4.5 Million Podcasts Fighting for 600 Million Listeners—Here's What's Happening

All right, we're live.

Mine's still waiting.

Yep, we're live on YouTube.

Hey everyone, welcome to the New Media Show. Rob, welcome back.

Yeah, well, we're back for another New Media Show, Todd.

Yes, we are. And, uh, one, one more here before I, uh, head back to the United States and back in the other studio. So, uh, one more next week.

Okay.

And then, and then home. Of course, then it's Podcast Movement, so probably we won't be doing one that week, but How's, uh, are you going to be going or have you decided to— I'm—

I don't have current plans to go, but okay, things could happen last minute. Who knows?

Yeah, understand. The, uh, the week has been— I guess for a better word for me is, you know, all good plans. Uh, you know, we bought a bunch of advertising on PodNews and, uh, I was fully expecting to have had my GMP launch for 2 weeks And we've had to change up the ad copy, and I think we'll finally be ready next week. It's just, you know, nothing ever goes perfectly in final testing, and if you find little quirks, uh, quirks. So probably Tuesday of next week, those of you that want to see, uh, GuestMatch.pro and its beta release— and will be a free beta for 90 days, so should be fun to see how that, uh— we're gonna need guests. I think we're going to be able to fill it with podcasters, but a guest is going to be a challenge. So if you want to be a guest, we're definitely going to want you to register.

So you got to have both, right? You got to have the hosts and the guests.

Yeah, yeah. And I will talk a little more about that next week when it's— if we actually get it online and it's ready. So we had a shakedown today during the team meeting, and there's about, yeah, about that many issues left, about 10 issues left. But we'll see. But, you know, Netflix is rattling their saber, not their savior, their saber, not savior, saber.

Well, there's been rumblings about this and they've been playing around with podcasting for many years now, actually. So it just appears that the big shift here is that it's more of an emphasis on the video side where In the past, it was kind of more focused on the audio side, which maybe didn't work out as well for them.

Well, makes sense. Yeah, you know, being— and again, I think it goes back to anyone that is putting just audio up on video platforms. I don't think it's very, uh, very effective per se.

It doesn't exactly seem like a very smart thing to do.

No, I don't think so at all. But, uh, you know, I think what it really says, and I think this is starting to be talked about just a little bit, is— am I out of focus?

You seem to be okay.

Yeah, what it really means is that podcasting talent is probably now going to start to be seen more as actors or And maybe not, maybe that's not, not the right word, but maybe teams of shows are going to be started to pick up for more traditional media. And I wouldn't necessarily call Netflix traditional media, but they definitely were a disruptor of the industry. So, you know, what happens now? Do YouTubers move into Netflix and sign big deals and get shows? And are we going to start seeing more of this? But in reality though, with the shift of people, you know, not watching traditional cable, and you know, that business really in trouble from ratings revenues, I can't tell you the last time I watched anything on regular TV that was not—

traditional cable.

Yeah, traditional. But you know, besides maybe news snippets from different news organizations, other than that it's on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, usually on YouTube. Or like here, I get my 5,000 channels for free, um, you know, that's on a little Android box. You know, where I can watch Fox and all the— I can watch anything. I can watch anything on this. 5,000 channels of every channel in the world. I don't know how they do this and run this bootleg infrastructure, but it's pretty incredible. And again, I don't pay for it. It's just in, you know, it's part of my rent.

Yeah. I guess I do pay for it. It's interesting what's happening with Netflix as Netflix and Amazon Prime kind of, and YouTube are replacing the traditional TV networks and channels and stations and things like that as we move into a new generation, a new era. Right? I mean, that's kind of what's happening here. Um, because there's talk that Netflix is going to get involved in short-form content, recurring video content designed to build an ongoing subscriber engagement, which they've been doing recurring video content for, for years. I'm not sure what the difference is between that and a video series, but the The line on Netflix between what a TV show is and what a movie is have been blurred for years.

Oh yeah, that's true.

And so what we see is really a series on Netflix has just been an episodic kind of presentation, really. And then the movies are typically shorter in length clips, which most people, when they typically think of movies and TV, they think of TV as shorter form content. But in the movies are long form content where in some ways it's kind of that is flipping, right? So I'm not quite sure entirely what that means for what they're going to do with video, with video podcasts, but it could be a hybrid model here. And there may be some new formats of content. If you look at what's on YouTube today, there's long-form documentary-type productions that are happening over there that are high-value productions that I think would fit perfectly fine on a Netflix platform. But the big question is, is it going to be like a, you know, like it used to be with Joe Rogan? Is it exclusive content over there? Is that what it turns out to be? Or is it a dual distribution strategy? I kind of doubt that it's going to be the content that generally on Netflix is going to be available on YouTube or out as a video podcast in an RSS feed. So, you know, this is where we get into the definition shift of what a podcast is, that they're using this term video podcast loosely. Yeah, just like YouTube is.

So, well, one thing's— I, I guess in the end, uh, as long as creators get paid, I guess that is the, you know, that's— it's all good for, for the space. And time will— time will tell what happens there. And, you know, they're— I, I don't know if I would go to Netflix for Shorts though. You know, that's probably not the place I would go and watch and watch shorts. But yeah, who knows? You know, we'll see. Change the interface, anything is possible. One thing that—

Well, if you think about just taking what YouTube is doing and transferring the model over to Netflix, you can kind of envision what they might be thinking, right?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I go to Netflix, I'm looking for some long-form content. I'm usually looking for a series or a movie. Yeah, I'm not going over there.

That's all it— that's what's in YouTube today.

Yeah, but again, I'm— I don't go to Netflix to find a, a 60-second short. That's what I was referring to. I just—

I don't know, right? You don't, but that may be something they're bringing to the platform, is what I'm trying to say.

Seems weird. Seems like it would— things are cluttered already over there, so I don't know. Uh, time will tell. Hey, Overcast is, uh Looks like Marco, congratulations, finally, welcome to the party. Looks like he's adding transcript support to the platform. Now it's not completely clear if he is going to use transcripts he's creating or the ones that are in the RSS feed, because he's been spotted testing it, what's called a transcriber tool. So, you know, I, I would hope he would adopt the, the transcript tag, and, um, that, you know, that would be nice if he did that. And if he did, he would join, uh, Apple Podcast, um, and Pocket Cast in the, in the party there. Of course, Spotify did their own thing. They, they didn't want to do any— everyone else is doing, so At the same time, uh, we kind of talked a little bit about it before the show started about Spotify missing their advertising numbers. The profit was up, but ad revenue was down. So you saw something too.

That's because everybody's, everybody's shifting over to subscription models.

That's the—

I mean, that's where the big momentum is, you know, paying for it. Does raise the question about the long-term future of Advertising.

But if they— so, so then let me think about this for a second. So I don't pay for Spotify.

Um, but how much do you use Spotify? Barely.

So some people— I assume if you are a heavy user, but even if you're a heavy user, you're still getting subjected to ads. That's my understanding.

If you're not a subscriber, right?

No, I— if you are a subscriber, you still get a portion of ads, I thought. It doesn't guarantee an ad-free experience if you're paying for it. I would hope so. Yeah, but then do they take a portion of that revenue and give that to the creators?

That, you know, well, that's exactly what the YouTube platform is doing.

Yeah, well, there's never been transparency on what that equates to. You know, if I pay whatever the YouTube Premium is, and if I watch you know, 10,000 hours— that's an exaggeration— but if I watch X number of hours a month across X number of properties, then, you know, do they take $5 of that and split it between all those hours?

Because my understanding is they do.

So yeah, I just—

I wonder, it's a share of, of audience that is the takes a percentage of that, that, uh, subscription revenue.

It'd be nice to know what those actual numbers were, what that ratio is, because it can't be very high. They must take a majority of that money for revenue, uh, for the company. I just, I, I just can't see it because YouTube's not an inexpensive machine to run.

So, yeah, well, we We may be able to see it in the backend tools of the monetization stuff. I just haven't dug into it to try and find out what the numbers are back there for subscription revenue share. But I think I have seen it in the past broken out as a separate line item in the monetization tools.

So is a stock, you know, the stock report or whatever they do, their earning analysis or their earning announcement, Spotify? Yeah, Daniel Ek basically said, hey, we had some execution challenges, and that, uh, what that meant, uh, uh, someone, someone getting fired.

Well, the ad chief Lee Brown is, is departing, uh, departing mutual agreement.

Interesting how they termed that, which is code for, yeah, you're out, dude.

Yeah, you didn't hit your numbers, you didn't get your numbers, so it's, well, you know, it's, you know, pack up your bags.

Yeah, that's That's the way it is in real life, you know, and—

Well, in a public company.

Yeah. Well, even private companies that have a board of directors, you know, you don't hit your numbers. Okay, we're going to be looking for someone to help us get these numbers.

Right. You know, so— And he may be in a no-win situation here too because the ad market I think is a little soft right now.

Yeah. And at the same time, RSS.com finally joined the party. Hey, welcome guys. And they're, uh, they're, they're doing, uh, programmatic ads now for any show. They're doing the same thing as we are.

Um, very, very creative naming that they gave this, right?

Yeah, paid programmatic ads. And they're doing a $1 payout threshold that, you know, I give them credit for, for doing a dollar. Um, the overhead to process payments and just the amount of, you know, it costs you 30 cents to send a dollar. So I don't know if I'd want a payment at a buck, right? Yeah, yeah. So good for them.

$1 payout threshold.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. You know, from a— if I, if I tried to do that, my CFO would be like, Uh, I think our minimum is $25 or $50.

I don't think there's any problem with setting it at a minimum amount.

Yeah, but the processing fee, that's the problem.

The process of check or payout, right?

Yeah, you know, check or pay.

I mean, not a $20 or $25 or $50 payout amount. I mean, if you look at what the YouTube platform does, they have a $100 threshold.

Yeah, we have, we said, I think $25 or $50 is what ours is. You know, for the first— and we'd only pay by PayPal. You know, that's very rare do we pay by check. It's kind of a special exception to do that.

And I think you can transact that for free, can't you?

Uh, on PayPal, no. Either we pay it, or either we pay a fee, or they pay it, or the recipient pays, right? Yeah, I think we end up— what we do is I think we pay the fee. But we do a bulk transaction so that we're doing all of it at once and just get one, one transaction. So, um, Time publishes 100 best podcasts of all time. I don't know if you saw this list from Time.

This came out a couple weeks ago. Oh, this came out a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Um, and it was interesting because, um, That was announced on the 24th, 7 days ago.

They weren't on the list.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was since we've had the show, was on the 24th. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I thought I saw it before that.

Yes, maybe. But yeah, just they left, uh, Pod Save America. Yeah, missing. And Joe Rogan. Yeah, I wonder if that was a little—

there was a few others out there that were missing too.

I wonder if that was a little political swipe by, by time?

Well, I think it was a political swipe of, uh, that they didn't want to get engaged in any direction on the politics. So if there was a show that was extreme, yeah, and what is perception of its politics? I mean, if you look at Pod Save America, that's a left-leaning, yeah, podcast, and the perception of Joe Rogan is that's kind of a right-leaning. So maybe they, they just wanted to stay entirely out of politics.

I think they should have a list of the best podcast shows 15 years and older.

Well, that's— that was the intent of the whole thing, was what were the podcasts that really pioneered the, the medium. It's, it's the legacy media stamp of approval, giving mainstream— yeah, um, you know, shine, I guess, to the medium. But shows that really, you know, boosted the, the podcast industry early on, um, you know, and to leave out a huge show like Joe Rogan seems to be like, maybe.

But there's shows on here, of course, through the trees. If I, if I look through these shows, there's some shows here that are pretty new that did not shape the industry. And there's, there's some, there's some stuff in here I'm like, I see some that were, yes, but others, a lot of them really weren't that important of shows in, in the scheme of things.

In the scheme of the medium.

Yeah.

And weren't that important.

Yeah. And maybe in their own right they were.

Yeah, I'm sure that they had their audience and they were good shows, and that's nothing to take away from them. It's just, I don't— that 100 list, um, is kind of an exclusive club. It shouldn't include just anybody.

Yeah, I, I'm looking through the list, I'm like, really?

Yeah. Right. Well, there's a lot of public radio shows.

A lot.

A lot. Which leads you to feel that there's a little bit of a public radio bias on that list.

You think? Yeah. And to be honest with you, I don't think I've listened to a single public radio podcast in 10 years. At least.

Yeah, well, yeah, and over the last couple years, kind of, kind of, kind of struggled too. I mean, there's, there's been a lot of shows that have come and gone in the public radio space over the last couple years.

Well, it is being reported though that, uh, you know, the podcast market is going to boom towards $40 billion in 2025. Hahaha. We went from what, 2.5 billion to 40 billion? Okay, I guess that's the general— that's, you know, the word podcast again is being used very liberally here.

So, well, it's the whole industry. It's not just looking at it from an advertising lens, which I think is— I think it's the smart thing to do because Or the advertising side of things have been pretty flat lately.

Yeah, well, you know, we're not getting to the $40 billion number with hosting companies or advertising either.

So, yeah, you know, it's, it's probably better to start looking at it from the whole industry perspective.

Yeah. And again, it looks better. Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, it's just like, you know, they keep toting this numbers of 4.5 million shows and 584 million listeners. And I can believe the listener number, actually. I think that number's low, to be honest with you. Um, you know, I look at— I don't know, I have to go back and probably pull some math, but if we're, if we're measuring 300 million downloads a month, um, you know, what does that equate out to in audience alone just from us?

Um, well, that's a different metric, right?

It is ours.

It's ours, right? Is that what you were saying, or is it just using—

No, they say there's 584.

No, no, you, you had quoted a number.

Yeah, we met— we measure 300 million downloads a month.

Downloads, that's not necessarily users, right?

Well, but if you, if you, if well, 300— well, there was at least 300 million listens, you know, or thereabouts. And, you know, what is the— what is the divider factor on that? So if someone— if we put out 5, 4 episodes a month, so, you know, someone, one person listened to this show 4 times, that's a 1, it's not a 4 from a listener standpoint. So there is some derivative of listeners that are accessing that, you know, those 300 million downloads.

Yeah, but as far as total list, I mean, what's the listener number? If the average listener is listening to 5 podcasts, then that would—

so then it would be number and yeah, divided by 5. So 60 million on our side, right now. So, uh, 584 million. And you know, we're not even— you know, you look at Libsyn and Buzzsprout, they're much bigger. At Spreaker, you know, they're much bigger.

So there's still, I don't know what the percentage is, Todd. Have you seen any numbers lately about how many, what percentage of the podcasts that are out there that are still self-hosted?

Hmm.

I mean, at one point I thought it was like a third of all podcasts were self-hosted. Well, we have a lot of shows we measure that are self-hosted because they're using your plugin, but they're not hosting with you, but they're hosting it off of their own website.

Hosting platform. Yeah, if everyone that uses our plugin would host with us, um, I could hire a couple more people.

Okay, yeah, there you go. Also, before we move on, we skipped, we skipped over another Spotify story which is interesting too, is that, um, Spotify and AI— and this is kind of following in the footsteps of YouTube because YouTube just announced this too has announced that they're going to translate all the podcasts globally. Yeah. Into multiple languages, just like what YouTube is doing. So if you have a podcast in their platform, I'm not quite sure if they're only doing this with shows that are hosted on— Oh, I'm sure. Spotify, or if they're— I'm not sure how they would do this with a show that's a pass-through. Do you have any idea, Todd?

They haven't said nothing to us, so I would assume it's only shows hosted over there.

Well, but they don't really say that explicitly here in there.

No, they're messing— and I'm sure they— it, you know, the cost to do this is very high, so I'm sure it's not for every show.

Yeah, it says that they're gonna— they're gonna allow creators to produce a single show automatically available in multiple languages. So that, that does sound like it, it would be— yeah, Spotify only hosting shows.

I think so. You know, we've looked at that and, you know, ran the numbers and using someone like ElevenLabs or something like that to do the translation. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, uh, that could be expensive. Well, you know, and there's not a lot of other platforms out there that are publicly available that do English to French, English to German, English to whatever language. There's just not that many. I'm sure we'll probably start to see more, but I can't imagine— Go ahead.

It doesn't say in here if they're going to clone the host voice. No, I know. They're just going to apply a like a voice actor. Yeah, to it. So it'd be a different voice in your podcast.

Yeah, it definitely would. And, and what are they actually doing? Are they taking the— well, I'm sure they're taking a transcript. You know, our transcripts come up and have second-by-second tracking, so I'm sure there'll be errors in the transcript though. That, you know, that I, I think that you— believe it or not, The transcripts have gotten—

A lot better.

Yeah, a lot better. You know, the accuracy. And actually, I talked to the team about this a couple of days ago. I said, what level? Because you can set the translation level with the service we're using right now.

Or the transcription or the—

Yeah, the transcription. You can set the accuracy level. Basically pay for— and so we're paying for the most expensive model that does the— gives the highest results. So, you know, and it breaks you and I out. I can see when we get the transcript, um, that it understands when we— when you speak and I speak, and it switches back and forth. Matter of fact, today we were gonna double-check to make sure your levels are good, and I forgot to do that before we started today.

So, uh, yeah, I turned my, my own mixer up a little bit too.

Turn yours up.

All right, so let me boost you here as well, just in case, unless you're leveling me down.

There we go.

You're okay.

Yeah, much better on my side. I put you up a, a whole bar.

A whole bar? Oh my God, I've been, I've been elevated to another bar.

Yeah, you might actually be louder than me now. That's okay, because you always come across—

for now anyway.

Yeah, you always come across a little soft in the live Yes, I fixed—

I'm purposely speaking a little louder into the microphone today, so I, I pick—

I, I definitely, uh, fix you in post, but it doesn't help for your YouTube channel when you're a little—

right, right, on the, on the live side, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the live ends up being a little quieter.

I thought this— oh, good, good thing.

No, no, no, go ahead.

I was surprised when this story popped up in my query about venture capital and their focus on big firm networks trying to reshape podcasting. I don't know if you've heard about this, Todd. I haven't heard much about this. The major venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, are investing significantly in podcast and creator networks. I didn't realize this. Well, I thought that they would have been backing away from this, but what's really interesting about this is that they're offering executive salaries approaching half a million dollars to develop branded podcast networks. This aggressive strategy signals a VC belief in the power of audio-first content.

Hmm. Well, I know, I know, I get at least—

the climate is—

I get probably 10 emails a week. Hey, you ready to sell? You know, people fishing, M&A fishers. And I tell them, yeah, we're always willing to sell, but we require a $50,000 deposit before we start any discussions.

We're gonna find out if you're serious.

Yeah, find out if you're serious. Or I have a candidate, I have a company candidate that might be interested in acquiring you. It's just, you know, and you can tell they're all AI-generated emails from some assistant of some, you know, and you look at the email and you go, yeah, they're, you know, they're a firm, you know, and it's, so I'm not surprised that they're going after content.

Well, this may be, Coming off of some research that's been coming out over the last, I don't know, 6 months or so, talking about how the creator economy is going to be like a $60 billion industry in the next 3 years. You know, I mean, you see these, these marketer research studies that are coming out saying that the creator economy is going to be, you know, this huge of a market. So, all of these VCs are like going, my God, you know, $50 billion, we got to get in on that.

Well, so then what happens? And I, I think that the flaw here is, is it's just like a— okay, let's take a podcaster that podfades. You know, I've had— I've known some very, very, very, very successful podcasters that were, you know, even in the early days, making more than $100,000 a year in, in, in revenue. And they just hit a wall and quit and walked away from significant revenue. And the question then is, is okay, if you and if you're investing in content, Aren't you really investing in the voices and the talent behind those shows? And, you know, I just— I even see it on YouTube. People quit because they get tired of the rat race of chasing the algorithm. So what happens when, you know, they make these investments in networks and, you know, talent quits? It's not— it's It's, you know, I don't think what we've seen, okay, you and I are an example here. We've been doing this show for 15 years or so, or whatever the number is. It's, I think it's like 15 now, maybe 14. And I've been doing my, and you've been doing your other shows or a series of shows for 20 years. So you've done, but, you know, I consider that my tech show, obviously I've been doing that show consistently for 20 years. Um, there's not a lot of podcasters that have this type of standing power. Now, obviously, like some big names, Joe and others that are out there, you know, they, they got a team and they, they're kind of obligated to create content probably until they die. Um, I, I don't— I just don't know. Is there, is there enough talent out there to, you know, if you're going to build a network of shows and branded shows that you have? I don't know. You'll even look at The Night Show. How long did, uh, what's his name run at CBS before they, uh, before they killed the show? What's his name? Was Colbert or whatever. He ran for— yeah, he ran for what, 15 years or something like that?

So I I don't know, maybe he had a show for a long time on the, on Comedy Central.

Yeah, that's true. So he's been in the space a lot longer. But how many, how many people in this, in this new media space that are doing YouTube, doing podcasts and everything else have 20 years of longevity? So I, I just question when some— and maybe they're only thinking 3 years, so maybe they're not worried about it. But if you're going to build a big show, you need a talent base that is not gonna quit. You're investing. I think the manpower issue is the biggest issue. Maybe they don't look at it that way. Maybe they say people are replaceable.

Well, I tend to look at this from the— I was really more shocked around this statement in here that the VCs believe in the power of audio-first content. I think that may be missing the revolution that's happening here. If you look at what's happening with like a Netflix or whatever, that is an energy shift of consequence from the standpoint of those platforms are, I guess you could look at it that those platforms like Amazon Prime and Netflix and YouTube are replacing cable television. Right. They're actually taking those spots.

But equally important, the audio audience has not left, has not declined.

Right. It's still there. It's still doing well. So they may be taking a contrary view here to the mainstream narrative that audio has its own kind of carved out niche because of the decline of radio. So the same phenomenon could be happening on the video side. But they didn't mention like a hybrid model of audio and video, which I would have been more likely to have expected to see with these VCs. So it's really interesting that they're doubling down on audio first.

I think we forget that, and you know, with all this hype around video, again, the numbers prove that that audience is is, is maybe they're watching more video, but they're definitely listening to as much or equally or more audio, or it's growing.

It's still growing, right?

Yeah. So, but incrementally, but we've been growing 1 or 2% a year for— or 3%, you know, for years and years and years.

But yeah, well, I always thought it would, it would keep growing, but I always thought at some point it would kind of peak, right?

But you know what VC means, right? Vulture Capital. Oh yeah, in 3 years, in 3 years if you haven't made your numbers, you know, you're gone. All right, well, you run out of runway, right?

You got to start generating revenue.

You can't— yeah, you better, you better, you, you know, you'd— so, you know, maybe it's just maybe they're running out of things to invest in. And yeah, that's—

yeah, I know. And it also says in the article, it says there's important discussions revolving around the— how these significant financial injections could affect independent creators, the shift economy. I'm not sure what a shift economy is, or alter podcasting that's traditionally been an open ecosystem. So Maybe what they're implying is that this is, this is something new and different than what we have had before.

Well, they've— where are they going to find all this talent?

Branded podcast networks. So what would be the definition of a branded podcast network be?

It would be like Anyone that's, you know, like the— it's like Glenn over there at the Horse Network. And I would assume it would be a topical—

yeah, no, but I mean, it—

that, that word brand, yeah, it could be, it could be a corporate brand, right?

That could imply that, right? So like, uh, like a Tesla creates a a network of shows that support their, their brand.

That could be. Again, I— unless we know exactly what that definition is, it could be two ways. It could be sports networks, it could be, uh, yeah, you know, the Mommy Cast, it could be anything here, you know. It, it could be, yeah.

Is that a niche, niche-branded podcast networks.

The question is, who's getting this money? Have we, have we heard anyone get—

I haven't heard of anybody in the podcast industry getting the money unless it's new people.

Oh, hey, hey, hey, Anderson Horowitz, uh, hey there, how you doing?

Uh, you guys need some technology to distribute this stuff.

You guys went and talked to us 20 years ago, so, you know, times, times Time's here.

Well, you know, I went—

Time's up. Yeah, Andreessen Horowitz didn't want to talk to me about, you know, investing in a podcast hosting company. Or at the time we were a media company. We weren't a hosting company.

Well, the Andreessen Horowitz—

Andreessen, yeah, whatever.

How do you ever say it? Has been around a long time. They've been around a long time. And they've— they're the biggest of the VC capital companies.

All right. Yeah, but I send the— that guy that, uh, told me I was too old to build a business, I send him a note every year, an email, say, hey, we're still fucking here.

Is there a— some sort of a middle finger that gets involved in that?

A little involved me being thrown out on my throw out on my ass when I went to, you know, I got like 15 minutes with him, you know, and just like, get out of here, you're too old, your team's too old, you don't live here in Silicon Valley, and good luck to you. Right, right. As he's, you know, he didn't—

don't wear that suit.

Well, that happened in New York, you know, don't, don't let the, don't let the door hit in the butt on the way out, you know. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that was the same day I got a flat tire. I was so pissed off, I ran into a curb and punctured a tire that day on a rental car.

Yeah. Well, it's probably good that you took it out on the tire instead of him.

There's nothing more degrading than being told you're too old, you know, too old to build a business. You don't have the energy. And of course I was still in the Navy, so it wasn't like I could, you know, like I could move to Silicon Valley.

So. Yeah, Todd, Todd, I think you want to be with a company that thinks of you as a slave, right? Yeah. You're too young, you don't have enough energy for this.

Or the, or the, I won't say the group name in New York where I was grabbed by my sleeve and basically told, you know, Don't ever come in here with a, you know, to see me again in my team with a JC— it wasn't JCPenney's, it was a Macy's rack suit.

We will not be demeaned.

Oh yes, you know, looking me up and down. Of course, I probably had, you know, $80 black shoes on, and you know, you know, there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a brand thing on me. I was just— we were just poor.

That's why the hell we're here. We don't want to be poor anymore, right?

Yeah. And, you know, to be honest with you, uh, um, that pissed me off pretty bad too, but I ended up going to Brooks Brothers and, you know, buying a suit, upgrading suit. Yeah. And, you know, again, we had no money, so it was like—

that's like— so you lost money on it?

It's like $2,000 I didn't need to spend, you know? Right. And then you end up, you know, then, then how things go to California, you show up in a polo shirt and you're good, you know. They don't want to see you in a suit. You walk in a suit, they're like, hey, or, you know, we're right down the street from the beach, you know. Do you really need to be here in your, you know, your blazer and your tie? Yeah. Oh yeah, it's so funny how the difference between co-star when it comes to clothes. Oh yeah, yeah.

So, Edison, I guess there's a shakeup in podcast, um, host leadership out there that's occurring right now with the Gen Z and women-led podcasts surpassing traditional giants like Joe Rogan. I don't, I don't know if that's entirely true, but, well, I hope they are shaking. Definitely shifting. It's definitely shifting.

Yeah, good. I don't know, you know, women, I think we see it. I think we see more women creating new podcasts than men right now, so it makes sense.

Well, there's definitely a lot more, more energy around women-led podcasting companies. Well, um, one thing—

well, as hosts— one thing we do see is men are more likely to go solo and women are more likely to have a team. Team from the standpoint of on mic, or like people that are helping them, 2 or 3 people, you know, they're more than like— and maybe it's a friend or whoever, but you know, they— we do see that, uh, most— a lot of ladies' shows are not solo, uh, solo shows.

Now that switches. When you say solo show, let's be clear, are you talking about, um, supporting team, or are you talking about non-solo show, solo, like hosting, Geek News Central, host, talent, marketing.

Oh, do it all. Yeah, do it all. So we see more women having, you know, a small team that helps them with, with all of that. So typically I'll get out of the post-production. Yeah, and stuff like that. Typically I'll get on a call with, um, a new creator that's a man, and it'll just be him or maybe his co-host.

He's trying to you know, be Superman and do it all.

Well, it's just— and then I get on a call with the— a new creator that's a woman, more often than not there's 2 or 3 people on the call, not necessarily a co-host, or there's a co-host and someone that could be a co-host. Yeah, yeah, right. So, um, but again, there's always— seems like there's a little more, and it kind of makes sense to me a little bit in the way I think it's very You know, to be a successful podcaster now, I, I think it's very complex game right now.

Um, you know, all the, all these platforms want you to publish directly to them.

Of course it's going to add work.

Just two? What do you mean just two?

They all want you to publish directly.

YouTube and Spotify? No, X, uh, Instagram, Facebook. Yeah, yeah, you know, TikTok, all of them want you to publish directly to them.

There's no syndication to those platforms, I mean, of any consequence, unless you're restreaming like we are and it just goes up there.

Yeah, well, that's what— the only way to do any kind of a simul posting to all these platforms is to do a live show.

Yeah, if you're watching live, make sure you check in and say hello.

Sorry, go ahead, Rob. Yeah, and so You know, it's, it takes a team to, plus trying to manage these algorithms, you know, with the reels and the slideshows that people are putting up on their posts on LinkedIn and Instagram and stuff like that, trying to do these stories, right? These slide stories. All this stuff takes a lot of production work and a lot of work. Generally, I think over time AI is going to, you know, help with a lot of this stuff. But currently AI is still— I don't think AI is still quite good enough to 100% rely on.

Uh, it requires, it requires manipulating. Yeah, proper prompting. But it gets you 80% of the way there, and that, you know, for most people that are time constrained You know, for moms that have kids and, you know, people have busy lives, it's, it's a force multiplier for sure.

It's definitely gotten better with the imaging.

Oh, our imaging, images stuff. Our imaging has— I mean, it's, it's a thousand percent better in just the past. Yeah, yeah, we, we made a switch on a model here about 2 months ago, maybe a month ago. Night and day. I was actually not happy with the outputs before. I just thought it was horrible.

Um, well, the problem it had before was spelling of words. Yeah, it just couldn't— it couldn't do it, right? No matter how many times you scolded it or told it to do it right, uh, it wouldn't make any difference. Um, now I've noticed that at least the OpenAI platform, the, the chat GPT-4.0 or whatever it is, even 4.5, will actually spell things right, but it won't put all of the text on the image. It'll only put like half of it on the image or something like that. So you have to tell it to slide that text over so I can see it.

Yeah.

One little—

It's still making mistakes. One experiment I've been running with, and I still have a hand curator for my tech show that does the goes out and looks for content, um, you know, digs through. We use what's, uh, it's called, uh, name of it, it's called Feedly, and we just are subscribed to every RSS feed we could potentially be subscribed to. And, and then he curates the articles. And then, uh, but I've been recently building an agent— not an agent, um, What's it called in AI? It's called a, uh, uh, let me get it open here. It's called, uh, a GPT. I've been building it. I've been building a new GPT to try to help with show prep. Um, and basically it's a custom one because I have, you know, basically sources that I need to have it looked at, you know, give me the, you know, the most hot stories in tech in the last 3 days. And you have to feed it, you know, a whole bunch of sources in order to get it to, you know, to basically put out a list of, you know, 50 topics that you pick 20 from. So I've been playing with this a little bit and I think within a year, And Kirk, your job's safe, don't worry. I think within a year I could replace Kirk and use— but again, then what do we miss? You know, so that's the, that's the key here is even though it puts me out a list of 50 topics that are fresh, I have to still go and look at TechMeme and other locations to make sure that we didn't miss anything. And it does, it misses stuff quite, quite regularly. And it also, the same thing is some tech sites now have gotten so political. Um, I, I, matter of fact, I called a site out on my show Monday. It's just so blatantly but they have TDR. They hate Trump so bad, it's— and Elon, uh, they hate those two people so bad that every article that has any relation to those two people, they're just, you know, it's like a paragraph of— I don't know, way to kind of a bashing. Oh, it's a bashing. Yeah, right. And that's exactly what it is. So You know, and I don't want to be honest with you, I don't want to, um, even— I'm trying to stay involved in that, right? It's a tech show, so I'm trying to stay neutral and not bring, you know, let people generate their own opinion. If Tesla earnings were up or down, what was it in fact because of what he was doing with Doge or whatever? Okay, then I'll let the listener make that decision. I'm not going to say, well, hahaha, they're down And because, you know, he's spending too much time over at SpaceX. So the problem that I'm having is currently is filtering out the biases and the biased content that is actually still being handwritten.

Well, the irony of all that is one could be seen as biased because you don't want to talk about the bias.

It's a tech show. I'm reporting about tech.

I know, I get what you're saying. I'm just saying that's how, That's how crazy our world is.

Now, to be honest with you, I, I have no problems going after congressional people or, or talking about bills. You know, that side I'm good at when it comes to talking about policy. And if, if policy was changed because someone was a friend, well then I'm going— that's fair game for me to talk about, right? So someone got a, a sweetheart deal because they're a friend of the administration. I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about that on a tech side. Uh, it's, it's valid, but I don't know. So for me, I think the AI planning stuff is just going to get better.

And, um, but should you, should you rely on it?

No, you can't right now. You can't rely on it because it misses stuff. Yeah, yeah. And again, I've been working on this GPT for a while and you overwhelm it because the, I can't really, I don't wanna do a screen sharing.

No, it's like what happened on the show today is that the research that I did using AI came up with this investment thing from the Andreessen Horowitz thing into podcast networks that I hadn't heard anywhere else. There's nobody else talking about that that I've seen.

But at the same time, the podcasting news ecosystem's pretty small right now between James. We try over at Podcaster News to put some stuff up, but it's always behind, uh, and it's all handwritten over there. So the, the number of news sources for podcasting is pretty narrow. But when you're doing a tech show, I think my resource catalog is like 1,200 sites. So trying to tell an AI—

you're doing more than just podcast news, so—

oh, and my tech show. Yeah, so I'm talking about it would be easier to build one for this show than it would be for my tech show because I rely on 1,200 news sources to find 25 news stories twice a week.

Yeah, well, the problem with our genre here is that it just— it's not it's never gonna drive a huge audience.

Oh no, for sure, for sure.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like at some point, it's almost like doing a podcast about telephones, right? It's so mainstream and so accepted and so understood by so many people that there's nothing mysterious about it anymore. So, you know, it's one thing that we've been doing this a long time And at some point, Todd, it's not gonna be new media anymore. So how do we take that ball to the next level is a question that we're gonna have to ask ourselves if we're gonna keep this going.

Well, again, we've kind of changed the format up a little bit already. So trying to stay more focused. I will say that there's an initiative And I, the purist in me is take everything away from everyone. You know, build solutions where people don't need a Patreon. Build solutions where, because be, you know, be honest with you, creators are not trusting many of these platforms now. They're even bringing into question trusting YouTube and Spotify and creators are finally waking the hell up on this, and I think that's critical. But a few folks in the, you know, the Podcasting 2.0 space proposed a, a spec for linking paid feeds in podcast apps that originate— this basically everything happens within the RSS, one RSS feed, and It's a noble— and, you know, and basically Sam Sethi and others have, you know, there's been a few back and forth with me and the Podcast Index, Social, um, Mastodon, and a few other places where I basically said we are in a time today when there's not enough podcasters that are doing premium content, um, Premium content now is being delivered. It works, uh, very easily. You have a username, a password. It's a secure RSS feed. Um, you can subscribe to a show. You can go on Apple Podcasts. You can do a premium subscription over there, uh, to premium content. And they make it easy, one click. What's being proposed is basically trying to go around these folks, go around Patreon, go around the premium offering. But the problem is, is you don't have— you have less than, less than maybe 1/2 of 1% of shows globally that are doing premium content. You know, just, they— people, you have to have a pretty massive audience to consider offering premium. Um, and it just, it's a pure math issue. So if you think about having 100 listeners and let's say 3% subscribe to premium content, there's 3 to 5 people that'll probably subscribe to premium if you're 100. And if you're charging $6 for that, you're going to have to create extra content for $30. You know, if it's $5 a month, that's 6 people. Now, if you get 1,000 and you can get 30 people, or 6, 30 to 60 people, maybe the math starts looking a little better. But then you got to get to 10,000. And if you use the 3 to 5% math problem, then maybe you're into a position where you could do premium and do okay with it and have enough time to say, I'm gonna do an extra episode, um, or I'm going to give them ad-free for $5 a month. Maybe that math starts working. Well, how many shows are more than 10,000 listeners per episode, Rob? You know, that's a pretty small number of shows.

Yeah. So this— well, at the same time, we're seeing growth in these, um, these private platforms too. Yeah, like a Uscreen, or, uh, and Patreon is an example of it. Uh, you know, Substack is another one that people are getting more and more involved in.

There's other ones out there too. It's very hard to usurp at this point Patreon, Substack, and those other folks that offer this premium content because It's just easy. People want easy. And I understand buying premium content in an app would be easy, but I think again, it's such a small number of people doing it. I, I don't know.

But it's not all about people doing this necessarily around podcasts. It's people that are doing it with exclusive video. They're building right communities around— I understand that— written content. They're doing it around—

but I'm referring largely to a spec podcasting, for RSS-based.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you look at the whole ecosystem of where the energy is going, it's going into these private communities because, you know, quite frankly, like we saw with the announcement from Spotify, the advertising market may not be long-term strong. So, you know, I think creators have to start thinking outside of the box a little bit and start thinking,, you know, beyond just podcasting, you know, creating their own kind of community of subscribers. I think they're subscribing to get access to their, their relationships, their content.

Again, big shows are doing this, and they're smart to do so, right? You know, and that's certainly true. And again, there's only so many big shows that are in open RSS. Uh, people that are defining a, you know, a podcast on YouTube that is big— most of those shows do not have a corresponding true open RSS-based podcast. They're just strictly on YouTube.

So yeah, I've heard many creators on YouTube take this perspective too, that, you know, I'm gonna focus my energy just on this platform. Yeah. And that's YouTube. I'm not going to spread myself too thin and do a bunch of other platforms, especially when these other platforms are not rewarding me to, to do cross-promotions. Right. So that means that I'm going to have to duplicate everything I'm doing over here and duplicate it over there. And they all want it to be a little different. And so people are like focusing more. Right. And, and to some degree, that's what podcasters should do too.

They should primarily focus? Well, I think the big ones, the big— I think they're starting to realize that YouTube, Spotify, all these platforms are not necessarily their friend and are waking up to this. And I hope more of that happens. And I hope they all look to alternative ways to make sure that their revenue streams making sure that they're building community, that they're capturing those people external to those platforms.

And that's exactly, I think, what we're both saying here, uh, is that having those direct relationships between you and your audience and driving value in that relationship bypasses, yeah, these big platforms that want to get in the middle of your relationship.

Have your own mailing list, have your own merch store, have all this stuff that is, you know, going to help you and, uh, in not giving, you know, 30% to someone because they've hit a premium subscription. Rob, we've, uh, we've made it to the top of the hour here. We did, we did. I have got quite a few people watching on YouTube. Hey David, thanks for checking in. So, uh, yeah, so thanks for, for, for jumping in. A few on Facebook today as well.

Yeah, I've got 17 on mine.

Oh, you're doing better than me. Um, also, uh, I guess no, this— the big tsunami that was supposed to hit Hawaii, it ended up— that was going to be a dud. Well, it's good it was a big earthquake.

Well, it is good that it's a dud.

Yeah, dud is always good. Yeah, I was in Hawaii when the, uh, the big one came about 15 years ago, and they did considerable amount of damage to the harbors stuff. So nothing inland, but it was, you know, this, this pounding power of this, you know, water is so powerful, it's unbelievable. But yeah, thank goodness, 8.3. What a, what a ride.

Oh no, I thought it was 8.8.

Oh, was it 8? I was in a, um, one in Guam that was 6 point— uh, it was, and it was a shaker, it wasn't a bouncer, it was one of these. And knocked me out of my chair. I was in a— it did. I, I had my feet up on a table, and when it hit— now luckily in my house it shook, uh, this way, and all of my cabinets were this way, so all my cabinets were this, and nothing tipped over.

So— oh well, that's good. That's so— that's why you should secure your bookshelves.

That's right. If you live in an earthquake zone Yeah, of course, you know, when you have a concrete wall behind your bookshelf, kind of hard to secure your bookshelf, but that's why those little straps are in all bookshelves is for a shaking earthquake.

But yeah, or if you just have a tall bookshelf, right? Yeah, that could easily do this.

Yeah, I've got a tall liquor cabinet right now that I've got secured because I'm just afraid someone's gonna bump it and it's, you know, $500 worth of bourbon's gonna, you know, get destroyed on the, on the floor.

Yeah, if you live out in the— out like on the West Coast or in that part of the world, like I lived in Seattle for many years, I've lived through many earthquakes.

Um, so you secured your furniture?

Well, yeah, and you know, you know, you know what it's like. So, you know, I went through a few 6.6s and 6.8s and stuff like that over the years, and So I was in a brick building one time when it—

when it's, I think, a 6.5 hit. I was drinking— I was drinking a beer in a bar in the Philippines with a Philippine construction at the time, 4 stories above me. And the— oh boy, and the bar was waving, and all I could think of was the concrete workmanship of that building. And I couldn't— people couldn't get out of that bar fast enough. It was like that, all the ants going towards the exit. Hey, by the way, um, if you're a bourbon lover, um, you know, a lot of people listen to the show all over the place. If you're a bourbon hunter, uh, don't forget about me. You get into some place and someone's got a great deal on, you know, some allocated or something that looks cool, you know, always feel free to text me because I've got Venmo, I have, uh, Cash App. Um, I'd be always on the hunt here, uh, for a good bourbon. Bourbon? Yeah. Oh, so my flavor profile is definitely— I'm a Buffalo Trace kind of profile. So if that gives you any idea, or Green River or Michter's, or— yeah. So Rob, this is one hobby you don't want to get into, right?

Yes, I was going to say, I wouldn't recommend it, right? Yeah, you know, it's, you know, it's a connoisseur kind of a thing, you know. It's like a—

it's like Connoisseur of cigars, of wine, you know, that type of thing, you know, you, you know, and it's just like, does it really taste that much better? You know, that bottle that was $40 on the shelf versus the one that is $369, is this— is the taste that much better? Then I'm thinking, well, $360, whatever it is, and you only get 750 milliliters, or not 7, whatever the bottle size is. 75 mils or whatever, they say, what is that? That's, you know, that's, that's like $40 a drink. Wow. Yeah. Is it worth it really to be this big?

Is it worth it to your liver, I guess?

Well, you know, you, at an ounce at a time, you know, you know, but it's just like wine, you know, people spending big money for a bottle of wine. So one thing about bourbon, it lasts a hell of a lot longer than wine does. You open it up, you got to drink it. So I don't drink any of it anymore. Yeah, I, I, I still do. So, all right, uh, todd@blueberry.com, @geeknews on Twitter, @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon.

RobGreenlee.com, great place to get a hold of me. If you want to send me an email, you're welcome to send it to robgreenlee@gmail.com. Love to hear from you. So we found on all the social platforms, YouTube, doing stuff on a regular basis, guest on shows, guest on group events, all sorts of stuff. So if you just look at the posts that I make, you can see all the stuff I'm doing. I'm increasingly talking about AI and how humans and AI are going to work together, Todd.

Well, I've been using the AI operator from OpenAI. Um, been talking about it quite a bit on my tech show. It's—

have you been playing around with the agent capability in OpenAI now?

Yeah, because I'm still paying for the—

I, uh, here's people—

the Pro Plan. I'm still paying for the Pro Plan, the $200 a month. I'm getting at least 1 to 2 projects a week that pay for it in research. That's good.

Yeah. Are you using that agent technology to do that?

I'm not. The agent technology though, give you an example, and you know, I know we were just about ready to sign off here, and again, this is the operator.chatGPT. I said, look for the cheapest flights to Manila from Chicago starting on October 15th with a return flight between January 3rd and January 9th. My preference carries United, and I will pay a slightly higher price for those flights. The output was incredible. I let it go to work, worked for 5 minutes, and it gave me 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 flight options. Gave me the lowest fare, the medium, it gave me, um, the best day to return on. I didn't take it any further than that. I didn't say go book the ticket or anything, but, um, I would have— you could, right?

I could.

You could do that, right? Yeah, I could have. Well, I don't know if it lets you do that at this point. It gets you almost to that point. I could have— no, no, no, not could have. That would have took me an hour. Yeah, just to look at all the different flights and sort. And it always is frustrating. Yeah, it is. And, and so for me, I was like, okay, 5 minutes, do the research, I pick one. Book it, I'm done. I've just saved 55 minutes or 50 minutes of my time, right? So this is where the operator functions are going to save you time.

Yeah, well, hopefully it'll save you money too because it's able to find the, the best deals.

And, you know, and maybe it's anonymously searching and it doesn't know it's you and you're you're not a logarithm because you're, you know, they know you're gonna buy the ticket, you know, yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of crazy. I don't ever use, I always use an incognito window whenever I'm searching for flights. I don't log into anything and I use incognito right up to the point where I buy the purchase and I sign in and then it knows who I am.

'Cause I don't want them—

Specific reason for that? Yeah, because they know you. And the airlines, airlines, everybody knows you. And the airlines are doing AI-based pricing now.

So if they know you and you're willing to pay a higher price, exactly.

It might be, it might be $100, but $100 is $100. Right? You know, if I can save $50 here, $25 there, $15, $20, whatever it is, It's in the end, in this economy, good Lord. Yeah, you know, of course the economy they say is on fire right now. If it is, where's the podcasters?

It's got to say, I think it's, it's on fire but it's burning down.

Yeah, you know, that's what every— everyone's saying, Rob, so it hasn't burnt down yet.

No, I know, I know, I was more talking about, um, other aspects of it. Oh, um, Uh, yeah, I'm, I'm hearing rumors that, uh, from people I'm talking to that are, that are trying to make plans to go to Podcast Movement, that there's not that many people going at this point. That's what I'm hearing, some rumors bouncing around right now.

Well, look at the Speaker lineup?

Well, that's probably the majority of the attendees. No, but I, I don't know about that. Wow. So what are you trying to say around that?

I don't know. I, you know, we got two sessions. We never get two sessions. Mike and I both got sessions. That's my— that was my thing. Hmm. And we applied late. On the last day of submissions. I didn't expect to get one because I thought it was going to be late. So, and been awful quiet out of that team. The team hasn't— there's news, but there's not a lot of news.

Yeah, I'm not hearing a lot of announcements out of— I mean, James does a fair amount of plugs above it, but he's part of podcasting. He has to.

Yeah, yeah. So not— well, well, I don't— yeah, I'll leave, I'll leave that alone. Okay. Yeah. Uh, everyone, we'll see you back here next week. Thank you for being here. Take care.

Okay.

Yep. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.