In this video a Finish guy is talking about compressing vocals heavily on the monitor mix when recording. He uses 76 and a 2a style compressors with tons of reduction to achieve this. I'm trying it, but can't get it to work somehow. Any of you peeps got experience with this???

https://youtu.be/L2YMsgWUsUw?feature=shared&t=1266

This is referencing hard singing not really appropriate for a podcast.

you should need that much effort to get a sufficiently range-reduced signal on a talk podcast, unless the "talent" has terrible mic technique and absurd swings in vocal volume.

it sounds like you are new at this. as such, it's probably good for you to start with a works-most-of-the-time recipe. nothing always works. but some things work quite often without much effort.

these two things working together should enable you to create very acceptable finished products in terms of range control of signal level:

1. put a multiband compressor on each solo vocal track. you can put a single-band compressor (such as the ssl bus compressor) on each track. but a multiband will do some of the wizard work for you and manage the bass frequencies, etc. you will probably need to watch four ten-minute videos and and spend about forty minutes of experimenting to get the hang of a multi-band compressor. you're willing to invest eighty minutes of learning, correct? the fabfilter pro-mb is excellent, but there are free ones that are perfectly sufficient. whether it's free or paid, find one that has enough training videos for you to undertand and operate the tool.

2. on the stereo master track ("2 buss" "mix buss", etc.) put a "maximizer" on the overall track. this will do wizard work for you so you get even more forwardness and range reduction. just move the controls down to where the maximizer is working but not overworking the signal. this should take about two ten minute vidoes and twenty minutes of practice. you're willing to invest another forty minutes of learning, correct? free and paid maximizers exist. find a maximizer in your budget that has enough training videos for you to undertand and operate the tool

so we are talking about 120 minutes (two hours) of learning and two tools.

there are other concerns such as noise removal, equalization, etc. but as far as level management, it will be very easy to handle that part of the process using the 1-2 approach i outlined above.