Overall, I really like Jose’s character. Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for family-before-self characters.
One way to avoid loudness variations with the promos is to do two things to your final recording. 1: Soft limit it then 2: normalize it. The first step will soften any volume peaks in your recording. The second step will scale your entire recording up so that the loudest part is almost exactly at 0 dBs. I almost guarantee that the promos do these steps. This will at least align your peak volumes.
Also, was that reverb/echo I heard when one of the characters was thinking?

Question about Jose/Matt, was the revelation that they’re adopted brothers abrupt? I’ve considered mentioning it outright earlier.
Garage Band says that it normalizes it. Gues not.
Yes you heard the reverb. I don’t have characters “thinking” like that very often, but I needed something to make it sound not like regualr dialog. Other casts use reverb for that purpose. Good, bad, indifferent?

No, I think you timed that revelation just right. It explains their previously expressed closeness. The reader knows that they have some sort of history, but it’s left as a mini-mystery for a while. I love that kind of stuff. Were they in the military before? Did they have shared experience/interest in the occult? A few chapters later is a good time to resolve those kinds of mini-mysteries.
If you normalize before step one: soft limiting (compression would also work), it may not make the difference you were hopping for. It may be normalizing to one, very brief spike in volume. If that spike is near 0 dB, then normalization wouldn’t do much. I’ll download the audio file and take a look at it. Oh, and you have to normalize before adding the promos, of course.
The reverb was too subtle to notice. I only noticed it after he finished speaking. I haven’t listened to many (any other than yours) podcast fiction, but I have listened to a lot of radio drama and books on tape (podcast fiction seems to seek out the middle ground between these two media). They never use reverb for that purpose. It’s typically used for characters’ thoughts when they are delirious, losing consciousness, or the like. The level of reverb reflects (pun intended) the level of delirium.
Most often, I’ve heard no effect used for internal monologues. Since internal thoughts will be rare in your podcast, I would recommend that route. It would work. I knew he was thinking to himself before I even noticed the effect. Context was (and in my opinion, should be) enough.
I have heard an EQ effect (set to a phone-like sound) for when a character is narrating in some radio dramas. That worked well.

Jose has an interesting past and you’ll definitely see more of that coming up in about 3 or 4 more chapters.
Thanks for the technical sound tips. I’ll give that a shot in episode 6 which I hope to have in the can by Thurs. Going camping with the kids this weekend, just me and them.
How about the length? I’m trying to stay between 20-30 minutes of story.