Is AI Tools Bringing Podcasting Efficiency? Women Podcast Listenership Triples!

Todd and Rob in the afternoon.

Hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob.

Oh yeah, there we go. Hey Rob, welcome to the New Media Show. Welcome back.

Well, it's great to be back, and it looks like you're not using your boom mic.

Oh yeah, no, I am not. I am on a, uh, I ordered, um, same boom mic that I have in Michigan.

So, oh, it's an Uplift one. Yeah, so it's from below.

And from the last show, uh, everything is— I think I talked about last show, everything's running the Mac Mini. I'm crossing my fingers, uh, for after a month or so everything is, uh, finally dialed in. But, uh, hey, uh, I've been on vacation the last, uh, 3 days And, uh, to be honest with you, you can hear it in my voice, a little too much party party.

Oh, okay, that's what it is.

Yeah, so I might be reaching over here and, uh, hitting the mic button as I'm, uh, clearing my throat. So, uh, hopefully I remember to do that. So hey, you know, I've, uh, be honest with you, I just, I really took vacation. I didn't check the email once and Slack once. And so I got a lot of catching up to do, uh, Thursday when I'm back in the office. But, um, podcasting space continues to rock and roll. And I guess the one thing that, uh, I had saw— we had gotten something on X from a, a listener of the show, and they had said, um, this to take a look at a deepfake. And it's interesting, this was a post from Rich Rural Podcast, and he posts a Substack article talking about how his voice was used in an absolute deepfake, video and audio, to say things he would never say. Yeah, and, uh, I guess it's caused quite the uproar, and there's been a few people that have commented on it. And, um, and he just really— he found that Facebook and YouTube and other entities were not at all prepared, not at all responsive, uh, didn't take the content down. Um, and I, I continue to see some of this type of stuff that happens with Facebook too. Had some personal stuff of, you know, of late where they never respond. Their safety team never responded. So, um, I, I just wonder if this thing has gotten to the point where the Autobots are now, you know, deciding what they want to respond to and we're going to have to protect ourselves at, uh, at all cost going forward, literally, because we have to.

Well, I think these tools have been around for a while now, so I'm not, um— and I've been seeing them being used quite often, um, basically around big-name celebrities and, and people that are very, very famous. So I'm not I've seen this a lot over the last, probably the last 3 to 4 months. I'm not surprised that it has entered the podcasting space, if that's what we're talking about here. Or is it just a video, like a short video that was made?

Yeah, it was a couple of different things. But the main thing is, you can see this person's mouth moving and it looks like him. And, you know, you probably— I didn't actually watch. He just described. And, you know, I think this is going to be—

Well, this is the capability of the Notebook LM is kind of like that. But I don't know that you can use another person's likeness.

No, but he used— they used his voice and used his likeness and were able— it looked like him. And it sounded like him, and he had no recourse. So I— and the main thing was he acknowledged that this is going to happen, but the bigger challenge is how did— how do you— if Facebook and YouTube are not being responsive to these types of activities, then how do you protect yourself when you need something taken down that is Not true. Okay, so anyway, this tech, this tech now, it just lets it easy. It's easy to do a date bank. And how do you protect yourself?

Yeah, I don't know that you can, um, that's the honest truth.

But why, why did he have such a trouble— have so much trouble getting a response from, from Google and others. Now that's, that's the next piece.

Yeah, I think it's a, it's a little bit of a Pandora's box, right? It's like, well, you know, do we want AI content to be taken down? Do we want— I mean, how much kind of blowback do we want to accept on AI content? So I guess at the end of the day, when it's unauthorized reproduction of another human being that is fraudulently portraying something that that person that's being portrayed is saying that never said or never intended to put into an AI, that's a different matter. So I don't know how you protect against that, there's going to have to be almost like in the early years, like a DRM or something like that, where your likeness and your voice is locked to some sort of a, you know, like encrypted message in the content that, but I'm not really sure how we would technically do that at this point.

Yeah, I don't, I, again, I At this point, I'm not sure that you totally can.

Yeah, I don't think it can be stopped at this point.

Well, I'm not sure it's not going to be stopped, but I sure would like to see, you know, when individuals being disparaged and—

Yeah, no, I think that's the line clearly this crossed. So you should be able to activate, you know, the safety kind of systems that Facebook and these platforms have to I mean, it's unauthorized, unapproved deepfakes, right? That's a clear portrayal here. The problem is what the viewers see up to the point where it gets kind of blocked. That's where the danger is, is, you know, if it's not blocked before it's published, then it's kind of—

Oh, he says he's been dealing with the damage all week. Oh yes, you know, and getting emails from people that cancel and, you know, like, I can't believe you said this, and oh my God, and, you know.

Oh yeah, people are hypersensitive to, right, saying something that isn't politically correct, and, you know, and their reaction is, you know, visceral. Yeah, well, it can be— it can, it can turn to violence and threats and all sorts of stuff these days.

Yeah. So bad, bad juju. The only other topic I had that I was kind of— I think we know this, but a report came out that women podcast listenership has tripled in 10 years according to the Women Audio Report: Women in Podcasts released by Edison Research and SiriusXM. 45% of all women in the US, 60 million, are monthly listeners, and 52% consume podcasts in some form, whether listening or watching. I have no doubt that it's tripled. I would be surprised if it's not quadrupled.

Oh yeah, yeah.

But again, if we think back 10 years ago, we saw a major, major, major influx of women I would say maybe 12 or 13 years ago now, not necessarily 10, but— and I think the majority of new content being created, I think we're still seeing more, more women creators come on board than we are men, so far as percentage-wise.

So yeah, I see whole teams in the podcasting space that are pretty much all women.

Yeah.

You know, if you look at the percentage of staffers that work for a particular platform now, I would say that it's dominant on the female side now.

Yeah.

So, you know, I mean, I just look at a platform like a Spreaker or any of these platforms, and most of the people that work there are women.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

But as far as actual creators go, of any, at least on my side, the number of shows being produced are, you know, if it has to be 50/50. And I haven't, I just, it's just general observation on my part.

So though I still hear, hear, um, women say that it's not enough, right? They're still, you know, men are still kind of still in their perception still dominating the podcasting space. So anyway, it's just one of those things that has been evolving for many years. And I've been saying for years that I thought eventually women were going to pretty much take over the medium. So, and it's definitely heading that direction.

Well, I've never really done an analysis of the top 200 chart. Yeah, so I, I think it's, you know, just nuts to bolts is I, I think you have, uh, maybe that's a bad analogy, but I think you have a, um, maybe, yeah, yeah, apples and oranges. Um, God, too early, sorry. Um, it's a, um You definitely have a high— this high, you know, talk about the number of listeners. So the number of women listeners are there in huge numbers. So the question is, what are the ladies listening to? Um, and what are the men listening to? I would, I would, uh, there's a couple of shows that I listen to that have women in it, but not solo lady shows. I've been listening to shows that have women as co-hosts. Yeah, or they're the host and co-host, you know, one of those types of deals.

Yeah, it goes the whole spectrum.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've been— I don't think I listened to any solo women's shows. Um, it'd be— I have to search around. I should search around and find some and subscribe, uh, on a regular basis. But I would, I would bet because true crime is so high in that, in their genre of listening, I would think— and a lot of those shows are created by men, so I would probably just on a hypothetical basis, assume that a lot of ladies are listening to a lot of men's shows as well. I might be wrong, just because, just because they're true fans. I mean, not true fans, because of, uh, true crime. Yeah, yeah, I can put a little weight on the scale.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. Yeah, I've been kind of scrolling through X, kind of looking under the search term deepfakes, and there's all sorts of commentary in here that's going on about it. One has a woman giving some commentary on it, saying that the House and the Senate in the US here has put forth a bill that says the No Fakes Act was reintroduced by a bipartisan group of members in the House and Senate. The No Fakes Act would protect us all from deepfakes and voice clones by creating a personal property right for everyone to their own voice and likeness. I don't know if that stops it, but there has to be some technology to authorize, or kind of like music, right? So it's almost got to have the same kind of like audio authorization.

Well, I think the Alagos are going to have a hard time detecting when someone's a deepfake, unless there's something embedded in the creation of the content.

Yeah. No, I think it's in uncharted territory here.

Lacking that, we will have to deal with, you know, hoping that, you know, they react to takedown requests.

Yeah. And then they're going to have to authorize that the person that's demanding the takedown be the right person.

Yeah.

You know, so you have all sorts of authentication issues that are put before us here.

Yeah. So I see in your notes that you sent over that you have been playing around with some single-use AI tools.

Yeah, I think this whole reality that we've all been living in, in the podcasting space, where we've seen these, you know, these new companies being birthed that are trying to utilize AI technology to solve a particular problem, right? That we've oftentimes said on this show are really kind of maybe a feature, not a product, right? And I think to some degree, this new platform that was introduced here at the end of March, I don't know if you, seen it or played around with it, Todd, but it's called Podcast Prepper.

Yeah, it kind of copies everything we do with our AI tool.

Yeah. So you have these, and I was using this platform as an example of what I'm talking about where this, I think, and I'm jumping ahead a little bit by saying this, but I think that the future is integration of all of these potential time savers into one platform. So you create a holistic publishing process. But in the period that we're in right now, this is the period of, and I think we saw this in the 2000s and timeframe too, where individual startups would start up with a, you know, an interesting idea, right? Where this particular one, this Podcast Prepper is really all about doing Guest preparation, right, to supposedly reduce the effort that it takes to prepare for an interview by 95+%. So, you know, when you have to ask the question, well, you know, they're going about in a pretty systematic way and they're being clear about what they're doing with the product. But I think as the podcast industry starts getting pulled into AI, I think what we're being pulled into is more work, not efficiencies. And now granted, this might offer some efficiencies, but then again, you're gonna have to go through and check everything in this thing.

Oh yeah, for sure.

You know, so you're gonna have to do a lot of work around this. It's not as simple as they say it is here where you just, give it the guest's name and, and it does everything for you and spits out questions and the bio and all this stuff. I don't think it's as simple as that. That's the problem.

The way we approached it was, yes, name, and you have to upload the bio, you have to link to their LinkedIn. Yeah, and any other supporting links. And then We don't create a background about the guest. We create what is the topic of the show going to be about? What are you going to be discussing with this guest? And then give me 10 suggested questions. Give me 10 suggested topics. And then you can add your own. I don't— I'm at this point. I'm not going to bring back what the education is. I'm not going to talk about their awards and honors. I just think that that leaves too much to— you need to do a little bit of work on your side, largely because, like you said, this data is not 100% accurate. That comes out. So questions and topics, that's what we restricted our tool to because I don't want to give— I don't want to risk having hallucinations in the outputs because that could really spell trouble if you took that just by pure value.

Yeah, and I'm a pro-AI kind of a person in how I look at these things to play around with the tools, but I also think that there's potentially, and this is one of those areas where you're really playing around with the content, right? And you're really giving AI a lot of license in controlling what your content is. And if you take it, you know, with what it gives you and you only do that, then you're kind of shifting your mental abilities as a human over to the AI to do all the thinking for you and all the learning for you. And I think that's a dangerous place for us to go. Though I think, you know, this can be helpful, but I just wonder if it's, It should be viewed as something that's not something that you should solely use, right, based on its exact recommendations. Maybe you can learn from it to maybe do a better conversation in your show and take it as a suggestion, but don't take it as the only thing that you can think about.

You know, it's just like the outputs that we put out. I put a warning on this that said, hey, this is AI generated, you need to validate these outputs, you know. And even in my show summary, this show specifically, um, I have to be real careful because we cover such a range of stuff usually during the show that it will often either get something you said wrong or something I said wrong. I have to QA, that summary. It does a pretty good job on my tech show, but this show specifically, because we go for 90 minutes, it tries to cross-correlate stuff. It's a lot.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot. And I know that there was a little bit of a controversy that came out this week about the Descript tool on its audio transcription, leaving big chunks of the transcription out from the audio.

Oh, that's not good.

Yeah, I guess that there was a bug in there, and I wasn't aware of this, and I used the, the tool as well. I don't use the, the transcript to, to put out as content, but I use it as a foundation to maybe come up with a summary or, or that kind of stuff and do some editing.

But don't you edit by text? Isn't the text— is the text missing?

Yeah, you do, but I've never noticed that. But I don't actually go in and edit every word in the text when I do the editing. So it's usually, you know, there's a layer of editing that I do in the Descript tool, but it's very kind of superficial. It's like pulling out some ums and ahs and things like that. And then maybe some gaps between words and things like that. But that's about the only editing that I do in Descript. And then I export it and then I actually will go through and hand edit in a wave editor. So that's where I actually pick up all of the edits. So there's a multi-level. So what my goal is with the Descript tool is to cut down on the editing that I have to do. Not eliminated entirely. So I just didn't realize that it, it just was leaving out big chunks of text in the transcription.

Yeah, that, that's, that's not a good bug, and hopefully they get that fixed. Yeah. Hey, did you—

I've actually never noticed it before myself, so yeah.

But anyway, did you see Brian Barletta's, uh, comment about them not They're basically telling their partners that they don't—

I put it in the show notes at the bottom of the show notes list.

So that is a topic.

Yeah, it's a topic. It's not specifically the Brian Burletta commenting because his commenting has been pretty much the same thing that we've said over the last couple of weeks. So there's really nothing new that we haven't said multiple times.

But it's nice that he's come out and said they're recommending other partners don't do this. Yeah.

And that's what we've been saying for the last 3 weeks. Yeah.

Or actually longer. Yeah.

But what I have in the show notes is really about Spotify's response, which could draw a little bit more clarity, I think, on what they're doing. Yeah. But in the article, and I ran through, I ran their article through AI as well, and it extracted the key points out of it. And I think the big one that I took away, which I thought was interesting, is video on, this is from Spotify, this is off a Spotify website. Video on Spotify and automatically is automatically converted to audio for RSS-based distribution elsewhere. Elsewhere. This is an aspect that we hadn't talked about before, which is if you upload your video to Spotify, the audio from it will be used in the RSS feed that's being distributed outside Spotify too, like Apple Podcasts, which is even worse.

Right.

So it's actually replacing the RSS audio as well as putting it out as a— now granted, this is probably only for people that are only hosting on Spotify for creators, right?

So unless, yeah, for source audio from Blueberry would be safe.

Well, it's still going to be overwritten on Spotify.

Yeah, right.

It's still going to be overwritten. Yeah, but this is for— they're taking the audio from the video and putting it in RSS feeds that's going to be published on the creator's behalf.

So they've doubled down and made it worse.

Well, I mean, yes and no. I, I tend to want to create separate audio from the video. And what Spotify is doing here is assuming that the audio from the video is what you want to put out as an RSS-based audio version, which that also is a whole nother level of problem in my view. Now, not everyone probably sees it the same way I do. I'm sure there's creators out there that are just putting out the audio that's the same thing as in the video, right? That's kind of what we do with this show. So, you know, it's not a huge thing, but I just didn't realize that they were doing that with RSS-based external distribution.

But one thing's for sure, it completely destroys any programmatic advertising opportunity Well, again, you get what you get with Spotify. And if you're hosted with Blueberry or Libsyn or Podbean, you know, you, you know, again, I think Barletta's and our recommendation is don't put video over the top of your audio.

Well, don't publish video into your same show account. That you have in there for your audio show via RSS. I think—

Yeah, that's correct.

What this is, and that's different than what I was just talking about. So, 'cause Spotify, I guess, has their own ad insertion technology and targeting. Oh yeah. That's what it talks about in the article. It also says that Spotify allows megaphone publishers to, monetize video content through direct sales and through the Spotify Partner Program. So, I mean, but that's not anything new. No. It says direct sales options include baked-in host read ads and dynamically inserted ads. So they do have, but that's been inside the Megaphone platform for a long time.

But I don't know that it had it for video. And generally to be part of the partner program, Right. That doesn't, doesn't mean if you host on Megaphone, you're part of the partner program. That's something that's got to be clarified because there's a small list of networks that are in the partner program.

Well, I don't know that that's entirely true, Todd. I think if you have a certain plan inside of the Megaphone platform and you're a publisher, I, I think that gives you access to the advertising tools, not to the partner program.

You have to be approved. There is a list of shows that are No, no, I think partner program.

Well, yeah, that's, that's true from a, a Spotify ad sold publishing. I'm talking about if you're a publisher and you're, you're selling your own ads into your own content, you can utilize their tools to publish ads into your own show.

Yeah, that's different than the partner program though.

Yeah, no, no, it is. I think what you're talking about is those that are, that are just uploading their content, their video content, just through the Spotify for Creators platform?

No, Spotify has a specific platform for people that are on Spotify for Podcasts. If you—

okay, but that's different than Megaphone is all I'm saying.

I know, but again, the Spotify partner program, not every podcaster that's on Spotify as part of the Spotify Partner Program. Usually you have to be part of a network that's one of their partners, Spotify, to do the ad sales for you, right? And then the megaphone piece is separate. They've got their own tools and services, right?

So you have to qualify to— and it's just like, yeah, what YouTube is doing, right? Yeah. Now granted, what, what YouTube is doing, and probably Spotify is doing this too, is that they're still going to run ads against your show.

Well, they are. Yeah.

I mean, if you're in, if you're in the partner program, you get a revenue share, but if you're not in the partner program, you're probably not getting any kind of revenue share, but they're still running ads. Yeah.

You get, you get nothing. Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

And I don't think they run it mid-roll. I think they run it in between. Yeah.

Like a pre-roll or post-roll. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. So, but But, you know, I, I'm trying to think what YouTube does. I think YouTube runs mid-rolls on content that's part of their, their monetization program.

If you're not paying for it, they'll, they'll cut you midstream and they figure out where to insert an ad. And every 10 minutes, if you're not paying for YouTube Premium, you're watching a—

oh no, no. I'm talking about the creator side. So yeah, you're talking about the consumption side.

I'm talking about the creator side.

So yeah, you're not gonna, even if you publish content to their platform, they're gonna run probably even mid-roll ads against your content, even though you as a creator are not part of the monetization program.

Right, right, right, right, right. On YouTube, oh, 100%. Yeah, that's how they pay for, uh, the ability to use that platform for free. They monetize around your content for the majority of the folks that never reached the minimum watch hours to be monitored.

Yeah, so you have to keep, you know, grinding to get those numbers before they let you make any money, right?

Yeah, and of course Spotify numbers are so high that, my God, 10,000 hours a month or something like that.

Yeah, that's— that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, I mean, if, if they're going to compete with YouTube and get content that would go to YouTube, they need to compete. That's expensive.

You know, it's a lot of work to sell advertising into videos. So it's all automated, so.

Right.

Uh, I think a lot— you look at a lot of YouTube stuff that goes in Yeah, of course I don't see ads no more because I can't pay for premium. I just hear the baked-in stuff from the creators, so I guess that's true.

Well, there's, there's programmatic, um, video buying platforms that exist out there that have existed for a long time for, for streaming television.

Yeah, so it's just, it's just sure that's what's being done. Yeah, just programmatic. They just drop whatever ads available.

Or whatever it's called. It's called, let's see, the dynamic ads in Spotify for both audio and video are inserted in real time.

Yeah.

Using Spotify's proprietary streaming ad insertion technology. Yeah. Or SAI. Yeah. It says the ads are, this ensures that the ads are only served when the user reaches the ad slot. So one thing— targeting and all that stuff.

So one thing's for sure, it's more about lock-in and more about do it our way and not supporting, you know, again, I think my recommendation still stands: have two shows, one audio, one video.

Yeah, well, you know, that's what we've been doing for years, right, with RSS. That's right. It's just, you know, it's just another lack of integration of the two, right?

So yeah, but it really doesn't address Brian's recommendation or our recommendation. They just doubled down.

I think they're going to do what they're going to do. Yeah, so, you know, I don't think— also, also said in the article that's The Spotify is positioning video podcasts as a major growth engine, highlighting the 270 million users already engaging in video on the platform.

Well, well, you know, we've already seen the reports that the engagement doesn't mean more dollars. We've already, you know, already covered that people that have audio are losing money when they're putting video on top of their audio, their revenue's going down. So may have the engaging audience, but it surely is not paying.

Yeah, they're really, I mean, it's either one of two things. They either want to disrupt RSS or they didn't think about the ramifications of their strategy here.

Well, you know, I had, discussions with them and, you know, them wanting us to implement the API to be able to send video over. And we said no because of this exact discussion point, and they are hell-bent on going the course with, uh, you know, what, with what they have. So yeah. You know, they made it a business decision. This is what they're going to do. And I think anyone that thinks otherwise may be in for a surprise. So I guess, you know, we and Brian and others, Sounds Profitable, have been spreading the alarm, but they have not, you know, Look at the company reach that Sounds Profitable has, how many companies they're working with, and for them to basically tell their members, hey, you're getting, you're getting screwed, don't, uh, don't publish, you know, your video on YouTube on top of your audio, um, that's a pretty strong statement. That's, that's—

yeah, and James, James Cridland's been saying the same thing too.

Yeah, so, you know, And so what you have is the industry, or as Adam kindly referred to it as the, you know, the podcast industrial complex, have made their stand and said, this is bad. And Spotify basically said, screw you, this is the way it's going to be. And that's fine. So people know the playing field. Now they have to make a business decision on which way they're going to roll. Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm like, I know which way I'm going to roll. And that's not rolling with Spotify. That's for sure.

I don't know why they felt like they had to do this practice of stripping the audio out of the video. To have it a separate thing. I mean, especially if that show is already in their catalog via RSS.

Ease of publishing.

Just leave it alone. Just leave it alone.

Well, they want all they have to do— they want one-step publishing. They want you to publish the video and we'll take care of the rest. That, you know, they're making it as a convenience to the podcaster that doesn't have a clue. Because yeah, but videos— video-first people don't care about the audio unless they've gotten dialed in.

But it comes across as not realizing even their own infrastructure. It's like, it's almost like an engineer decided, well, we might as well just do this. Yeah, it's easier.

It's easier. Oh, I am absolutely convinced that's the case. Yeah.

Oh, for sure. I mean, without regard to I mean, all you have to do is just block the audio from replacing the RSS feed. Right.

Audio.

That's all you have to do. It's not really any more complicated than that. Yeah. It's fine if they want to strip the audio out of the video and put that out as an MP3 file to external RSS. That's fine. I mean, if that's what the content creator is okay with, then they'll enable that.

How about an A/B option? Yeah. Right.

Just a choice, right? Or I can upload my own audio version. So, you know, this whole thing that Spotify wants to decide that your audio from your video is going to be your show, I think is either was done with, you know, less than stellar intentions here, or it was just done because it was easier. Which isn't a very good excuse, right?

So yeah, anyway, well, you know, and at the same time they're, they're jumping in on audiobooks, so they've invested some money there. And at the same time, Acast is signing some former Spotify exclusive shows, so, you know, so people continue to to shift around here and there. Um, so I don't know, I guess we'll see.

Yeah, did you see the Nielsen stats that showed up in the Pod News Report today that was gauging total TV and streaming snapshot?

Oh yeah, I did see that.

Yeah, and it's showing that YouTube is just dominating. Oh, I have no doubt. Yeah, so it says for March 2025, um, YouTube is at the top of the list for—

wasn't there some— wasn't there something else higher than that in YouTube? Wasn't there a— let me go to—

no, it's, it's, it's the biggest one.

Oh yeah, 12%.

The next closest one is Netflix at 7.9%.

Yeah, and then other streaming 6.1%, whatever that means. 5% Disney, 3.5% Prime Video.

Other is probably the OTT apps out there.

But it's surprising though, they say that broadcast is still 20.5%. I just, I, I just find it hard to fathom. 24% still cable, and 11.7% is other. What is other in TV? You got broadcast cable and streaming. What is other?

Um, other probably would be other kind of smaller tier OTT apps, probably. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, but it was a bunch of those.

What's interesting here is that I would bet if I was a gambling man, the cable industry is still heavy reliant on sports because it's still not always clear where to get a sports program. If you— because, you know, they, they move around. The NFL sold so many— the NBA sold so many episodes to— or so many games to one network. And so they're either on Fox Sports or they're on ESPN or wherever they may be broadcast. And then trying to find the live stream of those sports are— is— can be challenging. So I'm assuming because sports is so heavily tied in broadcast that a lot of people still have cable subscriptions is largely because of sports. Now what's funny here—

what's the difference between broadcast and cable now?

Well, broadcast is supposed to be, you know, your, your rabbit ears on your TV. That's my assumption.

But I thought everybody was getting it through a cable box now, pretty much.

Well, there's no cable where I live, but I can still get television stations. Okay, so, but again, 20% of the people are getting over-the-air television?

I would be shocked.

I would be shocked. That to me seems like a high number. I get what, 4 channels over the air?

I know, that's what I was going to say. The number of channels is extremely low, right?

And sometimes it doesn't even work. You know, depends how much foliage is on the trees.

Yeah, it depends on the, the direction of the antenna and all that stuff. I know, I've done it before. I know how much of a struggle it is. I know RVs have TV antennas on top of them that have like a little crank that you crank in order to get the TV signal to match up with it.

The older ones do, the new ones don't.

You know, I had a I had a pretty new one too, and it still had a little crank on it that you had to crank it.

A lot of them now just have a Starlink adapter.

Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's a different kind of a— that's like taking you into the streaming side. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, it's just interesting how cable and broadcast are holding on. If you combine them together, it's based on this Nielsen study, it's what, 44.5%. So it's the biggest chunk.

Yeah, well, you know, if you think about it too, where I live, Dish is the only thing you can get if you want. If you want— maybe that's what they're considering broadcast is Dish. And, you know, those— because where I live, that's it. Yeah, there's no cable, so you have to have Dish. So maybe they consider that broadcast. Could be. Yeah, I would assume where that's come because I can't imagine people are using rabbit ears very much. But, uh, you know, people don't even— what the hell are you talking about, rabbit ears?

Yeah, and your signal sucks too on that.

But if you look at it, at 44% for broadcasting cable and 43, it's almost even steven here.

Yeah, which is also a shock.

Yeah, I don't think so, because my kids are—

yeah, still that many people that are still living in a different time.

Well, you know, if you, if you think about the percentage of people that live in rural America, that's the only option they have. So if we ask, you know, what is the percentage? What, what is the percentage of people in— my God, I can't type this morning— of rural America. I think it's 12 or 13%, something like that. 20% sell, live in defined rural areas. So that makes sense if you have a number that's in the report that's, what, 24% You know, that would— that accounts for all those rural subscribers that are on a broadcast, almost exactly 20%, 20%. But I don't think all my neighbors have. Well, I think about it. I think about driving down my road that I live on. Yeah, almost everyone has a dish. From Dish Network.

Yeah, so that must be— I just don't know if they're lumping that in under cable or they're under broadcast.

Cable's cable. Yeah, so, and if you have cable, then you have cable internet. So yeah, right, then, you know, then that number, then that streaming number, those that have cable then can have So I, I would, I would venture that there's a portion of people that are on cable that are also, you know, part of that YouTube streaming and Netflix. It has to be. Well, we, we do it, you know, I do it here. Yeah, except I have IPTV here that I get every channel in the known universe through some— God knows where they originates, but Yeah, in America it's a— well, here I'm sure it's illegal too, but it's— everyone has it, has IPTV.

Todd, have you noticed just an explosion, or is it just my perception, of all the podcast awards?

Yeah, there's a lot.

It's really blown up.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch last 2 years.

I mean, a lot of them are happening now over in in Europe, which is adding to it, and up in Canada and Australia. And so it's, it's getting scattered all over the country, all over the world.

Yeah.

So, but it's just remarkable how many there are. They're just in Pod News from the 14th. Yeah, there's, I think, mentioned of at least 2 or 3 awards.

It's funny, I've, uh, I've had some recently, had some more offers on Podcast Awards. They— people wanting to buy it, and, uh, um, I just put a ridiculous number on it.

You know, that'll keep them away, won't it?

Well, you know, you— it's, it's a valid number. Um, yeah, you know, if you look at from an acquisition standpoint, yeah, here's, here's the number. You want it, write the check. And the problem with it though is I'm going to pay full tax on that. You know, it'll be— of course it's a bad problem to have, right, when you have to pay tax?

I know, I guess so.

I just got done with my writing the check to the IRS and sending it on the 14th. Oh, you did?

Oh, God. Yeah, no fun.

Yeah, and I look at the number and I'm thinking, God, if I had— I could just have 10% of that back. Yeah. You know, or 25% of it back.

It'd be nice to get a tax relief here, right?

I don't think it's going to happen.

Well, from what I'm starting to learn, that taxation in this country isn't really needed. Well. Depends on how you look at the monetary system.

You know, they gotta tax something. It's, you know, here's the thing, you know, it's completely non-podcast related, but if they could just eliminate property tax nationwide, if there was no property tax nationwide, that means when you are getting older, and I look at the property tax that my sister, my mom, I pay, and I'm thinking—

Well, especially for retired people or older people after a certain age, that just doesn't make sense.

The property tax just that my sister pays. I don't know how they would keep the house. They planned well for retirement. So, they're going to be fine. But I'm just thinking, how do you afford $12,000, $14,000, $15,000 a year in property tax on a property you own outright in retirement if you have a Right.

Well, that's the problem, right? Yeah. So, plus, I'm starting to learn from some economists that are saying that based on the monetary system that we have in this country, the government, when we pay money to the government, they just destroy that, that money because it just, the Federal Reserve makes money. Yeah.

Oh yeah. That's the problem with it. That's how—

I mean, you're not really giving the government money. They already have the money. They loan that money to us. All we're doing is paying it back. So, right? I mean, it's all based on debt. The whole thing is based on debt. And I'm also hearing that the US government debt clock that's out there, that $36 trillion, that's actually a count of how much money that the federal government has put into the economy of the US.

That's been bought up by other people as part of the debt. Right.

That's how much has been put in as a loan to all of the economies of the world and the American people. And so when we pay taxes, we're actually paying back the government on the loan that they gave us.

That's right.

So, you know, I think all of us have this perception of what our money is, and it's not what we are being fooled with it.

Yeah, that's why people are big into gold and silver. Right?

It's all funny money. Yeah. It doesn't really have any inherent value to it.

Yeah, that's why inflation's such a, it's brutal. I look at my military retirement and—

Well, inflation is a real thing because the more money the government makes to put into the system, as that supply Suppose the debt clock number goes up. That's an indication of inflation is what it is. Yeah.

I just look at how, you know, when I retired, it's a pretty nice number. That was 2007, you know.

Hey, $40 trillion in debt means that there's more money out here for us.

So that means there's less value for my retirement.

Right, exactly. Exactly. Your buying power drops, but there's more money for everybody to have. Yeah.

And we go to the grocery store and, you know, where'd that $400 go? Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

It's hard to go to the grocery store and not spend $200 now.

Oh, it's, that's the min. You know, that was, that, you know, it used to be, you go to Costco, spend $400. Now you go to Costco and spend $800 and you go to the grocery store.

I try not to do that. You go to $200. That's just me. Yeah.

Well, me neither.

Yeah, so, but yeah, I used to, you know, a couple years ago I used to walk out of Costco and, and think, wow, I made it out of here for only $100.

Wow, how did you do that? Did you go in?

I know, yeah, right, right. But back in those days it was reasonable. I started shopping at Costco back in 1988, so that's how long I've been doing it.

In Hawaii we had to have Costco. Otherwise, we wouldn't survive just because of that. No, we wouldn't. Honestly, we would have starved. Yeah. See what else has happened the last week here.

Oh yeah, I just keep seeing these new tools coming out like Podpaste. Did you see this podcast speech normalization tool now that was launched? Podpaste? Podpace, P-A-C-E. Oh.

Podpace. And it's an audio normalization tool. Yeah.

Okay. Upload your audio file. It analyzes the speaker and uses Assembly AI to normalize the audio, I guess.

So what does that cost a month?

It doesn't say. Let's see here. It doesn't look like it's— it doesn't look like it has a fee. It looks like it's a free thing.

Well, we'll see how long that lasts. Yeah.

And it's a bunch of downloadable code files, JSON files. Yeah, it's really usable for everyday podcasting. Oh, okay.

Yeah, that's a little being sarcastic here. Yeah, right. Uh, yes, build your own normalization tool on your computer for the super geeks out there, right?

That there's so, so many of them.

Just remember, uh, Podpace, um, most podcasters Some don't know what the right-click button on the mouse is.

Yeah, we've been fighting that one for years. Yeah, right.

That's interesting. Yeah.

So I don't know. There's not, you know, I don't know, Todd. I mean, be honest about it. Is there a lot of stuff going on in podcasting or are we kind of in the—

It's pretty quiet right now.

The doldrums to some degree.

Yeah, we've been head down pretty hard on trying to get Guest Match Pro launched, you know, at least in the beta. So, you know, I got my— that's what my team's focused on. And, and then we've got another project we're going to start on soon that's big.

I did a call with the, the Podcastle folks. Um, I, I don't know if you're, you're familiar with that a little bit, but it's a little bit platform out of Europe. And I guess they built a complete publishing, editing kind of creation tool. It's kind of a one-stop shop for creating a podcast, right? Kind of like what the Notebook LLM is trying to do, right? But the piece that I learned is that they don't have any metrics that are connected to this. It'll create your RSS feed. It'll do all the AI stuff for it. It'll get it into an RSS feed. It'll get it into all of the platforms, all the listening platforms. But the piece that's missing in their platform is any kind of metrics. So there's no counting of plays or downloads or anything in the platform. So let alone IAB metrics. Right. Right. So yeah. So we're still in this age of incomplete platforms, right? That can't do it all in one place. And is that where we're going to wind up, Todd? What's your thought? Are we going to have a handful of platforms that are going to integrate all these AI functions and tools? Into one publishing work stream.

We are.

It's just, when are we going to see it, and who do we think is going to build it?

Well, you know, we're probably 85% of the way there already. Yeah. So again, but again, there's more, there's more. There's— podcasters need more than publishing and production tools. They need the social piece, the social promotion, marketing.

They need all that stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah, and well, and you have to think about the monetization parts too. There's a lot of pieces to bolt together to come up with something, but I'm increasingly thinking that this, the agentic movements in the AI world are gonna make that possible like we've never seen before. But yeah, we'll see. I don't know if it's gonna be put together with agentic capabilities, but I'm sure there'll be some element of it in a platform that does all this stuff, because that assumes separate components that do separate things.

Well, you know, we built part of our matching algorithm for Guest Match Pro uses AI. So, you know, leveraging that to do, you know, to do something that would have been ordinarily something very complex, and it, you know, not so complex when you— yeah, and you can, you know, do stuff through an API call.

So yeah, I just wonder if, you know, there's platforms right now that you can get access to that you can manually assemble a workflow, right, of an AI by plugging in components that will do various things and then passing data from one component to another component to another component, and it gives you an output, right? So I guess what we're probably building here is like what you're building, which is kind of like a one-stop shop kind of experience, but the user itself of the platform doesn't realize that it's using Agentic tools. Or, or agentic type workflows. All they see is the input and then the output.

Yeah, you know, it's simple things sometimes too, is, yeah, um, something that you and I consider really, really simple for a new podcaster can be a roadblock. And, uh, we're building something right now that we've learned is hindering as we've watched, you know, using Hotjar and different things on the website. We've been watching new podcasters come into the platform. We see stuff that they should do but they don't do, which then ultimately ends up being maybe a deterrent to them getting to episode 1. So, you know, we're building stuff to really completely lower the barrier 100% to getting them to it to that first episode and flowing them through. We didn't have to do this 10 years ago, but now we have to provide— I don't want to call them baby steps, but it's a checklist of sense that allows them, okay, I've done this. Now I got to do that. You had to do this. Got to do that. Okay, I'm ready. You know, 4 or 5, and it's not that many steps, just a few steps of, you know, critical things. And then those situations where, um, as an example, do you, do you need help in creating the description for your show? Yeah. And, um, and if it says yes, then I, I can open a query box and I can say, you know, type in you know, what you think your show is going to be about, and we'll help you create a description. And, uh, and, you know, what categories— you know, another thing is, what category should my podcast be in? And people go, oh, I don't know what. I said, well, you can pick 3, you know. So, you know, here's the 3 suggestions based upon the description. And just kind of stepping people through and, you know, given the option to manually set it, of course, but taking, you know, because they don't understand why they need to set a category. Only we know they have to, um, for them to be, you know, properly placed in Apple Podcasts and, you know, the other things that need to be in there so that when they're ready to submit and, you know, produce their episode 0, they're ready to go. Um, yeah, and that way it reduces the support calls And because the challenge is not the existing podcasters that are creating content. The challenge on my end is the new podcasters and educating the existing podcasters on, hey, by the way, we've got this tool you can use. And I think what happens too is podcasters get in a production flow that they're very comfortable with. Whatever they learned the first time, if they're using Hindenburg or they're using Descript or they're using Adobe Audition or whatever they're using from a tool standpoint. When you come in and say, hey, we can save you time here by using this tool, people have a— they're used to doing it in their workflow. So getting people to consider a new workflow is very, very difficult unless you train them from the very beginning to do this workflow. Yeah. And then you hope that, you know, the creators will come in and say, okay, you know, what you're doing here is going to help me how? And that really is the, you know, what is the why? Why should I use this? You know, what is the benefit, the why and the what?

Yeah, but that's true. Totally.

It's still in this, in my opinion, we're still in a situation where You know, getting— if I could get— well, it's just 50% of podcasters never get to episode 1, right? Yeah, they, you know, they don't even just get it, you know. They say, I want to do a podcast, and they sign up, and then, you know, we're watching, you know, we have a dashboard that tells us all these new shows that are on 30-day trials, and sometimes they add their billing and then it's month 2 and they still haven't done episode 1 and we're like, hey, uh, you know. And with this new law out, there's a new law out that basically says you have to tell your, your podcast subscriber, um, hey, in 7 days we're gonna hit your credit card. Now we were doing that already for people that were brand new, but now this new law requires you to send an email on a recurring charge that says, hey, we're going to hit your credit card in 7 days. You're gonna— you're going— and if you don't want to have us do that, here's the cancel button. Um, they made that— the FCC or one of those groups made that mandatory for big fines if you don't, because, you know, it's— it— people have difficulty finding the cancel button and And companies have made it hard. So the FCC came in and said, okay, you that are collecting a recurring payment, you know, by law you have to inform them that you're going to hit their credit card in 3 days or whatever the number may be to give them ample opportunity to cancel. Right. And companies that don't do that are subject to big, big, big, big, big fines.

You want me to pull up a deepfake video that's a good contrast between what is real and what's fake? Sure. Pull it up. Let's see here. Let's see here. How did I share? Okay, here it is. Share sound.

I would like to welcome you to the era of synthetic reality. Now, I am not Morgan Freeman, and what you see is not real. Well, at least in contemporary terms it is not. What if I were to tell you that I am not even a human being? Would you believe me? What is your perception of reality? Is it the ability to capture, process, and make sense of the information our senses receive? If you can see, hear, taste, or smell something, does that make it real? Or is it simply the ability to feel? I would like to welcome you to the era of synthetic reality. Now, I am not Morgan Freeman. What you see is—

So then what if Morgan Freeman doesn't like that? They've used his likeness. What happens next if Morgan says, hey, I don't want my likeness being used, even if they've disclosed I am not real? This is a virtual synthetic. Yeah, that's pretty convincing.

Yeah, well, even this is probably not something that Morgan would approve of, right? But even though it's clear that it's a deepfake.

Yeah, so I'm saying, how does he have that taken down? Yeah, you know, or does he care? I would think he would care.

Where we get into this gray area is that he's considered a public figure, right?

Well, still, you're using his likeness and his voice. Yeah, you are, right, right.

So they're kind of straying into kind of new territory here. And I guess it's— this capability's been around for a while, it's just getting better.

It's—

yeah, it's, it's getting to a point where you can't really tell anymore.

Yeah, I would have probably— I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have been able to tell on that one. That one was pretty good.

Mm-hmm.

So at what point then does I just show up and do the podcast and people not know that I'm some agent? Doing the show. Yeah, right.

No, I think that we'll— I think there's a good chance that we'll get there, Todd.

Oh, I think so, for sure.

I mean, I mean, I don't see any roadblocks.

So then I can, then I can create, uh, you know, content 5 days a week and, you know, sip margaritas.

Well, the question gets back to is whether or not people are going to use AI to create the the transcript is then used in the video. Oh, I'm sure. So even our words aren't even ours. Right.

Oh, they're already doing that. I know of a guy that's doing a show. It's an audio podcast. It's completely created by AI, 100%, end to end. And it's a news summary show.

So every word that he says probably comes out of an AI generated transcript. Yeah, that he then pastes into a video, into an engine. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's not even a clone of himself. He's not even using his own voice.

Yeah, it's a— it's an AI clone voice and AI clone video.

Or you go to ElevenLabs and you license a voice. I know people that have submitted voices to ElevenLabs, and you're— you, you pay to license the voice by the minute. Yeah. I have a good friend, it's a very loyal Blueberry customer that his voice is available on ElevenLabs and the man has some chops. He's got a voice that's made for radio, made for podcasting. A deep, garbling voice, you know, it's just like— Yes.

Yeah. Like the movie trailer voice.

Yeah, or you know, or you can just think about, you know, some iconic radio people, Howard Stern, or, you know, folks that were just, you know, world-renowned, and all of a sudden their voices are available. Now Howard Stern's probably not gonna make his voice available, but what happens to people's, people that are dead voices that are being used, you know, that's already an issue.

Yeah, there's—

and then again, we can say at the beginning, hey, I'm real. But what if I say, hey, I'm real, in a— have the AI say, hey, I'm real? Then, you know, you can cheat disclosure. Oh, I'm real. And if, you know, it's just like, what do we have on this show? We have 600+ episodes. That's about 9— how many hours is that? That's probably about 900 hours of content. I'm very certain if we took those 900 hours, they would completely learn our mannerisms, our preferences, And I would have no doubt that we could create this show in the coming couple of years completely with an AI tool.

You know, one thing that I've noticed with some of the AI platforms that I've talked to that are doing the voice cloning is that when they started doing voice cloning, this was a few years ago, they were requiring people And I remember Descript required this too in the early years where you had to like voice an extensive script and go through like 4 or 5 different versions of it and tell a story. And that's what created the voice clone was these deep training data that we were giving it through giving them a recording. Well, I've noticed that the more modern ones like Descript and this one that I talked to just the other day, that Podcastle is taking like a 5-second audio clip. That's what they're using to generate your voice. So it's like—

It seems pretty narrow.

But it's like this focus on trying to make it faster to get it done, right? Less of a hurdle to get it done. But my comment to them was, is that, well, what's the quality of the output? Yeah, sure, you're helping. But their comment back was, well, we only need 15 seconds of your audio in order to do this. And I'm like going, well, how does it know how to do all your accurate voice inflections and your emotions and your pauses?

It doesn't.

I mean, is it just making it up or?

I think it's just— I think I destroy the English language enough that if I had a perfect show, it's like this morning, you know, I've had to mute myself a dozen times here this morning because of congestion and, you know, I'm graveling my voice and, you know, and then, you know, no one wants to hear that. So it's how do you— if your voice is perfect every day, you know, we all get colds, we all, you know, we have morning, morning voice, nighttime voice, and it all depends. I got on the headset this morning before you got on, I'm like, oh my God, I sound horrible. I started reaching over to adjust the, uh, the, the, the tuning of the— and I'm like, no, I just need to drink more water and Right. Just because my voice is, you know, holding it.

Yeah, it does raise a lot of questions around this concept of training data. I've been thinking a lot more about this lately, and I think, as I think about Tesla or whatever, my car getting better and better in driving based on video training data that it gets from my car and millions of other cars. But I was starting to think about this at a different level too. I don't know that you want to give the AI, okay, let's say you want the car to drive as safely as possible, right? If you give it a bunch of training data that tells it that it's okay to, you know, do things that are not legal, right, in the training data, then it's gonna think that's what it needs to replicate. So that's what kind of pushes this issue around only giving the AI training data that is perfect, right? Or tells it that this is the right way to react to something or the right interpretation of something versus giving it everything and it knowing all the flaws and the errors, right?

Well, you just heard what OpenAI did. They made it so it can remember the conversations you've had with it. And now, as a matter of fact, the first prompt it said is, you know, test, tell me what you know about me. And kind of scary and whatnot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've, I've, I've done that test many times.

Um, but it's just, just do it now when they've just switched the memory on. Yeah.

And, but it does really make you question, you know, the quality in, quality out thing, right? Oh yeah. I mean, if it's learning how to think about you as a person, you probably don't want to give it all the negative things about you. You only want to give it the positive things, right? Or you want to give it the safe way to drive. If you're a car and an AI is driving a car, you want the car to know how to drive safely, not, you know, so, so here's unsafely.

So here's the— here's one that'll mess your mind up. All right, so, uh, this thing's getting smarter. Yeah, some people will argue with me on that, but it's, it's, it's learning our algorithm. Let's just use it that way. It's learning our patterns of speech and writing and questions that we've asked and everything. So are we not? Are we agents already? Are we in the matrix? Are we really here right now?

Well, I think that the same concept of our existence is exactly that. Each one of us operates autonomously, right? And we connect with other things, right? We transfer information from one place to another. That's the exact definition of what an AI agent is.

So, you know, I just hope the AI agent makes me a lot of money. I hope it makes me, figures out a way to make like a million dollars a year and I can retire.

Yeah, I think that that's, that's the big thing that I can't really get my head around is that, you know, how is AI going to be any better than us when it's only been trained on us?

Uh, the only thing it's going to get better at— so for example, other, other input. Well, you think about the speed. So let's, let's just break it down.

Speed is a difference.

Let's think about the science piece. And, you know, talk about looking for cures for cancer. Now they can run instead of, you know, it takes so long to build profiles. Now they can have this thing building profiles and, you know, running 24/7. And they have all this additional data. They got the DNA, they've got the da da da da da. So I think what will happen is the breakthroughs will come from the ability of the AI to be faster. Now, how does that affect us? If it's truly agentic, what I could say is, hey, you know, keep your eye on the United prices going to Heathrow and predict, you know, when the lowest price is and then buy that ticket. Right. You know, so it could save us money. It could, or it could end up putting us in first class and spending $10,000 on a that, you know, on a, on a seat that we didn't want. So you never know how this is going to work.

Depends on what that priority is, right? Yeah. Is it comfort? Is it, um, being able to sleep?

But if all of us are using that same tools, then the, the playing field is level. Then, you know, then it's like, again, you're, you're all competing for that one ticket that's, you know, 10% less or whatever it may be. So I don't know. We'll see. It's an untold frontier here. And on the creator side, it's pretty exciting. But at the same time, I still go back to my hypothesis here that people are going to be seeking out original voices. Maybe not. Maybe the AI voices will get so good that they won't want to hear Todd and Rob banter about economic reform, what we did just a few minutes ago. That 5-minute segment would be gone.

Well, if the AI gets better, right, than us, if it's smarter about what's happening in podcasting and it knows more about what's happening in podcasting than we could ever comprehend, and if it doesn't make any voice mistakes and the audio is always perfect and The video is great, but people get, get value out of it. But why wouldn't people watch?

Would the reporting be— but the thing is, at what point? Okay, so if, if we're just gonna say as an example, Android app AntennaPod version 3.80 has been released. Among some new features are you can leave comments at the— so basically you can, you we can report on that. Now, yeah, it's like a news project, but it's kind of like what you do with, right, but, but what I will do, and again, I'm just using this example, so Attentapod, I'm not picking on you, I, I could say, well, that update sucks. Well, the AI say that? Probably not. Well, be able to form an opinion? Will it be able to have an argument like we have sometimes on things here? Where I play devil's advocate, or, you know, is, is that gonna come into the mix?

Maybe.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's a weighting scale. Maybe in the weighting scale is okay for 10% of the show, allow one of the hosts to play devil advocate, and it will, you know, pick an opposing side to a topic. Maybe it will play against each other, but then again Then do we cease to be humans anymore? Do we cease to be creators and creative and just allow some machine to do something? It's kind of scary. Yeah.

And I do kind of wonder about, you know, the whole thing. I don't know if you use the, um, the spoken word version of OpenAI ChatGPT where you can have a Conversation with the AI.

Yeah, I've used it before.

Where you'll ask it a question and it always says, that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. Right? Yeah. And it's always so appreciative of everything when you're like going, I asked you a very serious question.

Yeah.

And you're like going, that's a great question. Thank you for that. Well, that's— And I'm like going, you know, I just challenged your intelligence.

Well, this is the challenge we had in the AI writing the emails for the show summary. The challenges I had was, oh, this was a great episode, you need to tune in. It had all these accolades. And I'm like, this audience— so what we had to train, and it was very difficult, it was the hardest prompt I wrote, was to get that stupidity out. Getting into remove the accolades, remove the flowery language, remove— just give the information. The audience already knows this podcast. They already have a relationship with the host. You do not need to— yeah, you know, you know, you know, this is the best episode ever. You don't— don't, don't do that. It may have been the worst.

Yeah, right. You don't want to overplay something that could have been bad, right? It's not like you don't want to make a, you know, like an astroturf scenario.

If it was a great episode, I'm gonna— I'm gonna add to the email, this is a great episode. You know, you need to tune in. Or this episode kind of sucked. I've done that before, you know, when I wasn't feeling good.

Where's the sarcasm when you need it?

Well, you know, give them a few years. Maybe they'll figure out the sarcasm. Who knows?

But that comes from actual learning real human training data too. But if we're only feeding it, you know, the the accolades and the positive and the, that was a great question, no matter what you ask it, right, right, then it kind of loses a little credibility. Yeah, it does a little bit in people's perception.

You know, it's just like clickbait on YouTube. I get so pissed off about the clickbait, you know, I'm quitting, this is the last episode of this, or, you know, it's the end. Yeah, you know, and, and then you turn on it, it's the end of washing the dog, or, you know, It has nothing to do with the end of a channel, you know. So, right, right.

Do you need to quit now? Yes. Yeah.

So yeah, the clickbait on YouTube is out of hand. Rob, we've made it to the bottom of the hour even with our technical difficulties today. Okay.

All right.

I will send you a master file to replace the silenced audio. So. Okay. I have editing to do.

Edit it down a little bit. That'd be great.

Yeah, it sucks to edit. So anyway, you guys have heard this live or heard— we listened to this via podcast delivery. Yeah, there was a big blooper today. So you didn't hear it.

Flaws and all. Yeah. So it wasn't AI. So you can count on that. Yeah.

The RODECaster decided to just, you know, It's kind of amazing. It's like, I got all this stuff that's supposed to work and then RODECaster just disconnects. I'm like, what the fuck? And I had reset it. I had turned it off, turned it back on, thought I was good. It's just one of these things. Nothing is, seems like nothing's, I guess I truly love my studio in Michigan because everything is wired. But then the problem is, is the wires get, scratchy, and then I have scratchy voice. So it's a whole, whole different set of issues.

Sure.

Yeah, it's gonna be fun to turn the system back on from Cold Iron when I go back in about 3 weeks.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Okay, so you'll be back. That's right, in May.

May 11th, I fly out just before the podcast show in London.

Oh, that's right, you're flying to London. Yeah.

I got my airline ticket and, uh, company didn't pay for it, but I paid, I paid for my own upgrade, so out of my own money, because I don't want to sit in coach.

So yeah, so you say May 11th is when you get to London?

No, May 11th is when I leave here.

You leave there?

Yeah, so that would be on a Sunday, on Mother's Day. I get home on the 11th, but I'm really not. I don't be on the train on the 12th, so we'll be able to do the show on the 14th, normal time on the 14th.

I thought that they— okay, so you're not going straight to—

no, I'm going back to America first.

Oh, you are?

The cost to fly from here— I was going to just leave from here and go to London, but yeah, the cost didn't make sense. It was— it's cheaper for me to fly home and then fly to London. Really? Yeah, yeah. The routing out of here takes you through Doha, and it's on— there's only a few routes, and it's very expensive with Qatar or somebody like that. Yeah. And if I wanted to fly United out of here, they still take me to San Francisco, then they take me to London. So—

oh, that's a long flight from San Francisco.

Well, it's to London. Yeah, I mean, it's a long flight from here to San Francisco, so I figured have a week in between. And, uh, plus I'm gonna be suitcasing stuff to London. If you're going to London, by the way, you're from America, they have new entry requirements. You have to get something else. I think it's a— what do they call it? See if I got a visa. It's not a visa, it's a Uh, where did I put it? That's not in that email here. Yeah, there's a word for it. So if you're from America, and there's a number of countries, let's see here, it's called ETA. It's an ETA application, and once you get it, it's good for 2 years. So yeah, you have to have an approved ETA and you get a number.

Was it like a TSA type of thing?

Some sort of, yeah, some sort of clearance and it's good as long as your passport number doesn't change.

Oh, right.

I've drank nearly a whole bottle of water here. Um, all right, so anyway, if you're going to London, make sure you get your ETA before you go. That's changed from last year. Last year you just show up with your passport, the United States, and smile at the camera and walk through the gate.

So where do you get that from?

Um, it's on a UK website. Um, Yeah, I have to— anyway, just, just search for ETA UK and it's on the gov.uk website. They say 2 to 3 days. Mine was 2 to 3 minutes. Oh, it approved almost instantly. It is a pain. They have an app and the biggest pain is the app is scanning. You got to scan your— a bunch of stuff and then you have to find your eSIM in your passport. And if you've got a new one, the instructions is wrong. The new— if you have a new passport, the eSIM is on the hard page of your, um, it's on the hard page of your passport picture. So I don't know if you've got one of those new passports or not, Rob, but they've got a— like, the second page is hard as a rock. Um, it's almost like a laminated page.

Yeah, I mean, I've got one like that. Also has like an IR chip in it.

Yeah, yeah, the older passports, the, the eSIM is on the back page of the passport. So, um, the app tells you to scan the back page. Well, the new passports, it's not. It's on the second page on the hard, on the hard bar. So, okay. Anyway, Todd at blueberry.com, at Geek News on X, at Geek News, at geeknews.chat on Mastodon.

Yeah, I'm at, um, rob.greenlee@gmail.com is a great place to reach out to me. Um, and I'm on X and Facebook and YouTube under my name, so you can find me over there pretty easily. So it's been great doing the show, Todd. Yeah, we'll be back next week, I assume. Yep.

Next week, same time, same channel. All right, everyone. Okay, take care. We'll see you next time here. All right, bye-bye.

Good night.