Latest / Buzzcast / Shaping the Future of Podcasting: Standards and Innovation

Transcript

Shaping the Future of Podcasting: Standards and Innovation · Buzzcast

• 0:00
  Jordan: I'm gonna start in an analogy jar, you guys are gonna have to put five bucks in it.
• 0:04
  Kevin: Terrible analogy jar.
• 0:05
  Kevin: The Podcast Standards Project has launched publicly. So our
• 0:16
  Jordan: So podcasters and listeners should really care statement about what the Podcast Standards Project is, is that we're a grassroots industry coalition dedicated to creating standards and practices that improve the open podcast ecosystem for both listeners and creators. So there's a couple of words that are worth exploring in that statement. And the ones I want to dig into is like that we are advocating for and pushing for open podcasting. But we're not necessarily like a body that is intending to go out and invent new things. So like, what's the difference between what the Podcast Standards Project is and what is Podcasting 2.0? Well, Podcasting 2.0 launched three years ago, and they've done a great job of inventing a whole bunch of new, they're really called elements.
• 0:56
  Jordan: Some people call them tags, some people call them features, but they're like tags that live inside of an RSS feed that extend the functionality of podcasting. So some of those could be things from like, how do your listeners support your show? What is the data that you make available about your show, about the Podcast Standards Project too, because it's going like a location tag or a transcript tag or a funding tag, that's like on the invention side, that work is still going to take place in the podcasting to auto project, we don't want any of that work to come over to the podcast, Anders project. But what the podcast Anders project can do is that we can look at that project, we can participate in it. And when we start to see some momentum around certain tags, certain new technologies, we can say, Hey, these are really good, is it time to start bringing it into a standard. And the benefit of calling it a standard is that you can get more adoption that way. So now we can adopt it into a standard spec. And we can start at the maybe the recommendation level, and then move it to a required level, possibly down the road and say, Hey, if you're going to be publishing RSS feeds, you should be including these tags, you should be supporting them on both sides. That way, when new apps come on board, they can look at one standard spec. And to elevate podcasting as a whole. It's going to elevate the they can say, hey, I can support all of this stuff. And I can experience that podcasters and podcast listeners have, right?
• 2:03
  Jordan: expect broad support on both sides. So if I'm building a podcast listening app, I can expect to see these tags in the
• 2:08
  Kevin: Yeah, I think so. I mean, our hope is that everybody who's RSS feeds that I ingest. Or if I'm a new podcast host that's coming on the scene, I'm saying, Hey, which tags that I should I create an interface around for people to be able to input data?
• 2:20
  Kevin: Well, this is the spec that you can look at. And you know that if your podcasters put in location, or transcripts or something like that, well, those are part of the standard. So I should expect that at least a good portion of the podcast playing apps would be able to support those and make use of that data.
• 2:50
  Kevin: building in the podcast space starts by supporting the standards at a minimum, like we would love for that to become table stakes. And then we also want to encourage experimentation, like, let's take value for value. For example, right now, value for value is not a part of the proposed standard, right. But that doesn't mean that people shouldn't experiment with it.
• 3:08
  Kevin: People shouldn't be building into their interfaces shouldn't be getting feedback from podcasters feedback from podcast listeners, that podcast app shouldn't be building an end trying to figure out how to do it. Like we want to keep the experimentation side going. But at the same time, you also want to set here's the base standard that everyone should try to adhere to. So that we know that we're all building in the same direction, so that we know if we're building something new, if I build this, it will have support. And the other side of that coin is that if I build something, it might not have broad support. But that's totally fine. Like that's how things get broad support is that people take risks, they experiment, they think they've got a good idea. They see something that maybe the podcast namespace project is doing. And they're excited about it. Great, build it out, try to build an audience around it build momentum, and maybe you help get it to the place where it can be considered as a standard.
• 3:55
  Alban: So podcasting starts depending on exactly how you want to label the beginning of it, so around 2001, Dave Winer, who developed RSS and Adam Curry get together, and Adam really is like, Hey, let's get this audio stuff into RSS. And they kind of build up this baseline idea of what podcasting is, and starts off really small. And a very slowly people start doing these kinds of broadcast shows, and people are starting to download them. And then you see hosting companies and apps start to come on the scene. Big change happens when Steve Jobs finds out about it. And he's like, this is really cool. Let's get this into iTunes. And podcasting just continues to slowly grow, and it was open. That meant every podcast app worked with every podcast out there. There was interoperability between everything. Same way that if you have a website, you can be accessed whether or not people are using Internet Explorer or Chrome or new browser like Ark.
• 4:54
  Alban: They're all going to be able to go to the same website. That's how it was. And then around mid 2010s, the serial moment was really important because a lot of new people started getting into podcasts, it was big enough that it got me to switch my job to podcasting. And the big tech companies start noticing, oh, there's this cool new thing. And by then stuff like YouTube have already tried to like steak out video. And you've got social media trying to take over all of the different like writing platforms. You know, we used to have lots of blogs. But eventually, we saw social media was able to kind of steal a lot of the writing away. I think a bunch of big tech companies go, Whoa, this whole podcasting thing, pretty much apple is like the biggest player by a mile, and they're not trying to steal it. So why don't we try to grab it. And so we see a bunch of players are moving in being very aggressive, saying, let's get everything on our platform. And very quickly, what were we stuck with is this world that we're at now, where most of podcasting still open. Most of it works with any player, any host any podcast, any listener. But now there's pockets these individual fiefdoms where it's like Spotify has got their exclusives, and Amazon has exclusives. And there's some shows that will work sometimes, but they won't work here. And it's getting fractured up. And it's becoming a battleground. And we're looked certain look more like streaming services where you're subscribing like 15 of them, then we're looking like websites. And that's what's at stake. And so this is gonna mean lots of different companies, lots of competitors coming together to say, Okay, here's what we have in common. Let's make sure this stays in common, rather than us all turning into battling each other, while the TIC TOCs. And the YouTubes of the world continue to get even more mindshare.
• 6:42
  Jordan: And that's what's so cool about it, too, is like just seeing all these different companies and all these competitors coming together in like having one cohesive mission is very cool.
• 6:53
  Kevin: Yeah, I like that analogy to the web browser. Because I think it's very similar. Like with HTML5, a bunch of people building for the web came together and said, We need to standardize a set of technology that works for the web. So regardless of which web browser you use, a website can be displayed, and the information can be consumed consistently.
• 7:14
  Kevin: And that was super helpful for the web. This is this goes a long ways back. But if you remember, in the early 2000s, web browsers were becoming largely incompatible instead of very compatible. And so people realize this, who were working in the industries at the time, and said, Hey, for the greater good of the internet, we need to come up with some baseline standards. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't innovate on top of this. And we've seen this very recently, like in the past couple years. So web browser support now is really great, regardless of whether you're using Safari, or Chrome, or Edge, or Firefox, or even some of these new emerging browsers.
• 7:48
  Kevin: So web browsers got together, where browser makers and people who are building the internet come together, they decide on a set of standards, they formalize it, and to a living standard, which is now HTML5. And from there like we can, like I'm going to use the shopping experience as a baseline web browser experience, right? So like any website that you land on now, regardless of the browser you use, you're going to be able to make a transaction you're going to make a purchase.
• 8:12
  Kevin: So they standardize on things like what is the secure browser protocol that we can use, like, and they came up with secure socket layers? And how is that going to work in form fields that all work consistently. So if I land on a website, and I'm in Chrome, I might just punch in my credit card information and buy whatever it is I'm looking for. In Safari, I will have the same form fields, but I might also have a button for Apple Pay. And Google answered that like a year later with Google Pay. And so now if you're in Chrome, you have Google's checkout experience as well.
• 8:36
  Kevin: That's like an enhancement on top of the standard. So Apple says, Hey, we want to offer Apple Pay to everybody who comes in our browser to a website that supports our payment method. And you can build above and beyond the standard. But you also have the ability to always fall back to the standard. So the websites never broken. It can just be like progressive enhancement.
• 8:55
  Kevin: The Podcast Standards Project is not pushing for like slowing down innovation or saying that you shouldn't do experimental features on top, or not even like when I've been saying that you can't have proprietary stuff. Like if Spotify wants to do their own experience in podcasting, in their app with their own proprietary technology. That's great. All we're saying is please also support the standards first before investing in proprietary stuff. And so it's really worked well for the web. We hope it can also work well for podcasting, and long term. There's this goal of preserving open podcasting.
• 9:26
  Kevin: Because regardless of where you want to listen or where you want to publish, if the tools are following the standard, you know that they're going to have some sort of consistency in their experience.
• 9:36
  Alban: Yeah, another example of the layer on top inside of an app that adds another cool experience, I think, would be like Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Apple Podcasts, like already supports everything in the podcast Standards Project, because they've always been very friendly with like the open ecosystem and been big supporters of it. And then they say, you know, there's this really cool thing that would work really well inside At our app, and it aligns with our business models, and it can help creators. So we're doing these subscriptions. And that's a cool layer on top, and it works really well, because everything else still works, you can still add a podcast feed, just by having the RSS feed, you can still click links and show notes. There's all these things that we would consider table stakes. But every once in a while you have new apps are like, oh, you can't have you can't add a feed just because you know, the RSS feed, it has to be inside of our directory, we won't let you add one outside, there's sometimes we'll see apps that are like no links outside. And it breaks the experience, not just for the creators who feel this pain. But for the listeners who are now like, why the heck am I hearing go click the link in the show notes. And they forgot to put the link in there, I don't see a link, I see the word but no link. That's the experience that I used to have in the early 2000s. On the web, you would be on a website and it would say something about like a video or an audio file or some images.
• 11:01
  Alban: And they were not there. Or it would be broken images. And you just be like this is a bad developer. And then you start to wake up to oh, I'm using some new browser, I'm using Netscape.
• 11:12
  Alban: And they built this to work on Internet Explorer. And the web should not work that way. And the web solve this, the podcasting industry should not work that way. And this is the attempt to have lots of companies come together and say, Alright, let's make sure that everything still has this shared base, so that we can all innovate in cool ways on top of that.
• 11:36
  Kevin: Yeah, you've got some really great ideas there. And like, as you're sharing them, I'm like trying to take notes.
• 11:42
  Kevin: I'm trying to do a podcast at the same time. But I'm trying to take notes, like some of your ideas that we should we need to be doing stuff like this. So our initial proposal is called, it's like a .9 proposal right now, for a podcast standard. We didn't want to launch with a 1.0, like we want to have input from the community before we go ahead and get to a place where we can finalize it and say, Okay, this is the spec now. And then like maybe on a yearly basis, we increment or something like that, we'll figure all that out in the open. We didn't want to do any of that, while the group was still closed off. But you mentioned some really good things like how apps are interpreting episode descriptions or show notes like that should be something that we tackle. So right now, the spec says something like you can use HTML in your show notes. And here's the tags that should be supported. But we don't go like any further than that right now.
• 12:22
  Kevin: So I think it'd be a great discussion to have in the group.
• 12:25
  Kevin: Like if you're building a podcast app, and somebody puts in an HTML link is the expectation is the standard set that this is how you display that link, versus just typing out a URL. And that's how we have to do it. That's exactly the thing that we're talking about people who are podcasting all the time, they're just like, just tell me how to format my link. I just want someone to be able to click on something and I get a different experience in every app. Is there something that I can do that would work in all apps? Well, there's not right now. And so formalizing stuff like that, and having discussions around that, and coming to an agreement, and then having everybody kind of update their code to work like that at a base level, again, progressive enhancement aside, like, we're not saying you can't do progressively enhance it, make it better, you got a better idea and make it better. But at a minimum support, this is what we're trying to accomplish.
• 13:05
  Jordan: So if one of our listeners, you know, has a lot of really great ideas for this, how would they get involved with the podcast standards project to get their opinions moved forward?
• 13:16
  Kevin: Yeah, it's super simple.
• 13:16
  Kevin: So go to podstandards.org, you can read about the project. And there are links over to the GitHub. So GitHub is where the work takes place. And that can feel a little intimidating for somebody who hasn't like they're not in technology themselves.
• 13:28
  Kevin: They don't write code, they don't ever want to look at, you know, the guts behind an RSS feed. But you don't have to write code to participate, you can just write words, you can just say, hey, here's a problem that I'm experiencing. If somebody with some technical knowledge can help figure out how to solve that problem, it would be helpful to podcasters.
• 13:45
  Kevin: So you can just click on a button says open an issue. And you can just describe the issue that you see in podcasting, in your own words. And then hopefully, we'll have a community come in behind that who are technical implementers and say, Oh, this can actually be solved with code like this, or like this, or here's a different technical solution.
• 14:01
  Kevin: And you can follow along you participate, whether you're a coder or not.
• 14:05
  Jordan: That's great.
• 14:06
  Alban: This is a very cool initiative to have seen a little bit behind the scenes, Kevin, because I know you've been involved, along with a ton of people, I have not been, but I've kind of seen the amount of time that you've been working on it and working on the website and working on the spec. And so it's very cool to kind of see it finally come into, you know, out into the open and get shared with everyone think it's really needed. Because the web still right now has three open protocols that are used any level, it's got the email, we have web, so the for websites, and podcasting. And there, this was the promise of the internet a long time ago, and that promise has kind of gone away, but we still got three areas left. And so I love that this is a organization coming around and saying okay, let's keep this open. Like let's not just give this over to the big companies, let's instead fight for things to be open and free so that people can express themselves how they wish.
• 15:09
  Kevin: Yeah, I agree. It is a battle worth fighting. When you say podcasting that the really the backbone of that is the RSS spec, which still exists a little bit in the world of blogging and like website publishing with a blog and distributing that via RSS, and that's, that's the same technology that podcasting was built on top of so with RSS to Dotto, the enclosure tag includes your element and try to use the correct terminology that can enclose your element was added. And that allows you to associate a media file with an item in your RSS feed. And that's where podcasting came from. So it's important to remember that we're talking about standards. And sometimes there's a little bit of angst that builds up in people about like, well, I don't want anybody telling me what I can and can't do like it's the internet, I want to build my tool my way and yada yada yada. But like podcasting was built on standards, RSS two dot o itself is a standard. It is a massively. It's a genius standard, because like the best standards in the world are super flexible. And they don't do any more than they absolutely have to and RSS to odo kind of encapsulates that mentality that that vision of a really great standard, it's very minimal. And then it allows extendibility beyond the standard itself. So when David want to release it, he said it is done, it is closed, you cannot just will not be modified or changed. And it'll live as long as it lives.
• 16:32
  Kevin: And we've seen that as lived a very long life and like still going strong, because it was so beautifully simple. And it has this ability to be extended. And then so there's some great projects that have extended it.
• 16:47
  Kevin: And the spec proposal as it exists today is using some of those extensions. So the first one that we use is the iTunes namespace extension for podcasting, which kind of became a de facto standard, like Apple never called to the standard.
• 17:03
  Kevin: But they just said, Hey, if you want to get listed in iTunes, here's the extension that you're using, here's what all those elements do. And people basically took that as a standard, because everyone wanted to be in iTunes. And so we use a lot of elements from that still, Apple continues to slowly kind of modify that over time as their as their apps change. But the standard, the iTunes namespace still exists, and it still called iTunes namespace, funnily enough. The other one that we use is the podcast namespace. And this one is the opposite. This one's like very innovative, it's changing all the time. They're adding new elements all the time. And so like, if you want a bunch of experimental features, that's a great namespace to play with.
• 17:40
  Kevin: And then there's two others that just do very basic things. One is the Adam namespace, which just gives you kind of a permalink for your RSS feed. And so that's the only element from that namespace that we that we use. And the other one is, I can't remember the name of it.
• 17:57
  Kevin: It's kind of a funky name, but it allows you to basically put HTML in your show notes. And so we use that just to accomplish that one thing. So there are a lot of standards that are used in podcasting. But there's not like anybody saying, Hey, we use all these different things from all these places all over the internet to create a podcast feed. Is there one place on the internet, I can go and just learn how to create a standard podcast feed? Well, this project aims to solve that as well. So like somebody coming on the scene saying, Oh, I have an idea for this technology I want to build and it involves podcasting. Where's the one source I can go to on the internet to find out how to build a standard podcast feed?
• 18:30
  Kevin: This is it, it never existed before you had to go to all these different places and pieced together all this information and try to figure out like, which way is the wind blowing right now in podcasting?
• 18:36
  Kevin: Well, now you have one place to be able to answer those questions.
• 18:41
  Alban: All right, I've got a new analogy off the cuff, this might get cut. I'm trying to think of areas that are in our lives where a standard actually allows for more flexibility, and more innovation. And the one that popped in my brain is like shirts. I know if I go online, and I'm looking for a shirt, if it says L that probably stands for large, and that's likely going to fit me because we have a relative standard, especially for men sizes that like these sizes correlate with these body proportions. But it doesn't indicate like what's on the shirt, what type of shirt if it's a t shirt, or it's a button down or it's got an image, all that is still open for total creativity by the people making the shirt. But there are some things that it can share some information. Now I know how to interact with it, instead of going online and buying six shirts and sending most of them back because I have no idea that your large has like giant arm holes or something. Right? Is this ending up getting cut, Jordan? I'm seeing-
• 19:45
  Jordan: Oh absolutely.
• 19:47
  Kevin: It's not it's not a terrible analogy.
• 19:50
  Jordan: No, it's not terrible, unless you're a woman in which there's absolutely no standard to the sizing.
• 19:56
  Alban: I thought about halfway through because that's my wife's experience of shopping online.
• 19:58
  Alban: There's not a standard for women's sizes.
• 20:02
  Jordan: Nothing fits.
• 20:03
  Kevin: Yeah, so the t shirt analogy, I think there's some validity to it. Let me see. Let me let me throw out my own analogy and see if it works better. And mine is in the technology space. Well, let's talk about email. So email, there has been a standard that's been around for years and years and years, I really have no idea how old the email spec is, when I talked, when we talked about email protocols, we're mostly talking about IMAP, which is pretty much what runs Internet Mail. Nowadays, there was another one called Pop three, but they were they were compatible, very similar technologies. And most email transfers on both of these two protocols. But for for years and years, when email came out, it always looks the same whether you're in Outlook, or Yahoo, or whatever. Well, about 20 years ago, Google said, We're gonna launch an email client, we're gonna do things a little bit differently. And they organized your email differently. They organized it by threads. And they said, instead of creating folders and putting things in folders, you can just tag stuff and just archive it. And if you want to dig it up, again, your primary way to do that is going to be search. This is all proprietary technology that was built off of the same standard protocol. Since then, in recent years, we've seen more innovation happening email, like now another company came along, called superhuman, and they decided to innovate on top of people with Gmail addresses, but they're just using that same protocol in the background.
• 21:11
  Kevin: They're saying, we don't actually have to serve the email, let Google do that. But we can improve upon Google's interface around it. So we're leveraging a protocol that's being delivered by another company. And we provide our own UI, again, all innovation that's happening on top of a standard protocol. And then just even more recently than superhuman, you have Basecamp, which is now called 37 Signals, that the company behind Hey, they launched their own email product. And they say we're gonna thread messages as well.
• 21:36
  Kevin: But we have some new ideas around the interface, and we're going to strain stuff out, we're not going to let people into your inbox by default, you have to get give them permission to land in your inbox. Like, again, a more innovation that's happening upon layers of a standard protocol. And that's the same thing that can happen in podcasting. But we don't have to change the original protocols like RSS is great. The extensions and the namespaces that are built on top of them are great. So the podcast standards project, we're not going to come out and say, Hey, we need a new namespace, it's going to be the new podcast standards namespace know, there are great namespaces that exist, all we're doing is trying to figure out the best of all of them, and putting them together and saying, Hey, if you're gonna build technology in the space, let's all agree to support these things as table stakes, and then innovate on top of that, and create great experiences on both sides for the podcast or for the listeners, for advertisers for whatever, but like, we need some set of ground rules to be able to all work from so that what we build works for a lot of people.
• 22:34
  Alban: I think that going forward, Jordan, we should have an ongoing segment of Kevin and I try to think of different areas where there's I've got some other words, to take out this whole podcast.
• 22:46
  Kevin: The analogy wars, yeah,
• 22:47
  Jordan: this episode is gonna be the analogy smackdown.
• 22:54
  Alban: Of all these cool things that are at least this consolidation that's happening with PSP, and then some radical new ideas with the podcast to Dotto, one of the cool new things that's come out of there was some of the stuff we did with this new cycle, the podcast, TX T tag,
• 23:11
  Kevin: okay, I mean, so the way that we implemented it within Buzzsprout, is that you're never going to see something in the Buzzsprout interface that says podcast-colon-txt, like that's code. And so we don't think that podcasters need to be exposed to the code that lives in the RSS feed. That's the job of Buzzsprout to make that stuff simple. But the main use case right now for this new element, again, created from the podcast namespace project, which is part of podcasting, to Dotto is to be able to offer a better way to verify feed ownership. That's the main use case. There are other potential use cases for it. But right now, that's the main one. So that's the, we built an interface around the main use case. And so if you remember, it's been about three or four months ago, maybe five, I'm not gonna be time, but we pulled email addresses out of RSS feeds. The main reason that email addresses were in RSS feeds is it gave an easy way to verify the ownership of that RSS feed. So if you went to try to claim your feed, on some directory, they might say, Great, we just shot an email to the email address that was in the feed, you got to click a link in that email. And then when though it's you. When we pull the email addresses out, now, they don't have a way to verify. And so this has been a solution. We also had our own solution, which was we'll just put your email address back in your feed for a short period of time so that you can get the email and verify it. But as more and more companies are starting to catch up with this idea that this is a good thing to get email addresses out the podcast namespace project has come up with a solution that says we don't actually have to put email addresses back and fees not even for 24 or 48 hours, we can just put this other element in so that you can drop a verification code in your feed and that's the way for them to verify that you own it without ever having to expose your email address to all the bots that are out there scanning for them. And so we incorporated it into Buzzsprout into the feed ownership there.
• 24:59
  Kevin: application workflow. So where you used to go and be able to turn your email address on for 48 hours. Now you can, instead of typing an email address in that field, you can type anything you want. It can be a verification code, it can be copyright information, it can be an email address, whatever it is, if it's an email address, we recognize that it's an email address, we put it in the email field. If it's something else, like a verification code or a token, we recognize that's not an email address, it must be something else. So we drop it into the podcast colon text tag.
• 25:27
  Jordan: Wow. So you could just like make up your own thing, like if you have a podcast safe word in essence, like, you could just put that in there. And then like, have the podcast platforms verify with that word. Right?
• 25:41
  Kevin: Right. So like one of the use cases that exists today is that you have to have an Apple ID to list your podcasts on Apple podcasts. So you sign in with your Apple ID and you list I'm gonna start in an analogy jar, you guys are gonna have to your podcasts. Now that podcast is associated with your Apple ID. So Apple knows who you are they verified that you own that feed. But let's say I'm going to be off the show and it's on my Apple ID I want to give it to Jordan. Well, Jordan says, Great transfer it to my Apple ID, I'll take it over. How do you do that? Well, the way that Apple wants you to do that right now is they want you to put a code in your RSS feed. So they're gonna send you an email, it says, We understand you want to transfer ownership to a different Apple ID, we need you to put this whatever 12 digit code in your RSS feed somewhere, once we see it, we'll know that you've authorized this transfer.
• 26:20
  Kevin: And so you can add that anywhere, you can add it to your show notes, you could add it wherever they just have to find it. But like who wants to put that in your show note of an episode, it's a weird string of characters at the end, like randomly. And so a lot of people just added it to the copyright field there, like nobody notices that there or whatever. But like now we have a place to put it.
• 26:37
  Kevin: So you could just log in here Buzzsprout account, you could go put it into the verification field, which then we throw in the podcast X tag, Apple sees it, they transfer ownership, and then you go and you take it out, it's a much cleaner, nicer way to do it, it doesn't disrupt anything, and there's a place for it. Now there wasn't before, it's kind of like how many times you lose your keys, your car keys, like until you had to place the keys go there, you know where they are. It's this cleaner. So throwing your keys on the counter, put it in the textfield. That's my analogy.
• 27:08
  Kevin: put five bucks in it.
• 27:10
  Kevin: Terrible analogy.
• 27:12
  Jordan: So another thing that we added this work cycle is dynamic content mid rolls.
• 27:20
  Alban: This is a long time coming. So we first launched dynamic content to just be content that was at the beginning in the end of your episode. And so now you can upload content and upload some audio and say I want to put this in my episode, you put it at the front, you put it the back, but now you can put it into the center. And the problem with like just dropping things into the center of episodes is things have to naturally fit, you have to find good spots to actually put minerals in. And part of what we developed with Buzzsprout ads was a smart insertion point finder, where we would find spots that were a natural break of the conversation. And we'd say that's a good spot for something to be dropped in. We added like a nice transition around it to help orient listeners. So they would know there's something different here, this is an ad, or it could be a piece of dynamic content. And so we've leveraged all of that work that we built to now make it so you can upload content yourself, and it'd be inserted into the middle of all of your episodes. And obviously, like appropriate spots, and then you can go and check them out. So this is something people have been asking for since about 20 minutes after we launched dynamic content. And it's exciting to be able to go back and reply to all those emails and try to go find old Facebook conversations and say, Hey, this thing you were asking for, it's out there, and you can use it.
• 28:46
  Kevin: Yeah, it's very cool technology. And there's a lot of technology that lives behind a really beautifully simple UI. So it's not any harder to add content as a mid roll now in Buzzsprout, than it is to add it as a pre roll or post roll. And that was that was a big thing that was really important to us.
• 29:03
  Kevin: And we're developing this feature is that we don't want all of our podcasters to have to go back through all of their entire back catalogue and add insertion points, like I want it here and here and here in this episode and here and here. And that's very time consuming. You add extra energy and effort every time you publish an episode, then you'd have to do that this technology allows you to not have to worry about that you will automatically get insertion points at natural breaks in the conversation without you having to do any additional work. And now being able to do dynamic content in the middle position allows you to do your own ads. So Buzzsprout ads is a really great opportunity. It's a solution for people who have podcasts that match with a bunch of ads, but not every podcast does. So we do have ads that are constantly flowing into the Buzzsprout ads marketplace. And a lot of our podcasters are seeing good opportunities consistently. A lot of our podcasters are not and that's just dependent on the type of content that you produce. And so if you have a the more niche your podcast, the less opportunities you're going to have. It doesn't mean that You don't have an opportunity to monetize, it just might mean that a lot of people are coming into our marketplace. They're not targeting podcasts exactly like yours, nothing that you should change on your content side. Like if you're, you're passionate about this content and you have an audience, but you might just have to sell your own ads for now until the Buzzsprout marketplace starts growing in popularity, and you start getting more opportunities. So in that time between now and then you might have opportunities to sell your own ads. And if you do, now, you can drop them in as mid rolls, they don't have to live in the pre or post roll position, which we know are usually lower value spots. So pre roll ads get skipped often post roll ads, sometimes people cut off and don't listen to, but mid rolls have the highest rate of the highest level of efficacy because they're in the middle of an episode. And so if you're driving in your car, the phones in the pocket and an ad comes on, you hope it's relevant. So you help people listen to it.
• 30:47
  Kevin: But it also helps the phones kind of away
• 30:49
  Alban: You also hope they listen to because they're driving.
• 30:51
  Kevin: I don't want them messign with their phones while they're driving. So hopefully, they're not skipping over midrolls nearly as much as they might in the pre or post position.
• 30:59
  Jordan: So podcasters can upload up to three midrolls at this point, right?
• 31:04
  Kevin: Yep, we stopped at three, like there's a right number there somewhere. We don't know if it's going to be three forever. But we started with three, we'll see if people say no, I really maybe five or three is fine. I don't know. But at a certain point, it starts to become a little bit like kind of overwhelming. And like how many episodes are going to be long enough to get more than three.
• 31:21
  Kevin: So we felt like that was a safe place to start. But just like everything, like we put our best ideas out there. And then we listen to what our customers say, and then make adjustments as needed.
• 31:31
  Jordan: Well, what's the duration of the midroll that you can record?
• 31:35
  Kevin: It can be I think that can be up to five minutes. That can be super, like longer than you ever need them to be.
• 31:40
  Jordan: Yeah, I mean, so you could record your own, like host read ads and put a couple back to back and insert that as one.
• 31:47
  Jordan: You can't?
• 31:48
  Alban: You can do that.
• 31:50
  Kevin: Oh, I see what you're saying. I seriously. Look at Jordan with the hacks.
• 31:53
  Jordan: Thank you. You're shaking your head No, I was like, What? That's smart.
• 31:57
  Kevin: You're right.
• 31:58
  Alban: Yeah, I mean, that can work. It's got a couple of downsides. One, that's just not a great experience for listeners. I mean, how many times have you listened to podcasts and you're excited about 30 seconds to a minute of one ad. But then once you get to add two, then three, then four, you're like, Okay, give me a break. Yeah, I started feeling like I'm listening to a radio show again. The other downside is now those are all married forever. You know, now it's like, your HelloFresh ad, and your MailChimp ad and your Blue Apron, ad or whatever. They're all stuck together. So as soon as your Blue Apron contract is done, you're like, Okay, we served up the 20,000 downloads I sold. Well, those other two ads are still connected to it, it's good point. So it makes it a bit less dynamic. So I don't love that hack, though. It's a perfectly legitimate hack that I'm sure now it's out there.
• 32:51
  Alban: It's gonna happen.
• 32:53
  Kevin: People are gonna do it.
• 32:53
  Kevin: Yeah, I mean, I guess it could, it could certainly work if you sold whatever 10,000 downloads to two different customers. And your episodes are typically short, so you're not going to be able to get them like served up at the same time, then you could record them together as one piece of audio. So you do your whatever company ABC ad and then you go into your company XYZ ad.
• 33:14
  Kevin: And they live as one ad group, and you're giving them the same number of downloads. Yeah, it absolutely could work. Probably not something we'd recommend.
• 33:24
  Kevin: But it's not something that you can't do if you feel like it works for you.
• 33:27
  Jordan: So, midrolls: use responsibly.
• 33:32
  Alban: Kevin, you kind of mentioned Buzzsprout ads. So another thing we added are a total new type of ads for Buzzsprout ads. For a while we've experimented and had brand ads in beta. These are just companies that can buy an ad inside your podcast. So people might have seen some of those.
• 33:51
  Alban: Those were pretty rare because that those were all manual and like early stage beta. But now that is out and available to everybody. So now if a brand or a company goes to buzzsprout.com/ads, and signs up, there's a whole workflow for them to create, upload and purchase ads inside of podcasts, they can specify what type of podcasts they are looking for, so they can target the listeners that they want. And it's a really great way to add more ads to the marketplace, but also help small businesses start testing podcasting ads in a easy way.
• 34:31
  Kevin: Yeah. And part of this project. When we launched it in beta, we called them brand ads.
• 34:34
  Kevin: And as part of this project, we'd learned some things and we started calling them something different. So now they're called product ads. If you have ads enabled for your podcast, you'll see some ads are labeled podcast and some ads are labeled product. And so that can be a product or a service or a brand or whatever, but it's this distinct category of an ad that's not a podcast ad. So we hope it solves a couple of problems. One, we're trying to get more advertisers into the marketplace so podcasters have more ad opportunities to Do some podcasters didn't like the idea of promoting other podcasts within their podcast. And three, we had a lot of contact and interest from people who wanted to advertise on podcasts. But they didn't want to advertise on other podcasts, they actually had a product or service, so solves all of those problems.
• 35:14
  Kevin: It's super exciting. So as Alban said, hopefully, you'll start logging in. And if you use Buzzsprout ads, you'll see opportunities for products. And it works exactly the same as podcasts that so you can accept them if you'd like them if you think they're a good fit. And if you don't, you can decline them and kind of tell us why. So hopefully, that advertisers can make adjustments, like if it's audio quality, or something, or if it's just not a good fit, no problem at all, like, they don't want to waste their money. If you don't feel like as as a podcaster, you don't feel like it's good fit for your audience, then don't feel bad about marking it as not a good fit for my podcast. And we'll get a little bit smarter about matching you with more appropriate ads in the future.
• 35:48
  Jordan: That'd be really exciting for people. We've had a lot of podcasters in the Facebook group, ask if they're going to be brand ads in Buzzsprout ads at any point. So this is gonna be a really big deal for them.
• 36:00
  Kevin: Yeah, I think there's a lot of overlap between people who are interested in podcasting, and people who are kind of like entrepreneurial, who might like have a product or service of their own, that they want to promote a lot of podcasters do books, a lot of them do e courses, stuff like that. And they might be interested in trying a podcast ad to promote their products, instead of just promoting their podcast that also promotes their product.
• 36:20
  Alban: Yeah, one thing that's different with the product ads in Buzzsprout, are that it's really self service, it's really easy for you to buy an ad and get it into podcasts. Without all this like jumping through hoops and meeting with like kind of a pushy salesman, and you're getting all this like stuff about all the amazing things, you happen to your business and you do 15 meetings, and then you do one ad, you know, it's we're lowering all the investment you have to put in, especially time investment to get started with ads. As someone who buys a lot of advertisements. Sometimes it's so painful to go through all the meetings, that there's just entire channels that we have not invested in or we tried once or twice, and even if they're good, they have to be really good because they take so much time. And there's a big difference between the way the world used to be, which was like running around on the web and asking people to add you to a blog post and you'd pay and you put a banner ad up. Well, when Google came along, it was like, what if we do Google search ads, or we do ad sets where we'll put ads on people's sites for them?
• 37:28
  Alban: Well, then it made it so much easier for businesses to try digital advertising. Rather than going around and doing stuff manually. I think ConvertKit has tried this now for newsletters rather than everybody running around and doing one off newsletter sponsorships, you can sponsor with the marketplace.
• 37:47
  Alban: And with Buzzsprout ads. Now, you can just go ahead and you can buy some ads, and you can target some listeners, and you can experiment as a company is podcast advertising a place for us, you can start to figure out pretty quickly, yes, this works or no, this isn't something I want to invest in any more. So that rather than every like company meeting for the rest of your life, where you talk about marketing and ways to grow, you don't have to keep saying podcasting could work, we don't know we've never tried it, we're not going to really be like keep putting it off, you can start to figure that out pretty quickly.
• 38:23
  Alban: So I'm excited as a marketer for how much easier this is than a lot of other options out there.
• 38:35
  Jordan: So last week, YouTube tweeted, Podcasts are a go! So I had to go on there and see if I could get my podcast designated as a podcast on YouTube. So basically, the way that you do this is you just on your YouTube dashboard, you'll just click the little link that takes you to your YouTube studio. And they have up at the top there's like a little Create button. And when you click that there is an option in the drop down menu for a new podcast. So you click new podcast and then it pops up saying you can create a new podcast or you can set an existing playlist as a podcast.
• 39:09
  Jordan: And what I found with YouTube is that the podcasts are very like playlist specific. So basically, you could have several playlists on your channel that could be designated as different podcasts. But something they're kind of warning against is you don't want to mix like video clips in with full blown episodes. They want to make sure that it's very cohesive. So you need to make sure that like if you do designate a playlist as a podcast, it needs to be like the full podcast episodes not just like intermingled with everything else. And it was actually really easy for me to set up and I just added a few videos and now I have a podcast on YouTube is pretty quick and easy. You know the thing about it is that I don't think that podcasts are necessarily a go on YouTube. I think that it's still just to Playlist but it's called a podcast because there was no RSS feed involved. It's still not on YouTube music.
• 40:06
  Jordan: Apparently, they're going to be working on that. But yeah, so it's not quite a go. But it's like a soft launch.
• 40:17
  Alban: It maybe it's a go, it's not a done. The playlist thing, I actually really liked this way of organizing podcasts on YouTube, the idea is you have a channel, and part of what's on the channel is a podcast. And they're like, Okay, we already had these groups of items called a playlist. And the way that things work inside of YouTube is you put all the episodes in a playlist, and then you tag that playlist as, hey, this is a podcast, since its serial content, often it's ongoing, episodic content. I think that's a good way of organizing it. I do think that's a good point from YouTube, like, hey, the clips are different than the full episodes. And so you got to make sure you keep those separate. Imagine how frustrating would be if you went to your podcast player, and you flip it open, and you're trying to listen to Buzzcast ad in between every episode of Buzzcast, we had like 4/32 snippets of the show that you just listened to, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for you to get served all of that. And it's a clean and easy way for YouTube to say, Okay, you're interested in full episodes. Those are all in this spot. You are somebody who doesn't listen to this show, or you haven't listened to in a while. Maybe you'd like some shorts. shorts are a different thing. And they go somewhere else. So I think it's a good way of organizing it.
• 41:41
  Kevin: I was going to ask you, Alban, did you figure out? Well, a couple things. Let me start by saying I launched YouTube Music last week, and I spent a little bit of time trying to find podcasts on there. I could not.
• 41:48
  Kevin: So seems like Jordan has confirmed my theory that I guess don't actually exist yet. And YouTube Music I'll be excited to hear when they do. But the second part of my question Alban is Have you seen when you log into the studio, we have a bunch of podcasts that it looks like YouTube has just decided that they are going to label as podcasts. They've taken a few of our playlists, and they've like automatically assigned them the power of the podcast designation. And then we also have Buzzcast now in their and its own playlist, and it's also labeled as a podcast, but it's still set to private. So like what's going on in your mind in terms of what are they doing?
• 42:21
  Kevin: And when are you going to make the Buzzcast podcast public?
• 42:25
  Alban: Okay, so a few things.
• 42:25
  Alban: First, I would say things that are happening on the Buzzsprout YouTube channel are not reflective of what's happening on podcasting as a whole on YouTube. Part of that is just because we been part of some betas. And we've, you know, told them, hey, we've got podcasts, and we've got a YouTube channel.
• 42:44
  Alban: We love all your stuff. So anything that's new or experimental, we want to try it.
• 42:51
  Alban: And so that's some of what you're seeing. We do have our YouTube channel right now you can go and see, we actually have a couple of the Buzzcast episodes live, I think we have to like last two, and people can go on there, and you can click play, it's a slightly different interface than video is just a picture of our artwork, and then you can listen to us chat. It's not the optimal experience for podcasting. Yet. You know, YouTube, I think is still a place people are going because they want to watch video, and we're not making video of Buzzcast Right now, I don't see that really changing either. So I kind of mean, on one hand, we're testing this out, because we want to be teachers of this.
• 43:34
  Alban: On the other. I have been somebody who's over and over and over, you could quote me 50 times on this podcast saying like, Hey, if you're gonna be on YouTube, like make a freaking video, so I appreciate that we don't have videos. The results are, you know, mixed. Because a lot of the people who watch our channel are watching our channel because they're trying to learn about podcasting, and they want to watch something, and all of a sudden, this is not a video experience. So the viewership has been lower one has 272 views, so it's not zero. But the videos around that are you know, 4000 views, 3000 views, 1000 views 2000 views so it's a much smaller amount but we are experimenting with it.
• 44:21
  Kevin: Have you been able to talk with anyone at YouTube to find out if since these new like they're audio only but they're listed as videos? Is that hurting our ranking in YouTube like on our channel Overall,
• 44:32
  Alban: these that are being pulled in? Those are in a playlist that have designated as a podcast. So the algorithms I believe, I do not know this for sure. I know this for sure was shorts, like they have separate algorithms for short content and video content. So mixing those together and YouTube. YouTube is totally good at figuring out what your which and my guess I don't know this for sure is that by putting everything in a playlist Just marking that as podcasts that's being served up on the podcast tab, that will likely end up inside of YouTube music. By doing that, there's probably I'm guessing a different algorithm that's being used to surface that content, it would definitely be a bummer if the thing I was always worried about and I'd seen happen on other people's channels happened to us. That is, you build a long time building a channel of high quality video content. And then you start uploading static images with talking. And people go, man, this whole channel kind of stinks now, and then they move on. We saw this happen so many times on other channels, all of a sudden, the viewership dropped off a cliff for everything, because YouTube was getting a pretty clear signal, hey, this channel doesn't put out good videos anymore. And so I'm guessing with at least some hopes that I mean, some hope some guests some thinking it's true that YouTube is being smarter about it than that they know what to how to make a good video experience on YouTube. So I hope they're not just crushing our algorithm right now.
• 46:02
  Kevin: Yeah. So that's something we'll be keeping an eye on for sure. Yeah, that's why we've never done this before. And even when we tried to push, like for Buzzcast, specifically, we did record because we record Riverside. So we did record video for a while and put those up. And those didn't even get the engagement that warranted are continuing to do it. Even though they were video, the those videos themselves would get such a lower level of engagement, that it brought down the value of the whole channel, in terms of YouTube's willingness to recommend it. And so we stopped doing that. If they figured this out, if they're like, Yeah, we know that podcasts that are static image only, primarily audio first experience are going to have a lower level of engagement, and we're not going to punish your channel overall. For that, we're just going to recognize it as different types of engagement.
• 46:43
  Kevin: So your videos will be promoted based on their merit, and your audio only content will be promoted based on its merit, and they're independent. That's great. And that's what we're hoping for. But if there is still some sort of, you know, bad side effect of doing audio first content in the YouTube ecosystem, especially like not specifically pushing it in a way that only goes to YouTube music, but it also shows up in YouTube proper, then we're gonna have to figure that out.
• 47:06
  Jordan: Yeah, I'm wondering if they're probably going to be looking more at like, average view duration. I'm looking at the podcast analytics, because I uploaded eight videos yesterday.
• 47:17
  Jordan: And I have two views.
• 47:20
  Alban: There we go.
• 47:21
  Jordan: My average, my average view duration is 49 minutes.
• 47:25
  Kevin: That's good.
• 47:25
  Jordan: Yeah, that's great. So hopefully, they look at that as opposed to the two views.
• 47:31
  Alban: Yeah, YouTube is going to use that is like a pretty big indicator, I think you'll probably get more views as they start figuring out like, there's a type of people that really like listening for a long period of time, they're going to figure out who those people are, there's nothing that YouTube's better at than finding out what your content is about what type of people like it and serving it up to them. And so if that was consistent, which those numbers are stupid, high, if that was consistent, I'm sure you would start to see pretty incredible growth on YouTube.
• 48:03
  Jordan: We'll see.
• 48:04
  Kevin: Yeah, the YouTube experience for premium subscribers to YouTube is not terrible for audio only. I'm sure you all have experienced this before you've come in contact with someone in your life who uses YouTube a lot their premium subscribers, and they're using it as like the main music app in their car or something like that. I've gotten into Ubers many times, they're basically listening to podcasts through YouTube. But you know, they're premium subscribers because their screen is off. And so the challenge that YouTube has had is how do we bring that same type of experience to non Premium subscribers? And it seems like their answer is going to be YouTube music, which allows screen off background audio streaming.
• 48:38
  Alban: You know, I've actually, I've run into that to Kevin, but I saw it the other day as at a restaurant, they had clearly set up a playlist of videos that they liked on YouTube, and their premium subscribers and it just played on a like loop inside the restaurant. It's up near a naval base. And the theme of this ramen place is very much like military stuff. And it was all these like reviews of ships and planes and all sorts of stuff, just playing on a loop. And I was like, Man, when you uploaded this stuff to your channel, somebody uploaded one point they never do this is going to play on a loop inside a ramen store in Jacksonville, Florida.
• 49:17
  Kevin: I wonder if we will ever get that experience with like, I mean, Buzzcast is not going to be a fit. But if any of our podcasters I wonder if any podcaster has ever. I'll share a little bit about this. But have you ever like walked into someplace or like ask somebody what they're listening to and they're listening to your podcast? What a neat experience that would be. I will say this, we went skiing a couple weeks ago, I was not wearing Buzzsprout T shirts or swag or Higher Pixels or anything that would connect me to Buzzsprout at all. And we were getting breakfast at a place and then we sat down and I heard the two people behind the counter talking about that they were podcasting. And she said something about you have to log into my Buzzsprout account and do that.
• 49:57
  Alban: No way!
• 49:57
  Kevin: I went, Oh my gosh, that's so cool.
• 49:59
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 50:00
  Alban: Did you tell them who you were?
• 50:01
  Kevin: No, I didn't. We were ready.
• 50:03
  Jordan: I honestly thought for a second year to say that someone came up to you while you were at the restaurant and was like, Are you Kevin?
• 50:08
  Alban: I hardly recognize Kevin and we worked together.
• 50:13
  Kevin: It wasn't that they didn't recognize me, but they did mention Buzzsprout. And so my wife heard it. And I was like, oh, did you hear that? And she's like, Oh, they say something about Buzzsprout. I said, yeah, she's like, oh, you should go tell them who you are.
• 50:22
  Kevin: I was like, no.
• 50:26
  Alban: If you imagine if you're like, you're working somewhere and you're like, oh, yeah, bah, bah, blah. I'm logging into my account. And then the next person in line is like, yeah, I have actually the co founder of that company. You're like, No, you're not. Like, like, I just wouldn't believe it. I'd be like, This guy is like, I think he's hitting on me. I don't know. This is weird.
• 50:46
  Kevin: Coming up creepier than cooler. Hi, so I went with a no on that.
• 50:54
  Alban: Have You Ever Have you seen this new XLR? USBC combo jack, that road is done?
• 51:00
  Jordan: Yes. I just saw it yesterday.
• 51:03
  Kevin: Yes. It's a very interesting, cool idea. I like it.
• 51:06
  Alban: I think podcasting has we talked about this before, there's this whole really cool world of audio equipment that is all based on analog audio, like it's used with XLR cables.
• 51:20
  Alban: Downside, obviously is those don't work with your computer unless they're going through some kind of audio interface.
• 51:26
  Alban: And so we've seen a lot of podcast microphones that support both digital through micro or mini USB or USBC cables and they also have XLR and now road has made this one that's an XLR cable, the hole for it in the center of that they put a little USBC I think it's a cool idea.
• 51:45
  Alban: You know, it makes it really easy for people to know plug in here and either their two cables plug they're not really much more to say it's not like the next level of podcast microphone innovation, but I liked that road is testing this out and making it a little bit easier for people who are trying to get into podcasting.
• 52:07
  Jordan: I mean, this is really cool. Having them combined instead of having the USB port up above the XLR on the side of the XLR because I mean, one of the things that people run into I mean, I've run into it with my Shure MV7 is when you plug in your USB cable into the back of your microphone, sometimes if you move it a certain way, or it's like pointed downwards, like the cable will sometimes fall out. And what they did with the like little prongs that stick out for the XLR is its position. So if you do stick the cable and it kind of like supports it, so that doesn't just fall out. So that's kind of cool, too.
• 52:43
  Kevin: Yeah, I when I was looking at it, I was wondering if they were trying to solve for the problem of every other microphone that's combined XLR and USB had both inputs, or, or the outputs are the inputs, or the outputs. Yeah, output. Okay, so every other mic has allowed you to plug in both at the same time, which I wonder how much of an issue that is for their support teams are saying, Oh, I have an XLR and I plug that in the back of my road caster and I also had USB so I plug that into my computer. And now my microphone is not working or it's not working the way I expect and it's like well the both plugged in you have to choose one or the other. And so this solves that problem. You can only plug in one of these at a time. Whichever one you plug in.
• 53:18
  Alban: It's pretty clear that you could not plug both at the same time.
• 53:21
  Jordan: Unless there's some new innovation that we're not aware of.
• 53:26
  Kevin: This solves that problem.
• 53:26
  Kevin: I wonder if they're gonna get calls now that saying like I got my USB plugged in, but I can't get my XLR jack in it's in the way like what's How do I do this? They invented a new problem.
• 53:40
  Kevin: Are we rebranding this segment?
• 53:41
  Jordan: I don't think we should.
• 53:42
  Alban: I would prefer to rebrand it because I think rebranding it makes it a bit more inclusive of the other feedback types and it helps reduce how like triggered the anti-buzzboosts people get.
• 53:55
  Jordan: I just don't know what to call it.
• 53:58
  Alban: Feedback Friday
• 53:59
  Jordan: Feedback. Uhh.
• 54:01
  Kevin: That's Jordan Harbinger.
• 54:02
  Alban: Okay, it's not good.
• 54:03
  Jordan: Oh, yeah. Like communication corral.
• 54:09
  Alban: That one might be worse.
• 54:12
  Jordan: We'll workshop it.
• 54:13
  Alban: What's the workshop? I mean, so far, we have feedback Friday, which is a blatant rip off of Jordan Harbinger show.
• 54:21
  Alban: And what was your communication corral?
• 54:27
  Jordan: Ya.
• 54:29
  Alban: Community corner?
• 54:30
  Jordan: No, I don't like it.
• 54:32
  Alban: But it's something about community or audience. And it has to have alliteration.
• 54:36
  Kevin: I guess. I just don't like the word feedback. That always sounds negative.
• 54:39
  Alban: What did you just call like sound off? It's not bad.
• 54:42
  Alban: You get to sound off and the Buzzcast Sound off section
• 54:46
  Jordan: Buzzboosts has been laid to rest and it's now Sound-Off segment, where listeners of the show get to send in comments, tips, answer questions, things like that. I don't like being put on the spot.
• 55:01
  Alban: Now it's time for sound off the segment where we read your buzzboosts, we read your tweets, we connect with our audience.
• 55:09
  Jordan: Wasn't much better.
• 55:10
  Alban: That was, that was really good. First feedback was from Jordan, That wasn't a very good read by Alban. Second feedback was a boost from GeneBean. I hadn't thought about YouTube shorts thanks for the tip and Gene mean we thank you.
• 55:27
  Kevin: All right mere mortals podcasts sent us a boost. They said I've always been able to put online reviews and communication into a different category is in there just worth less than in person feedback? I find they don't seem to impact me emotionally good or bad for that reason. I hope it's the same for you guys. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I don't know that that works for me as well. But I think you're right, in theory that like, it's a lot easier to write stuff that's kind of negative online that you would necessarily say that somebody's face. So I think it's a good perspective to have on it when you're reading reviews, if they're not exactly positive.
• 55:57
  Alban: I think that goes for all online communication, to be honest, the amount of things that people say, on social media in particular, that are so negative, and so mean, I'm constantly shocked and like, you would never say that to someone's face. And I mean, that was the big wake up call. When on Facebook, I started realizing people I knew in real life, I knew they didn't talk like that in real life. And they would just go at it. As soon as they got together on Facebook. And I was like, There's something unhealthy about this, you know, computers disintermediated the relationship and all of a sudden, people get much more intense. So I think mere mortals podcast here, right?
• 56:36
  Jordan: Moritz of Alby, sent us 10000 SATs saying regarding receiving feedback. Since listener feedback is extremely valuable. We want to make it as easy as possible. With more and more players adopting features like cross up comments, or booster grams, we are on a good way because it works directly in the app as comments on YouTube.
• 56:52
  Jordan: No need to switch context and open another app anymore.
• 56:56
  Kevin: That's right. Yeah, that's, that's great. So the more technology we have for people to be able to interact with podcasters, the better. And I think you're right, like the key is making that like into the listening experience as much as possible. So we're excited to see more apps pushing in that direction and making it possible.
• 57:11
  Alban: Scott, our friend on Twitter, not just an editor, wrote in Hey, Buzzcast, so please make sure Kevin Finn didn't get kidnapped. I heard way too many positive things about Spotify for him in the last episode. I thought the same thing. When I listened as well, though, I will vouch for Kevin, the persona that is on the podcast is not Kevin. But this is a it's not you 100%. And I think that often the news, when Spotify is the news that gets pulled in to the show often is the news about Spotify that saying, hey, Spotify is trying to do this business thing to try to own podcasting. And that is like a total trigger for Kevin, where he's like, yeah, that's not a good thing. We should keep it open. And obviously, working behind the scenes on the PI Standards Project, you get that version of Kevin, there's also in real life. And on this podcast, like you saw last week, a version of Kevin that's like, Oh, that's a cool thing. Spotify did nice. It's just I think that is the news. That's not as exciting. And so when Spotify is like, hey, what if we tried out this vertical feed to recommend podcast clips and parents like, Oh, that's cool. Flip through it a little bit. We're just not talking about that as much. And so I think you got a little bit of the, it was one of the times where the positive side of Spotify was on the show, and you got that part of Kevin, Kevin, do you think that's true? Do you think that's a fair?
• 58:37
  Kevin: I think so. I mean, I really think like if we had a beer together if we had dinner, I don't think I would talk about Spotify at all. I wouldn't bring it up. But if you did, you're gonna get it all.
• 58:48
  Alban: Probably my favorite piece of feedback that we might have ever gotten. Jordan, you shared something with us. I don't know if you want to put this on the podcast, but I think you should. You got some feedback personally, that you shared with Kevin and I could you read this email that you received.
• 59:01
  Jordan: I received an email to my personal podcast inbox and in all caps, it says FANMAIL. It's from Molly Blair. And she wrote in saying, guess what I listened to Buzzcast. You said you don't get fan mail. Here it is. And I appreciated that so deeply. So I had to give her a shout out.
• 59:19
  Kevin: How about that. So she listened to Buzzcast like she looked up your personal podcast found Dreamful like that.
• 59:25
  Kevin: remembered from Buzzcast that you don't get a lot of fan mail after listening to your dream full episode and then shot you some positive fan mail. What a nice story.
• 59:33
  Jordan: I know. That's awesome.
• 59:33
  Jordan: All right. Thanks for listening and keep podcasting. Yeah, I'm always really interested. When Kevin sends a TikTok, I know it's gonna be good.
• 59:46
  Kevin: So I know Alban is all into AI. AI is everywhere. Now it's like everything that people are talking about. And a guy who's a golfer was out on the golf course. And he said, I want to try to use Chat GTP as my caddy for the day and I want to see how it does. And so we set up Chat GTP with like all the prompts that would make sense to Chat GTP understood that it was going to be serving as his caddy for the day. And then he played a round of golf. And so the first thing he did was he told him that the chat should repeat which course he was playing. And he said, the clubs that were in his bag,
• 1:00:16
  Alban: Kevin could just step in for half a second? Chat G-P-T.
• 1:00:21
  Kevin: What am I saying? GTP?
• 1:00:21
  Kevin: Yeah, oh my gosh. I know that in my brain. I didn't mean anything. I just coming out of my mouth. GPT doesn't it stand for something?
• 1:00:31
  Alban: It does. But I now have to look up what it is.
• 1:00:34
  Kevin: So chat GPT was the interface that he was using to interact with artificial intelligence. So he hits his first golf shot. Well, he actually says, okay, I'm okay, check GPT caddy, or he calls the caddy says, okay, caddy, I'm gonna hold one. What club should I use? And it says, it gives them all the information about hole one like it found the course it knows what it is hole one is this many yards, I think you should use a driver. So he's a great uses driver hits a good shot. And he says I'm about you know, 140 yards from the green.
• 1:01:01
  Kevin: What should I what clubs should I use? And it says Use your nine iron. He gets his nine iron he types and I came up a little bit short. Just so you know. For future reference. I usually hit my nine iron about 120 yards and chat. GTP says I said right now.
• 1:01:13
  Kevin: PT. I'm just gonna say Caddy.
• 1:01:13
  Kevin: Yeah. And then so the Caddy says back to him. Okay,
• 1:01:19
  Alban: generative, pre trained transformer. Just say that it's easier
• 1:01:24
  Kevin: Because he says back to him. Okay, great. I'll remember that for future information. And then he says, So are we on the same page that I should use my like 54 degree wedge. And the caddy says back to him? Yes. I think that sounds right. He hits his wedge, and he says about a great amount of green. And then the caddy says back to him like congratulations, nice shot. He says I'm 10 foot out. And the caddy says you're gonna use your putter, right? He says, Yeah, anyway, he does the whole round of golf like this. And I don't know, I was just like, This is amazing that I can interact like this, obviously, probably was never trained as being a caddy as a use case. But anybody who plays golf knows that on the nicer courses anyway, they have like GPS is built into the golf carts themselves. So it shows you exactly where you are in the course how far you are to the pin, so you don't have to use a rangefinder. And I could see within a couple of years, all of this coming into those GPS systems that are already built into the golf carts, like your golf cart now has artificial intelligence built into it, where you can tell it with probably just a few things like on average, I drive this far. I hit my five iron this far in my wedge this far. And they could probably figure out everything else from there about which clubs to recommend, and could probably start learning like the safest shots to hit or make recommendations about, you know, like flying over hazards or not, anyway, really cool application.
• 1:02:34
  Kevin: And I thought it'd be interesting because you love artificial intelligence and you love golf.
• 1:02:39
  Alban: The golf tech world has really, really improved over like, I don't know who last 10 years. Me, I guess it's been improving the whole time. But the thing I use is something called 18 birdies. And it's an app that is tracking your GPS the whole round. And then is showing you you're this far from each spot on the hole in it asks you what you hit. And so it starts figuring out how far you do hit. So it's actually doing a lot of what you're recommending right now, one of the even cooler things that I love about it is when you're teeing off, it's not going to say things like, hey, there's a bunker 230 out, and so you should be able to hit over that greenside bunker. So but it will say people who hit center on average are hit shooting par, people shooting left, on average, or one stroke over people shooting, right, three strokes over. And so you can go like, Okay, sounds like if anything missile left rather than missing, right. And you could probably look at it and figure it out. I think really, what's super impressive, I guess, is Chat GPT was not made for golf caddy. And yet, it's still like, reasonably good at interacting with humans on you know, just by this nature of the way it's built. It's able to interact with us and give us somewhat useful information in all sorts of ridiculous contexts.
• 1:04:01
  Jordan: That's kind of the thing that's interesting to think about is that, you know, he just he didn't have a caddy, he didn't have someone with him to give them advice on it. And so he just said, like, Here's what I have. Tell me what to do now.
• 1:04:14
  Jordan: And I'm thinking about, like, other use cases for like, this is what I have, what can I do with it? So I'm thinking for some reason, cooking comes to mind. So saying, like, I have noodles, and I have this vegetable, and I have this and what can I make? And then seeing if there's some sort of recommended, like recipe and stuff like that. I know that there's apps and things like that. But if you have that just with the Chat GPT I'm trying to think of other instances of like, these are the supplies I have, what can I do with this?
• 1:04:41
  Alban: Oh, yeah, the and the one you just gave, hey, here's what I have on hand. What could I make? And could you also give me a recipe for that? Yeah, that is a something that Chad GPT is really good at.
• 1:04:52
  Kevin: You know, we're actually thinking about a lot I would love you know, we have this sound off segment. I would love if anyone's listening to our post show if you're interested in like creative solutions for how AI can help you in your podcasting workflow that's something that's something that we're discussing a lot around here so if you have ideas if you have suggestions for that like us the opportunity to interact with us on the show because we're thinking about it so how can AI help podcasting