Video Podcasts and YouTube Podcasting Deep Dive and More! #561 | New Media Show 10/18/23

Okay, we're just about ready here. Todd and Rob in the afternoon.

Hey, afternoon delight with Todd and Rob.

Oh yeah, and that's— oh no, because I had to do it old school way because I set up a RODECaster Duo this morning, Rob, and when I press the button to play the audio, it goes—

Yeah, and I can't hear it on my end. So it's kind of a weird deal.

Yeah, there's, you know, that's, you know, you think you just— oh, you're just gonna plug it in and just put the things in and work just great. And no, it does not. So, uh, you know, such is life. And, uh, You know, really, I'm gonna— I've only put it here for one show because I'm going to use this for when I travel. This is going to be my box of travel, but I wanted to get everything kind of juiced in. And but you know, this box is much more complicated than the original RODECaster Pro. This thing's got—

it's really, it's really what? It's complicated on the software side, right?

It's got lots, lots more bells and whistles., per se. And I didn't realize how actually how much more it had, but it is what it is. But here we are, we are live and lit. We're back with another edition of the New Media Show. And boy oh boy, I, I, my dandruff, my dandruff is up. And be honest with you, tomorrow—

that's saying something, Todd, for you.

That's not, you know, I I get ornery every once in a while, but we're getting briefed. Apparently all the podcast hosts are getting briefed tomorrow by YouTube. And that's what I heard. And they sent some supplementary info over and my eyes started seeing red. And, you know, here's the thing. They're not going to be happy with what we recommend to our podcasters.

That's probably not entirely aligned with their priorities.

Well, I'm sure, but I was, you know, I, I, number one, the way they want to validate their account, I did say to them, I said, you do know that Apple Podcasts has basically deprecated the iTunes email, that that has been, that's going away in Apple Podcasts. You do realize that because that's how they're going to verify. You got to have your iTunes email address in your account when you submit an RSS feed. And I'm like, you know, that has been deprecated, hasn't gone away completely yet, but a bunch of us have already implemented removal. So I made the comment, maybe you should support the Podcasting 2.0 text tag. And I'm sure they have nary a clue about what that even means. And, and then I kind of went on a rant. And this is before the meeting. And, you know, about their advertising policy, about not allowing any programmatic ads in front of the content, about caching. I'm serious now, if you don't already have a podcast— or you have, excuse me, a YouTube channel, you're not going to get any stats from YouTube. You're going to have to go to their stats because they're not going to give any stats back to the podcast host. At least I don't think so. And they're definitely not going to be IEB certified. At least I don't think so.

You know, are they even members of the IAB?

I, I have no clue. Um, their revenue numbers could probably fund IAB based upon membership levels by itself. Um, but it's, it's a, it's a situation here where you got to be careful what you wish for, podcasters. I'm not telling you that you shouldn't submit your RSS feed to YouTube. I'm not telling you shouldn't, but I'm telling you, you should really think about it. 97% of podcasters will never meet the threshold. This is my main kicker. 97% of podcasters will never meet the listening threshold to earn money on YouTube, yet they are going to monetize around your content. How many ads are going to play in your content? You don't know. You can do a host endorsed ad in your content. It appears, but you, you will— they will monetize on top of your content. So you have to think about, is it worth it? If you don't have a YouTube channel already, is it worth it to give up your audience's privacy? Number 1. Number 2, is it worth letting them take every dollar that they earn off you and keep that? Number 2. And number 3, it is going to require extra work because my understanding is when an episode is ingested over there, you're still going to have to go to YouTube and make the episode live. Because it's, it's going to come into their system as pending. It's not going— my understanding is it's not automatically going to be live. So you're still going to have to go over and you're still going to have to set whether there's advertising in your content. So there's going to be extra steps you're going to have to do for every episode.

Have you done this meeting with them already?

No, but they provided some information that's publicly available.

Oh, okay. Yeah, because it's— there's still a couple of big questions. Um, I'm, I'm wondering, they want your RSS feed, but the question I have is, what are they doing with that RSS feed? Um, what are they doing to the content in that RSS feed? Are they converting that MP3 into a video file?

My understanding is yes.

Okay, well, that would be consistent with the messaging that I've gotten from the YouTube team over the last year. Was is that they're not going to be making audio available, right, on YouTube Music, but it's going to look like it's audio, but it's actually a video file. I think so. Yeah, so they'll have the ability to just hit play and you'll be able to play the video, but it will have an audio-like experience, right? So, and not that that makes a huge difference really in the scheme of things. Um, but it also, um, I, I don't believe it gives you the opportunity to make it a visual video though. Um, no, with, or does it display like your thumbnail?

You'll have to go in and update your post and you'll have to, understanding if you want to make it something nice, you'll have to replace the the, the media, right?

So, which is almost like starting over with an episode, because there's no mechanism that I know of in YouTube that allows you to replace a prior published, um, any type.

Yeah, might be right.

So you have to delete that one and add a whole new one, and that basically deletes all your metrics from the prior version of it, but it doesn't and coalesce those together.

But my whole point on all this is you're giving up a lot. You're giving up a lot. And are they going to pull a bait and switch like Spotify did? That's the question. Now, the only thing that's different with Spotify is we at Blueberry, we have pass-through agreements.

So when you say bait and switch, what do you—

well, they're going to come— well, from my perspective, is it, you know, they, they're going to come back later and say, well, in order to do this, you have to do it through YouTube. Like Spotify. Now, if you want video, you have to be on Spotify. You have to publish on Spotify.

Right. Publish direct to them.

Right. Right. So, and they're not going to take video feeds. That's the thing I kind of laughed about. So as my, my video podcast feed will not work.

Well, neither of them, um, Spotify or YouTube are embracing video feeds, which is kind of, kind of silly when you think about it.

So, so my, my actual podcast video feed cannot be submitted to YouTube, which seems a little bit, um, off the mark a little bit. So considering it's a video platform, and my, and my input to them was I have had nary a call with YouTube. They Maybe they've been talking to other people.

Yeah, I've, I've met with them out here in New York. This was probably a year ago though. And then I've seen them at Podcast Movement a few times.

Yeah. But it's just, again, they haven't had direct conversations where there's been this one-on-one. I have not had a one-on-one with YouTube at all. So I'm not—

I do know that there was an announcement about a year ago that Lipson had a had a relationship with them that would provide metrics back.

So is it— so it's all you— it's all Lipson's fault?

I don't know that it's Lipson's fault. I think Lipson may have been a little bit ahead of the curve on this, trying to get them to send them data, um, back on based on the, the plays on the platform, right, into the Lipson kind of metrics backend. I don't Actually, right at this moment, I'm not sure that that relationship still exists. Um, I haven't gone over there to check on it, but, but it was announced.

This was probably 8 months ago, probably. 1,701 sats from— I'm not going to say who, but they said F YouTube. So, you know, they're right in, right in the comments immediately. Comes some, comes some, some podcaster feedback. Mm-hmm. So, but again, it's going to be the little shiny object. We've already got podcasters asking, how do we submit an RSS feed to YouTube? They're all excited about it. Yeah, but I don't think we're going to make it a destination. We might have instructions on the website on how to do it, or maybe we'll point towards YouTube's own documentation, but I don't think we're going to have it as an official destination in our destination menu. I don't want to internally endorse what they're doing here.

Well, a lot of ways, some of this process is already existing. Um, I know that Libsyn and some of the other platforms have, um, a pathway to publish into, right, to YouTube right now.

That's fine. That's fine. So for their YouTube channel, no problem. And again, this, this show right now, we're streaming live on YouTube. We got people there listening on YouTube. I have no problem with that.

No, no, through the API relationship.

Right, right, right. I know, I know.

But again, so a lot of the platforms have this ability to check. But the problem is I post to Twitter.

But the thing is, for us, the value of sending audio YouTube is worthless. They, you know, you go to the podcast section of YouTube right now and what is all, it's all videos. There's no audio podcasts there. They're not surfacing those.

Well, let's, Todd, let's talk, talk high level here. Um, what is YouTube known for? They're known for, for video experiences, right? Right. So what they're trying to do here is get more audio experiences into YouTube, which is which I think they've been thinking that this aligns with the YouTube Music side, right?

Yeah.

Okay. So not so much the YouTube.com property, but the YouTube Music property is where this is being thought of, right? And this is a way for them to hack their system to create kind of an audio experience in really what is a video file, but that process actually breaks the ecosystem of podcasting, which has always been the debate here is like, well, if they're going to convert it to video, it can never be a pass-through, right? So, so there was never an opportunity for the audio podcasting space to actually have a pass-through relationship with YouTube, even though there's been rumors in the last couple of months that YouTube is talking about pass-through. But I'm— I don't see a practical way of doing that if they're converting everything to video.

So let me just state my opinion. So it's clear and on the record, Google has a horrible, horrible track record when it comes to RSS. It abandoned Feed Validator. It killed Feed Reader. Now, most of you have no idea what I'm talking about, right? Why was it canceled? Because it allowed people like me to have a list of great set of resources, blogs, podcasts, everything else, and then be able to go to the website like Geek News Central, like NewMediaShow.com, like Blueberry.com, like Libsyn, all these sites that had blogs and information. It allowed me to go to those sites and go to their websites, and they killed it because Google did not want people leaving their property.

Right. This is the same situation with Spotify.

Google has killed Google Podcasts. Why? Which finally has gained traction and allowed podcasters a way to get Android users to subscribe to their podcast. What I would say easily, right? And they're killing it. This track record makes me and many others not trust Google and what they're doing with this YouTube initiative. And the simple hijacking of the podcast name when there was no RSS being supported these many, many months is another issue I could have take with, but we can leave that. That's just a Todd thing, right? Most listeners don't care. I'm a strong advocate for privacy. And now Google's going to have more information about your subscribers. And as a hosting provider, we're really getting screwed. We got screwed when we helped populate Spotify and then they started competing against us, which is what I fully expect Google and YouTube to do down the line. At the same time, I've been supportive of the— to help Android adoption through subscribeonandroid.com, where we allowed podcasters on Android to have the same one-click subscribe function that Apple has had since 2005. Now, once again, we have to retrain, retrain Android users on alternative apps. Google's purposely sabotaged listening on Android. My podcast is at Blueberry Enjoy, 6 to 9% Android penetration because of Google Podcasts. And now they're killing it.

Well, Todd, I'm not sure that they are purposely sabotaging—

they are purposely sabotaging because if you are, if you are listening to a podcast on Android with the Google Podcast app, when it goes away, you are now going to have to find another app and subscribe to the shows that you are subscribed to on your Android device. They are purposely sabotaging Android. Well, they're trying to move people over.

Absolutely they are. In YouTube Music. I wouldn't— I think sabotage is kind of—

It's sabotage. I love the word because as a podcaster who's been promoting Google Podcast, which I should have never promoted, Should have never promoted knowing their history. Shame on me. I should have learned this a long time ago. I should have been sending people to Overcast and Pocket Cast and to any other Android app.

Yeah, but that's not what your users wanted though, Todd, or your podcasters. What your podcasters wanted you to do was support Google. And I think back, if you think back to it, we were thinking that this was the second coming.

It was. And they've already— in, in my—

for mine, you can't really second-guess yourself on that because I think just the scale of Google was an opportunity.

So now, now podcasters, if you're not telling your audience to find another podcast app today, what happens when Google Podcasts goes away? You're going to have an extinction event with your Android users using Google Podcasts. You need to tell them to move because Google has done this asinine thing of killing Google Podcasts, all in an attempt, all an attempt to move everyone to YouTube. So guess what? They can control the audience. They know the audience. They can monetize against the audience.

We didn't even really— wait, dug entirely into that.

Wake up! You gotta, you gotta think down the road. YouTube is hot.

YouTube, the expectation of Google is, is that any any feed that is submitted to them is basically, um, not going to include any dynamic advertising. That's right, absolutely. Which on, on the surface makes sense, because if you do support it, you're going to have a bunch of old ads in your permanent stored content.

So what they're going to do is they're going to serve advertising around that that you're not going to get paid for, right?

But Todd, that's That's, that's the consequence of it. But yeah, more from a hosting platform standpoint, Blueberry, Lipson, all these, they're going to have to create a separate version.

I'm not doing it.

I'm not doing it. Then, then your, your customers are going to submit shows over there that have permanent ads.

They're going to have to, they're going to have to know. Now there's other ways, there's other tricks we can use to serve a clean episode. Without—

well, that— yeah, that's all I'm saying is that it's a clean version that goes into YouTube.

But the problem is the pro— and I'm not going to create a new feed for that. That's asinine. I can do through technology, right? Okay, but the, the situation—

however you want to do it, right? I think, uh, Lipson is going to create a unique feed.

That's dumb. That's, that's the stupidest thing ever.

Yeah, but that's what they do for all their destinations.

That's still stupid. That's a form of lock-in. I've said that for years. That was a marketing ploy to get people stuck on Libsyn and having 10 feeds or 10 different destinations. I've always said that that was acidine. As long as I can detect the user agent, I can send a clean audio feed to them without having another feed. That's on me.

Sure, it's technically possible to do that, right?

Yeah, so, but YouTube is not taking any input. I'm happy we're getting briefed, but they're not going to like— again, my public stance on this is, yeah, we're going to tell you how to submit, and it'll be up to you to make sure you follow their rules so that you don't get kicked off their platform, right? And you're going to have to do these extra steps. So I don't care what the data says. Majority of podcasters are getting no traction at YouTube. All the studies in the whole world can come out and say YouTube is gaining us new listeners. Where? If you're an average podcaster that has a YouTube channel now that's using great metadata, ask your audience, did you discover me on YouTube? Are you listening to me on YouTube? Ask, and guess what you're going to hear? Crickets. I might be old school thinking on this, but I'm not convinced that this is—

I think Tom Webster had a good take in his Sounds Profitable newsletter today.

Oh, I want to hear.

I didn't read it. Yeah, I think the more I think about it, the more I think he's probably right on the mark on this. And I made a public tweet about it. Earlier today. Um, but the key takeaway from his article is kind of two things. There's, he feels like, um, you know, since a lot of the really big podcast shows are on YouTube as well, right? So there's this overweight kind of experience that listeners have that finding a podcast on YouTube is overweighted towards like maybe the top. Yeah, of course it is.

100 shows, right? And it means nothing else to anyone else, right?

And then the, the other part of this is that he feels like that the YouTube platform, if you really think about all the creators over there, they're really, um, the creators over there are actually names, like people, right? Not shows per se, right? So when you think about even Even my channel on, on YouTube is named Rob Greenlee. It's not named the name of my show, though it could, right? Um, that, that, that is an option. But his argument is, is that really YouTube is a place for, um, to discover a particular podcast host, right? A personality. I mean, if I look at my own channel, I've got 4 different podcasts in my channel on on YouTube. So it's not like I'm focused on one show to drive people to that show. It's more like people that want to hear what I have to say go to YouTube to hear a variety of content. And I'm not saying that's entirely what's going on here, but it's, it's a symbol. And I think he may be a little bit onto something here that people, uh, watch a lot of Joe Rogan on YouTube, even though he's not a podcast on Joe Rogan.

They watch clips because he doesn't have his full show on YouTube.

YouTube. So, right, but, but people are finding the personalities and the names that they associate with podcasting over there. So it's not even full episodes.

So is Tom having a change of heart on YouTube? So, by the way, 10,000 sats from Adam Curry: the YouTube talk is killing me. Well, I, I know it is, Adam, but we have to hammer this home that this is not necessarily a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, and there's a whole nother layer of topic here when it's, when it comes to even what's going on in YouTube from the standpoint of the creators on YouTube as well, which isn't even part of this conversation yet. It's like, well, once you're a creator over there, and there's a strong history of YouTube, you know, uh, taking more of the of the ad revenue.

Yeah, of course.

They take a huge amount of time. They did the same thing with AdSense. They've done the same thing over the years is that the creators, as they, as they grow, get a smaller chunk.

So this is why 2,222 sats for Mike Dell. Google no longer uses Don't Be Evil. This is where the, we come back, where we come back.

Yeah, so it's a very powerful platform. Let's be entirely frank about it. I mean, it's, it's, it's the number 2 search engine in the world, and it is probably— I would consider it the number 1 search engine for, for media content, for how-to.

Yeah, I think Kidrian says my greatest concern is Google and YouTube censorship history. That's another thing.

Well, that's another element to this too, is the moderation over there, and they content blocking and the—

the open. So what, really, Google's really not supporting RSS? Because if your RSS feed changes, they don't do nothing. You have to still go in. They're using it as the initial, you know, gulp.

It's a way to grab content.

Yeah. And but on their platform, and they're not going to update your show name, they're not going to update anything else. You're going to have to go in and manually do that. It's just a matter and it'll wait. So it really, it's not even the only thing they're doing it is, and you don't even get published automatically. Again, you have to approve the episode, you know?

Well, and also Todd, one other piece of this that they haven't explained is what they're going to do with all of the RSS feeds that were in Google Podcasts. Are they going to automatically migrate those over to YouTube Music or are they going to expect podcasters to get in and claim it.

Like I said, we'll find out more tomorrow, but I'm sure that knowing them, there'll be some sort of an extinction event over on Google Podcasts.

That's my guess. You know, on the surface of that, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do that.

Um, but guess what?

They did a lot of stuff they're doing doesn't make any sense because it still makes sense for Google to be a place where people can find podcasts, right? I mean, to completely strip it out of Google, it kind of flies against the face of it. It should be a resource to link to shows potentially in Google Music, right? Or in YouTube Music.

Who knows? It's going to be a cluster anyway because—

or into Apple or into Spotify.

It should still do all that, right? Open RSS and what we have built is going to carry us no matter what these folks do for forever many years ahead. We don't have to worry about these folks. You do what you want to do. You do you, boo, for where you want your show to be consumed, how you want it to be consumed, but Again, um, we're— again, we have to remember that the success, the absolute unequivocal success, and the trust that just came out in report that we've established as podcasters with audiences is because there's been no gatekeepers. There's no one that's been able to say, Todd, you can't publish your show. Rob Greenlee, you can't publish your show. Susie, you can't publish your show and make it available for syndication to whatever platform you want. This is what OpenRSS has allowed. Right. And we need to not lose sight of that and not look at the little shiny dangly, you know, silver bar that's being waved in front of you that will probably end up being a lump of coal. Better the word is the diamond they're shining. That's a better analogy. The diamond they're shining in front of you. And yet in the end, you end up with a lump of coal in your basket for Christmas because they want your listeners. They want more metadata on your listeners. They want to monetize against your listeners, and they don't want to pay you nothing unless you achieve 4,000 listening hours or whatever it is in a 12-month period.

They're a for-profit business, so they're going to squeeze you as much as they can.

And they're not going to— and they're going to treat you just like Spotify treats your music artists, giving them, giving them trinkets for millions of plays. And if you want to be a YouTuber, be a YouTuber, right? If you want to be a podcaster, you can be a podcaster, but just understand the price you may pay by shifting your audience. You know, this is the, this is the, this is the, this would be my worry scenario.

Yeah, but are you, um, you could blanket statement to say that we're gonna, we're gonna shift everybody over to, okay, well, to YouTube, right? Because Apple's still dominant.

I know, I know. But, but a lot of people spend a lot of time in YouTube. I do. I watch a lot of videos.

Right. And I want to be found over there as well.

And, but so all of a sudden, you know, Todd's Geek News Central listeners are watching whatever they're watching. So I can just check out, I don't need to, I can just use YouTube to play Todd's podcast instead of using a podcast app. Which they can already.

But Todd, I think that the bigger, the bigger topic here should be that YouTube needs to take its proper place in our media distribution strategy, right? Um, given its percentage of utilization or access, right, it's got this overweight perception that it's this top destination for discovery of podcasts, per se. It's not. But I, like Tom said, and I tend to agree with him, is that it's overweight towards like the top 100 podcasts, right? And that's what's driving this perception. It doesn't, that perception doesn't drive down to, you know, the top 200,000 shows in podcasting.

I agree completely. So I agree.

So that's, that's what I'm talking about. We need to put it in its proper position. And if you want to take a YouTube strategy, build a channel, do some unique content over there, and maybe do some crossover, maybe do some live, that's its proper place in our podcasting strategy. But it's not the only place, and it shouldn't be our focus, right?

And meanwhile, You can watch this show right now on a brand new Fandango podcast app over at podcastapps.com. We're live streaming on the same type of podcast app that you consume the content when you're driving down the road. And just like Adam Curry is doing right now, you could be sending us 20 sats per minute to the show. We want to thank Adam for doing that, watching live. And, you know, and, and the boosts that come in. And, you know, there is— and again, don't give up your PayPal donations. I have an idea. I'm actually stealing this. Adam's gonna laugh. So, Rob, you know, we've always talked about getting a PhD in podcasting, right?

So are we going to start printing certificates and mailing them out?

Is that what we're going to do, Todd? I'm stealing this. I'm stealing this from No Agenda Show. If you send in a $1,000 donation to the New Media Show— hey, if you're going to get a PhD, it's going to cost you a lot more than that, right? Okay. If you send in a— and Rob, we got to get this design. We got to get this certificate designed. So maybe we can have ChatGPT make us a certificate. I don't know. We'll have to figure it out. We're going to make a certificate.

We should make plaques or something. Something, not just paper certificates.

That's right. Well, for a while, that's— no, no, that raises overhead. We'll give them a nice, nice, highly high thread count printed PhD in podcasting. For a $1,000 donation, you as a listener of this show can officially get your PhD in podcasting.

Okay. And a stack of New Media Show stickers too.

Well, because we're both going to have to sign this. You're going to have to sign it and I'm going to have to sign it. So, you know, we're going to have to figure out legit. Can't be a, you know, what you call auto pen signature. It has to be a real signature on this document. Right. You will get a PhD in podcasting. An official— you'll have a PhD in podcasting from the School of the New Media Show.

So are we gonna have to register with the government for being an educational institution?

Not at all. Nope. And so you, you'll be able to display this where, you know, it's, it's a value. It's a— because there is no PhD in podcasting. We are the origins of the PhD in podcasting. And, uh, so for a $1,000 donation Um, and we'll have to get— if we can't let them— that's one thing, we can't show the certificates online because someone would just copy them. So we don't want any counterfeits going out there.

Well, somebody's gonna share it, right?

Tom's proud of it, right? Tom says, wow, did I waste a lot of money on degrees. Who knew I could get a PhD for $1,000?

What a steal, quite literally.

And, you know, and we might even do some honorary PhDs. Tom might be a candidate for an honorary PhD in podcasting. I I think Tom would probably be a good candidate for that.

So, yeah. So Tom's been around this medium a long time.

We've talked about this for years that you listen long enough and see this is this. You don't have to go back and listen to 560 episodes. You can just send us the money and it's— oh, there you go. How much for just a New Media Show sticker? $5.55. I actually still owe some New Media stickers to some people. It tells you how bad I am. I am not one that should be in charge of the admin stuff. It's— I'm—

we need to issue like a, like a, a PhD exam or something like that.

No, they have to know. No, not at all. Just, just the $1,000 donation to the show. Okay. And Satoshis or PayPal, either one. We'll take them both. Wow. That would be a lot of Satoshis. We have enough— what do you call it— liquidity to handle that. So don't worry. So anyway, a little more lighthearted here. So, yeah, and I think we could probably issue a few honorary PhDs. So I am not an artist. So if anyone out there wants to help us with the, with the artist part of this and designing something that looks like would come from a like Harvard or someplace like that. It'll be a nice, you know, nice— can't be bigger than 8 by 10 though, so we want to make it 8 by 10. Um, you know, that's, that's the, you know, a legal size. Or is that— no, that's not legal, that's letter. I don't know, letter size, I think.

It could be a, could be a legal size certificate, right?

It could be. But anyway, 5555 Sats from Medus. How much for just a new media sticker? Well, we set that out a long time ago, but I hate to say the thing because I still owe 2 people stickers. Oh, so I've been negligent on my admin duties. I, you know, we need an administrative assistant if anybody wants. And that fact, if anyone wants to be our administrative assistant, I will add you to the split and you can be in my administrative assistance to be able to send out stickers and that kind of stuff. That's about the time, talent, and treasure. You know, if you can give us some of your time by helping us out by being an administrative assistant. I'm too busy making sure I make payroll every 2 weeks.

But anyway, so we may get a lot of, a lot of people stepping up for that. So you, we would be creating kind of like a New Media Show army is what we'd be creating somewhat, right?

Yeah. Todd Rob, the show's not live on Fountain right now. It says it's going live in 20 minutes. I don't know what's going on with that. I think we have a lot. Yeah, we're live. We sent the live bat signal and we have not switched. We're still on Eastern Daylight Time. So, uh, I don't know. I think it's a time zone thing right now. Yeah. So everything has been— the bat signal's been sent out because we are in EDT right now, right? Yeah, yeah. So I don't know why that's the case. Let's— oh, here comes another boost. What was that boost? Still waiting on my stickers. I'll pass on this blatant plagiarism. That's what Adam said. Another 10,000 sats. Hey, you know what it is? You have to steal the best ideas. Flattery And plus, they're given— what's happening here, where this idea came from, the No Agenda Show, John C. Dvorak came up with the idea of giving a PhD in media. Oh boy, I'm gonna— I'm now— I'm gonna be in trouble. Um, oh my God. Oh, and it's gonna kill me.

Anyway, it's involved in the No Agenda's, uh, well, they're constantly kind of beating up on the media, aren't they?

Well, yeah, they— and, and the word is slipping through my tongue here. Maybe someone will help me in, in chat. Uh, media deconstruction. A PhD in media deconstruction. That's what they're giving. So, matter of fact, uh, the No Agenda show is celebrating its 1,600th episode, I think. Tomorrow. So you can get on that by sending $1,000 to No Agenda Show and you will get a PhD in media deconstruction. So when I heard that, I was like, oh, oh, oh, that, that sounds like a fun thing for us to do. Yeah. So David says, ah, yes, I'm still waiting for my sticker pack. See, I gotta write some notes down because I— that's actually— I'm— I owe 3 people stickers. Adam too, after I specifically asked him for his address twice. Horrible. Anyway, okay, so that was the fun thing I wanted to talk about after us bashing— me bashing on YouTube. But I do agree with Tom's assessment. Yeah.

And it's given an overweight perception to YouTube's significance in podcasting is that these really huge shows are doing a lot of this convergence strategy. They're doing stuff on YouTube as well as in their podcast. And lots and lots of people are thinking that that 100 or 200 shows is pretty much all of podcasting.

And it's not. Yeah. And it's not. And the thing too is, is you have, um, two different strategies. We've talked about this previous episodes. We can— you can go back and listen to the back catalog on this show. We've talked about you need two different strategies if you want to build a successful YouTube channel. So did you know, Rob, this, this comes as like the most shocking, the most shocking discovery ever, that podcasters are the most treated personalities in the United States. Most trusted. Most trusted. Right. The second most trusted are those YouTubers. Right. And the data was released by ACast. And again, it goes back to what I said last week. As AI becomes more prevalent and AI is putting out more articles and more content, at some point people are— it's like your show, The Trust Factor. Are you still doing that or has that faded?

Okay. So, no, no, I'm still doing it.

So we have original voices now. You like it or not, we're pretty original voice here. Yeah, definitely. Send me another email with your, with your address and, and put it, put a really explicative subject line on so it really catches my attention. Like, hey, beep, or something like that.

Okay. Well, Todd, I think that, that, that comment you made that podcasters are the most trusted personalities among US consumers is really a lot of the reason why we've seen kind of audiences decline in mainstream media, um, is because people are gravitating increasingly over to, you know, more normal people, people that are doing niche content, doing more authentic and real and trying to, you know, do the best they can to say what is really going on in the world. And this whole free— that's why free speech and these online platforms is so important, um, in a lot of ways. Now, there's a lot of people that disagree with the fact that we shouldn't allow certain speech on these platforms, but that does fly in the face of, uh, you know, the principles of the United States, uh, where We are open to express ourselves. Not that doesn't cause us not to be liable for the things that we say or face consequences from the things that we say. It's just we shouldn't be denied saying things that people don't like. And I think that's the challenge that we all face in the media landscape today, is that if we don't like what's being said in mainstream media, guess what? We're moving over to independent media because we trust them more than what we're being told in mainstream media. So, you know, that, that's why this is important. And, you know, YouTube is certainly part of that.

So let me just give you some perspective. So I flew out last Friday.

What day did I fly?

You flew to Seattle, flew to Seattle on Thursday, I guess. Yeah. Or no. Yeah, I know. I flew Friday morning and, uh, got into Seattle, drove the pass and the wild drive over to Wenatchee and And just basically, we stayed in the house.

We— yeah, I used to live over there.

I love that area. I loved on my little daughter, and we did do a little Oktoberfest in town and went and had a few beers. But, um, you know, just loved on my new grandbaby and had a good time. And, um, so we were, we were kicking the YouTube quite a bit, and I was introducing my daughter to some of the YouTube channels I watch. And but we got to talking about the situation in Israel and, and we flipped on a couple of YouTube videos that were mainstream media. And you know what ended up happening was the tension in the room went way up and anxiety went way up. And my daughter put it to— she—

was there a difference of opinion? No, things—

no, not necessarily. But it was just like my daughter's like, turn that crap off. Oh, she says this is just, you know, she says it's just, it's given such a— she just, it's too much, you know. And, and I agreed with her, you know, and I have really, really tried hard to stay off of mainstream media. And, you know, Adam, if you're listening, God bless you for having to, you know, cipher through all that sewage. It is not good for you. This, this, this content is not good for you. It's not healthy. And so we switched to more positive content and we had a great time and hung out and had great conversations. And but it was just the vibe and the spiel and the— and this and that and showing the protest and all— it was all this stuff, you know. And, um, and it wasn't about either sides of that whole conflict or nothing. It was just the motif of the content. And again, I go back to, I think people are seeking out content that doesn't make them go, you know, and and not so politicized and entertaining and informational and, you know, talking about what's really going on. And well, you want to watch what's really going on, just watch TikTok, you know. That's, that's where the real information is, frankly. Also on, on X too, you can see a lot of stuff over there too, you know. And of course, you know, everyone's down on X right now. They want to— they're doing everything they can to kill that, but I think that it's, you know, this going back about trust. Again, I think it's just going to grow. I think it's, I think it's, I think podcast consumption is, and we have to, as podcasters, we have to market this as such, that we're original voices. You know, obviously, if you're running advertising on your show, you might be holding back on some stuff. So, you know, people also have to understand that. And that's where the value for value piece comes in. If you're supporting a show either through PayPal or writing a check or Time Talent Treasure, you're sending Satoshis, you're supporting a show that doesn't have advertising, you're allowing those content creators to have— if you're a listener, you're allowing those content creators to gain value back from you and not have to necessarily take advertising. And be able to say what they want to say without being constrained. You know, when I was active duty in the Navy, Rob, there was many stories that I saw in tech news that I couldn't cover because of my job and what I did and the security clearance I had. And there was stuff that was just too close, stuff that I would have loved to talk about, but it was that little 10% more of information I knew that if I made a mistake and said something, I was going to jail. So I just didn't talk about those stories because I didn't risk it. And that's what happens now with a lot of shows and this thing with this YouTube. You're going to send your content over there. If you're going to be 100% true and tell your opinion, you may be pulled down.

Yeah, there's a risk of that. And that's, that's also a risk to trust, um, of getting in a situation where you're on a platform that doesn't allow you to be your genuine self, right? And what you really believe, and you're always self-censoring yourself, you're kind of doing your audience a disservice in a lot of ways. And that over time will create the same thing that's happened with mainstream media, where people over there take a certain position on things because that's what's accepted, right? And that's what's expected. Unfortunately, the content moderation side of things causes that type of atmosphere where people filter what they say and they only say certain things because they, they know that their content is going to get taken down if they say anything different than that.

Right.

And I'm not sure that we want a society and a world where, where, you know, someone else is deciding what's okay for us to think about. I'm not sure that's a good society to have.

Tom says, if I'm granted an honorary PhD in podcasting, am I allowed to have a show called The Podcast Doctor. I think that sounds like a YouTube hit. Well, maybe it would be. Actually, you know, you know, Tom, I hope you went out and looked for that domain name already.

You know what? Podcast just got it if you didn't.

No, I haven't looked for it. I haven't searched for it, but podcasterdoctor.com, I would 99% guess it's already been taken.

Uh, maybe we should rename this show to Podcast doctorate.

No. David says, you flew to Seattle? I bet your arms are tired. Absolutely. He has lots of flapping to get there.

Yep. You got to fly over the Cascade Mountains too. So you had to go up quite a bit.

You know, Rob, what is the deal with the price of gas? I paid $5. I don't care about gas, Todd. $5.16. I know you're one of those.

Greenies. Um, no, I just don't care about gas.

It's not that I'm a greenie, so even though it's in my name, so I know.

All right.

Um, the, um, yeah, podcast doctors already purchased, but I think I paid $5.69 for gas or $5.49. I only pay— the gas pump here was $3.27.

In Michigan.

I was like, wow, it's that West Coast tax.

You know, I think it's like $3.49 here.

Yeah, I think, but something like that, like $5 something. Wow. Uh, Tom, if you want thepodcastdoctor.com, it's available on GoDaddy for $2,795. $2,795. So it can be purchased. Um, So I did look just now. The, um, well, again, I— you, you already heard my experience with a Tesla, so, uh, yeah, yeah.

And I don't think you had a good, uh, good experience.

No, I did not have a good experience. And the— and this town, I actually asked somebody recently, there's now 2 chargers, but one of them are broke in my town. 2 public chargers and one's broken. This town of 25,000 people.

So I'm sure it's, it's probably not a Tesla charger. It's probably, you know, Charger America.

Yeah. It's one of the closest Tesla chargers, 32 miles, I think. Yeah. It's in Angola from my location.

Angola, Indiana. Oh, okay. So I was going to say Angola seems like a long way.

Yeah. That's a long way to get a Tesla charger. But, but, um, yeah, I don't know. And Tom says, yeah, I'm good. But that actually sounds like a pretty good show name, actually. The Podcast Doctor. We could be the Podcast Doctors. That would actually be a good, good show name.

You could start a show on YouTube, right? Yeah. No.

Yeah. No, no. What else was I going to talk about? Um, but anyway, I got off my chest what I had on my chest about YT.

Yeah, it was a little entertaining to see this post in, uh, Pod News, um, from yesterday. It says, uh, how can you make a whole podcast just using AI? No microphone required. And then also this comment that Your next co-host could be an AI. So did you have a hard time finding a real co-host? You can just get an AI to banter with you on a podcast.

Well, I think we talked about that on this show. Did you, did you listen to it? No, I haven't. I didn't listen to it either. But I'm sure it was a lot of work. Yeah, but you know, the way these tools are moving, Yeah.

Who knows? I mean, I, I mean, increasingly you can have conversations with these ChatGPT and other, you know, Bard and whatever. You can have a conversation with them. And I've been increasingly testing that water. And plus now you can upload a image and it will analyze and interpret the image for you and give you, you know, I used it on some podcast art to tell me, what, um, how this podcast art, uh, would appeal or what its perception is to human beings. And it'll analyze the artwork and it'll tell you, you know, its tendency, its colors and its shapes and its font and the expression on the face of the person in the artwork. And it will give you kind of like an outline of what the— what it sees as the perception of a human of looking at that artwork. I thought it was really interesting that it had that ability. I mean, it appears to be pretty accurate. The ones that I, I analyzed.

Well, we're gonna— we haven't— I know you guys don't hear about AI, but we've got Zoom going here, right? And I've got the new— because we, we pay for Zoom commercial, so I have the Zoom AI working right now., and we will get a summary of this episode, uh, from Zoom. And I'm going to see how good it is and if it will make sense to be able to put it in the show notes, uh, after the show's over. About 2 minutes after the show's over, I'll get an email with the summary, and, uh, I'll probably have to do some editing because you and I usually talk about little things beforehand, a little things after, so I won't be able to be able to generate a transcript from it, but it—

Yeah, so what's the scope of the AI companion tool in Zoom?

What it does, right? It creates a summary. Just that. It's definitely designed for summaries of meetings. So essentially we're having a meeting per se, but still be curious to see what the output of that is, if it's anything usable and will save me any steps. So this is, this is what I've been worried about. So any podcaster today that is paying for Zoom can turn this on, and they will get a summary of their podcast without using a third-party service. So, you know, all those companies that are building stuff that does some of this stuff, essentially it's included. And if it's good enough, you might for average podcaster, you might have a pretty good output. So again, I think what we're seeing here is services can be made obsolete. It's just like ChatGPT now. Their generative art creation in ChatGPT Plus, if you're paying for it, is pretty much on the level of Midjourney. So, you know, again, things are in flux about every 4 weeks.

Things, things change here. Well, Todd, like we've said many times on this show, as we've looked back at the history of podcasting, there's been companies that have come and gone that we've said on this show many times were features, not companies. Yeah, right. And I think this is another example of it, is that there are capabilities that are out there that are being built by individual companies, that are going to be integrated into the bigger platforms and basically make those— hate to say it— those smaller companies kind of hard to compete in the market because these bigger platforms are going to adopt the same technology and integrate them.

I, you know, I had an interview with Sam Setti from Pod— I think it's Pod News Weekly. I think that's the— was the episode I was on, right? And with James, right? Well, James was not— it was just Sam and I, and, uh, So maybe it was—

yeah, but he plays it, I think, with James at a later time.

Yeah. And, um, the, um, we had an extensive discussion, was about 50 minutes or so. And, uh, the, um, I'm scrolling through my X feed here, um, and there's an interesting dialogue, but the I basically said, if you are a podcast hosting company, which is now a commodity because there's so many podcast hosts, if you don't have AI fully baked into your services, uh, in 3 years you won't exist as a hosting company anymore, um, because you're just going to have to adopt all this stuff. Um, I truly believe that. And you know, you're going to have to have a minimum amount of offerings um, to put together.

So yeah, like I was just saying, a lot of these AI tools that, um, that are out there right now are going to get integrated. There's no question about that. Yeah. So, and the people that get it done the soonest are gonna succeed, you know.

So, um, there was a Where is this thread? Yeah, it was Pod News Weekly Review. I just want to verify because threw me for a loop there. There was a thread I was on in X that involved— gotta find it, let me find it here— um, involved Brian Person, JD Lasika, and they were talking about podcasting. And essentially the crux of the conversation is someone asked what was the first podcast you listened to, and then it went into quite a dialogue. And there was something funny in here. JD Laszlo said, and every year for a decade, Leo Laporte would declare podcasting is dead. LOL. You know, so it's just, you know, I kind of smiled when I saw that.

And, um, well, that's why he called, uh, podcasting netcasting for most of his— yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. And he's, he's changed now. He's now back calling what he does podcasts now.

Another thing that JD Lasica said is he said the book— right, he wrote a book for, uh, Wiley, which I did, and he said the book rights reverted to me. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if I can go to Wiley and ask for the rights to my book back. Because they technically own the copyright on my initial book. So I didn't know you could negotiate.

I've got your book right back here, the one you gave me back in—

I know, but I don't know if, you know, but he says I should, he made a comment to a book he wrote about the darknet and he said I should update and reissue it one of these days. I'm thinking. Hmm, if I could get my copyright back, it'd be a lot easier to update than it would be to completely rewrite. Of course, it would probably require a complete rewrite anyway.

So yeah, I was looking through your book because I found it in my stuff, and that book that you wrote back in that time frame is really a It's really a historical document is what it is. Oh, wow. I mean, if you think about it in that way, what you talked about in there was, was how podcasting was done back in 2005. Yeah. And, and as a contrast to how it's done now, that book, you know, you got screenshots of software, you got all, you know, all, all these platforms that are dead now.

Even a screenshot of me walking down the street with the— let me see if I can find it. Right. I found it here. It was in a pile.

Where did I put it?

I put it. Yeah. My little mini MP3 player. And I had hair then and I was about 50 pounds lighter too. So yeah. So then it was a picture of me walking with a little portable MP3 because it was, I couldn't, I was broke. I couldn't afford an iPod then, you know, I didn't get an iPod until later. You know, that's the price came down.

Yeah. I thought I had it up here, but I think it's That's still downstairs. As far as your book, I was going to hold it up.

I do have about 20 copies of that. They're still in a box someplace. I ought to auction those off someday. Yeah, it smells old. Well, they've been sealed, so they're, you know, they're fresh.

They haven't been page turned. Right, right. You know how the pages kind of turn that yellowish brown color. But if you think about it, I mean, that The Copper Island book is 2005, so yeah, it's been around a while.

It's been a while. So it, you know, and it does have, you know, that was pre-Itunes and pre-Steve Jobs, you know, comment about podcasting and, oh yeah, those are funny days. But you just, you know, the sequence of events that happened over the years is You know, been pretty amazing. You know, the stories that we— you know what we should have been doing, Rob, is I have forgotten more scandal than I've remembered fact. You know, there's, there's probably a whole book that could be written on, you know, the behind-the-scenes discussions of a podcast. I had to laugh at James Fridland's, uh, Pod News article about, uh, one of the, uh, podcast providers, or there was lots of talk at Podcast Movement about, oh, they might be doing something interesting. And, and I remember being asked, what was— what's the name of the company? I have to go back and look, but it's basically a lot of people are talking about the company and whether they were doing something wrong in far as how they were promoting podcasts and advertising and something to that effect. And I think I was asked maybe even by James. And I really didn't— I think at the time I said I would have to go home and look. So I might have been that reference, but I don't think I had an opinion at that time. Um, but yeah, it's just, it's just that, you know, the stories and the, and some of the commentary that happens behind the scenes is always fun.

Yeah. And I always wonder though, you know, you know, especially when I do interviews on other people's podcasts, like how far down this historical rabbit hole should I go? I mean, we don't want to go too far. I mean, are people even interested in that, that stuff. It's not relevant to them necessarily unless it paints a, a picture of a reason why things are the way they are today, right? I mean, unless there's some mappage to understanding why something is the way it is. Um, it's— I mean, that's what's interesting about the kind of renewed interest. And if you can talk about that a little bit, even on your own platform, if there is a unique renewed interest in true video podcasting? Or, or not?

Could that be something that comes back?

Say that again. Well, it's just video podcasting by its technical definition with an RSS feed.

And we're getting more queries about it.

Right? Are you seeing more accounts being created to create a video podcast?

I would say yes, but not dramatic.

Maybe—

probably not going to be dramatic, you know. Maybe we get 4 or 5 inquiries a month about video podcasting per se, you know, asking us about— most of the times we're asked about the specifics of how it can be done.

And, um, yeah, I'm planning on launching one on your platform, so yeah.

Yep. Matter of fact, I saw that account creation here recently came across in my report. I was like, oh, looky there. Yeah.

So you'll have to give me— I'm actually in the process of getting it set up on your platform right now, an audio feed and a video feed.

You'll have to give me the—

you're using PowerPress though, right?

No, I'm going to use your—

Oh, you're going to use the dashboard. Your platform for that and then get a website out of it too.

Okay. All right. Awesome. Yeah, let us know how that process goes. We're always looking for feedback. And, you know, that's one thing too, is we keep asking, you know, podcasters will often be real, real quick to complain about something, which, you know, if they're having an issue— we had an issue a couple of days ago with something that wasn't working and, you know, the dev team had to fix it. That happens with any tech stack and we got a survey out for our listeners saying, hey, here's, here's 11 things, you know, rack and stack these on where you think we should do next or what we need improvement, you know. And it's like, it's curious to see those survey results. And at the same time, sometimes you're like, wow, you know, you always ask— people are always telling us about stuff, but when we ask for input, they don't give us input. So You know, I think what you as a podcaster need to do, if you're listening, whoever you're hosting with, doesn't matter if you're hosting with Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Podbean, Blueberry, whoever. If you want something, you need to— it's like the, you know, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? Be the one that's the, you know, grease the squeaky wheel saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I could really use this. We had one suggestion that came in last week and said, It was simple, it was about a Podcasting 2.0 thing. Can you import my chapter files? And we're like, oh, we haven't been— and I just asked the dev team. So yeah, that'll be easy. Let's go ahead and we'll add that. And we're going to release that on Monday. We're going to make it so that people are migrating to us can import their chapter files. So they don't have to do that. That's a Podcast 2.0 thing. So we don't have to have this— people won't lose their metadata. But sometimes people just have to ask. So I think as those podcasters listening out there, you need to be proactive with your host and telling them what you want. And sometimes stuff is simple, you know, that was like a 3-day dev work that was easy, right? And something we should have already had anyway.

Yeah, I mean, most of the issues that I've seen are usually related to UI/UX experiences. Right. Of understanding the process of doing something or being able to discover something that you want to do. I mean, what the process is for doing that. I know it's a big thing that Lipson struggled with for years was trying to get that worked out.

And our UI stack just went through complete, you know, rebuild. And, you know, like just the other day, something popped up. We have the RSS feed in a certain section of the system settings. And then someone said to us, hey, I can't find my feed, can't my— and we have like 5 of those in a week. Well, maybe you need to make it more prominent somewhere else. You need to make it so they can really— you have to make it a bit— even though it was right there in front of them, it needed to be a bigger font. You know, something that stuck out. It's just a little stuff that—

yeah, I mean, I, I'm in your, your tool right now. And it's a nice looking tool, I have to say. I mean, you've done a nice job.

Well, compared to what it was. And that was painful. That process to do that UI update was not— and we hired someone outside the company to help us with that because you often need complete fresh eyes. And the person was a podcaster too, so that kind of helped. That had UI/UX experience.

And so she was such a hard thing to— I mean, it's such a hard thing to get right because every, every human looks at things differently. And, you know, I was involved a lot of that when I was working at Microsoft because I was always run through the wringer of going in and giving them feedback and getting eye tracking testing and that kind of stuff.

I don't know if you've ever done that before. No, we do hotspots and stuff like that. But you know, Well, here's the thing too.

It's the same kind of a concept.

Yeah. It's the hotspots. The challenge comes in with us is because we really have, well, technically 3 publishing ways. One, self-hosted WordPress with PowerPress. Second, they can use our dashboard. Or third, they can provide— they use the WordPress site that we provide, which is the same experience as self-hosted, but when you offer, like, that's the advantage Libsyn and Buzzsprout and those other folks have. They have one, one way to publish, but you're locked in, then you're on their platforms. And for us, we've made it so if you need to be on our platform, you can be, but if you want to be on WordPress and have your own.com, which we prefer, but that split runs about 70/30. So, um, that makes it complicated, especially when the WordPress users come on the dashboard, they're like, We, you know, they hit the, you know, create episode button. It says, you know, there's a little message that comes that says this is done on your site. You don't create an episode here. You have to go back to your, you know. But if they— yeah, so anyway, it's— sorry, we're getting down in the weeds a little bit deep, but I think that, uh, you know, for whatever platform you're on, you just need to ask for those changes, especially if it's something that drives you nuts.

And it's important for the platform to have pathways for that that are easy to use and easily accessible. And then little pop-up tips around how to, you know, understand something, right?

Yeah, a lot of info bubbles, right?

Right. That's also an important thing to have as well.

It's like, it's one of those things too where you— I always try to When I go into any platform, especially, well, especially ours, I try to look at it from the 5th grader perspective, you know, and try to be the person that is seeing this for the first time that has nary a clue what they're doing. And so it's, it's, and it's, you can only get incrementally better over time. And then it's time to refresh the UI all over again.

Yeah, it's always, it's an evolving thing. It's not like a printed document. It's something that can be changed and updated rapidly.

But when you, you know, it's hard though, if you just, if you're not willing to take the plunge and completely gut something, you know, which we did, and then we didn't give people the option to go back to the old system for very long. We gave them like 3 weeks to get used to the new system. Then we forced the new system on them. Um, because we didn't want to have version 1.5, you know, for them to use forever, evermore, and have to support it. And that becomes a tech support nightmare.

And I noticed that you have, um, the value for value as a tab in your interface. That's right. That was interesting. I would say not many podcast hosts have that.

So, no, well, it's Buzzsprout has it, um, RSS.com, RSSBlue. A couple others, maybe Captivate. Okay, so a few, a few have it. Um, that's good. Yeah, you can actually go to Podcast Index and there's a, there's a, um, uh, basically list all the different services and apps and it shows what they've implemented and you can actually look at who has what. Mm-hmm. So that reminds me, Dave Jones, if you're listening, you need to do a pull. We want Podcast Mirror in that, in that list. But we're talking with the— we have to— you have to submit your new changes to a, to a GitHub, I think. I think that's where it goes. I'm not the technical dude, so, or the technical lady that submits that. So what else is happening besides that?

Anything you're seeing? Yeah, I mean, I think that the medium is going through some, you know, there's just a lot of discussion about, you know, changes in the medium from the standpoint. I know this week is also, you know, Advertise Week in New York too. So there was a lot of sessions going on. People talking about the podcast advertising market and things like that at the event. And you didn't drive down— is next week as well in New York too. Not that I would say that the NAB event is much of a podcasting event. It has nothing going on with podcasting that I'm aware of. I mean, other than maybe a few panels, but that's about it on that front. So You know, in a lot of ways, this is, this is kind of a, it's kind of a difficult time for podcasting, I think. Um, but it's also a time of, I don't know that there's going to be a lot of consolidation that's coming. I just don't know that a lot of people have capital to play with. Oh, there's people looking for deals. Well, I'm sure pennies on the dollar.

They're trying to get steals right now. Right.

I wouldn't say that.

Oh, you wouldn't?

Okay.

No, but You know, that they've got money, but, you know, again, you know, deals that come across the table are, you know, often short of zero or two. But so, so maybe you're right. You know, maybe they're trying to steal stuff, but, you know, you know, it's just hard to come up with capital now. Now the free money's gone. Right. That's why, you know, that's why there's been so many high-end productions that have been cut because budgets are not there.

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's expensive to get money now. So for investment reasons and there's higher risk.

And I know, I don't think the, I think there's going to be more blood in the water.

I think, you know, we're—

Layoffs are still happening. And the way there's the government spending money and now with Israel thing and having to fund two wars on two fronts and, you know, the military-industrial complex and all that that's going on. I, you know, I think, look at the bond rate. Woo-hoo! You know, we're spending money like, you know, drunk sailors still.

And we're trying to keep the economy afloat. And printing money in the face of overwhelming—

You can't tell from anything that's going on in the world that people are worried about the cost of anything. You know, the airplane was full, full to the gills. You know, to rent a car place, full to the gills. I think every— I think there's a phenomenon about that. I think that's going to come to an end too because—

Well, Todd, that could be a little artificial too because— Yeah, because people were stuck at home. No, I think that the airlines have cut back the amount of airplanes that are flying. So, so those that are trying to go to a destination have like two flights options.

I can tell you the price of tickets are down. Oh, they are down. Yeah. Now I'm pretty lucky. I've got an abundance of frequent flyer miles in excess of 900,000 still. So like going to Seattle, you know, okay, I pay $600, $700 round trip with Alaskan Airlines and get a direct flight into a— not a direct flight, but a hub flight into Wenatchee, or I spend, you know, 18,000 frequent flyer miles each way with United and essentially fly for free. I think, you know what, that, that was a pretty easy choice, right? Um, and really the only expense I had was a rental car, and rental cars are— that's the one thing that wasn't insane out of Seattle, which is— so some cities are more expensive than others Depends on how popular they are. Yeah. Right. And what I'm starting to find now is parking. Okay, this just sounds crazy. So I'm 2 hours from Detroit and 3 hours from Chicago. So what do I do? I have to go and park and pay $16 a day in Detroit, or I go to Chicago and I spend $24 a day for parking. That's okay for 2, 3 days. But when you get into 10-day, 15, 20 days or however long you're going to be gone, that racks up. So, um, on an upcoming trip, it's cheaper for me to do a one-way rental of $40 to go to Lansing, which is only an hour away, drop the car, get an Uber to the sub— to the train station, and take the train into Chicago and save myself like $400 in parking fee for just a little extra time probably double the time, you know. And I'm like, you know, who would think that you would, you know, try to save $400 or $500 on parking just so, you know. I think it's— I think for me, I found a new way to get out of parking fee, but I still have to pay Amtrak, which is, you know, like $40 or something like that. So I've never done it. I haven't done an Amtrak trip since I was 13 years old. But you live in the corridor. Do you take the train much?

Yeah, if I go into New York, I, I drive down to what's called Fairfield and take a train in New York.

How far— how much does it cost you to park at the place where you catch the train? $6 a day. So that ain't bad.

And then the train— but the train is like, uh $13.50, um, each way, I believe. Each way, right?

Yeah.

So, but that's, that's definitely cheaper, but it's definitely, it's over an hour trip to get into, but, but cheaper than Grand Central, cheaper than tolls.

You couldn't get into Manhattan Park for a tenth of that.

It's just a hassle. I've, I've I've driven down into New York before, and it's—

yeah, me too. I've driven in Manhattan.

I won't do it again. Yeah, but it's expensive to go there because, I mean, you typically, unless you're taking subways or whatever, it's expensive to get around.

The trick is to go to Staten Island, park at Staten Island, take the ferry across into, you know, lower Manhattan. It's never easy going into New York, that's for sure.

Not at all. So it's, it can take longer to go from here to New York and navigate everything as it is to like fly to Florida or something like that. You know, it's, it's crazy. Yeah. So anyway, I think we've, we've run out of stuff.

Yeah. There's not a lot of more critical stuff that's been going on. Yeah.

So I'm going to be launching a new live show tomorrow night at 7 PM for Yeah.

So that's going to be live on the StreamYard channels. So is that for StreamYard or who's that for?

Well, it's in partnership with them, but it's, it's, it's really, really my show. It's just on their, their platform. It's going to be, it's a partnership with them around creating podcast topic content for, you know, StreamYard users or ones, you know, if you're not a StreamYard user.

So what's the—

what's gonna be the name of the show? Uh, Podcast Tips with, with, with you know who. So I'm gonna have guests on and things like that. Okay. Did you get— so I'm not gonna have— did you get— probably— oh, I said probably not have a guest tomorrow, so it'll be a solo show tomorrow. But, but going forward, um, yeah, I'll, I'll have a cascade of guests on the show, uh, in, you know, various topics, trying to talk about this issue with, with YouTube and, and, and what's happening with video and podcasting and things like that and how that world can be navigated. Um, so that's not the only topic, but that would be one.

So if anyone has a RODECaster Duo, what has changed? Because I loaded my— maybe someone that's got one of these can tell me— I loaded my audio files onto a pad And when I play them, they're extremely low. I've got the— I'm using the headphone out going to a channel on my mixer. I wonder if there's a line setting or something that I've missed, because it's one— one sounds good, like this one. Hey, that one sounded good, but this one did not. I couldn't hear it though.

You couldn't hear it.

Hmm.

These, these RODECasters are, are complicated devices. They're not necessarily easy to get properly set up, but they, you know, it takes a lot of testing to get them just right.

Well, I've had good luck with them. So this one is, again, I've had no issue. Oh, I wonder, let me try this. Hang on. Yeah, it doesn't sound right.

Sounds But this one, that one sounds good, huh? These have, have a lot of, um, like noise reduction, de-essers, filters. I mean, there's a lot of compressors in these things. There's—

yeah, I need to gain levels. I guess I need to go, need to go look at the pad settings and maybe that's what's going on. I tell you one thing I do love is the ability to go right and left on the pads. That is an absolute fantastic function of these things. And not having to use the screen— the screen is bigger. So again, this is just a temporary thing. I'm not going to be using this. I'm going to be using the old one here going forward, but I just wanted to get it dialed in.

Yeah, for my upcoming 3 weeks travel. Really, really powerful, powerful devices, I have to say. I mean, it's But they are complicated to get set up. So if you get one of these things, expect a few weeks of testing. Yeah, a little bit.

Get them dialed in right, because I definitely couldn't— yeah, I was using the most simple function and it, it's kicking my butt. Hey, so what do you want us to talk about? We made it almost an hour and a half, but is there something that we're missing that you guys want us to talk about? I'm, I'm done ranting, of course, until tomorrow after I hear the YouTube, uh, briefing. I'm sure I'll come back next Wednesday with my head still pounding.

But so were those only private briefings to hosting companies?

Is that what they are? I think it's— there's been a lot of people— those, I think those emails have been floated around. So they have a live stream of the event or of the briefing. So I'd be curious to see how many people are on the live stream of that event tuning in because they said we could share it with other team members. So to me, the— so the email— technically, Rob, you're not one of my team members.

So, well, just say I'm your co-host on one of your platform shows because I am, right? Okay. I'm not affiliated with the hosting company.

That's true. But it was for my host, for my team members.

So your team members.

Okay. Got it. David says the pads are about to get an update. Well, that's good to know. Definitely something going on there. Okay everyone, thanks for being here. I'm Todd at blueberry.com, but you can send your complaints to Rob, uh, but I'm at— I'm at Geek News on Twitter or at Geek News at geeknews.chat on Mastodon. Feel free to follow me. Again, we have been lit in live here today, so get yourself a new podcasting app at podcastapps.com. We do want to thank everyone for their boosts. Let me see if any more came in. I wasn't paying attention. Um, oh, Adam says there's no processing on the pad channels. I never drag and drop files. I record straight to a pad. Oh, and edit the ends. I will send you my configuration files. I have the Duo and the Two. No issues here. Oh, that's cool. Rob Greenlee, 10,000 stats from Adam. Very awesome. Adam's again said, uh, so anyway, thanks for the sats, Adam. Uh, go ahead, uh, Rob.

I took your glory here. You did?

You took my glory?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Um, I can be found on Twitter @RobGreenlee, uh, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it. I think a lot of people still call it Twitter, but, uh, and then you can send me an email, rob.greenlee@gmail.com. Uh, it's a great place to reach out if you would like to, and And, um, that show I mentioned earlier is launching tomorrow night at 7:00 PM Eastern, uh, 4:00 PM Pacific, um, on, on the StreamYard channel. So if you just search for the, for the StreamYard channels on YouTube and Facebook and, and, uh, and Twitter, I believe it's also gonna be there as well. Um, and check it out and, and hopefully we'll have some fun on that show and It'll be interesting trying to thread this line on the video and audio side of what's happening in the medium today.

Ask the StreamYard guys for an HLS output. Okay. Good idea. Yeah, it is a good idea. Or at least a restream on HLS. That would be a great feature for StreamYard.

They do have the ability to do a webinar in there that does have its own kind of player experience.

Yeah. Right now I'm going to Restream and then I'm going to, because Restream doesn't have HLS output, only Wowza does. So I'm still paying for my Wowza account just for HLS.

That's a good, it's a good comment. I've been giving them feedback on things that they need to do to kind of catch up to some competitors.

So, but yeah. Okay. Everybody, thanks for being here. And if I had the pads right, we could play the outro music, but Let me see if I can find it. Let me try and we'll see if this works as we leave. You can't hear it, Rob, but they can hear it. See you later, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.