The Battle for What is a Podcast #563 | New Media Show Live 11/1/23

Okay, just about ready to go here.

Afternoon Delight with Todd and Rob.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. And I would blame the low audio on, on a cat, but there's no cat here in the office. The intro was a little low coming in, but we're coming in with lots of power. We're power strong today.

Yeah, so if you have your own studio at home, uh, and you have a cat, just be aware of the fact that cats like to walk across your mixer and move the sliders up and down.

It used to— when my kids were small, Rob, I literally, in the studio, because there was lots of knobs, I put like protective plastic over all the knobs, and so it really made it a pain. You had to make sure everything was good. And I even did it— I had one light switch, it was on the wall that controlled a socket, you know how those are. And, uh, I had something real critical plugged into that till one day when my, you know, I was midstream and my wife came in and clicked the switch and turned half of the studio off. So, you know, I, I, I— then I put like black tape. That thing was permanently on, so Yeah, it's those, those kinds of things. But here we are, and, uh, I've got a couple of things I'm doing personally that I've, I've tried 6, 7, 8, or 9 or 10 times to start a vlog.

Oh really?

Yeah. So, so the vlog is, uh, officially launched on my other channel, so Uh, well, let's, let's, uh, try and define what that is. That's going to be a true vlog where it's just—

okay, but I don't know a lot of people know what that is, so—

well, people call YouTube channels vlogs, so it's a vlog.

Okay.

All right, it's a video log, you know, and that's kind of an older term to describe it. Okay, so anyway, it's whatever we want to call it. It's— so I'm going to attempt to maybe do one a week or something. I don't know. I recorded— I've already got 2 weeks worth of recording, and I spent some time last night.

And so how is the content different than, than other things that you're doing?

Just behind the scenes. It's going to cover—

it's going to cover your personal life and your work, kind of work balance, work life.

There is no work balance. It's just work.

You know, that's kind of— that's kind of what I was wondering. So are you going to classify this new thing as a, like a business show?

Yeah, I'm calling it Behind the Office.

Behind the Office.

Or let me hang on, let me actually, let me look at the actual, let me look at the actual, what did I, because I renamed the channel and people are like, okay, no, please stop. On the, uh, yeah, Beyond the Office, that's what I'm calling it. So anyway, but we're not going to spend a lot of time on YouTube because we We got crucified last week for, for way too much YouTube talk. But I will— I do want to acknowledge that we're lit and live and we got a bunch of boosts last week that we did not go over. Um, 2012 stats from Matt. He says, I'll have a nothing burger with a side of YouTube lies. Podcasters would be foolish to promote their show on YouTube. They're essentially asking for an ad-free RSS feed. Happy to upload a video of my show to YouTube for search purposes. Also of note, attaching RSS feed to YouTube yields the same results as what Headliner is providing for nearly 2 years. Nothing burger indeed. Between this and the Google app being sent to the graveyard, it is clear that Google hates our ads. 1701 sats from Nike. My prediction is it won't get much traction. 2,200 stats from Mike Dell. If you want to do YouTube, do YouTube. It's not a podcast. And those are the stats that came in from the last show. So, uh, thank everyone for, uh, for your, for your engagement here. We appreciate it. And by the way, you know, this— we haven't talked about it in a while, but, uh, and a matter of fact, tomorrow— not tomorrow, today's Wednesday. Friday, I'm going to be on the— Mike Dell and I are going to be on the Podcasting 2.0 show to talk about some of the stuff that we've been doing at Blueberry and some recommendations that we have on some new features that we'd like for the Podcasting 2.0 space. So if you listen to that show live, we'll be on it on Friday, or you can catch it on demand on your new podcast app at podcastapps.com. And we encourage you to boost the show because, uh, just because you should.

So, right, move your content consumption off of Google Podcasts and move it over to one of the new Podcast 2.0 standard apps?

Well, so yeah, well, it's already on the podcast. Your content's already on the Podcast 2.0 standard apps.

So no, no, I'm talking about if you're a listener.

Oh, absolutely.

Right.

Matter of fact, if you listen to this show on Google Podcasts, which I know about 12 or 13% of you do, Please move. Please move immediately. Don't stop. Go and collect $200.

There's no $200 to collect.

I know. Immediately. Immediately. Instead of going to jail using the Monopoly logarithm, right? Instead of going to jail, go to podcastapps.com and get you one of those newfangled modern podcast apps. We beg you to move, please, because you're on your— I've told my audience, too., and I had probably a dozen emails from listeners that were like, well, the word they used mostly was WTF. You know, they're like, really? I— they're killing it. Yes, you have to move. And interestingly, part of a private conversation that several of us are on, apparently this has gotten the attention, uh, the negative attention, not from us but from overall, on the killing of Google Podcasts has, uh, actually got some attention at my— into my understanding, Google Music. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. And, um, there has been—

what would you say that that means?

Well, I know that it got some attention. I know that there has been direct sharing of the— how should we say it— disgruntlement of podcast hosts, podcast listeners. Okay. And listener feedback specifically too has gotten directly to the team at Google Music.

So That's the only team that cares right now, right? Yeah, mostly.

Yeah, I think so. So, and again, it's— it is— it is what it is, and we're not going to spend time on it, but I, I, I do know there has been some direct feedback given. Um, a matter of fact, I was solicited to give input on what we had heard from podcasters and podcast listeners. And we had a number of inquiries and I gave stuff from my personal show. I just, I basically took out the, I screenshotted the, the emails, I blacked out the data for who sent me the email, and I sent them lock, stock and barrel to the person that was asking to give feedback. So that, you know, they could provide some input. So, um, I don't think it's going the way they thought it was going to go.

And it isn't like, like they, they weren't warned, it's just they didn't want to hear it.

And in a matter of fact, I had one podcast host that must have been completely asleep at the wheel, said, hey, I'm ready to go to war. And I'm like, uh, you should have been like It's too late, right? And their business model is specifically— they, they— this particular podcast host is about 99% of their shows are on programmatic, right? So their entire—

that's why we're— most of us out there are just recommending don't even do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, there's no advantage.

Right.

So it was kind of interesting to me that I got that email. I'm like, yeah, uh, hello, where are you? Where you been the last 6 months? You know, so, and we just, we recorded a podcast episode, it'll go out later in November at Blueberry, just kind of explaining people's options and, you know, whatever. But I had 2 or 3 things, other things on my mind. I can't remember what the heck. I guess it wasn't that important. About what I wanted to talk about, but I'm sure it'll come back. Yeah, come back to me.

It's like what always happens on this show. Eventually, you know, 5 minutes in, it'll come back to you. And we have a new topic to talk about on the show, thank goodness.

Oh, we do? What is that?

No, I said then we'll have another one to talk about and not just go, right, right, right. What are we going to talk about, Todd? Um, Yeah, I did notice in, in Pod News, um, thank you, James, um, this, this post that he made about, um, this new podcast, um, it's called The Podcast Graveyard. Oh, did you see this?

Yeah, I did, but I didn't read the article.

Yeah, well, it wasn't a podcast about podcasts, right? It's only had a couple of episodes, I guess, that have come out, but, but the whole purpose of the call of the show is to talk about, um, You know, what happens to podcasts, you know, when they podfade or when they, you know, stop, you know, what's that, what's the reasons behind that? I mean, that's the whole topic of the show is exploring, you know, why did they start? Why did they stop? What lessons can aspiring content creators learn from their untimely demise?

So that's, you know, but go ahead.

But the truth of. Pod fading is, you know, take the word at its meaning, and it means that death isn't usually sudden. It's usually a gradual thing that it's kind of like your podcast is in hospice, right? Yeah, you have to kind of ride it through the death process. And that's kind of more typically what happens.

Well, that triggered a neuron. So I remember what I was going to talk about. Pressing— I'm getting a lot of press inquiries about trends, changes, what to expect this year. So getting a lot of those types of inquiries with multiple questions on, you know, what are you seeing? You know, you know, what's it really look like? And I get that too. So, you know, those are coming in and, you know, they're still trying to figure out there's emerging trends or, you know, globally and where stuff moving and Um, yeah, so it is interesting that, um, that these types of— and it's, it's, it's a basically I'm seeing the same type of questions come in and, um, it's not about how great shows are, it's all about the economy. They all want to talk about the economy.

Yeah. And the path and trajectory that usually podcast follows whenever we're in kind of like a weird economic time, layoffs—

and I'm not convinced it's going to get any better.

No, I don't think it is going to get better anytime soon. I think we're going to live in this world through 2024, more than likely.

Yeah, I would expect, you know, and of course, you know, inflation is still out of control, in my opinion. You know, it's— but, you know, we've been so high and they're staying— they're not coming, they're not going to come down, not at all. So, right, this is for everything. Yeah, right. And it's, you know, it's— and we saw our, you know, as a company, uh, I guess I can say this, our healthcare costs this year went up 13%. 13%. Now this is not unusual. It's 7, 9, 10, 12% every year, but this year was 13%, an overall 13% increase for not changing the plan, nothing. They're just 13% more right off the top. And if you think about that, if you know, if you're— if you work at a company and you're small like us, we're under 20, so we probably pay a little more of a premium because we don't have economy of scale with, you know, 1,000 people on medical coverage. The— that 13% is massive, especially if you're doing a split. If you're doing, you know, whatever your company split is for 70/30, 80/20, 60/40, whatever your company split is, it's going up for everybody. It's going up for everyone. And that, that percentage of increase just chips away at the, it just chips away at the, you know, whatever pay raise you gave everyone. You know, it's just this back to back impact. And so, you know, internally, you know, the last couple of years we've absorbed the cost of the healthcare increases, not to put it upon the employees, right? Um, but you know, you start looking at that bottom line and you start looking at, you know, how much you've absorbed. Well, at some point, where, where do we say, okay, sorry, we have to, you know, your healthcare costs are going to go up X percent because, you know, we've absorbed 25% increase over the past 2 to 3 years. Um, and I, and I think what we have to really look at out there is these cumulative costs. It's just, it's just killing. It's just, it's just a killer. Um, you know, obviously payroll is the number one expense, but, you know, cost of employee salary is not the entire cost of a, of the employee. Yeah. You know, 401(k),, you know, whatever matching you have for education, health, dental, vision, you know, all those things, you know. So if you're— whatever that multiplier is of 1.5, you know, if you— if someone's making $100,000, it's probably another $50,000 in benefits you have to pay. So it, it's— yeah, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy.

Yeah. And all those increases over time will cause the economy to slow down and people have less disposable income to buy buy things. Yeah, right. So people will start cutting back, and, and it puts more pressure on the companies because the companies don't have enough, you know, increasing revenue to pay their employees more. So it creates this vicious downward cycle. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of what we're, you know, we've been in this for a while now. This isn't something brand new, but it's, it's definitely not getting better. I think many hoped that it would get better by now. Um, so So, Todd, I also noticed that half of children— now, this is a, this is a study that was done, I guess, by, uh, the talent agency UTA, I guess, um, asked 5,000 U.S. parents. Uh, 48% of U.S. children— it doesn't give an age range here, but, um, the, the, that I see, about 48% of U.S. children are listening to podcasts weekly. You believe that? Do you believe that, Todd?

That's a big—

of course it doesn't give an age range here. That's a big number. Yeah, I think it is too.

Now this— and it's— is it, is it podcasts the parents are listening to in the car, or is it they're listening to their own podcast?

Um, well, they do say in here, there's a quote in here that says podcasts are a huge part of family media. Now, it does make you wonder if this is joint listening or separate listening. Um, that isn't entirely clear.

My kids got forced to listen to podcasts because they were passengers in the vehicle. They didn't have no choice. And they—

and of course, well, unless they put their earbuds in.

Exactly. And they went and they went and listened to music. And anywhere they weren't listening to podcasts, right?

You were forcing them to.

Yeah, you know, they got force-fed stuff.

Said, Dad, I don't want to listen to this anymore, right?

You know, yeah, you want to encourage it.

Yeah, exactly.

Turn that off, right? And the mistake I made growing up was I always said whoever drives controls the, the audio in the car.

Well, when they started driving, I got payback on that, you know, because actually more and more of these cars now are having like screens in the back seat, right, right, right, you know, that kind of stuff too, so they can like do their own thing.

Yeah, but mine didn't have that type of vehicle, you know. I, I I was poor. I had Bluetooth.

Well, actually, even the screens, you know, like behind the seats and stuff is coming to even kind of the more moderately priced cars now. So that technology is kind of moving forward. But I thought it was an interesting trend. And I know that if you look at the overall numbers, young people are growing the fastest in this medium. And as far as on the listener side, I believe it's that way on the content creation side also. It wouldn't be happening on the listener side. So yeah. It's, it, they kind of ride together, you know, the content has to be there that's appealing to that younger demographic as well. Also, they won't tune in just like what we were just saying about dad's podcast versus Spotify, you know, it's so it's an obvious choice for, for a young person.

So I, you know, I've got a little bit of a, and just, you know, I see, for example, here, there's an email that just came in. And it caught my attention because it said Joe Rogan's big decision. And it was from, uh, it's the Hot Pot newsletter with Ariel. And, um, it's— she's doing a thought exercise about his contract negotiations. But there's one thing that I saw in this newsletter that she put out. She says Spotify really needs to find a way to make it work. The question I ask is, why do they need to make it work? Why does Spotify have to find a way to make this work? What difference does it make to the majority of podcasters out there that have very small audiences on Spotify? Why does Spotify need to find a way to make this work?

Um, well, you could make a case that it is working. And it's been working for a few years now. It's just because we're in an economic decline that all of a sudden now it's not working.

They haven't been working. They've lost hand over foot money.

Well, it's all relative, Todd. It's all relative to how this whole thing started with these guys, right? I think in the early days, we didn't give them even an ounce of chance of being able to make this work. But they have picked up, you know, double, maybe with some platforms, double-digit market share, which is more than Google ever achieved, right?

So, so here's the thing. Spotify is in a tough spot, and, and it's their own damn fault, right? Because if they want to keep Rogan, they're gonna have to dig really deep, because Rogan knows he's got the upper hand here. They fired all these other platforms. They fired Megan, and they got rid of all these other folks. Yeah, so if they don't dig deep into their pocket and give him a couple hundred million dollars and he goes back to open RSS, which he'll probably do better if he did that, just might, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, people will— people, you know, they, they have to pay to keep him. It's like Howard Stern. It's like Sirius had to write the big check to keep Howard Stern because he's a linchpin. Now, I, I canceled my— I got a free year of Sirius with my new car, and my bill came due and it was like $347 for a full year with Sirius. And I was like, like, I flipped them the bird, right? Like, no, no, are you insane? You know, are you insane? The only time I listened to Sirius was I was on super long road trips and I was trying to stay awake and I would tune into Comedy Central or some sort of comedy show. And I didn't even listen to Stern, to be honest with you, because he's become such— so weird over the— since the pandemic. I have no desire to listen to him anymore. He can't get over, you know, he's scared to come out of his house still. So, so I was like, no, I'm not. I'm not. Why? Not supporting the establishment. I'm not giving them $347 of my hard-earned money. It was some ridiculous— I mean, I was shocked.

I'm glad. That's like 30—

what, $33? I was like, I was like, thank God. Now they did send me a follow-up offers for some cheap price, but you know, it's come back to us. But why should I give the mortal enemy, uh, you know, money? You know, I don't need to give them money. All right, I don't need to. I don't need to give Spotify money either. Matter of fact, I used to have a Spotify subscription. I canceled that because I don't need to give them my money, you know. They're not helping me in my business. Um, so $200 million, if they're gonna have to— if they're gonna have to— they're gonna have to dig deep to keep Rogan. And if they do, and of course they won't disclose how much they pay him, you know, they're, they're going to get— they're going to get abused in the— but the problem is Do they have the money to give him? Do they have the cash to do the deal? Because let me just tell you something, the money's tight. If they need to go out and find money, they're, you know, they're gonna— they're not gonna find it. So I, I think that, uh, I think it's truly a 50-50, 50-50 chance. I don't think that podcasters need to really pay attention. We are at a point, we're at an inflection point in the podcasting space where we need to make sure we continue to double down on building our own brands, on our own websites, controlling our RSS feeds. Making sure that we're supporting platforms that are open, make sure that you— so we don't care where they listen, but make sure that these projects like what's going on with Podcasting 2.0, what's going on with anyone that supports open RSS feeds, you know, we need to make sure that podcasters understand where their, where their bread is really truly buttered. Um, again, the majority of shows out there don't have big Spotify audiences. Yeah, at least we don't see it. Maybe, you know, of the 65,000 or 70,000 shows we measure, maybe it's— they're a unique breed of shows, but we don't see it.

Yeah, Apple's still the king of the road on this. Particular pathway, right? So it's, it continues to be like that. And, you know, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with, with Joe if he outgrows Spotify, which, which means that he could be, he, you're exactly right, Todd. I think that there is a chance that he could be a much bigger brand and have much more revenue, um, than being exclusive on Spotify.

And I will agree with her assessment. She says, another thing agreed upon by the people I spoke with— again, this is Ariel from Hot Pod— Rogan has the upper hand in this situation, a lot of power right now. Nobody's managed to knock him from his pedestal in the past several years. It seems like unlikely anyone will in the near future. Very true. He's, he's, he, he's, he's got it locked down. Even with controversial guests or something. I, you know, I, I think more controversial the better. I think people more go listen to him more when he has more controversial guests.

Well, so his guest that he had on yesterday, Mr. Elon Musk, was probably the most controversial of any of his guests in quite a while.

Oh, really? I, I, I, what, what did, uh, I don't listen to Joe on a regular basis, so what, what—

you probably should go listen to this.

What made headlines on— again, I canceled my Spotify subscription, so can I listen to it on the free version, or— yeah, you can. I have to get subjected to ads, I guess, huh?

Yeah, exactly.

So what was it?

Well, it was like a 2-hour conversation, Todd. So they ventured into talking about Twitter, X, you know, and they start, they talked about, you know, space. They talked about cars. They talked about everything.

X is going to be a bank. Just don't, just don't. That's what it's going to turn into. Well, that's going to turn into WeChat.

That's what Elon wanted to do with PayPal too. And the problem is, as, as Elon was trying to do that with PayPal, they— he left to go on vacation and they fired him while he was gone. So when he came back, it wasn't an option anymore for him to turn it into X. That's, that, that's what he wanted to do back then. But, um, but yeah, so I would just go listen to that because He talked about lots of stuff that you don't hear a lot about on other—

no, if any conversations, if anyone has Joe's ear, this is advice I'm going to give him, right? And I know I don't know crap. Okay, this is just Todd speaking. You have to make this the equivalent of Howard Stern. Howard Stern is the linchpin of SiriusXM. Howard wanted to leave. Matter of fact, Howard negotiated fewer shows. Shorter seasons, a whole bunch of stuff. He got all kinds of concessions because Howard wanted to retire. He's tired. Well, that's what he says, you know, until they write the big check, right?

But I don't know how—

story until—

good story— until that offer comes through. He's got renewed energy at that point, right?

I, I would— if, if I was, if I was Joe, I'd go for 50% more than what you got in the first deal. If you got $200 million in the last deal, I'd go for 300 big ones. Yeah. You know, that's— if that was the number, I would, I would milk as much. I would take them for every penny, every penny you can take them for. Matter of fact, just start the negotiations at 400. Go right there at 400. Let them counteroffer at 250. Come down to 375, then don't talk to him for 2 weeks. You know, that's what I would do. And guess what?

Oh, go ahead. They also, on, in this episode, they actually, uh, Joe, um, brought out his high-powered, um, bow and arrow. Oh, you know, it's like this 90-pound.

Oh, and they shot the truck. And they shot—

I did hear Cybertruck. They shot the Cybertruck in the video version of the show, and then came back and so they actually left in the middle of the interview to go shoot the truck with a high-powered bow and arrow. And, uh, they have it all recorded right there too, as you can see. And then they came back in the studio and finished the interview.

Okay, for this show, for this show, we, we got us a $10,000 donation. 20-inch blades on the Impala. Well, Rogan, Rogan needs to come back to podcasting. That's what Mike Dell was And, you know, usually on the, on the Podcasting 2.0 show, you only get a big baller if you do 100,000 sats, but we'll, we'll do it here for 10,000.

Well, Joe still has his, his account at Lipson still active. And it just has like one episode in it. By the way, Joe, you got a place to go, but I feel sorry for Lipson if he comes back. By the way, we're going to get a big bandwidth bill.

Well, by the way, Joe, you can migrate to Blueberry and we'll hook you up.

Oh, okay. We'll hook you up.

We'll hook you up with a bandwidth deal.

You're not careful what you wish for.

Well, hey, you know, he won't be on a, he won't be on a flat rate plan. I'm not playing that game.

You know, as far as I know, he didn't pay for bandwidth.

Well, that was Libsyn's fault. You know, you know, you, you come back, you, you come back. I, I, if I think if he comes back to Libsyn, they'll say, hey, listen, Joey, we loved you before, but you know, you need to be on a pro account. That bandwidth bill's gonna be $100 grand a month. You know, that's what you're gonna pay. You know, I'll give, I'll give Joe a great deal on that. Oh wow. You know, I know what lives in pace for bandwidth more than— wow, really? That's a big number. Yeah. Well, there's no way he can come back and be on a flat rate plan unless, unless I get to sell all the advertising.

Well, that, that's the other cost of Spotify having him on, on their plan that they're, you know, a lot of people don't think about is the, is the delivery bandwidth of all these, all these viewers and listeners.

But if Spotify is moving as much bandwidth as they are, they should be, you know, most—

it should be pretty cheap, right?

It should be, it should be a sub-penny, like tenths of a penny per gig or something to that effect. If you're moving that much bandwidth You know, I would think that most podcast hosts today are probably at a penny or a little bit below a penny a gig on bandwidth. So I would suspect that would be my guess. Right. Again, the more you move, the more you can negotiate a better price, you know, and when you start getting into the decimals of negotiation.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple other topics I'd like to talk about too. Go ahead. Are kind of a little bit interrelated to each other. And then also, after we get through kind of that entanglement, we've unwound that a little bit, um, talk a little bit about the announcement that Podcast made for the Podcast Hall of Fame. Oh yes. So just, you know, mention a few things. Not all the details have been put out there yet around the Hall of Fame, but I just wanted to briefly talk about it here. Um, but I wanted to talk about first this IAB released, um, this US podcast advertising revenue study for 2023. I don't know if you saw this, Todd, but, um, this is also from, you know, the, the post that PodNews made about this too. And it's looking at the drivers and strategies and tactics for growth that we're seeing in the US podcast advertising, um, market right now. And the top one on the list Um, which we've talked about on the show a few times, is the use of brand safety and suitability tools, Todd, has almost doubled. It's, it's, uh, 69% of publishers are using brand safety solutions and 62% are using brand suitability solutions. There are slight differences between these two things, but they're very similar to each other in how they function and how they work. Um, so basically what these are, uh, just to refresh everyone's memory, if you're not familiar with brand suitability and censorship tools, well, they're tools to identify content that are in a range of spectrum around, uh, certain, um, topic areas, right, of sensitivity that, uh, brands, advertisers have.

It's advertising censorship tools is what it is.

Well, it's a pathway for them to identify shows that are less aligned with corporate brand values.

You can tell, you can tell I'm not playing along here, Rob.

No, I know, but I, I think it's good because you're using the, the, um, more critical view of what these terms mean versus I'm using kind of like the industry talking points on this.

Right.

Right. But they are fundamentally a— and this is how I think about it— they are basically a Trojan horse for content moderation entering the podcast space. And I think we need to be honest about this. And I think as a medium that has built its reputation on being authentic and real and kind of free speech related, this is a pathway as we increase monetization into podcasts increasingly we're seeing, you know, these advertisers drive the content that's— that they advertise in, which thus I think causes the potential of podcasters self-censoring.

Oh, they're going— it's, it's, it's already content moderation. And it creates self-censorship by the self-censorship, causes podcasters not to say what they really feel. Right. So let's go back. To this, this, this situation here. How many, how many percentage of these ad insertion systems are using Hummee's platform?

68%? 69% of publishers are using brand safety solutions. 62% are using brand suitability solutions. Now, now brand safety is more the, the heavy content filtering that's happening here. The suitability is when they actually take that data and match it up against certain advertisers.

And all these, all these publishers had to say was no, but you know, yeah.

And then the other part to this too, is that, um, and this kind of correlates to what we're seeing with YouTube kind of being out of touch with this. And this isn't a YouTube topic, but this is a corollary to this. It says more than, uh, this is coming out of the IAB. More than 90% of ad revenue. I don't know if this is really true or not, but they're saying 90% of ad revenue in podcasting is coming from dynamic ad insertion.

Right.

I have no doubt. Isn't that what YouTube doesn't want in their platform is content? Yeah. That has dynamically inserted content. Yeah. Right. So, so, so potentially YouTube is really only going to get freely access to 10% of content out there that are, you know, interested in advertising, you know, and I will say I'm pretty happy where we are today.

Blueberry is where Blueberry is today with the programmatic payments we're making on a monthly basis. It has grown each month consecutively and putting more pocket, more money in podcasters' pockets that So it's just so everyone understands, some shows are not as savvy about all the things going on with value for value. They don't ask their audiences for donations. They don't— they're not yet participating in Podcasting 2.0. They don't have merch. They're doing a show and they're basic. They don't have enough time to invest to do everything that they want to do to grow a show and to make some money, but yet they can turn on programmatic with us and get a check. And some people say, oh, that's, that just sucks. You're putting in, you know, put a couple of pre-rolls in front of a show. Here's the thing, from a hosting provider standpoint, the podcasters want something for their work, and some of them may be only getting $30 a month, $100 a month, $5,000 a month. There's really— runs the full gamut, right? But the key is the money that's coming into those smaller shows gives them energy, just like a boost that just came in. 5555 from Mike again, advertising podcasting is censorship. And the— but I've been running a— we'll come back this a minute. But I think the main thing is, is it gives the podcaster some energy and some motivation to continue podcasting. So this is where, for us, shows that are making money and getting— and again, I'm just going to come from a, from a business standpoint— they don't cancel. They continue doing their shows. They have higher longevity rates. They've got some revenue coming in. Now, I'm sure if they would do and work into the value, value piece, they would potentially make more in donations than they would through the advertising piece. But again, it's— we're taking time here, um, but in the long run, the main thing that I, I think we have to remember here, and again, for any— everyone that's anti-advertising, we're putting money in podcasters' pockets that has been desperately needed for a long time. For years we couldn't put any money in podcasters' pockets. So for me, about it, I think we're about a year in now. I have to go back and look and when we actually launched it. I'm thrilled. Matter of fact, I was actually a little bit shocked because I hadn't been in the report a couple of months and went in because I had to do some auditing anyway. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's what we're paying right now out on a monthly basis. And Matter of fact, to check with Barry. So, hey, we've been getting a check from SoundStack, you know, because we got a lot going out. Are they paying us our share, you know, or, you know, paying us because we pay the podcasters immediately and we take that out of pocket. We don't get our money for a bit longer than, you know, so we basically pay the podcasters as soon as we get the report. So I just wanted to make sure, you know, that the receivables was coming in. It was. We are good. But it changes. So I got— oh, here's— here we go again. 20-inch blades on the Impala. 11,111 sats from Papa HD. Value for value is still limited to very tech-savvy audiences. It needs to be adopted by mainstream apps. That's true. And, and that the app stuff is growing. Pocket Cast is adding V4V. So I think little by little we'll see more of that coming through Pop HD.

But going back to your point, Rob, on how much of that was programmatic, it says here that the programmatic advertising part has grown 5 times. Yeah. You know, multiple of 5 times just in the last 2 years alone. Yeah. But its share of advertising is still only 11%. Oh, that makes sense. I'm not sure what that share is precisely if more than 90% of the revenue is coming from. Okay, so the 90% of revenue that's coming into podcasting is dynamic ad insertion, which includes programmatic as well as host reads.

Dynamically.

Right, right, right, right. Or pre produced host reads that are inserted on an ad buy. Yeah, so. So, but that means that the programmatic side is still just 11% of the podcast medium. In other channels though, whether it be live radio or streaming, on the streaming side of content delivery, programmatic is 87%. So what that potentially tells me is that we're just at the beginning stage of the growth of programmatic, which, which may or may not ever hit that 87%, because I don't know that in those other mediums that we've had a strong historical orientation toward host reads and the other mediums.

I think it's always been kind of more programmatic because everything we're doing is programmatic. And so I look at— now I'm looking at fill rates. Okay, where's my fill rate at? And you know, the goal was 80-85% on fill rates.

And we're still— a lot of revenue is coming in from those host read type buys.

Oh yeah, it's a CPM comparison. You know, it's probably double, in some cases maybe 3 times, you know.

That's why, yeah, 90% of the revenue has shifted into dynamic ad insertion versus—

and only 10% or less than 10% is now baked in, baked in post reads.

Yeah, so we've, we've made a big shift over there.

Everyone has, but 2 or 3 years. But the main thing too to remember is the host reads on DAI is not necessarily programmatic, it's just a host read that's being dynamically inserted.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that the term programmatic refers to the buying process more than it does to the delivery process.

Right. So, you know, it's— we're— I'm ecstatic where we're at for, for our content creators. I really, really am. I'm— in fact, I was, I was, I was surprised. So it just— I just want to build. Here's the thing I want to build. Is I'd like to see the programmatic continue to grow, which we, you know, we think it will month after month. But at the same time, I'm hoping the value for value— because I can track that too— if the value for value could grow at the same pace as our programmatic payments, um, I would be ecstatic. But right now it's probably— well, I made a public announcement of how much we'd given in So I can't give you the ratio because then that would, I would reveal my programmatic numbers. So we've, we've done their programmatic is doing significantly more than the value for value. But again, we put since we started programmatic, we've put over $10,000 in, excuse me, in value for value, we've put more than $10,000 in podcasters' pockets with value for value. Well, we didn't, their audiences did. So, um, but again, the programmatic is multiple, multiple, multiple multiples higher. But it's nice, it'd be nice to see those be even. And really what we have to do is keep telling the audience about this and get them excited and, you know, have them start getting engaged. Yeah.

Todd, you know, um, over the last few months we, we, we've been talking about AI quite a bit too. Yeah. And talking about these individual companies out there that are starting very specific kind of AI engines to support podcasters. And I saw one, one thing, and I think, you know, we've been wondering about this for a while, is that can those standalone companies that are doing a very specific thing in podcasting survive, right?

They can if they keep moving quick, right?

And they have to move towards consolidating abilities, right, that can add more value, right? And so part of what I'm raising this topic around is that I think we're starting to see that the early stages of that start to happen, where the larger platforms are starting to integrate more AI capabilities into their their platforms and those AI capabilities become features, not core products to a company. Right. And that was announced here recently by Descript. They added this like chapter generators and summarizers and social post writers and things like that, which are, if you look at each one of those things, they are components of a, of a company, right? That's offering just those services, but we're starting to see those get integrated into larger platforms.

Just give me a couple months. Yeah. And Descript, don't get me wrong, they're doing some amazing stuff. They're a partner of ours. Uh, you can't go wrong if they're using their platform. They got a way big head start on everyone else, and they have this combined component with having the— who they bought And so, you know, they, they've done a pretty brilliant thing over there. And I, you know, I don't discount it at all. I actually, I don't think anyone can afford to buy them right now. I think probably the only company, well, there's two companies that could afford to buy them right now. Spotify, maybe, and Libsyn. Apple? Apple won't buy them.

Well, they won't, but I'm just saying they could.

Yeah. They, they are fast, um, they're fast locking up a whole bunch of this by just the feature announcements. And there's, you know, there's other platforms out there that are trying to do this.

But again, um, I think it's a race, Todd.

I think that—

oh yeah, if you want to become and survive and be a large platform, you're gonna have to integrate as much AI functionality that podcasters want into one platform as rapidly as possible. If you're going to keep your market share.

We did some survey results of our listeners over the past week, and actually I can't talk about the results. Um, because it's going to, it's going to have strategic, um, implications on what we're doing next. But there is, I will say this, there is a segment of the podcast community that don't care about AI. There's a segment that just don't care, uh, in the least.

Um, I won't tell you if you've established your workflows, right, right, and they've been working for you and they're not that onerous to do and you don't mind doing them, right? There's no reason to spend extra money.

But it goes, it goes back to what we talked about last week, which I think was overlooked. Again, we talk about this money piece. There's still this big massive piece of the podcast community that don't care about money. Yeah, those that do, do, and they, and they usually have the biggest voices. But still, there's this huge segment of the podcast community that is, they're just doing a show, putting out content, and But, you know, I look at what I accomplished last week with our show notes. Um, I think our show notes last week were pretty awesome. Um, and what I did last week, I'll just openly tell you, I took the transcript that Zoom provided me and I ran that through ChatGPT and came up with the with the, uh, with the show notes. And, you know, it's one, two, three, four, five.

You ran the full transcript through ChatGPT and it gave you a summary?

Gave me a summary. Pretty much, I probably edited this.

Well, let me think. I think there's a character limit, isn't there, on text input?

No, not anymore. ChatGPT now can take a whole document, can take a whole PDF.

Okay. Oh, okay. So are you uploading a PDF?

Oh yeah. I'm giving them— well, I'm giving them the actual— I'm actually giving them the file I get from, uh—

Okay, so you're not cutting and pasting?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm giving the media file that they give me. So, you know, this is the— compared to before, I would have about 3 sentences of show notes, not even a full character, a full But now, wow, you know, we got, we got a little bit richer show notes. It didn't take me much longer. It took me— it was the— honestly, it probably took me longer to edit the output that it gave me than, um, than the actual— well, yeah, I, it, I— then I would normally take. So it did extend my production piece. But if I go over now and talk about And again, I know you guys are like, damn, he's talking about this again. Um, but if I go over to Geek News Central, I have found something truly remarkable. Um, and I'll just go and let me bring this up on screen for those who aren't listening. I have a 1, 2, 3 paragraph intro about my lead article. And then, you know, I got the player and I got all this stuff. And again, go back to my saying I've said for years, I'm, I'm record for the— we record for the audience, we write for Google. And then we've got all the articles linked with hashtags so you can jump to the place in the audio wherever that topic is. But then I have a summary, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 paragraphs. 9 paragraphs, a summary of the show for 45-minute podcast. And this was done with the actual transcript. Just dump that into ChatGPT. Just, I just attached the SCP file. And yeah, I had to edit this a little bit, but I probably spent no more than 5 minutes editing this.

And you take the audio or the text that's outputted and then you do a quick run through it. Yeah.

That what you're doing? Yeah. Yeah. I take the raw and then sometimes it misses some stuff. So sometimes I have to kick it in the butt and I have to say, hey, you only talk about 10 of the 23 articles. Where's the rest? You know, and then it gives me the rest of the summary. So you have to like teach it, you know, treat it like a teenager.

Get with it, dude.

Yeah. You know. And, you know, but for me now, I'm starting to do some A/B testing on where I'm landing on Google search results. Is my, is my Google search results not for the title of the show? Because if I just do that, boom, I'm, you know, if I take the title, I'm number one, of course. Course I'm using my logged-in account, so it would— it's not going to be as good as that. That's a little tainted because I'm not an incognito window. But I'm now taking other topics that I'm talking about during the show and I'm Googling that to see if I'm starting to rank. And what I'm finding is my 4 top articles that I talked about in the last podcast is in the top 5 search results for those specific top 4, they're in the, within the top 5 search results for those 4 topics. So not only am I ranking for the main topic, I'm also ranking for 3 subtopics. Now people go, well, what did you do? Well, I'll lift my skirt here. What do you think I did, Rob, to get, to get that, to make that happen?

You probably had subheadings.

Nope. No, because I'm article-based. I'll just tell you, I'm article-based. What I did was in ChatGPT, I said, here is the summary of each of the 4 articles that I talked about in my podcast. Oh, I see. And I took the summaries for each of the 4 articles.

Articles, okay. And there's a link to each of the articles?

No, I copied the raw text.

Oh, just the raw text from what you said in the podcast.

Is that what you said? No, I got the raw text from the articles that I talked about. I took the, took the raw, I cut and paste from the actual article.

Just a certain portion of it or something?

The whole thing. All the whole thing. Author's name, ads, everything. I just dumped it in. Then I said to it, look at what I said in my transcript. About these 4 topics. Mm-hmm. And then come up with a melded summary of my commentary and what was in the article and produce a summary, essentially. So basically, I told ChatGPT to look at my transcript of what I said about each of these 4 things and then meld them the information in the articles, because again, I'm doing a news show and I'm giving arbitration or attribution back. And then give me an output based upon what it says in the article, what I said. Give me the meld of— and bam, magic, magic happened.

Well, because it is a, a unique version of the —of the article, right?

And it's using— it's— well, what it did is it used my commentary, my flair of what I said about this, right? Because I was talking— because I was basically— one of the articles was about, uh, someone's trying to prevent a nuclear attack or something, you know, basically trying to— and I was just blowing on that. Oh, this is impossible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what ChatGPT did is took my negativity or commentary and took that to that and basically come up with this melded piece now. Right.

Okay. So it took information from the core article and then took your information and merged it and merged it like, like a sandwich. I think that's a good way to go.

I think that's a good way to do it. And that was my— oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God.

You know, I've been, I've been playing around too. So if I make like maybe a long comment, like on some of the social platforms like LinkedIn or something like that, in, in response to a post, I'll take the content of the post and then I'll take my comment and I'll put it all into ChatGPT. So it is a lot like what you just said, and it creates a completely unique version that merges those ideas together.

So, and I am looking because I'm looking to say, did that copy? I'm making sure it's not copying text, right? You know, but it definitely, you know, there is a fine line here though. Let's be frank. Because I'm feeding it the source article, I'm using my transcript.

Probably still change some of the words.

Oh, I do. I have to edit it anyway because it doesn't come out and it doesn't give— it doesn't ever take cut and paste from a— from the article ever. But again, I have to go in and edit that. That probably takes me as long as the full summary. And then what I do, here's the trick I do next. In the full summary, I said, give me a summary, but exclude this, this, this, and this story. Give me the— and it creates the rest of the summary that I put at the bottom of the podcast show notes. That has been pretty remarkable. And again, some of this stuff is just— I'm just experimenting. I'm just throwing stuff at the wall and see if it's working, right? Um, because, you know, I might end up going down in Google rank. You just don't know. So a lot of this is just trial and error, and I'm being my own— really my own guinea pig on my own site on all this. How much longer does it take? About 30 minutes more production every episode. That's what I'm adding, about 30 minutes more of production time.

But so, Todd, did you hear the announcement of the Biden administration? Yeah. Wants to pass an AI kind of, kind of— so here's a regulation bill.

Yeah, here's the thing. Nothing's happening in Congress. They, they, they're so screwed up over there. We—

so the, the executive is going to pass, you mean, anytime soon?

The executive order is going to set some guidelines between now until, you know, maybe 2038 when Congress can finally get back to work, whatever they're doing. 38, right.

But by then we'll be run by AI, so it'll be a little too late before then, right?

That's what I'm saying. This thing's moving so fast that AI saw what they wrote. And, you know, so here's, here's part of the problem.

I think they want to control what we want to do.

Well, okay. We're going to get techie here. We're almost turning into Saturday Morning Tech Show again.

But this is what—

Is that such a bad thing, Todd? This is what OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, all these players want huge government control. Yeah, they want this because guess what it does? It makes it harder for the open models who has very little money to comply with whatever government regulate, because Google and all these companies have 80 lawyers, 100, 500,000 lawyers on staff. —where these little open-source projects probably has a lawyer advisor. So they want all this. They want all this regulation so that they become God.

They become the puppet master of the AI. Right. They want to be, right. You know, the big thing I've been thinking about this is that if AI lives up to its potential, it's going to become smarter than any politician in Washington.

Probably true. Probably already is, to be kind of frank. Right, right.

And what's the implications for the establishment in Washington, D.C. if the AI knows the truth about everything?

Right. The executive, what do they call that? What does the president issue, an executive order or whatever it is?

It's an executive order.

Yeah. It only lives as long as he's president. In office.

Right. And then the new guy comes in and writes a new one down.

They can do their own thing. Throw it out. So essentially, um, yeah, it's not exactly— they did try. And I, you know, I guess again, I listened to the Marketing Institute AI show. It's a must-listen-to podcast. If you don't listen to that weekly, uh, sorry, you, uh, you're gonna be out of business in 3 years. Um, you heard me, you hear me say it, right? Um, I did, yes. The, the, um, lost my train of thought here because I just threw an ultimatum down. Uh, what this is, what, what has happened, um, and what is happening is that the administration did try to thread the needle a little bit. They tried to leave a little bit on the open side And they tried to, you know, they tried to carve a path. Of course, we haven't— all we saw was the Cliff Notes. No one's really read the full executive order yet. So until we get some, some people go through the whatever the, the actual executive order says and isn't the Cliff Note version, we'll know. But at least in the Cliff Note version, it looks like they've left a path for open, open models. And that is just like open podcasting is something that we all should be really get behind because otherwise Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Anthropic, all these companies are going to— they are going to be the new Google. They are going to— they're going to be the biggest companies in the world.

Yeah, they're going to say there's a very good chance that Microsoft would be a bigger company than that.

I want some of that stock. Any of those companies get ready to go public, I'll drain— I will drain my savings account and buy every piece of stock I can buy from OpenAI.

Did you hear, I think I read yesterday that OpenAI and Microsoft did another a big deal. They're all investing.

It's kind of weird, like a $15 billion deal. It's crazy the amount of money that's being put in there. All doing— they're like, Google's investing, Microsoft's investing.

It's like everyone's investing in everyone. That's, that's the future of all those software, uh, tools that Microsoft has, is the ability to integrate.

I mean, they're, they're already doing it with the Copilot anyway. Back to podcasting, right? What has a connection to podcasting? I, you know, again, I— everything is going to be touched. Every, every product that you use that is a digital product is going to be touched.

Every product.

Yeah, I think we're just seeing the beginning. Oh, this is— we're using the stupidest thing we'll ever use.

We're in the, the very early stages of this.

Yeah, we're using the stupidest thing we'll ever use. Yeah.

I mean, it's pretty good, but it's not really, it doesn't really blow my mind by any stretch of the imagination yet. So that's coming.

And I don't think we're quite there yet. The, when it will blow people's mind is, well, these new, these additional models, again, we're dealing with large language models, but when you get into the point where you're Well, you can do it now with the— with— you can chat with ChatGPT.

I found that to be very limited. It is capabilities, right? But I've already played around with it, but you can have a conversation, but you can't really get anything done.

You know, it's— I heard a use case someone had it create a, a Halloween costume for him. Yes, gave suggestions for somebody that was— didn't buy a costume and you needed something to go to a party and you know, that type of stupid stuff. But there is— I'm finding more and more, I'm like, I wonder if that can— if I could use that to help me. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, right? So again, because it's just a language model, but we're headed for something beyond a language model. I think it's called AGI. What's it called?

Artificial General Intelligence.

Yeah, AGI. When—

and I think you're seeing an early example that I would go to YouTube and watch a video on, I believe it's on YouTube, of Elon Musk driving a Tesla with his future 12.0 version of the FSD software. And he talks about how this version that he's testing, right, that he made a video using AGI, is, is basically a neural network, right? It's built—

well, most of these large language models are neural networks already.

Yeah, I mean, they're moving that direction, but, uh, if you really think about what he showed in this video, it's like an hour-long video of him driving with this. He's telling us that there's no code that tells it to do anything. It's all learned from video, right? And guess how we learn? We learn from seeing things and seeing the world.

And all of you Tesla drivers have been given your, uh, your, your camera, uh, you know, when you've visited strip bars and, uh, wherever you've went in your Teslas, all that video is on file of where have you been and how you've lived your life, including the insides of your garage. So, um, just remember that, right?

But what this means is that car is driving itself like humans drive that car, with vision.

If you look, if you look at decisions based on vision, If you look at the new Apple MacBook Pro that was announced on spooky Halloween or whatever the night was, and what was it, Monday? You just look at the focus on GPUs. Tuesday. You look at the focus on GPU. Was it yesterday? No, it was.

Well, yesterday was Halloween, so it was Monday. Was it Monday?

It was Monday. So you look at the focus on GPUs. Yeah, and they're already talking about that, you know, the $4,000 or $4,500 version of the Mac Pro with the M3 Max specifically designed for AI developers. And because it's loaded with GPUs and—

Yeah, I have a new computer here I haven't brought into full service. Oh yes, got a much, much more powerful GPU in it.

Sorry, you know, I know you're still on Windows.

Yeah, well, I don't have any problem with Windows. Windows works for me. So I, you know, it's kind of funny, I had a Mac for a while back when I was working for Podbean, and I—

it wasn't really for me. I get into Windows now and I get lost. You get lost in Windows? Yeah, I get lost in the Mac ever since they— ever since they put— took the, you know, the Start menu away and be able to navigate It's just to me, it's, I don't know, it just feels, feels, it feels truly alien to me. That tells you how, and of course, you know, it's not actually, it's becoming more like a Mac all the time, actually. Yeah, probably. Yeah. And I don't do the only thing I run on my desktop as an actual program is Audition and Premiere. I'd rather everything else is web-based. So why do I need a, you know, that, that's the thing people need to understand. You don't need a MacBook Pro if you're only using web stuff, you need a MacBook Air.

Right. Yeah. Todd, did I mention this last week that Satya, you know, the CEO of Microsoft was quoted in saying that he, he regrets, I guess, voting on, on the board at the time or on the executive leadership committee to, to get rid of Windows Phone. Of course. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, he said that that was probably one of the biggest strategic mistakes the company made, but they, but they couldn't get their act together.

Yeah.

But the problem is they, Microsoft has this tendency and they, they've always had this tendency. They don't believe in what they're doing enough to keep doing what they're doing. They're so sensitive to, uh, public sentiment. Cash. It's all about the cash. Investor criticism that it forces their board of directors to make rash decisions around strategic direction.

Well, they made a winner-winner chicken dinner vote on OpenAI. Well, they did.

They jumped on it quickly. Yes, they did. And it really set Google back on its heels because Google had been working on AF for a while, but they were scared to let it go into the world. Well, don't count Google out. Well, you can't count them out, but you see what Bing is doing. I would go definitely go look at what Bing is doing.

I'm using the new stuff that Google has released. Yeah. Well, their Bard stuff. Yeah. Whatever it's called in Google, Google, in the Google, because we're—

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Not Bard. It's whatever it's called inside Google.

They've built that Bard into search results, right? So you can—

I'm not in— I'm talking about email responses and document creation. And those types of tools I'm using. And it is, it is definitely a version 1. So example, if I put a—

I haven't been as impressed with Google's AI.

Well, you have to pay for it. This is inside Google, Google Apps, not apps. It's, you know, my Gmail and Docs and all those presentations. It's okay. I can respond to— he says, do you want to respond aggressive? Not aggressive, but firm, happy, business. You know, they give you the tone and then how do you want to respond to this? You give it like 3 words and it writes the response on the email. That's not bad. Yeah. And creating docs and stuff too. It's not bad, but I'm You know, again, I'm testing it and I'm paying $35 a month for that. And I'm not paying for anything on Google right now. Yeah. So again, it's all about the— it's all about testing and seeing where things are at. And, you know, I'm not going to open up to the whole team because I don't think it's ready. I think the other tools out there are still much, much better. But so if I want to compose an email, I got this little thing down at the bottom. That basically it's a, it's a plus saying it says help me write. And you tell it what you want to write and it will write the email. If you put the subject in, put the recipient name and subject, then you can give it a little bit of a prompt and it will write an email for you. So it's not bad. Same thing with a doc. You can do the same thing with a doc. You can actually tell it to, you know, help you write the doc.

And I think there's a lot of— oh, go ahead.

Go ahead. Nothing.

I was just going to ask you, have you gone in and created a voice clone for yourself at ElevenLabs or Descript?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Have you?

Yeah. I heard it works pretty good.

Descript's Overdub, but it's actually not really called Overdub anymore. It's called, it's called Voice AI. Yeah. Now in the Descript platform, but they're still using both terms to some degree, which is a little confusing in their user experience, but it did okay, but it's, It's really missing kind of more natural inflection.

But it's not designed to do a whole thing. It's designed to do 2 words or 3 words. It's not designed to do, you know, it'd be dumb to do a whole paragraph.

No, but that's what their competitors are pushing. Yeah, well, who wants that? So if you go in and use like ElevenLabs, you can create a video and an audio clone of yourself. Okay, and, and be able to create content through that just by, just by writing a script. And I do, I played around with a little bit, and I think you have to write your script in a certain way that it will actually say things in a more natural cadence. Because if you, if you write something that is written for text consumption, it will come across as kind of robotic. So, and that's not what you want in voiced content. So who is ElevenLabs? There's another AI company that's, that's building tools to do these kind of cloning of, of, um, of human, human voices. And there's, there's this whole sub-economy, Todd, right now too. If you think about all these companies that are doing, um, uh, transcription into multiple languages and all the stuff where these professional voiceover artists are going in and training. Yeah. And, and people are— I think people are selling their voices to these AI audio companies.

Anyone want to buy my voice?

I've been trying to figure out what that pathway is and how those companies determine who they pick as far as their— I'm sure it has a built-in voice actor.

I'm sure it has to be someone that doesn't have a life. Because I would— more of a voiceover artist. I would never, I would never license my voice because then someone's going to create something and I'm going to be accused of something that I didn't say.

So yeah, I think that, yeah, I think that's the danger of it. I, I agree with you. I mean, it— let's say I sold my voice to another platform there could be a bunch of podcasts that are created using my voice.

No, nothing to stop someone taking 1,700 episodes of GNC and almost 600 shows of episodes of this and cloning our voices anyway. They— there's plenty of samples out there. They can do it if they wanted to, and they would— could do it without permission, nefariously.

So the script now requires you to read a 2 or 3 paragraph script. Before they'll generate one for you. You have to actually— Is it a legal disclosure? Well, it's serving two purposes for them. It actually is a disclosure plus an authorization statement that you are saying that they're authorized to replicate your voice. Plus it requires you to voice a little bit more, so it gets a little bit more training. So, so What I discovered with that is that they're actually building these voices with very limited training, right? So they have like, maybe it's like a, maybe a 30, 40-second—

but they get your audio files so they can train from the audio that you upload as well. So if they wanted to, that's what I would hope they would do.

They're not explicit about that in the platform. Because what they say is that you can only upload to them for training purposes, a clip up to, I think it is 2 minutes.

Oh, well, interesting.

I think so. That's changed from the past where the overdub product, like a couple of years ago, you would have to record like 30 minutes. So it's gotten smarter. I guess, you know, I don't know if it's gotten better. Maybe it's gotten— it's, you know, to create your voice clone with a shorter amount of content. Does make adoption easier, right? But does it make a better AI clone? I don't know.

When I went to the house yesterday, I went back to the compound. I ran over to the other— basically, I live really close to where my mom and sister live, so I ran over there and I think we're kind of talking about this AI stuff, and I was talking about the, you know, my belief that we've shared on this show, and I think you have— you're in the same agreement with me that, um, you know, voices right now, you're not going to know who to trust. My sister says, well, I already don't know who to trust. She said, I heard something the other day from someone I'm a fan of, and it was a clone fake voice. And she says, how am I gonna— how am I gonna be able to tell if that was an original on what this individual said. So she says it's already happening, that even, uh, the voice, standalone voice, wasn't trustworthy because she, she had to— she went back to the source website and there was a big disclaimer on the, on the individuals. My sister's a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, um, so she went over the website where this was at, I guess, and then there was a disclaimer on there that that audio was not real. So I think we're all going to have to understand at some point that people are going to be doing nefarious things with our voices. And, you know, I think there's probably going to be a whole litigation market that's going to pop up from this. But part of that AI agreement that was not an agreement, executive order requires the government to come up with a way by 2026 or something like that to mark all AI-generated content as AI-generated. But the problem you're going to run into is, you know, I don't take anything raw from that's generated except maybe the images. And, and I edit them. I edit heavily usually. And I mean, you know, heavy meaning 5 to 10 minutes worth of work to edit 2 or 3 paragraphs. So the question then becomes, is that still AI-generated content? Do I still have to mark it? How much of a change do I have to make while I still, you know, original was, you know, original was done by AI and it was edited by human? Is that going to be the— it's going to be like a Creative Commons license that we're going to have to put on content? You know, is that how you have to license everything you put out? Out, you know, you're not going to get copyright on that anymore because, you know, 80% of it was generated by a robot. That's— there's true copyright challenges here to some of this stuff because a robot can't hold copyright.

Well, Todd, it could also be solved, and there's been some discussion about this too, about the use of voice clones to like maybe get in a situation where you get a phone call from someone claiming that they have abducted your child, right? Right, right. That's something that's been happening, right? And, and that, and that abductor puts your child's voice on, but that voice is actually a cloned version of your child. Um, and, and to have like, um, safe words that you have in your family that you you would always use, right, in any situation like that. And if those safe words weren't used, then you would have to assume that this was a faked voice. The other end of the spectrum is we've all been accustomed to— was it kind of two-level authentication? So maybe, maybe what we'll need to do in the future is we'll have to voice a code somehow a randomly generated code in our audio, then it gets picked up and validated. So I don't know if there can be some authentication process that can be done through audio and video that can be linked up directly to us.

David's asking in YouTube chat, says, Todd, can't find the Marketing Institute AI podcast. It's the marketing, it's how it's listed in Google, I mean, in Apple Podcasts. I should have pulled this up in Fountain because it's in Fountain too, but it's called The Market.

It's snowing here.

It was snowing here last night too. The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Show with Paul Rotzer, R-O-E-T-Z-E-R, and Mike Kaput, K-O-P-U-T. This, this Right here. This recommendation should be worth $500 for every one of you listening to the show. So please make your donation known to the podcast. Again, the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Show comes out every Tuesday morning. And don't— and please feel free to email me after you've listened to the 10 past episodes.

So what will the, the response be to consuming that content?

You will lose sleep. Had a feeling you were gonna say it depends on the week. Depends on the week. This week. You know, I got 20 minutes left in the show from this week and it's not so bad. But some of the early stuff, some stuff, sometimes I'm Beep. And no, it's just, it's good information. I don't have time to track all this stuff, and no way do I do. I don't have— I have nary the time to, you know, it's like, so who you— I want to listen to people that are tracking this stuff. And was this primarily AI topic content, or is it— it's, it is the name of the show. It is the marketing artificial intelligence show, and it's particularly for marketeers, for marketing people.

But does it spend a lot of time on content marketing?

It basically goes through and talks about what's happening, what's moving in the AI space, and announcements, changes, legislation, new tools, you know, commentary by experts in the space. They usually cover 3 main topics and then they have a quickfire list of maybe 10 things. They have an associated emailing list that I read religiously as well. So it's one of those that doesn't get, you know, dumped to the trash bin. It's one that I read through. You know, there's probably 5 AI newsletters now that I read. Some of them I just skim. The one guy that if you really want to listen, his name is Ethan. I think it's Ethan Pollack. Let me find it.

Ethan. But I have a big picture question for you after you get done there.

Yeah, go ahead.

I've been thinking about this a little bit as I'm seeing what's happening in the world around mainstream media, radio, kind of what we view as a different medium, right, which comes out of earlier eras in media, right? So we're seeing this decline of viewership of mainstream media, right? While we're seeing at the same time the growth and expansion of online media, right? So I think we can agree that that's in full swing, right? Whether it be on network television, radio, all that stuff that we're shifting over to pure digital consumption. Yep. So as we go through this progression, and, and we may see over the next few years a lot of these mainstream media channels either go away, go out of business, or consolidate with bigger brands, right? So we're probably going to see another level of consolidation that happens, but over time As this younger generation comes into kind of the mainstream, right? More and more, right? And the older generation, which grew up with mainstream media, kind of, you know, goes into retirement or passes away or just, you know, isn't involved in media as much. And we see this younger generation, which is growing up with digital media. Um, do we see this evolution of the perception of podcasting, as kind of following that track, right? Uh, do we see if mainstream media goes away, uh, this term that we're using today, television, or network television, becomes passé, right?

What's going to replace that? Is it already— has— you can't— I should cancel my Netflix subscription because I don't know.

But yeah, but What do you call the content in that medium? Not the brand of the digital platform, but what do you call the content on Netflix? What do you call the content in, in ABC's, you know, app or something like that? Is it television? Is it— what, what are we going to call it? Or is it just video? I mean, if it's not TV, is TV going to be a a name for that content that's gonna— TV's not going away anytime soon. Last, or is it going to be increasingly replaced by the term podcast?

No, I don't think so.

I think that, uh, I'm just posing the question. I don't know the answer to that either, but I do wonder as people get older.

I don't care who, you know, when I was— I did some subtle observations when I was with my my 33-year-old recently and my 28-year-old, you know. And then basically Dad wasn't running the remote, they were. And, um, they were 100% cord cut, and they got 90% of what they were learning about what's going on in the world off of YouTube. They were, you know, they were watching news clips on YouTube. So they were seeing the local Seattle news on YouTube. That's what they were, you know, just getting the highlight reel. So I think that content's still being consumed just in a different way. I think what we're— I'm starting to adapt the new, new term, and it probably is— probably it's insensitive based on what's going on in the world with fentanyl and everything, but we're overdosing on content right now. We're having so much content, you know, and what I've started to find myself doing is because I think I had 200 channels I was following on YouTube and I found myself, even though I had 200 channels listed on YouTube, there was probably 10. And so I started, yeah, so I started unsubscribing from a bunch of the YouTube channels that I weren't following so closely that was, to be frank with you, wasting my time. So I don't know, Rob. I'd be honest with you. I don't know. I still turn on the news periodically because of this office. The package I had to buy was a triple play. I had to have a TV, telephone, and internet. That's— it was cheaper than buying internet alone. So I think I get 6 channels or something like that. And Weather Channel, I get the news channels, no sports or nothing like that. I do find myself at lunchtime sometimes. It's my only time to flip on and I get my 30-minute dose of the mainstream media crap. And it's the same thing every day. So it can go a week and turn on a week later. Nothing's changed. So I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I think just like radio, I think they, I think they've got many years left in them. Oh, yeah.

I'm not saying that it's going to go, it's going to happen right away, but I do feel this progression happening where we're— mainstream media is losing momentum, and this whole concept of TV is— there's fewer people watching it. It's an aging demographic, and people aren't really engaged in it as much. And what we're seeing is huge audiences on that that are watching video content on Twitter and, and YouTube and these platforms that those are branded proprietary consumption platforms, but they're not what I would consider to be the name of the medium, right? It's kind of like saying, and to some degree the word podcast is kind of like an amalgamation of broadcasting and the iPod, right?

Here's a weird thing that I've slowly become to understand. Well, maybe not. Maybe I've known all along, but I've been able to define it better. Is I know the podcast that I listen to, the, the 20 or so that I'm really tuned into, I, I truly feel on those podcasts that I have a relationship with those hosts. Yeah, I, I feel a kinship to them, and if I was to meet them, I feel that I could be comfortable in having conversation with them because I've listened to so much of their content that I know who they are. And of course, I've— you probably experienced it too. You meet somebody that's not a podcaster out in the community, they go up and grab you, say, hey, I listen to your show, whatever it may be. You know, we've all— I think a lot of us have had that happen. Whereas the YouTubers, I watch for entertainment. I don't feel there's any type of connection at all to them. Um, the ones that I do have a similar gut feeling as to the podcasters I listen to are the ones that are typically solo type of shows and they're talking about life and that type of stuff. They're not, they're not out jumping off cliffs, you know, that's not the kind of YouTube stuff I watch. So, um, I think we're all seeking seeking relationships. I think the world has become pretty lonely out there, you know. It used to be, you used to go to the bar and hang out and meet people and socialize, and there's just not— older people especially don't socialize, I think, as much as they used to. And, you know, and me, I feel like I'm a stranger in my own town still that I moved back to. So I don't know, it's a weird mix, you know. And people say, who are all your friends? Well, My friends are all digital. They're all online, right? Yeah, they're all digital, you know, and we see each other once or twice a year, and, you know, that's why we're so happy to see each other.

It's like a reunion, you know. Yeah, this, this focus— and what's really changed is this lack of focus on local versus beyond our local, right?

Yeah, there's no one that I— there's nobody that in my community— if there was somebody that was doing local stuff, I might watch You know, I might, but I live in such a small town.

Yeah, it's not even that. It's more like, um, each of us' connection to what's right around us has gone away. Oh, it's gone away completely. Our focus on outside of our local. Yeah, right. It's like there's no local news anymore, really. I mean, there's some, but it's usually pretty, pretty slim.

Every couple of weeks I get a knock on the door. It's usually some young individual, maybe someone 18 to 25, and they're like, hey, you know, what are you doing here? You know, I can't— do you, do you do green screen? And yeah, I said, well, I said, I really don't do commercial business unless it's for a commercial. What do you got going on? I don't even let them in. I stand outside and they probably think I'm rude as hell, but I just don't let people in the studio. And, um, the— of course, the online audience knows You know what I just put on YouTube is a walkthrough of the studio, you know, but at the same point, the— I asked folks, you got a YouTube? I asked these kids, you got a YouTube channel? What do you got? What are you on Instagram? And you use it, they'll give me their title and I'll look them up and, and you can tell they're playing around with media and having fun. And so there's potential there for someone to figure out that, hey, maybe, maybe, look, maybe we can capture the local market. I just don't know. I don't know if it's possible. I don't think— I think people know what— I think people are bored with the areas they live in. They already know what's going on for the most part, maybe. But I'm in a small, small city. Yeah, it's hard.

I just see more and more people looking at online media. Yeah, yeah. Be audio, video on all these platforms, and they're all having this common referential that they do, um, that is saying they're a podcast. And I keep hearing it over and over again on YouTube. I hear it on folks that are just doing YouTube. I hear folks just doing audio. I hear folks that are doing it on, you know, Reels.

I hope, I hope you're educating them. Well, you know, Todd, there's really only so much arguing you can do with them. Don't argue. Just, you know, just—

when they're actually putting it in the content that they're putting out to listeners. Yeah. That they consider themselves to be a podcast. And I just wonder that, you know, and I know, you know, Joe Rogan's a terrific example of what I'm talking about is that he has this huge reputation of being a podcaster, but technically he's not a podcaster. Yeah, I know. But yet he's still thought of as a video and audio creator, right? And they're calling him a podcast. So what does that mean for the future when a creator like that, that's getting billions of views a year, what kind of an impact does that have on future generations? It already has.

It already has, obviously. So that's, that's where old goats like us sound like we're living in the past. Well, no, we just didn't know. We just have to continue to say and remind people the values. You just have to remind the values of open.

Yeah, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what listeners and viewers are perceiving, right?

Well, you can pry my RSS feed from my dead bare hands.

Nobody's telling you to take your RSS feed away. It's just, it's just, I think that the consumption side is getting a lot more broad than people realize, um, in that perception of what it is.

Well, the perception is if you're on YouTube, you are a YouTuber. Right now we are live on YouTube and we are a YouTube channel.

That's the message that we're putting out for a particular reason, but that may not be how the vast majority of people see—

yeah, potentially see what we're doing, right?

Yeah, thus the hijacking of the term Is it a hijacking or is it an acceptance?

Well, I think, I think ultimately what's going to happen is the majority of podcasters are going to be disenchanted because they're going to get no growth from that platform. Well, that's, that's, that's a challenge. It's not a challenge.

That'll be a realization when a lot of people see the success of Joe Rogan and they see the success of lots of others that look a podcast, and that are getting, reaching millions of viewers on platforms like YouTube or Spotify.

They're going to see it as what it is. You know, but again, what they perceive it to be too, they, they, it'll be just like anything else, there'll be some that will do well, and some that will do nothing.

So, but Todd, me saying that has nothing to do with the viability and the, the practice of open RSS.

I'm not worried about the viability of the space from that standpoint.

It's not to take away from that.

It's to be more inclusive of what— last, last I checked, the last time I checked, the only way you could get on Apple Podcasts was with an RSS feed. And the only way you could get on 90% of the podcasting apps that are actually podcasting apps is an RSS feed.

Right. So it, it, it becomes less about the word podcast and becomes more about the technology of distribution.

It's always been about this. It's always been about the distribution.

Well, it's been about the— all I'm saying is that the word is being perceived as something more than just RSS.

So, oh, it's been that way for the public side for a long time. So, right.

So that's all I'm saying here.

I'm not trying to take away from— no, no, no. What I mean is when a creator, when someone asks them, they say, oh, I got a podcast. They're going to say, oh, what, uh, where you at on, uh, Apple? Can I subscribe to your show?

I said, oh, I'm only on YouTube.

Yeah, but increasingly people aren't asking that question. I've never been asked if I'm on YouTube ever for my podcast. So, so at some point, at some point, let's say they're expecting a certain answer. Let's, let's, let's say, let's say 7, 7 says, oh, where's your podcast on YouTube? 7 of them say, oh, here here, you can find on YouTube. And 3 of the people say, where, where's you on the podcast app? They'll make that person go, what, what, what do you mean? And guess what they're going to say? They'll make— they'll trigger them to go look if they're smart.

Sure, if they're smart. But Todd, let's play out this scenario. Let's, let's say that the content that they're producing that looks like a podcast is getting 100,000 views on YouTube. Great. Congratulations.

Without, without RSS. Yeah, that's fine.

Congratulations.

But it looks like a podcast. It's like every, every time, every time someone's on a YouTube channel that says I have a podcast, which there's been a couple of shows that I listened to on YouTube said that they're going to do a podcast. The first thing I say to them in comments is I can't find you in Apple Podcasts. Where's your podcast? Right?

I say that.

That would be an audio version distributed by RSS. And I say, where is your, where is your podcast on Apple Podcasts? I can't find you.

Right. Right.

It's a reasonable question to ask. Yeah.

So hold the flame. Educate. It's, it's another distribution opportunity that content creators have that needs to be presented to them. But increasingly they're getting confused by this term podcast. That's because we want to force them to think that the word podcast means RSS. It does. That's why I'm trying to tell you, Todd, that that's the fundamental thing.

Rob, I know. But I got to hold the line here. I know you have to hold the line. But I still have to agree with the line. Don't be a traitor.

Don't be a traitor. I started when you started, Todd. I started before you started on RSS, so I'm not a traitor.

We just, we just, everyone in this audience. If you, if you're listening to a show on YouTube that claims they're a podcast, ask them, ask them, I'm trying to subscribe to an Apple Podcast. I can't find you. Where are you at?

We would love to have you over in Apple Podcasts. Where are you? I would say, where are you at?

Get your content out on audio. I can't consume you while I'm in the car. Where's your car? Where are you at?

I don't have time to watch you all the time. That's why I'm out there, Todd, talking about this concept of a convergence strategy, which is kind of a revisit back into the earlier era of podcasting when shows put out audio and video versions. Well, and until they're true video podcasts like, like this show does.

That's right, which we are late and we need to go. You're— we are way late. You guys get entertained today? What should we do?

You guys tell us.

For Todd, what are we late for? Huh? Late? For me to get this editing done so I can get out of here.

Oh, is that what it is? Okay. I just wanted to be clear what I was making late.

Yeah, we're not late late. It's just time to— Beauty Bubbles. Todd is a tuber forever now.

Yeah, I've been on YouTube forever already. I have too.

I've had content on YouTube for over 16 years. Been on it since the beginning and none of it's ever gotten traction.

Yeah. Some of mine have.

I've got one video that's got— A quarter million. Well, that's, you know, you hit the search engines there, didn't you? I guess so. Yeah, you need to figure out how to rinse, wash, and repeat that a few times, and then you will no longer do this show.

You'll be over there doing YouTube stuff. No, I won't.

I'm still going to be a podcaster. Okay, we'll see. Just on YouTube. Oh my God, what a traitor you are. Have we pissed everybody off today?

Oh, I'm sure we have. Of course. Yeah, of course.

We didn't do our job if we didn't do that. Yeah, that's right. People did enjoy us arguing last week. So hey, we do appreciate all of you been streaming by the minute.

Chad, thank you so much. That's why we went longer, Todd, is because you're paying us by the minute.

That's right. And, uh, but yeah, feel free to, uh, use one of those new modern podcast apps and hold the line.

Hold the line. I'm going to go down with the RSS ship. No, just kidding.

Well, the RSS ship's not going anywhere, you know, because as soon as you get demonetized, deplatformed, all these things have RSS. You've got, then you go, well, you know, I think Joe Rogan's a good example here. My, my, my show said— I said something wrong on my show and they took my money away.

Right, right. If Joe doesn't do a deal with Spotify, guess what?

He has RSS to save him. So there you go. Again, do we value— do you value your freedom? This is what it's all about. Do you, do you have— here's what people— here's the the essence. Do you value your freedom of being able to put your double middle fingers up to the man and say, screw you, I don't need you? Do you value that, or do you want to roll over and be a controlled sheep? What, what do people appreciate? This is why podcasting is the way it is today. Right?

Because we are not controlled by nobody. And on this show, we're not afraid to expose what's really going on.

And no one can say no to us. Spotify can remove me, YouTube can remove me, and guess what? 99% of you are still here.

Right? Simple.

There's, there's examples of what you say. Here we are. Oh, I'll never get deplatformed. Well, maybe you won't, but I see emails come across my desk every day— well, once a week, couple times a week— crying. I got took off this platform, I got took off that platform. I get emails from Spotify saying, hey, we've removed these number of episodes because they go against our community guidelines. Yeah. And then podcasters say, hey, how come my stuff's not on Spotify? Well, they deplatformed your episode. You guys don't hear those stories because those folks don't say anything. They keep quiet, right? It's about freedom.

And being a rebel. It's a distributed platform too, Todd.

It's not vulnerable to nuclear attack. Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point.

Until your data center gets taken out. Well, hopefully you're hosted on a platform that has multiple data centers.

Well, most people are not, you know. Most people are on— you, depending where you're at, you, you usually are on one data center somewhere.

Somewhere, right? Unless you—

they're replicating content around the world. Yeah, hopefully it's backed up, replicated, but you got to pay for that replication.

So have a good backup, right? Sometime we should dive into that topic a little bit deeper.

That's right. Yeah, the backups. Yeah, I have a safety deposit box, I have a NAS, and the distributed distribution aspect of OpenRSS. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yes. Yes, we did get to the core. Here we go.

The essence is shared finally. And then there's BitTorrent, which is a whole nother conversation that many people haven't heard of, right?

Well, yeah, we used to distribute shows on BitTorrent as well. I did too, right? There's this new thing that's called IPFS. That's the true equalizer in making sure a show never is really taken down. And if you don't know what that is, then that's really— it's a really nerdy thing. But IPFS really relies on your peers, similar to BitTorrent, without having to run a whole bunch of fancy software.

So Todd, when are we ever going to talk about IPv6?

Well, we can talk about that soon.

Believe me, I've got a lot of—

a mom topic for a couple years now. But you know, those of us, those of us that are watching are watching. You know, we have a, we have a conversation about it every whip stitch at Blueberry.

Didn't, uh, Apple announce something, or Google? I can't remember.

Uh, yeah, their Google is going to be putting the— offering their own, their own VPN for browsers. Locks on IP sharing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

Let's get out of here. I'm Todd at blueberry.com, @geeknews on X, @geeknews at geeknews.chat on Mastodon. And if you love this show and I gave you that great podcast to subscribe to, send us a donation. Fiat, fun coupons, PayPal donation link is at newmediashow.com. Or get that PhD, right? Get that. That's right. $1,000 gets you that PhD in podcasting. And plus, get yourself a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. There you go.

Try.

Nice, nice host read there, Todd. That's right. Try it. You might like it. Right.

Let's have Mikey try it. Get that Fountain app.

That's right.

Podverse app.

Podverse, that too. Castamatic, a whole bunch of them over there. Pocket Casts, there's a—

there's one that you've heard of before.

Yeah, Pocket Casts is a good one. Yeah. All right.

Okay, Rob, how about you? I can be found on Twitter @RobGreenlee. I can also have my own website, robgreenlee.com. I'm back to posting articles in there again, so just, uh, and then doing lots of different content every week. I'm doing like 4 live shows a week now, so, so it's keeping me busy on that side. But, um, yeah, it's, it's fun. If you want to send me an email, you can send it to rob.greenlee@gmail.com.

I'd love to hear from you. And don't, don't get distracted by all the shiny bells and lures and little spinning things that are in the air and water. Stay the course.

Are you telling that to me, Todd, or you're telling it to everybody, all the listeners?

Yeah, stay the course, stay focused. The audience is still here. They haven't left for YouTube. They are here with us today. Build your show.

All right, everybody, even though they're watching us on YouTube, so, uh, sorry, not very many.

So speak for yourself, Todd. All right, good, good. Well, it's okay. Hey, those of you on Rob Greenlee's channel, if you're watching Make sure you just look for Geekness Central and New Media Show. Come over and subscribe to my channel too, right?

All right, we'll see you guys later. Okay, all right, bye-bye.