would involve finding someone who is not just an audio editor but they would need a ton of domain knowledge around 100 different assorted technologies. A lot of those timestamped notes aren't verbatim quotes. I'm mixing quotes with trying to keep it concise to fit into 1 line. I'm also making judgment calls on what to include because not everything is worth making a note over, otherwise there would be one every 30 seconds (I used to do this in earlier episodes).

Personally I would rather have a transcript with timestamped links where each guest is broken up into their own paragraphs but to have them done right costs a lot of money. Every machine generated transcript service I used had really bad grammar issues and mistakes. A human reviewed one would be well over $100 per episode to make which is a lot when the show already has a net loss on every episode (hosting).

That quote you mentioned was really good by the way. I'd like to think my editing style is more on the side of someone occasionally using their hand to make sure the food doesn't slide off the plate while you run the plate over from the kitchen to the customer. That's how I feel during the editing process. I'm trying to get through it as fast as possible but taking great care to ensure a high quality meal arrives to the customer. I'm optimizing for folks wanting to come back to their favorite restaurant on a regular basis, not serve an artificial feeling $10,000 plate to a king.