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Todd Cochrane: Updates from Blubrry
Episode 1123rd April 2024 • Podcast Answers • LehmanCreations
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On this episode I talk with Todd from Blubrry about new products that they have released including Vid2Pod and Blubrry PAI.

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Welcome to podcast answers, the show where I help people start and grow their podcast,

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answering any questions along the way. Guys, if you've not checked out the last episode

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I talked about, "Podgagement" with Daniel Lewis. This week I have another guest from

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another podcasting service. I have Todd from Bluebrry on with me talking about some of

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the things that they're doing in the podcasting space and it's talking about their new AI product

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and some other podcasting 2.0 things. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get into this

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episode right now. With me today, I have Todd Cochran from Blubrry. Todd, welcome to the show.

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Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So you guys have been doing all sorts of things at

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Blubrry for podcasting 2.0. I talked to you several episodes ago about the podcast

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mirror service that you guys have had implemented and created and allowed non-podcasting 2.0 hosts.

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There are hosts, non-compliant hosts to add tags and things, but you've done so, so much more

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recently. Can you tell me a little bit about... Let's start with VidDepot. That's a pretty

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exciting service and then tell me what it is. Yeah, and actually, my stats report came up today

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and we were actually blown away by the number of customers that signed up for. It was about five

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times what we thought it was going to be, but VidDepot is kind of as it sounds and it really

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was an idea that was generated from talking with YouTubers at PodFest who said, "I don't have time

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for a podcast." And they were kind of like, "I'm busy building my channel." And then we came back

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home and we talked about that and my CFO, Barry Kant, said, "Hey, you can't beat them. Join them.

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Why don't we make it easy for a YouTuber to have a podcast?" So that's what we really did. We did

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integration where a person signs up, they link to their YouTube channel, they pick a playlist,

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and if they want, we'll pull in all their old episodes or we'll just start at a certain date.

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And what we do is we pull down those media files and then we convert them to audio

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and we auto-publish. We utilize their title and their metadata from their description

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to pre-populate those two fields in their episode and basically it's a set and forget it.

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So it basically reduces the amount of time. Number one, the first people that took off on

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this was people that were already doing double work. Sure. Yeah. People that were posting on

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YouTube then coming over and now we're getting from the list that I'm looking at,

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we're getting peer YouTubers are coming over and basically now they've got an audio podcast

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that's available via the normal distribution channels with an RSS feed. So that was the goal

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here was to make it easy for YouTubers to have a true technical podcast.

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That's awesome because I think, I've heard you guys talk about it before and we both agree

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a YouTube video is not a podcast, but you've said it before yourself. When you talk to people,

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they're surprised when you say, "Show me an Apple podcast where your podcast is at."

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And they don't even know. They don't even know. So this really allows them to be able to

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take their YouTube video and automatically create a MP3 out of it and host it with you and create

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a true podcast. That's definitely a really cool thing. Have you had much feedback about it?

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People love it. They love it and what they're starting to realize is, "Oh, look what we've been

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missing." Because then you open them up to the ecosystem of everything that we've been doing

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with podcasting 2.0 and this whole new audience. Because what we're really the sales messaging

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on this is, "We want to grow your audience. We don't want to hurt your YouTube audience.

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But let's let that continue to thrive over there and you do the YouTube strategy."

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And then on the podcast side, you can have a podcast strategy to be able to market to people

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to a new hope, brand new audience. And there's only one really restriction in using the service

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and something we go through pretty heavily when they sign up is they can't bring

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any YouTube content that has any YouTube license music. So if you have any music in your show that

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you've gotten from YouTube, it's not legal to cross that over. And just because that's where

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people are going to get in trouble. So it basically said, "Hey, if you have your own license music,

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that you've gotten other places. Number one, you need to check to make sure it covers podcasting.

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And number two, if you're using YouTube music, then it's a non-starter to begin with."

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Gotcha. Yeah. So then they would just have to find some of their licensed music,

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replace what they're using in the YouTube from YouTube, but bring in their own licensed music.

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That's cool. So yeah. And then you've also been doing podcast AI or Blubrry Pi,

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which I love your name by the way. It's great. It's great. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

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Yeah. Blubrry Pi was actually, we were trying to figure out what we're going to call this thing.

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And it's podcast artificial intelligence assistant. And Dave, one of our support guys said, "Why don't

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we just call this thing Blubrry Pi?" And we're like, "Oh, a star is born." But what we did is

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it's a real targeted product. And we've really thought hard about this over six months. And it

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was me and several other team members that were using chatGPT, using Claude. We're using just

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about every product we could test. And it really has broken down into three components. One is

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planning. Basically, give me some ideas for a show on basket weaving or whatever the topic may be.

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And if I'm going to have a guest, let's preload the guest information, their bio,

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and link to their LinkedIn page or wherever they have information about themselves. And then

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what we've done then is it generates really a couple of things.

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10 potential questions. We allow them to add 10, excuse me, 10 topics for a specific show plan.

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And they can add their own if they want within that. Number two, we come up with questions for

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their guest. If they're going to have a guest, allow them to add more as well. And then finally,

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the planning project just spits out a kind of a show flow. And what we've told people is,

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you know, with any product, this thing does not alleviate common sense. You need to read

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true and make sure everything is valid. But the tool that's getting the most used is the production

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tool. Basically, you've already done your editing. You've uploaded your audio to the platform

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you can go in and select that audio. We create a transcript that's contextual. You say it's Todd

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and Rob or whoever's on the show, you'd be able to pick the speakers. And then it will suggest

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10 titles for the episode. It will go through and figure out, you also have to in the production

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planning have to say, kind of, here's what the main topic was. Or maybe this is what I want you

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to lead with. So kind of you give it a little bit of a lead. And what I found is it gets about on

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the titles of the episode that gets me about 50 to 75% there. So I'll see a title, say, okay,

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I like that, but I'm only going to use three quarters of it. So I'll edit it and select it,

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or I'll add my own. Maybe I've already got a title in my mind. But the next section,

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we do an absolute fabulous summary, give them a second section of bullet points of topics that

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recover. We create some episode art. And finally, we ought to create chapters. And so for me, when

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I'm doing my tech show, I know I talk about 30 topics. I said, I think there's going to be like

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32, 33 topics. And it goes through and it's really, really good at basically finding those breaks

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where you change topics. And for like the podcast insider show, we only talk about three or four

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things. And it usually comes up with about five chapters, which is about right. Nice. Yeah.

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And you can edit them, add your art, add links. So for those that are publishing on the dashboard

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at Blubrry and not using the WordPress, PowerPress combination, what happens is every

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edit you make, then changes a draft episode that we basically get ready. So you're on the dashboard.

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Once you're done with that production flow, you just go into the episode area and you'll see a

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draft there. You go episode draft, the titles in there, the summaries in there, the chapters

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files link, the transcript is linked, the media file is linked. All you have to do then is go

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in and do any small edits, any art links that you want, any hyperlinks within the summary,

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do your editing and bam, hit publish. And what we're hearing from the customers is,

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when I was, well, I knew personally, when I was using chat, GBT and Anthropik and all these other

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tools, I was spending like an extra hour doing my show because I was using multiple tools for

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multiple things. And now I'm back out the door just as fast as I was in my old process with a

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book, Richard made a data set. The folks, and even though I have to, because I'm on blueberries,

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I'm using the PowerPress plugin with my WordPress site, we don't have a direct integration there

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yet. It's coming where I basically have to copy and paste, copy the title, copy the

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summary, copy over the chapters file. So I have to do a little bit of extra work, but in the near

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future, what will happen is, as a PowerPress user, using the AI, you say, I'm finished.

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And that will invoke a reaction that will send the data to your site, long as you've linked it,

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and will pre-populate an episode or a post with as much data as we can.

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That's definitely cool. I know for me, the chaptering thing, I want to make rich chapters,

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but it's so hard because you've got to go back and listen to the whole thing and try to figure out,

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if you have an hour show, where you have to go back, you know where you talked about topics at,

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and you can skip through, but it still takes that time to go ahead and listen to your show,

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try to figure that out and get that. So that's the super handy feature. And like you said,

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it does a pretty good job at detecting when you're switching topics and work,

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should put chapters and stuff. That's a great thing.

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And you know, it's one of those situations too, where I have a Kirk who's my

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basically executive director. He basically pre-produces all the topics. I mean,

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he goes in a couple of days later, and after he's listened to the show and written down,

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you know, all the hash points, and he goes up and makes sure everything is matched up in the

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chapter file, so that from a longevity standpoint, everything is exactly where it should be. And

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he says it's about 90% correct. And he actually says it saves him time, because sometimes he

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doesn't have time to listen to the show, but he'll jump to the topic area. And then he'll say,

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"Yeah, that's the marker. Let me put in the link." And he backbills. So that's the beauty too. And if

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you're a Blubrry customer, you can assign someone that will be able to come in and edit the

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chapters separately. You don't have to do it. If you've got a fan of the show that does it,

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like many do. Oh, nice. Yeah. And then the same thing in wordpress, really,

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all you have to do is give someone an account and give them the right privileges, and they can get

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in there and do the editing. And we mirror it. So in other words, if you make a change in

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powerpress where you edit the chapter, it gets put back into the chapter JSON file that

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Blubrry's hosting. So it's a married situation. So you can edit on either side,

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and it works out well. And then the third piece is really kind of a social promotion piece.

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That's where you create clips, text clips only for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, all those

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locations. And we also have the ability to create an email that you would send out to your audience

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about the episode. And here's the crazy thing that I really attest to. That's what's really

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happening with my personal show. Is I used to just copy what I had in my post from WordPress.

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And I used to paste that into an email and send it off. Well, you know,

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people probably deleted 90% of those. And what I found now is because it's kind of,

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I worked the hardest on this email because this thing kept running home to mama and wanting

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to be like flamboyant and making, you know, it was really, I was not happy with the output.

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And it was like a battle. I think I probably did 150 prompt changes to get it right. So now it's

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got a good mix. And we've hopefully trained the model to make it understand that people have

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subscribed to the newsletter, know who I am or know who you are. And a little bit of the flavor

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of the show. And then ultimately it creates this pretty good email. And it's, it's almost,

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I wouldn't say a comedian, but it feels like sometimes when I'm reading what is come up with,

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I kind of laugh. I still have to edit it. Because sometimes you get something like, no,

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I didn't say that it run home to mama and assume it like I was talking about an interview with the

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I'm a show last night about the, an interview with the CEO of discord. And I didn't do the

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interview. It was done on another podcast. Yeah. It, it, it falsely assumed it was me and I had

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to change that out, but probably in the whole platform, the weakest piece of it is the image

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creation. Because we often tell it, you know, don't put any, any text in the image. And you know,

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about 25% of the time it still does it, still runs home to mama. But again, you know, I think we,

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you know, we've used enough disclaimers to the site to say, Hey, this is still early days.

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And the beauty of this is we build it internally and did the pay calls. It's not that hard.

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People just assume it is. It's really about the, it's really truly about the,

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the, you know, the scripts, but the prompts. And, but we got some stuff coming. We got some ideas.

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And, but who knows, you know, that's, this is fun stuff. And, and as we, I've heard several times

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before, you know, this is the early days of, of, of artificial intelligence, but it's only going

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to get better. Right. I mean, we're using this stupidest AI or language model we're using right

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now. Right. Weird things. I mean, it sometimes puts multiple hands on people, but it's only

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going to get better. And, and I, it's not ever going to be a replacement for, for human, you know,

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to do their whole job. Like I think that's not going to work. But the way that you're using it

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and, and to be able to assist with the production of your show, that's a great thing. Cause I know

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that like the more stuff that you do for your show, the longer it takes, you know, if you, if you just

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purely record an audio file and send it up to your, to your media host, you can be done quickly.

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But if you're going to do all of the things like create show are and do the transcripts and all

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of that stuff, which helps your show look better. It ends up taking a lot longer and you know, your

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production ends up, you know, like you said, doubling because you're doing all of the, all of

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this extra stuff besides just the show. So that, that's really cool. Now going back to your, your

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first thing that you included with the pie, you talked about it being able to suggest kind of a

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show flow and questions for your guests. Now, can you, are you able to tell who your guest is so

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that it has some, it has some knowledge of that. Okay, cool. Yeah. It's in the planning tool.

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Basically, we, we have a profile. So like Robin, I show, it's always like Todd and Robert here.

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And then what the topic that we have a guest, what the, what the topic that we're going to cover,

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then I put a, have the ability to put in either paste a bio in or link to a LinkedIn page and

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put information about the guest so that when we process the questions that for the potential

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guest, I go out at LinkedIn, you use the topics and come up with stuff. And I'll say that from that

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standpoint, again, maybe 60, 70% solution, some of the questions it comes up with is like, okay,

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that's, that's dumb. I'm not going to use that. So you're able to select and then we actually

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allow you to regenerate to come up with more questions if you don't find enough. And that's

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seemed to be pretty successful. Awesome. But ultimately in the planning document, what we

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want to do is everyone does a show flow different. And we want to be able to have a templating system

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where you say, okay, I do an introduction. I talk about my guests. We get into, you know,

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we want to be able to have people be able to set up a template so that they're show because we're

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giving them our show flow now. And I, you know, people are saying, I gotta, you know, I gotta edit

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this thing. And I'm like, well, it's okay. It's there for you to use it. And it's again, it's,

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it is a tool to assist you. Right. And, and some people say, well, it got me over writer's block,

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which was podcasters block, you know, I said, oh, you know, came up with a whole bunch of new ideas.

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And to be honest with you can go to chat GPT and say, I'm going to have a guest on a podcast that

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is going to be blah, blah, blah, blah with this as a topic. You know, give me 20 questions and it'll

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do that for you. But what I found and talking about time, I don't have time and I hate wasting

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time. I don't edit my show and I know that was against the grain for many people. But I wanted

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to, as soon as I hit stop, I want to be walking out the door in 45 minutes. And when I was doing

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all this manually, it was like 90 minutes. But now I'm back to actually I'm saving time. I'm

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actually getting the show out quicker with much richer metadata. And going back to that email,

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we send my listeners who, you know, I got this huge mailing list 16, 17, 18 years worth of mailing

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lists. Yeah. And they're saying, Hey, we're reading your emails now. And what I've actually seen is

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audience members come back and new members coming in because the show notes are richer. Even though

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I was preaching, Hey, I have two, three paragraphs of rich show notes. I always, that was lazy like

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everyone else. I didn't always do that. Right. So now I have this big chunk of metadata that

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that Google can just slurp up. And so it's, it's, I'm seeing increases in audience numbers that I

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have not seen in many, many years. And maybe it's audience members purely coming back from the email

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sure. But regardless, I mean, Hey, we're going to take it, right? If they're coming back or if

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they're new, you take any growth you can get. Right. Well, and you know, to be honest, like this is

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the reason that we get into podcasting is because we like the actual audio and actually talking and

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things like that. It's not the actual post production work that looks like doing, right? You

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know, I'm of the same way. I like to hit stop and be done. And so this, yeah, this brings back

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the joy to podcasting because it allows you to do that extra stuff without having to

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do the extra stuff or do as much. And when I get a 10, 10 paragraph summary of the show,

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and I drop it into my template that I have for my episode already, and I read it through. And

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again, it's, it's really just, okay, that wasn't right. That was right. Let's, let's change this

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word and tie that in with Grammarly. Oh, it's a beautiful product. Yeah. And some stuff has to

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be changed. There's always one or two things that it didn't get quite right. But again, it's

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trying to take contextual what's in the transcript and say, based upon here's the show topic. This

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is, you know, it's so again, we're using the dumbest, large, and I don't like to call it AI yet.

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Really, no, we don't podcast AI system because it's truly just a language model at this point.

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And we're nowhere near, well, we'll see how long it takes to get the AGI, but

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time will tell. But for me, this is fun stuff that makes podcasts, you know, I've been in this

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almost 20 years. So, you know, it's like the podcasting 2.0 stuff. Oh my God, I'm excited.

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You know, and some of the stuff that's been talked about recently is exciting for us because

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we're really trying to think about how do we get, keep this engagement going. Because in the end,

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if you have listeners engaged and whatever they're doing, if they're sending a boost,

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or if they're sending a cross-app comments post or if they're emailing the show,

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those little itty-bitty tiny things keeps a podcast, or even me,

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motivated to keep doing your show. If you're someone saying, oh my God, the takeaway from your

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show is, you know, I got X, Y, and Z out of this. Thank you. That, that, that drives you for another

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three months. You know, it really does, you know. So, it's so small things that were,

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you know, and I think if you're listening, if you're a podcaster listening to this, you know,

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we, we have to really work, work really hard and making sure we're coming up with solutions

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to get our audiences engaged. Sure. Do you have any future plans for the podcast,

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the Blubrry pie that you are working on currently that you can talk about now?

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Yeah. The clip creator, we publicly talked about that. It's actually, starts beta testing next

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week. I've got some other stuff coming. I don't really want to go too deep in it. And here's

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the thing. You look, I had one idea that I came up with and we had a meeting about it and about

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20 minutes in, I said, well, you know, big X mark through because it, it really wasn't viable.

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I'll just say this. We want to really, our goal over the past couple of years is,

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how do I grow my show? And because that's the question I get asked 100% of the time when I'm

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doing one on the ones with podcasters is how do I grow my show? Yeah. And, you know, usually I can

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go to their website and say, okay, here's 10 changes to make on your website to get you started.

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But in the end, I think we have to go much further beyond just updating your.com to make

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you more viable and findable on Google. We need to have this ability to give podcasters

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actionable things that they can do to change their show. One of the stats we added was tracking.

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Basically doing ABCDE comparison of different episodes. So let's say I talked about,

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you know, water bottles on one and I talked about Mountain Dew on the other.

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How did those track with the audience? How did they grow? What was the topic that more resonated?

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So is that, that kind of stuff? Now it's not AI. That's just pure stats. Right. You know.

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And so we're really looking at, I guess for a better word is where do I have holes? Starting

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A to Z. You know, I'm doing this, this, this and this to help a podcaster now. But where's the

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hole? Where's a hole where I'm missing something that will help a podcaster? So I'm, you know,

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if that gives you any clue, I'm looking at those holes to see where I can fill stuff. And number two,

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and this is probably going to make some people that compete with us with auxiliary products.

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If you're spending a lot of money on a third party product that's basically

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helping your podcast, I'm going to try to fill that hole as part of a basic hosting plan.

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Awesome. So, so the, the Blubrry pie, is that part of the basic hosting plan? Or is that in

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addition? Or how does that work for you? It's part of Thrive. And it's a whole host. The Thrive

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package is 10 bucks additional a month, but it's a whole host of additional items. I think we're

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up to seven or eight. So we keep throwing stuff into Thrive to make Thrive more, more valuable.

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And at some point, I'm going to say, when am I going to stop and stuff to that? Because, you know,

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I'm looking at the cost because this AI stuff is, you know, what, what really costs the most is the

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image generation. That is, that is the most expensive part of the whole query. But,

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but yeah, we're looking at anything where I'm, and hopefully the most of the stuff that I'm able

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to add will be part of the baseline price. If I do an integration with the, let's say Adobe,

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I'm probably going to have to charge for that. But unless I can get such a great deal through a

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third party that that integration, I can, I can make that those numbers work. Sure. In the end,

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really our biggest challenge to getting most of these brand new podcasters episode one, because

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we still have people signed up for service and we're watching, you know, we're watching a report

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and you get 10, 15, 20 days. We're like, Hey, do you need a hand? Do you need an assist? And it goes,

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goes dark and at 30 days they cancel it because maybe they figured out, okay, this is too hard

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or I wasn't ready. So our goal is really to help that podcaster get to episode one.

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And I think that's in the form of hosting. I think if you talk to any hosting provider,

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that probably is where the highest churn rate is. Once they start,

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you get to maybe episode six or seven, I can almost guarantee that. Yeah.

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Podcast is going to be around for a while. Yeah, they'll keep doing their show.

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Yeah. But you don't get to that number. Yeah, they're, they're, you know, 90 days they're done.

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Yeah. And if you're, so ultimately, people are, people are at a point today where

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they just want instant gratification. And then, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there

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selling strategies that says, we'll get you to X number of listeners and, you know,

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some amount of time and give me $5,000 to do it. And, you know, and people are, frankly,

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there's probably not a good strategy from a month, from a money standpoint. So

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we want to make sure we're having tools in there that they're not going to have to go out,

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spend that money to have a third party help them with a whole variety of things. Sure. Now,

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moving on to other podcasting, two point related things. You know, you guys went gangbusters and

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added a bunch of stuff before we talked a little bit about that last time you were on,

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and we talked about the podcast mirror service. But is there any, anything that you're adding

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new either recently or going to be adding here in the future?

Speaker:

Well, as soon as they formalize the next round, we'll look at all that and figure out where we're

Speaker:

going to drop. We'll add stuff as they add it. I tell you what I'm really excited about is this,

Speaker:

what do they call it? Satoshi backs or something. I don't know if there's an official name, but yes,

Speaker:

where you can, yeah, send it back to the listener, like from an advertiser or whatever. Yeah. To me,

Speaker:

that makes sense because I'm thinking to myself, okay, what I've been doing now has been telling

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any of my listeners, you go on Fountain and get the Fountain app and send me your Fountain address.

Speaker:

I'll send you sats to prime the pump. I'll send you a sats. You don't have to put your credit card

Speaker:

down or nothing. You can use that to give that to any show that you want, just as an education

Speaker:

standpoint to try to get people moving. But it makes it a lot easier if I can say, okay, you

Speaker:

listen to, you know, Podcast Insider, you listen to the new media show, you listen to Geek and

Speaker:

Essential and you listen for that 60 minutes, you're going to earn 4,000 or 5,000 sats. I think

Speaker:

people would say, oh, you know, over time, that's real money and they can use that whatever way

Speaker:

they want. But to be honest with you, I think Adam kind of hit upon it a little bit in a recent show

Speaker:

is I just want people to be able to put a fiat amount somewhere, put $20 on account. And then

Speaker:

this magically happens and then they can magically get their money out. We have to figure out a way

Speaker:

because there's still crypto stigmatism. There is. Yeah. I think, you know, I think Sam,

Speaker:

Truefans has started doing that as far as buying the sats. You're able to do like Apple Pay or

Speaker:

Google Pay and do that. And I think that when you're essentially saying, I'm going to buy,

Speaker:

you know, what we're calling like the fairground tokens where it's not, you're not actually looking

Speaker:

at it as crypto crypto. Yeah, I call it tokens too. Yeah. Right. If you associate that where you

Speaker:

put your amount of, you know, USD or whatever, wherever you're at in and you get these tokens

Speaker:

that you can pass out however you want, then it takes this whole like, it takes that away and

Speaker:

it makes it a lot easier to do as opposed to having to go over to another one app and then show a QR

Speaker:

code to the other app. And it's fine for geeks like you and I, but for everyday listeners,

Speaker:

it doesn't work real well. And it's kind of like the Dave and Buster saying you're going in, you

Speaker:

know, you power up your Dave and Buster's card or whatever. I don't even know if they're still in

Speaker:

business, but in the end, and the same thing is, is if we do this sat backs thing where I can say,

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okay, you listen to the show and we're going to send you so many sats a minute and I'll give you

Speaker:

a bonus sats if you listen to that, I have in my show. And I promote that back to an advertiser.

Speaker:

That's beautiful. And but the key is we got to be able to get whatever sats we send to a listener

Speaker:

to baby easily extract them into their PayPal account or into whatever mechanism we use to get

Speaker:

their cash back. You know, we want to get them that cash back. Well, and I think too that if we

Speaker:

end up doing that, you're going to be able to prove better to the advertiser, you know, this

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amount of people listen to your ad spot as opposed to now where we're just kind of guessing and hoping,

Speaker:

you know, we can say we have this many downloads, but again, that doesn't equate to a listener

Speaker:

necessarily. So yeah, I think that that would be a good, a good thing is we can then make their

Speaker:

advertising dollars worth it and go further. But also don't, don't disregard what advertisers do.

Speaker:

You know, they'll say, okay, we're going to give you whatever that sum is like for GoDaddy. They

Speaker:

give me a sum each month. I have a base, but you better bring us X number of new customers. They

Speaker:

back that out into a cost for acquisition. So I get an email from GoDaddy say, hey, you hit your

Speaker:

quota. Here's, you know, here's your, here's your performance for the month. And here's, you know,

Speaker:

this is what you earn. Whereas if I'm under quota, they're going to say, hey, you know, we were under.

Speaker:

So, you know, you're going to, you know, I get my base, but I get no bonus and you know, you know,

Speaker:

get busy next month. But if I can, it opens up a whole realm of opportunity. They're still going

Speaker:

to look at performance on money spent, but we'll have a better, better ability to say, did that

Speaker:

person hit that 30 second advance button? Or because I'm sure some of my audience has been in the

Speaker:

show for years. So as I hit the advertises, they go bang, bang, they hit the 30 second ahead twice.

Speaker:

If it's available, I'm sure. But again, if I pay them to listen and talk about a new offer,

Speaker:

then maybe they share that with a friend that, so it changes their dynamic a lot,

Speaker:

especially I know I'm okay, I'm going to get a dollar or 50 cents or whatever for listening to

Speaker:

this 60 second spot. So I think Adam's dead on and Sam on this setback thing, I think it's a

Speaker:

great idea. So we'll see, we'll see where it goes. Does it make it into this generation of the next

Speaker:

release? Probably not. But I think it's good times because people are starting out to pay attention

Speaker:

at podcast moment evolutions. There were some Apple folks there and I'm saying, hey,

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you know, I think we got these things and maybe this feature would be something that would be

Speaker:

awesome for us. And you know, and I you can't tell Apple what to do, but you can say, hey,

Speaker:

this might be helpful, right? And they'll go, oh, yeah, that's interesting. And that's about

Speaker:

as far as they say, then two years later, you get the feature if you're lucky, you know.

Speaker:

And it was the same thing with transcripts. And, you know, I think it's probably publicly known

Speaker:

that Ted was the one that really pushed it over there. But they did transcripts really,

Speaker:

really, really well. And I would actually, they are scoring. So they're scoring the transcript

Speaker:

I provide. And if it doesn't score high enough, my understanding is that they may not surface it

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if it doesn't score high enough. So we have to really work on making sure we have really good

Speaker:

quality transcripts if we're submitting them to Apple. Yeah. So don't go cheap on the engine that

Speaker:

you use to create a transcript. And if you're in doubt, then just let them run theirs. Yeah.

Speaker:

A simple fact. Well, and I mean, they do a great job. They're transcription from what I've seen

Speaker:

has done a great job. You know, I'm always providing my own my own SRT file for my transcripts. But at

Speaker:

the same time, the ones that I have seen that that I didn't do like is doing a great job.

Speaker:

It's it actually ignores I'm running pre-roll on the new media show. And it doesn't start the

Speaker:

transcript until that ad is done. Wow. And I was that's what blew me away. I'm like, wow,

Speaker:

they ignored the ad. How did you guys do that? Yeah, for real. Because because that's a big

Speaker:

complaint is syncing is off. And they basically that doesn't matter how that ad changes.

Speaker:

For every person, they know when I say welcome to geeking the center or whatever my intro is,

Speaker:

that's when the transcript syncs up and moves on. They know now I haven't checked to see if they

Speaker:

ignore the GoDaddy spot midroll. But I'm assuming they probably do. But to me, that that is brilliant.

Speaker:

I'm like, how did you guys do that? And Ted said, well, I was 10 years of tech. And I'm like, I believe

Speaker:

it. Yeah, no, no kidding. No kidding. You know, anything else that you want to promote here?

Speaker:

Well, before we before we get off the call. Yeah, I, you know, I just think it's a great time to be

Speaker:

a podcaster and people say that's pretty cliche. But if you look at the active number of shows,

Speaker:

I think the last time I looked last week was 350,000 shows have upvaded in last 30 days.

Speaker:

There's four million shows in the inventory. But again, 350,000 active shows. I truly believe

Speaker:

that someone that's sitting on the fence right now about creating a podcast needs to rethink that

Speaker:

strategy immediately because it is the best time ever. And boy, at 19 years, I hate it again,

Speaker:

it sounds cliche. This is the best time ever to become a podcaster if you're not podcasting already.

Speaker:

We're seeing overall just natural growth in shows that are, you know, that really haven't seen a lot

Speaker:

of growth. And the reason why is very, very simple. The listeners to podcasts have not

Speaker:

went away. That audience is still there. It's still same amount. They may be listened to a

Speaker:

tighter number of shows, but they're also digging deeper and they're going deeper down the stack

Speaker:

to find content that maybe was never discovered before. So great show titles, great metadata

Speaker:

will all drive discovery, even if it's not an Apple podcast or Spoutin or Spotify or wherever

Speaker:

people are listening. That's stuff of surface. And I just think that it's a great time. And a lot

Speaker:

of people are worried and we are too. The economy's flat or the space is flat. So we just have to keep

Speaker:

that in value to the platform and doing what we can to the best of our ability to grow shows. And

Speaker:

if podcasters grow and get feedback, they're going to keep on podcasting and not say that,

Speaker:

but that's going to keep us in business. Yeah, absolutely. Where can people find you at?

Speaker:

Easy. Todd at Blubrry.com, Blubrry without the ease because they couldn't spell. We couldn't

Speaker:

afford to ease. And I think they're right now that Blubrry.com is like 2 million B.

Speaker:

B L U B R R Y.com. So Todd at Blubrry.com. They may want to buy that domain for us too. We

Speaker:

gladly take that as a gift recipient for that purchase. But yeah, Todd at Blubrry.com.

Speaker:

Well, thanks, Todd, for being on this show. Really appreciated hearing all about the stuff

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that you're doing with Blubrry pie and the other features that you guys are implementing here at

Speaker:

Blubrry. Guys, if you've not checked out Blubrry, like he said, it's Blubrry.com without the ease

Speaker:

B L U B R R Y. They are a hosting company and they do a good job at what they do. And they're out

Speaker:

there leading the way and being innovative with some of the stuff that they're doing and implementing.

Speaker:

And so go check it out, guys. Have a great week and keep podcasting.

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