AI Created Content, Top Podcast Rankings, New Pod Conf King?

I'm live. Are you live, Rob?

On YouTube?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, here we go. Well, that didn't play. Okay, no audio. Hey everyone, welcome to the New Media Show. I'm back in the studio scrambling like a, uh, like a— I don't, I don't even know, I don't know what the word I want to use, Rob, but I turned every— I turned everything on last, on last night and updated it, and then as soon as, uh, 30 minutes ago I start, okay, I'm just ready to go live. And everything, this brother asked for a verification, authentication, make sure who I am, sending this text, sending a phone. Here we are, and, uh, welcome back to the studio.

Yeah, I guess it speaks to how fast things are moving these days around updates to platforms, and if you're not using it on a regular basis, I guess we just take for granted how much of this busy work that we do to keep connected and updates to APIs and OS updates and all the stuff that keeps us all scrambling all day and why everybody's so kind of burned out and trying to keep up with it.

You know what was funny was, is I knew when I got in— and I got in last 8, like 8 last night after traveling like 30 hours, and you and I were kind of screwed up on when to go live, and then I said, yeah, I can do, I can do 3 o'clock tomorrow. No problem. And my last meeting was at 2:15 and I got started, everything ready. I actually had groceries delivered. So that took about 10 minutes and turned everything up. And then I'm like, Rob, I need an extra 15 minutes. I'm not, I'm not going to make it. Uh, so, uh, yeah, here, here, here we are. And, uh, it's, uh, and believe it or not, everything really worked. All the electronics worked. It was just the authentications. Yeah, all the authentications. You know, we're live and lit, but I'm, I'm not, uh, I didn't do a lit livestream because I didn't announce that. I didn't have time. So, uh, yeah, here we are, and welcome back everyone. And I have a little, a little tone in the ear. I think I know where that's coming from.

Um, I can't, I can't hear anything.

So yeah, it's— and I know exactly where it's coming from because as soon as I hit play for our intro music, it didn't play. That means a little 1/4-inch dongle is hanging on the back, not plugged into the, uh, to the RØDE. So, yeah, so what are we talking about today anyway? What's, what's on our schedule?

Well, uh, I'm open to any topics that you're willing to talk about too here, Todd, but I kind of laid out a little bit of an outline of different things that are going on that we could talk about here. And one is the PodScribe December Ranker that was pointed out in a discussion group, a podcast group that I'm involved in. And it shows some interesting trends. I'm sure that you don't probably have it open there.

I haven't. No, I haven't read it. So go ahead and give me the the, uh, the breakdown?

Well, there's a, a ranker of the top 10 kind of like, uh, platforms that are out there, um, and their distribution of content that's on them that is being consumed by RSS, uh, versus YouTube. Oh, so it's kind of breaking out, uh, what these big platforms— and I'm, I'm talking about like Spotify, Wondery, Acast, NPR, Lipson Ads, iHeartMedia, Audioboom, SiriusXM, and then I guess Studio 21 and QCode. So they're part of this PodScribe kind of podcast rankings for December 2024. And what was pointed out to me, and I think just to kind of preface this, is that I've also heard others online mention that maybe the Podscribe numbers are not entirely reliable on this aspect. But what is very interesting that a person noticed in here is the huge difference in, I guess, plays that are on RSS via YouTube for those platforms. And I guess there's some confusion about, well, what's actually being tracked here? Is it Is all of the episodes that are published, um, on like the YouTube channel all being counted here, where on the, on the RSS side, is it only counting what was, what was delivered just in December?

Well, when you submit via YouTube via RSS, you have to go on YouTube numbers. There's no data that comes back to the podcaster.

Well, no, I think that there's a clear line of separation between RSS and YouTube and what is, what's being consumed in YouTube, right? So it's not necessarily the same thing, right? So, uh, and it's not clear about that here, but what it does show is it just shows 5 out of the 10 networks that are listed in this PodScribe Ranker as having dramatically more plays on YouTube than they do via RSS.

But isn't a play on YouTube anytime you just click play? And it lasts for 5 seconds.

Yeah, that's always the question that follows this ranker, right? Is, you know, what's the detail on this, right? And what is it including? Is it including just episodes that were published in December, or is the YouTube count here counting all the plays that happened on a particular channel in December, right? Which could include a bunch of archives too, right? So it may not be content that was just published in December, right?

So I don't know, apples and oranges, the numbers are com— I don't know how you can even do a comparison.

Well, you can based on when a, a piece of content is published, right?

Well, again, it— if it gets 1,000 downloads in an RSS feed and it gets 1,000 plays in, in YouTube, it's totally two separate numbers and two have total lead to different conceptions on— I guess I'm confused.

Entirely— it's not entirely different. It's, it's content was published via RSS. Was that same content in a video format published in YouTube during the month of December? And what— I mean, that's, that's the assumptions that I have.

So what is the debate?

Well, the debate is, is that the numbers for those 5 channels are dramatically higher on YouTube than they are via RSS. So, but there's other ones in here that are, that are much lower on YouTube compared to RSS.

Well, I think that would make sense. Some shows are going to do good over there. Some are not.

Okay. But if you can accept one, you know, we have to talk about the inverse of that. Right. So, and that's what we're seeing here is 5 out of the 10. Have dramatically higher YouTube plays on their content than they do RSS, and then the other 5 have larger RSS-based consumption than they do on YouTube. So there's a lot of factors that go into this.

So what's the debate?

Well, the debate is what's going on here? Is it possible that, that lips and ads primarily an audio platform, right, is showing 397 million plays on YouTube from content that's published into YouTube via Libsyn ads, and it's only showing 45 million plays on RSS.

So they— did they monetize those 790 million ads on YouTube?

Well, Ellipse and Ads has been bundling YouTube plays with RSS plays.

But they don't get paid the same. They never have.

Well, but they are bundling them together in ad buys is what I'm trying to say. So if you have a host read that you're doing in your audio, that host read is also done in the video side that's published to YouTube. And YouTube does have an API. Metrics API going back into Lipson. So they could compare those around plays during a particular window of time. Now, I agree with you that the way that audio is counted is different than the way YouTube is counted, right? So, but it's just an interesting contrast to look at real data. I just don't know what the data really is including in here to really draw any Very so hard conclusions here.

They need to list the shows that got the 790 million downloads.

That's a ranker. So yeah, I do believe that they do list them in here. So like, just to use the Lips and Ads as an example, it's listing 857 shows.

Oh, 857 shows. They got 790 million. I don't believe that at all.

No, no, no. 390 million plays on YouTube, 45.8 million plays on RSS across 800-some shows. Across 853 shows.

Let's, let's, let's, let's do some transparency then, Libsyn. Let's list those— well, no, 800 shows.

No, this is PodScribe. This isn't just— oh, there's Yeah, there's 10 companies, you know, like I, I just listed all the companies that are in here. The other one—

how does PodScribe know this number?

Well, that's what I'm— that's kind of the bigger takeaway here is that these numbers are being put out there and it's drawing people's kind of questioning of what's going on here and, and why are we seeing such a big discrepancy between plays on YouTube versus RSS plays. From platforms that are predominantly audio, right? So that's, you know, where's the reality here? So that's the big question, right? Is why are we seeing this kind of data? You know, if you look at, I mean, this isn't just a bash on audio here.

If you look at the— No, I'm just wondering how PodScribe's getting these numbers. I don't know, I can't, I can't, because they're not running a pixel on YouTube. Not allowed, you know. None of that. How do they get this data?

Well, it's coming from what they know from, I don't know, these platforms. I guess there's reporting going on between PodScribe and these platforms somehow, right? So also, they wouldn't be putting out a Ranker, right? So on the audio side, so if you look at the audio side, the month of December for all these platforms like Spotify, Wondery, ACast, Lips and Ads had big increases in their audio consumption, right? So Spotify is at 15%, Wondery is at 8%, ACast is at 6%, Lips and Ads is at 21%. AudioBoom's 34%, iHeart's 13%, and that's on the audio consumption side.

In relation to what, as a group?

Yeah, well, it's month-over-month growth, right? So is my understanding of month-over-month growth.

21% growth in one month.

That's what I'm gathering here. And then it ranks out. The video side of this as well, and it shows less growth on that side. It actually shows QCode at 15%, Spotify at 15%, and Studio 71 is not showing any growth. So, but it says the summary of the growth trends, audio is up 16.17% average growth in, in the video side is up 10% on average across all of these.

Here's, here's, here's what, you know, they can put all these reports out, but here's what I want to hear. I want to hear from the podcasters. I want to hear for the podcasters that are, that are doing well. I want to hear from them folks that tell me that my audio podcast putting— put on YouTube via an RSS feed is doing better than my audio podcast being delivered via podcast apps on YouTube. That's— I want to hear the podcasters say that, and I want to hear that this is because this is RSS.

I don't think that's what's being talked about here.

I think you're talking about apples and oranges here, but you said it was RSS. They were being ingested by YouTube via RSS.

No, no, no, I didn't say that. You said that. So I said this content that's being published into RSS versus content being published into YouTube.

Okay.

I'm not saying—

okay, that's fair.

What we're talking about here is RSS delivered to YouTube.

Okay.

So never say that.

So what I want to hear from those 800-some podcasters is that I am making 10 times the amount of money I'm making on podcasts as I'm making on YouTube. I'm— yeah, I know, 10 times the money on YouTube. And that's what I want to hear from them. I want these folks to start saying, start being, uh, very transparent. This, this whole conversation is all advertising driven, all of it. Everything that's been talked about, that's the whole point of PodScribe and their ranker. Again, but I, I want to hear from the podcasters that are doing well. And let's, let's start—

that's not going to answer this question.

No, it will start answering the question that my podcast that did X million downloads on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, my audio podcast earned this much, my video podcast on YouTube earned this much. And when they start talking about real numbers, then I'll start to listen.

I, I, again, advertising, uh, okay, well, okay, well, why don't you want to listen to what numbers are, are showing? And, you know, we can, we can prove them or disprove.

Well, again, I can question them and I don't—

those kind of things. But this is, this is, this is what the industry is—

this is what PodScribe is saying.

I know, but people are seeing what's happening here.

Okay, they're seeing, but is there proof?

Well, that, that takes into account kind of a perspective on whether or not PodScribe is a credible data gathering platform.

I know nothing about them.

Or, or the same thing with Triton's ranker, the same thing with PodTrax ranker. I'm not lumping them in here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not saying their numbers are wrong, but it'd be nice for them to explain the methodology on how they're getting this data.

Maybe people just know that PodScribe is doing this, but well, I mean, even if this stuff is correct, it's not really a threat.

Oh, I'm not worried about that from that perspective.

I mean, it's, I mean, I mean, it's clear that the YouTube platform has a huge— it's the number 2 search engine in the world. It's, it's, it's where billions of people are going to consume content. So just the fact that things are big over there doesn't take away from the success of RSS via audio because just clearly these numbers that I just shared with you show that the audio consumption side is actually growing faster. So, you know, it's, you know, it's okay for both of these things to be potentially true. It's probably a strength for the medium that we've kind of diversified and the audience, and we're reaching audience at a scale like we've never reached before. If these numbers are true, I don't think it's a— it could be a negative for the industry because of the business models involved. Well, that's a different problem than what's going on with—

I don't think there's an issue with the business model.

The business podcasting, I mean, it's been expressed by James Cridland and others that there is a threat to the audio business model, what's going on with YouTube. Well, and Spotify.

I think what will happen here is this, this next coming year, uh, we're gonna find out. And if all these—

I hope so. I hope we find out what the, what the truth is. And this may be a little bit of a glimpse of— so eventually that truth.

So the discussion then in the group, were they incredulous to these numbers, or what were they— what was their consensus.

I think a lot of people were questioning the credibility of the analysis based on what the criteria was to actually come up with this. So I think that's the bigger question is that if we're going to see this kind of trend line, it needs to go under the microscope of interpretation and clear understanding about what's being ranked and talked about. And that's That's one thing this show has been all about over the years. And oftentimes we get it wrong here on this show. And but, but the audience and people involved in it will set us straight, right? And help us understand what's going on here. And that's, that's the only reason I raised this is because people in the industry are seeing this and they're probably having the same question in their mind. Well, is this really accurate? And what's wrong with the data or what could be wrong? With, with the data that's giving us this when it could be, could be incorrect.

It's— the thing is, when people start focusing on plays and downloads, this is where— I mean, I've said this for years, um, in, in video, a play doesn't mean you got paid.

Well, it's not implying here, it's just talking.

It's just talking about pure plays. Plays a download that's qualified with advertising in it. You are.

So if you have advertising running in an audio podcast, and I wouldn't assume that all these big companies are using hosting, audio hosting platforms that are not IAB compliant.

So, well, I think the majority of them are.

Yeah, I mean, that was, that was what I meant. So yeah, so, so we're all analyzing the data, correct?

So I'm going to—

the question gets back to is what is YouTube doing?

I, I'm going to assume, let's say, a show that is in this reporting, or whatever Libsyn even reports on the audio side, every one of those downloads that had advertising in it was paid. That they They got— because it was— because it got qualified.

It doesn't say downloads anywhere, but it plays downloads.

People have stopped using the word downloads for years, so they use the word plays. It's the same thing.

Well, it's because that, that's what the advertisers, right?

So they're still getting paid for that play because it's been qualified as a download that they call a play. Just leave it at that. In YouTube— and I don't know enough about YouTube, I'm not, I'm not a YouTube genius, I don't have a YouTube channel that's monetized— in YouTube, you probably only get paid for an ad that was actually played.

Yeah, right.

But that—

I mean, I have a—

yeah, I have a monetized YouTube channel, but you may have gotten 1,000 plays but only got paid for 50 ad deliveries.

Yeah, I mean, it's a big black box, right? I—

and YouTube—

agree with that.

And YouTube decides what amount you're going to get paid based—

well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's based on what you would expect, you know. Like, I, I can see the average CPM on a, on, on a video that I have, and I I can see it's, you know, I can see who's listening to it, what the demographics are, what the play patterns are, what the time spent listening. But again, but again, see all that data.

But again, you're only going to get paid if that video or ad was delivered on YouTube.

What actually, I think it's more, it's paid if, if an ad was still, if an ad was delivered, if an ad was delivered.

Right. And then for those of us that don't have ads, you may get a percentage of money based upon share or whatever. But so the question then becomes, is when you see your plays— but do they— again, I'm not monetizing YouTube, so I don't know. You just see the average CPM. If you had 10,000 plays and your CPM was $4, then you get, you know, whatever the CPM end up being, because there has to be a difference between plays. You've got a million plays, you didn't get paid on a million plays because there wasn't a million ads delivered. See what I'm saying? Do they even tell you that?

Yeah, I, I don't really know on the back end how they're actually doing that.

They just tell you what it— they tell you what a CPM you're making from that show.

Right. And it tells you, you know, what your revenue is based on that. I mean, I suppose you could back into a number if you had your, your play count and then were able to back into it. But also keep in mind too, that the, that the advertising models on like a YouTube are very complex, right? There's all sorts of different types of ads. You know, if the user's on a, on a paid premium plan with no ads, then, then you get a cut of the revenue from that subscription. Right? So, which can be pennies or something like that. So if you just look at lips and ads in here, this ranker does break out some other data points, which are kind of interesting too. The percentage of ads that are in that ranker for RSS-based audio, as well as YouTube shows that 61% are host read, which means that the ad is being host read into the content and being passed to YouTube as well as the audio pod.

Then I wonder how they're backing that out and paying on that.

Right. And then it's got another category, which I can't really determine what it is.

It has like 81% or something, but I can't determine exactly what that would be. A total scam if they're able to charge, um, total YouTube plays on host reds and just charges a normal CPM for it?

Well, I know that's what like a, like Ellipse and Ads does, is they bundle the—

but again, they place— again, are they— they're, they're not paying a $25 CPM on a YouTube host red on a play on YouTube. I would, I would be utterly shocked if they were.

I don't know what the CPM—

somebody out there knows. Somebody knows. Who knows? Tell us.

Well, I think if you looked at the, the past numbers back when Lips and Ads was announcing their CPMs, which they've stopped, which is a little bit of a red flag about something, but, um, I, I believe it was in the $19, $20, $21 range.

It's the average. So the way to be transparent about this, which they don't want to be anymore, is tell us what the CPM is on podcast, true podcast deliveries, and what is the CPM on YouTube deliveries? That's where we need to see what the CPM is.

And they may not want to tell you because, well, they don't vary from, from show to show. So, um, so it's just, it's always going to be just an average. So, and then the, the other number that's fascinating in here too, that you can break out each of these networks of sorts is what the ad load percentage is.

Oh, and I've seen lots of articles recently about people complaining, more and more people, especially Joe Rogan Show people have gone off on people that are paying for Spotify and still getting, still getting ads. Well, they got screwed, didn't they?

Well, uh, so Lips and Ads shows in here an 8% ad load. So, and, but if you hop down to, let's say you go down to AudioBoom, which also has a similar kind of, but less kind of breakout difference, um, around YouTube and RSS-based audio, um, their ad load is 7%.

Okay, 7% of what? The total show length. So that means in— exactly, that means in 60 minutes you're going to get— Lipson was 8%.

No, no, it'd be less than that.

What's— I have to do the high school math here, right?

Uh, 60 minutes, it's probably like 6, 6 minutes or so, probably. But I'm I'm just guessing. I'd have to break out my calculator.

Yeah. So let's see here.

But, you know, AudioBoom and Lipson Ads are doing between 8% and 7% ad load. But if you look at, let's see if I pull up another network, Wondery. Wondery is in here as well and is showing 94 million audio plays on RSS and only 8.9 million plays on YouTube. So it's inverse of what we were just talking about, about Lipson. So Wondery is predominantly audio— I mean, dominating on the audio side— but they have an ad load of 12%.

So is this math right? 60 Minutes, you would multiply 0.8% 0.8, 0.08 probably, right?

Times 0.08, right?

Uh, yeah, 0.08. Uh, yeah, I think it's like 4 minutes or something like that.

Yeah, it's probably 4, 4, 4 or 5 minute range would be my guess. Yeah. And then Spotify, which I think is interesting on their side, is that they show 90, about 93 million plays on YouTube and 150 million plays on audio via RSS. So with an ad load of 5%.

Yeah, I did do the math right. 4 minutes and 48 seconds of ads in a 60-minute program. That's a, that's a lot.

And then iHeartMedia is, is showing, um, 15 million plays on YouTube and only one— oh wait, is that 1.1 million plays via audio RSS?

That's horrible. They say they're number one.

How much? They're 6th on the list.

At one point they only had— oh, this is from PodScribe, not from— that's their estimation.

Yeah, I said it wrong, that the— I was 51 million on the audio side.

Oh yeah, yeah, I was gonna say something's really wrong there.

Yeah, yeah. So the audio side for iHeartMedia, uh, is 51 million. The, the video side on YouTube is 15 million. So it's a dominant audio platform, of which it looks like 34% of those ads are host reads.

So ESPN is not in that list anywhere.

And well, let me give you the last number that's going to blow your mind on the iHeart number, 16% ad load.

Wow.

9.9. Twice as much.

Oh my God, how much percent?

16% ad load.

That, that, that's, that's crazy.

Well, they're a very strong kind of programmatic ad platform, right? So only 34% of their shows, or 34% of whatever it is, their, their overall distribution, um, is with host reads.

So they're, they're playing 9 minutes and 36 seconds of ads for every 60 minutes of content. That's radio.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Wow, that's the only other one that's up in that range is, uh, looks like is Wondery.

That I'm not surprised because I've listened to some of the shows and it's just insane. Yes. 30-second break. 30-second break. 30-second break. 30-second break.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so this, this is why I'm sharing this is because this is maybe a— I don't know how accurate it is, but it's a little glimpse into what's going on in the industry with the really big players. Right. What they're doing in the market and why we're seeing kind of like a pushback.

And Libsyn says their ad load was 8%. Yep. Oh my God, unbelievable.

And, and it looks like that's kind of like— I think, uh, Spotify is the one that has the, the lowest percentage of ad load.

It's because they can charge more. Of everyone on the list, it's because they can charge more for the ads, right? Because they got guaranteed plays, right?

But it's a glimpse of data. And this data hasn't really been visible in any way, any place that I've seen until now. So, and it really shows you who the players are in the medium that are very focused on heavy commercialization. And it's the players that you would assume would be, right? SiriusXM is also in the ranker too. That's a satellite radio kind of platform in its origins, and it has a 9% ad load.

So it's— That's not too bad.

It's still dramatically lower than iHeart. Yeah. So, but that's another one of those. I mean, it's lips and ads. It is AudioBoom, SiriusXM Media, Studio 71, and QCode are the platforms that are over-indexing with YouTube versus their audio site. So half of the list and half of the other list is indexing higher around audio.

So I don't know if that gets back to the strategy. It depends on the— goes back to focus, right? Of course, iHeart does not want to— they're, they're propping up their business with podcasts. They don't want to give that to YouTube.

Yeah, I, I agree. iHeart doesn't benefit from driving a lot of attention to YouTube.

No, they don't want them to go to YouTube.

And it's the same But yet we see SiriusXM, which is also an audio distribution platform, putting a lot of weight. I mean, their numbers are huge. I mean, so the SiriusXM platform had 23.8 million on the audio side and they're showing 175 million on the YouTube side.

Well, if you think about SiriusXM, I canceled my SiriusXM that I had in my car, in fact, because it was so— they wanted insane money, like $300 a year or something like that, you know. And then they came back to me a couple, 3, 4 weeks later and offered some deal, was like $50 or something like that. And, uh, and I, like a dummy, I renewed it. And I haven't even, you know, I've been out of my car 5 months this year. So, you know, value I got there, you know, because I only listen to one show on there and it's just for— matter of fact, I can't listen to him anymore because he's gotten so, oh, so political.

Um, yeah. So Todd, in the document I shared a link to that PodScribe Ranker. Um, so, you know, all the people that are listening to this, they're probably going to want to look at the document themselves. And, and kind of see the, the numbers because we're not showing it on the screen.

Yeah, all I got from you was an email, so let me—

yeah, it's an outline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, there's a screenshot in there, but there's also, uh, a link to the actual ranker for December from Podscribe that, that the listeners or viewers of this could probably get in the show notes after the Well, there has been some changes.

Um, I saw it come through and I was kind of surprised, but Jared has stepped away from Podcast Movement, huh?

Yeah, I was, I was surprised at— I think that happened maybe just before Christmas, I think.

And it sounded to me like there wasn't enough revenue to support his involvement. Is that how I read that?

I think that's a speculation that's going on about a reason for him leaving, but I'm— it certainly hasn't been confirmed by anybody.

So that's not a good sign for podcast movement.

Yeah, and that was, that was part of a bigger topic that I wanted to talk about, um, on the show. I think we've alluded to it a little bit in the past, but the the kind of podcast conference struggle right now of who's the dominant platform, right? I mean, who's the dominant event right now? And that's a little bit of a sign that maybe podcast movement is maybe struggling, or it could be just, you know, Jared is wanting to do something else. I don't, I haven't talked to Jared to interpret what's going on here, but I think it is a little bit of a worrying sign that Jared would leave the team.

Yeah. To me, it's very worrying.

Yeah. But I don't, you know, I've left things myself for other reasons other than the company's having problems. Yeah, that's true. So it's, you know, it's what it is. But I do ask the question at this point, based on what we saw at the last Podcast Movement, um, you know, who's got the biggest podcast show in the world now? Yeah, because it, you, you know, it used to be Podcast Movement, and we used to assume that, but I'm increasingly feeling that the podcast show may be taking—

oh, by— from them, you know, from a— hmm, you know, it's hard to compare because that venue is a little weird, you know. And I paid big for the location I wanted to be in this year, so I, I, you know, I, I dug a little deeper than probably I should have. Um, but you know, if, if I don't get the bang for the buck, then I'll be back in the cheap seats next year or the following year. But, um, Podfest.

Uh, I feel that there's, there's more, more momentum with Podfest now than I, I'm seeing. And actually, I, I was wondering about this because I'm really not hearing much of anything about Podcast Movement for their spring event.

Well, I paid to go, so I don't— I, and I vowed this year if the numbers weren't good for the spring event, we would only go to the summer event for Podfest Movement, right? So I'm not going to commit— I'm not going to be there. I'm sending other team members.

Um, oh, you're not going to go to the—

yeah, the Chicago event. So I'll be down in Orlando obviously for Podfest next week, but yeah, I haven't—

I haven't made any decision one way or the other if I'm going to be involved in the—

in the Chicago event Yeah, so then we've got a couple other shows outside of podcasting that we're doing, um, that we're not going to advertise. We're just going to go. So Phil, there's an opportunity and we don't want— because every time I talk about a show that we're going to go to, then all of a sudden 2 or 3 competitors show up, you know. So, well, can't have that now. Uh, no. And they may be there already, but they wouldn't have heard it from me, right? Yeah, that's true. So, uh, we'll see.

Um, yeah, so I'm just posing, posing the question. The Evolutions event in Chicago is March 31st, and I'm really not seeing any kind of external marketing about that event going on.

It's a little, little early, maybe. I don't know.

Well, I mean, contrast that with Podfest.

Podfest— oh my God, they're in my inbox.

Unbelievable tour events, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, constantly, year-round now. I mean, I think Chris Kramitzos was like traveling for the last 6 months, going to different cities all over the country and even heading to Asia.

So, and I was just asking my contact, uh, that I was part of Podfest Asia, and I said, is that on again? Are we still— we're going to be back in the Philippines, or or what. So, and I'd like to hear an announcement on that if they're going to do it, then I could plan my, my return around that date because it's kind of weird. Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, I've been hearing that, you know, it might make more sense for Podcast Movement to become kind of like a, like a business summit event of some— for podcasting or something. I mean, it's kind of turning into that anyway, right? It's not a, it's not an event that a lot of podcasters go to. Well, we downsized our booth, so, you know, you know, it's not a, it's not an event that's really positioned itself to go after the, the full spectrum of this new creator medium, whereas the podcast show, I went bigger, right? It's still focused on the business side, but it's focused on the full spectrum.

There's a full bevy of creators there.

Right. Full bevy. And what's interesting is Podfest is focused on really more the creator side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not so much focused on trying to be an event for Spotify to take a private room somewhere and have a bunch of meetings, right? Yeah.

Well, they still have private meetings. They still have private meetings at the podcast show, but it's out in the open. They're on the edges.

Yeah, yeah. So that's the contrast. But I've heard many people in the industry talk about Podcast Movement. Well, why go to Podcast Movement? Because they're not really a public event anymore, really. It's an event for business people in the podcasting industry.

It's very expensive.

Yeah, and it's expensive and it's during the work week, so it's positioned for people to go that this is their full-time job. This is what they do full-time. And that's different. There has been a little bit of talk that that may be changing with podcast movement, where they might move it into a half in a weekend or something like that.

I would be shocked.

Well, I think it would be a smart move for them to do that if they were to kind of shift the event, kind of split it up between Saturday and Sunday and then a Thursday, Friday. So those business people can just come in for Thursday, Friday at home and then they can attract those creators again that can come in on the weekend.

There was an interesting topic on Engadget today. It says Google can automatically make a podcast based on your Discover feed.

Is that through that Notebook LM?

It says, says Google knows a lot about you and your interests, and it uses that information to try and get more of your time and attention. New Search Lab experiment called Daily Listens can turn your Discover feed— and I don't know what that is— into a professional podcast. Google Discover has created feed on mobile devices filled with articles and videos that the company— a logo— oh, it must be that's what's on the sidebar of my Android.

Um, I know I've been playing around with some AI agents lately. There's an agent plugin that you can get for Chrome. It's called Do Browser. That's what it's called. And it basically integrates AI into being able to manage all your Google apps. So you can prompt it to, let's say, batch up a bunch of emails, go out and do a bunch of research, find an email address of a certain type of individual and put it all into a bunch of emails and then write an individual email to each one of them with your, like, whatever message that you want to batch send out to a bunch of people. And the AI will just pull all the data from your Google Docs, generate all the emails, and it optionally will allow you to approve each one of them, or it'll just automatically send them all out. Oh, wow. So it's this automation that we're kind of moving into now, which is going to require all of us to have a lot of trust in these things, right?

Well, if you trust, you're going to get screwed. I think you have to trust and verify.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at this point, I would agree with that. But being able to automate the research, I mean, I was thinking about this because all of us use ChatGPT with our podcasts to do, like, scripts, outlines, summaries, that kind of stuff.

Rob, you're not using the Blueberry Pi?

Well, it doesn't matter what AI that you're using. It's basically, that's what most people are using that for, right? I mean, I think the next evolution is that AI will will do more deep research for you and will actually be almost like a representative of you out there. And I think that's the next stage for AI, is agents.

My discussion at Podcast Fest is going to be around AI and the production of your podcast.

So, so is this, this tool that you're talking about with on, on Blueberry, does it kind of do what I'm talking about here?

Yeah, but it doesn't record for you. It just does prep and show ideas and show somebody.

Does it do that kind of automatically based on a prompt you give it? Yeah.

What it does? Yeah. You tell it what topic you want to cover and who your guest is going to be, or if there is going to be a guest, and you give it a few links.

How much prompting do you have to do? Because I found this kind of this balance as I'm playing around with these agents is that oftentimes I have to give it so much information about what it needs to do that I might as well just freaking do it. Well, and that's the challenge.

You give it the topic of your podcast and what your goal is with the show, and, um, and if you're gonna have a guest, you give the guest name and a— hopefully you'll have a bio that you can link to, or a LinkedIn page, um, or Wikipedia, whatever. And then, um, all we do with the show prep tool is help you with, uh, questions and topics. So we suggest 10 topics, suggest 10 questions for a guest, allow you to edit those, delete them, ask for more. And then once it's all done, then we produce a, a show flow for you. Comes up with a full show flow based on data that you've already preset into the system once. And, um, and from that show flow, you can print that out or use it in a PDF. And, um, it's, you know, I, I don't use the show prep tool myself because my prep is different. I'm doing— I have to go through, uh, um, websites and find— I got to find my links. My, you know, my guy is out in CES today, so I'm doing show prep for my show tonight., and, uh, I'm, was just about done mid-afternoon with that. But again, it's not something AI can help me with yet. At some point it probably will.

Well, I guess, but not yet. That's kind of the bigger thing that I'm trying to mention here is that, you know, prompting is, is going, going to be an art, right? That, that all of us have to develop. And since I've started using this AI agent, platform, this, this DoBrowser plugin, it's caused me to think quite differently about how I prompt AI, right? I mean, it's, it's asking for like links to resources, like a link to, to let's say a Google Sheet, right? That has data that it can, it can know where that is. It can go into that. It can grab all that data that is relevant to what you want it to do and it'll go in or it can go into your Gmail. And find things in your Gmail and use that to formulate a document or formulate a batch of emails or things like that. So, you know, how do you prompt the AI to do what you want it to do is, I think, where the challenges are going to be. How much work do you have to put into the prompting as a trade-off for what it's actually going to do for you? Right.

I think for some folks, um, we try to make the prep tool something you could do in 5 minutes, you know, and get an output. And then you can— but most podcasters do them more than 5 minutes prep. So again, this is just kind of a, yeah, a preliminary. But I think the the true value. Um, as an example, if, if I was going to be interviewing you for the first time and didn't know you, um, but I knew of 5 podcasts that you had been on, yeah, um, or linked to your website, I bet I could come up with some seriously good interview questions for you and under 10 minutes and not have them be duplicated, right? Well, they might be, they might be duplicated, but unless you listen to every interview that you've done in the past 2 years, then, you know, are you, uh, you know, is that information relevant? So, you know, we're looking at the AI stuff for stats and what we can pull out of all the statistics data that we have and We've been really thinking hard on that, and quarter 2, we're going to kind of tackle it because I've got data. So it's more about— it's not even AI really anymore, it's more machine learning.

Um, yeah, I think that's the key really here, is that that AI that's working for you needs to index you, it needs to train on you. Yeah. Um, in, in the content that you're making so it can make better decisions for you based on what you've done and what your expertise is.

I, I took, um, all of my blog posts that I've ever written, uh, for Blueberry, for Geekness Central, um, and I had that all brought into a database. I had all that, all that information. Um, I had, uh, personal folders, uh, proposals, correspondence, you name it. And I built my own doppelganger. Yeah, so I have adopted that. I have a GPT profile that has got my information that I wanted to share, and if I wanted to write— and I don't use it that much, but once in a while it comes in really, really handy. Um, but yeah, a digital doppelganger is pretty awesome.

Well, that's an AI agent right there. Yeah. If you think about where this is going, that's— it needs that AI agent that is yours, right? It's— and it's probably going to be loaded on your local machine.

That's the direction of this.

Well, you can, uh, LLMs are going to be distributed platforms, right? They're going to be in each of our computers, right? I'm sure you saw the NVIDIA, um, announcement at CES about their new, um, I already have RTX.

I already have one, 50, the little unit. Yep, it's in a box here. I haven't opened it up yet.

Oh, oh, did they send it to you?

To—

no, I bought one.

Oh, you bought one? Yeah, it was $249 or something like that, or $349 or something like that. But you, you need, you need to know Linux. This is their little, their little itty-bitty one.

Okay. Yeah. I'm talking about their graphics card that they just announced.

Oh no. Now I bought their little kind of like Raspberry Pi type of thing that you can run Llama or something like that on it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You also announced that little gray box that basically is running like a, it's like a tiny PC that you can put on your desktop and things like that. I think that's like $2,000. Yeah.

The one I bought was $249 or $349 or something like that.

It's not the cheapest graphics card of that GTX 50 series, uh, they announced on the keynote was $549.

It's not a graphics card. This is a— it's a standalone. It looks like a Raspberry Pi.

Okay, well, that's something different than what they announced on stage at CES.

Let's see here. This one has already been out.

I was, I was, I was blown away by the specs that this graphics card had. It was just incomprehensible.

Well, the AMD one here, let's see here, can I find, uh, where is it? History.

I'm trying to find the, um So Todd, the capability of this graphics card at $549 is almost like putting a supercomputer in your PC or your Mac or whatever. I mean, it has, from what I can tell from the specs on this thing, it's a complete AI computer in and of itself that has penta-flops of processing power inside of this thing. Um, it's, it's going to transform all of our PCs if we wanted to. I mean, he's even putting it in laptops now. Wow. That are selling for $1,200.

So what I bought was the NVIDIA Jensen.

Yeah, um, that's not the, the thing that was announced at CES two days ago.

Let me hang on, let me show you this thing if I can find it here. Nvidia Jensen's Orion Nano. This is, uh, this is nothing as— let's see here now, can I find it? Find the product here. Oh yeah, so let me see if I can get a screen up. All right, hang on here, let me go to— I'm not used to pushing these buttons, Rob. 3, I'm on 6. Let's go to 6. This is what I bought. Okay, and, uh, it's, it's for low-level stuff. This is not for nothing heavy. This is just for, you know, you can run security systems, security detection. It's, it's not that fancy, um, but that's what I bought. And I know they made a bunch of announcements, but this is relatively new too, and it kind of— it, it's a little more powerful than a, than a Raspberry Pi.

So yeah. It's called the Blackwell, um, NVIDIA Blackwell. Yeah, that's, that's the one that was just announced.

And this is for a Windows machine that you can—

well, he didn't specify. I think it's for any, any PC that a manufacturer wants to use it in, I think, or it can be a Mac, I suppose. It probably wouldn't be in a Mac. It probably would be more in a PC or a Linux machine. But just the processing power of this thing is off of the charts. I mean, it's going to change everything, Todd. I think this graphics card takes things to a whole—

Well, they've released a whole bunch of stuff at CES, so No, I know that, but this is— but you're going to need to be a super nerd to run one of these in your house.

No, it's going to come built into all the new computers.

Oh yeah, or they're going to have their own computer, right?

So this is a revolutionary moment. This is like going from, you know, a Core i9 to a Core i50. So I mean, it's got capability to process data. I think he said up on stage that this processor has the ability to process as much data as the entire internet traffic per, per second.

What? That's how fast this thing is running in your desktop.

Yep. So you're going to, you're going to be able to run these AI models right locally on your computer.

Well, uh, Elon Musk says that all human indexable content has been assumed already been indexed by AI. Nothing more is left to index.

So, uh, okay, this, this, this GeForce GPU, it's the RTX 5090.

RTX 5090. Because I was looking at what I was looking at was looks like huge amounts of money.

No, it's only, it's only $540. RTX 5090. And it, uh, it features 92 billion transistors. That's impressive. Plus it provides over 3.3 trillion AI operations per second. $2,000. That's— I think that's, that's for the high-end model.

Of it, right? Says starting at $1,999.

Hmm, he announced it $549 on the stage.

It must have been a different model.

Yeah, yeah, I think there's 4 different models.

This is the 5090. But again, you're going to need to have a machine that can run this thing too. It's not going to go in— it's not going into a, uh, this is not going into a Mac. Probably not.

No. Yeah, I've got a, a Core i9 Dell computer here, and I've been trying to research if I can trade up because I currently have a, a GeForce CPU in this thing right now, um, but it's certainly not at the capability that this has.

Fernan asked me, and this is in Facebook chat, I'm having a problem bringing up YouTube chat. I'm going to look at that here in a second. Oh, this is what's going on. My phone is— I wondered what was bleeping at me. Um, Ferdinand says, are podcast episode transcripts embedded in a post helpful to SEO, or are traditional show notes optimal? Well, both. Optimal show notes are best with the episode transcript is in the RSS feed as an XML file. So, um, hopefully that answers your question. What is— I have— X is going crazy, and I have— let me turn off my— it keeps going. All right, there we go. Silent, this stupid thing.

Part of what the big impacts of this new platform, this new GPU, is its ability to process media. Yeah, I mean, even still today, if I want to create a 4K video and I've got a very modern, fast computer here, um, it still takes— it can take me 20 minutes to, to encode a, you know, a 15-minute 4K video file.

Now that's where you probably need to switch to a Mac, Rob.

I'm not going to switch to a Mac.

This 90-minute show on my MacBook Pro takes a whopping 6 minutes to encode.

Yeah, but my comment really gets back to these new kind of GPUs that are coming out and available. You're going to be able to process very soon 6K and 8K videos. But why? Why? Because that's, that's what these platforms are evolving into.

But why would anyone want to— you don't have the bandwidth. Most of us don't have the bandwidth to watch 6K videos. Yeah, yeah, you do.

I don't. I've got probably close to 200 megabytes per second.

Yeah, well, I— again, you're the exception, not the rule.

I— not— no, I think there's, there's There's millions of people that have access on cable like that.

Well, there's, there's as many that don't. My neighborhood, if I didn't have Starlink, I would have nothing. Yeah, but I'd have 15 megs down.

Okay, but Todd, how many people live within a 2-mile radius of you? 400 or 500. Okay, that's not that many people, but, but again, uh Still, none of us have high-speed internet.

None of us? No, unless you have Starlink. In my area, unless you have Starlink, you don't have high speed. You have 15 meg.

Yeah, you're probably talking about 10% of the population doesn't have access to high-speed internet.

Uh, how much of the U.S.?

Okay, but that's not the argument that I'm trying to argue about here. Well, again, I'm talking about what the vast vast majority of people that live in the urban centers of this country have access to at least 100 megabytes per second downloads, likely today. So, you know, this evolution to 6K, 8K, I mean, I already have cameras that can record in 6K right now. It's just, it's just, I'm not using it. I'm I'm doing pretty much everything in 1080 and 4K now. So, and I'm— I can't do anything streaming with 4K.

In the United States, 48 million people lacked access to high-speed internet. Yeah, there's what, 340? The issue is most prevalent in rural areas and tribal lands, right? 48 million, that's a number, Rob.

I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying that it's, it's a It's a fraction of the opportunity.

How many people are in the United States? 300 and some million. Yeah, so, okay, so it— 10, 15%. Yeah, so 8% of the people— no, 16% of the people don't have high-speed— and 14% don't have high-speed internet.

That's, that's a big number, right? So we should hold back the progress?

No, I'm just saying, but why do you want to watch 6K video? You can see every wrinkle in your eye.

Well, okay, if you're younger you don't care, right, Todd?

Well, again, so, right, most people don't even have a 4K TV yet.

And increasingly these platforms are building in abilities to, you know, polish your face a little bit. Well, good luck on that. Well, I mean, it's part of— it's part of StreamYard, it's part of many, many of these live streaming platforms to touch up your, uh, your face.

I'll keep my wrinkles, thank you very much.

I'm not saying you got to get rid of your wrinkles. I'm just saying what, what is recorded on the video, it doesn't have to— yeah, be like that. And if you're going to be at 4K, it's probably a good thing.

Oh, here's the comment on YouTube. Um, Peter Ribian, founding engineer, PodScribe has a focus in AI. They could be rhyming the numbers through an equation. Meaning a forecast equation.

Yeah, interesting, though it's not portrayed that way.

So yeah, I'm a little bit of a grumpy curmudgeon today.

So, uh, well, you've been, you've been struggling with technology here to some degree. Yeah, exactly. That always leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Um, again, I think I think, uh, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens. I don't— you know, Cridland is also in agreement that he thinks the video stuff has been— I don't know if you've been listening to any of his content over the last month, but—

oh no, I know how, how James thinks about this. There's comments going on on Facebook and all sorts of stuff constantly.

Yeah, he thinks it's a little overrated.

Yeah, I mean, I think you can take that position, but as we just saw in those rankings, it's a little bit of a mixed bag right now around what's actually happening. And it just needs to be confirmed, right? Is it a bunch of smoke or is there something really changing going on here?

I think change is happening all the time, but You know, what happens is this stuff is like a roller coaster. And, um, we've, we've, we've heard podcast audio is dead at least a dozen times now. Rob, you've, you've joined the bandwagon here on audio, on audio, that audio podcasting is dead. No, I've never said that. Well, you talk, you feel like you've taken that position.

So I'm including video, I'm not excluding video. Or excluding audio. I'm including everything into the pie now. And that's why I talked about that ranker is because it looks at both sides of the pie and it portrays half of these networks are finding success with video. They still have growing success on the audio side. It's not taking away from the audio side. It's just maybe those platforms are strategically positioning themselves to go after video and audio. And there's nothing wrong with that. No, I don't think—

no, I don't think so either.

Yeah. So that's increasingly my position on this is that if you're a content creator, you know, life is kind of tough right now because you have a lot of choices to make and you have a lot of complex platforms that you have to figure out what you're going to do or not.

And we are And we are 10, 9 or 10 days away from the doom of TikTok.

I, I don't know that that's going to go down. I would be surprised, but you never know.

Well, there's, there's news that someone is trying to buy it.

I'm sure that's probably true.

Yeah, but without the algorithm, and anything without a logarithm is just another platform.

Yeah, well, I'm sure there's plenty of algorithms that are out there.

Well, you know, if you think about YouTube, YouTube is nothing without an algorithm.

They have an algorithm, I believe. Same with Facebook, I believe.

Same with X. Oh, speaking of Facebook, interesting development there, huh?

Oh, with Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, with his big announcement that he's anti-censorship now.

And it happened a day after he met with the incoming president.

Interesting how that worked out, huh? Well, everybody wants to be with a winner, don't they?

Yep. And all these companies that we're bashing seems to also be contributing to an inauguration fund. So, uh, It's just, it's just, to me, it just cracks me up on how, how the tides swing, you know.

Yeah, I mean it, but you have to ask yourself, how much has really swung?

Well, that's the question.

Or is it a perception of a big swing?

Well, there's, you know, I can just tell you from tech support tickets, um, you know, censorship is still happening. And deplatforming is still happening, and saying—

still happening in a significant way even on X. You know, Elon's out there saying that he's a free speech platform, but in practical data terms, I don't believe that that's 100% true.

So I think it's less than it was, but it's definitely— yeah, yeah. I'm finding X to be a hell of a lot more entertaining than anything. Oh, it is right now, definitely.

Oh, unbelievable. Well, and, and I think on the last episode you talked about the entertainment value of, uh, TikTok, right?

Well, there too, you know, the, no, the news gathering ability of TikTok and being able to— yeah, yeah, if you, you know, you want to see what's happening with these LA fires, go on TikTok. That's where it's all at. It's where all the action is. You can, you can, sadly, you can see it in living color. As the whole city's being burnt down.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's a whole nother show on that front. But, um, yeah, I, I'm increasingly seeing these big platforms, you know, all of them really, um, start to think about siloing their creators, right? Well, they want people to publish directly to them, only link to them, only post content to, to their platforms and this concept of syndicating. Across, you know, other, you know, like creating a YouTube video and then linking to it from your X account or from Facebook is now being suppressed.

Long live podcasting.

Right. So you have this kind of move towards all these platforms wanting to upload directly to them. And I've been saying this for probably a couple of years now, but that's the direction that everything is going right now.

Long live podcasting.

Right. And your ability to publish once and have all your content go everywhere, um, is really only living in the world of RSS with audio.

The last bastion of free speech.

Yeah.

Well, there's some true free speech. Well, there absolutely is.

But if you publish it into one of these big platforms, that may not necessarily be the case. Not at all. So even if it's in RSS doesn't necessarily make it a full free speech.

Well, if you publish into— if you publish an RSS and you publish it into a— well, most people, they're having success on YouTube or not publishing via RSS, right?

Well, that's true. Yeah, I would say that, that, that's kind of a, you know, let's, let's talk. What is YouTube accomplishing by ingesting RSS? What's your comment on that?

Uh, they're getting data.

Well, they're getting data, but they're getting those— the attention of those content creators to get them to create a YouTube channel, right? So, because that's the only way you're going to manage your content in there. If you ingest it in RSS, that's all you're going to get from it.

That's all you're going to get. You're not going to get no views doing it that way.

And those, those podcasters that are primarily just doing audio that enable their, their RSS to go into YouTube, uh, will go in and start probably creating videos. And that plays into, well, I, I think it's increasingly happening. Yeah. And you see the same strategy with Spotify. You know, create your RSS feed into Spotify.

And then if you want to upload video, that replaces your, uh, your audio feed and takes all your money away and takes all your control away, right?

So it sounds a lot similar to the YouTube.

So, well, so I think podcasting is safe for the time being.

Um, yeah, I think we're okay on that side. It doesn't appear that the— from what I've seen in the numbers, it doesn't appear that they— the audience for audio It doesn't appear that it's declining that I, I can see.

Yeah, time will tell.

Well, I hope it doesn't. And every, every indication that I've seen so far is that audio is still strong. Yeah, it's just, you know, this, this nagging video thing keeps coming up.

Well, you know, you're obsessed with it. I'm not so obsessed with it.

Well, I'm obsessed with it because I want to know the full spectrum of this because I think creators are increasingly challenged with this question, right? And I want to be able to give them a smart answer. So that's what it comes down to for me.

I think those that are really wondering about video are just doing video and they, they don't need to answer any questions. They're just going for it. And they have been for a long time.

Yeah, I think I've said that it's easier to start on the video side and then go over to audio than it is to go from audio over to video. I think it's, you've done a lot of the heavy lifting if you're doing video, I think, that will potentially, it's an easy adjustment to go over to making that as an audio program. It's easier that way. I'm not saying that it's ideal or best or anything to take that approach, but that's kind of what I've done. And I've tried it and played out that particular scenario. And it's an interesting approach to the market. But fundamentally, being a digital creator means that you're creating content and all these various ways that you can slice and dice and distribute and take various versions of it and put it out in various platforms gets to the heart of what podcasting really started out as being as a syndication strategy.

And what's interesting in some research I've been doing is that there are certain podcast hosting companies that are really doing a lot of video, but they don't support video. Yeah, well, yeah, and it's the—

it's a challenge of the age.

It's a very interesting, uh, very interesting strategy, you know, doing— they're doing a lot of video, but they don't support video on their platform.

Who are you specifically referring to here? It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. You know, but it's very interesting to see the strategy.

Well, there's one podcast platform that's been doing that for many years and actually was leading in it, I believe. Are you thinking of the same one I am? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Thou name shall not be said. Is that what you're saying?

I don't know if that rule applies with them.

But anyway, no, it's not a big secret. No, but it's, it's awful. A bus route? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They've always had a, you know, Albin over there has always had this, yeah, this video prioritization that he's—

but they don't support video on their platform.

That's the funny part. Well, it's just a marketing thing. He's the marketing guy, right? Yeah. So it It's a marketing strategy to reach new potential podcasters, to educate them. And so it's the same thing really, in a lot of ways, what you're doing with your, your podcast shows.

Yeah, but we don't do what we don't do. We don't have, we've never had a YouTube strategy ever, you know? So that's, you know, Blueberry's got stuff they put on YouTube, but probably to our detriment. Maybe it's time, Todd. Well, like I said, I've been doing some study.

Yeah, I'm sure you have.

Yeah, but it's, you know, it's just, it's just ironic to me, you know. So one of the few platforms that actually supports video, you know.

I think that's another check mark for you. Yeah, I think so, on that path. So anyway, we can have fun about this.

Yeah, yeah, we can have fun.

It wasn't always have to be an argument.

So who is, uh, who, who is going to be joining us next week at Podfest?

Uh, John Miles, the, the MC of the Podcast Hall of Fame and host of, uh, Passion Struck Podcast, very popular podcast, and he's a book author and things like that, as well as, uh, Rocky Thomas from—

oh, okay. And yeah, you told me about Rocky, right?

Yeah, from SoundStack.

And what are we going to be talking about?

I haven't figured that one out yet. Oh, okay, coming.

That's good.

Um, you can only do so much each day.

I heard a lot of the sessions are being streamed. Streamed live or just— yeah, streamed.

And but I haven't heard anything like that.

I heard that they were all being recorded. Well, they're not recording the slides, which is interesting. They're only recording the Speaker, and I thought that's a mistake. Hmm. Slides are important as part of, you know, that's a tie-in to the presentation, but makes you go, hmm.

Yeah, I wasn't planning on— for my, my particular presentation, I wasn't planning on using any slides.

Yeah, yeah, we never do talk.

Oh yeah, no, but I'm, I'm, I'm not talking about our— oh, you've got another session I'm talking about. I've got another session that I'm doing. And then I'm also doing a panel session, uh, with some Podcast Hall of Famers.

Oh, okay, that's cool.

Yep, so I'm doing 3 sessions plus the Hall of Fame, and we're going to get a, get a, get a recording of this show, um, that we can put out from Podcast.

Oh, awesome. Hopefully some good audio this time.

Yeah, well, I'm going to capture it with my Numano either way, so We'll have a recording either way.

Okay, then did the Numano recording last time work out okay, or— Yeah. Oh, okay. Are they still in business? Yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah, it's on the shelf back here.

I haven't heard from them lately.

Yeah, well, they do have a U.S. representative now, so he's based up here in New York.

Well, after 30 hours of travel and I got Did get some sleep, but a full day at the office. I had meetings running, I mean, right up until we started turning— like I said, 45 minutes before the show when I was scrambling to make sure the hardware would come online. Um, I've had a full day. I'm gonna collapse. I gotta— I got my regular show to do tonight too.

So what I usually do, my podcast tip show on Thursday nights.

Oh, so you got another one as well? Yeah. 7. All right, well, I'll try to get all these put out today. And, uh, we're a little long, but we went a little short in the beginning. And, uh, yeah, but all the recordings— all the recordings are working. Uh, my background here though, it's kind of funny. I, I can't— uh, Apple update changed where my wallpaper setting was, so luckily you don't see my screen because you'd seen a blueberry ad if you did. I don't have the new media— I don't have the new media show banner up, so just stupid little things. I've got it behind. Yeah, you've got it behind us, so that's good. And, uh, I didn't have time to white balance the cameras. They're a little bright, but yeah, after being— it looks good. Yeah, it should work out. But anyway, we'll get out of here. I'm Todd at blueberry.com, @geeknews on X, @geeknews, @geeknews.chat on Mastodon.

All right. I'm at my name, Rob Greenlee, on all the social platforms, robgreenlee.com and X. I'm on there as well. I post links to this, to the New Media Show X account as well. So we try and keep that up to— that's NMS Podcast.

Oh yeah, NMS Podcast.

Yeah. And so if you want to go there and subscribe to that, but you can certainly send an email to me, robgreenlee@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. And if you have any like secret tips on things that are going on with the PodScribe stuff, we'd love to hear it.

Yeah, absolutely. And join us for our live session at Podfest if you're there.

Yeah, it's on the 16th of January at 3:30 PM.

Okay, so how long do we have? An hour or how long? Hour and a half. Oh, we got a full, full lineup.

All right, perfect. 5. Yep.

Uh, come by the booth. We've got some, uh, some secrets that we've kind of already talked about, but, uh, if you come by the booth at Podfest, you can get access to GuestMatch, our new GuestMatch Pro service. Um, I'd like to sign up for that, Todd. Yeah, so, uh, it's, it's still being built, but we're going to be ready in about probably 30 days, um, or so. And, uh, I'm probably going to make some people unhappy that we're competing with them in the guest matching service, but it's not just for podcasters, it's for all creators across all platforms.

That's— those are going to be any AI relationship here in the beginning?

No.

Well, beginning—

no, well, there's, there's, there is some in the— but it's more machine learning. It's not necessarily AI in the beginning. The matching algorithms are going to be more machine versus the AI stuff.

Um, yeah, so, uh, and then it's easier to transition into, yeah, algorithmic matching.

But we're going to need guests and we're going to need to have creators, so yeah, sure.

Interesting that you're using that term, Todd.

What's that term?

Creators.

Creators versus podcasters. Because it is a platform for everyone. It's not just a podcast-specific platform. I, I would have called it Podcast Match or something like that, or something similar, but no, it's— I think that's probably someone else already has. Yeah, I think someone has that. So yeah, so that's why we, you know, it's Guest Match Pro.

Yes. Okay, that was a good choice. Yeah.

So, all right everyone, thanks for being here. We'll see you at Podfest, and if not, I guess we'll have a video to put up afterwards.

Knock on wood. And get in on the 15th.

So are you in on the 15th? 15th in the afternoon.

Yep. Yeah, same with me.

Okay.

All right, we'll see every— if you're going to Podfest, it's at podfestexpo.com. If you want to jump on a last-minute flight, it's, it's still, what, a week and a half away?

But, and our, one of our new partners is going to be there, Code ADX. So if you heard about that, Todd, yeah, so if you're a Blueberry customer, you can, uh, we've partnered up with them for another way to monetize your podcast.

So not that everybody wants to do that, right?

But this is using a unique affiliate code methodology. Very— you get to pick who you want to promote, and there's special exclusive deals that can't be found anywhere else. That's the Delta on it for the period.

It's not going to be like Honey, huh? It's not going to be like the Honey plugin?

Yeah, yeah, honey can go pack sand. Okay, that's good. Yeah, exactly. All right everyone, we'll see you next time.

Okay, all right, bye.