With so many big players making moves, we dive into the shifting tides of the podcasting world. The joy of Spotify's move towards open podcasting is tempered by our wariness of their advertising tactics and data collection—concerns that resonate with anyone mindful of the digital footprint they leave behind. We share our experiences grappling with these ethical dilemmas, balancing the desire to reach a wide audience with the need to safeguard listener privacy and content integrity. Whether you're a budding podcaster or a savvy listener, this episode promises a thought-provoking journey through the cultural currents shaping our beloved medium.
View the discussion thread on Twitter!
📣 Sound-Off Question: What are your podcasting Keys to success for the year? To have your response featured on our next episode, send us a text at 855-951-4230!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Contact Buzzcast
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
With so many big players making moves, we dive into the shifting tides of the podcasting world. The joy of Spotify's move towards open podcasting is tempered by our wariness of their advertising tactics and data collection—concerns that resonate with anyone mindful of the digital footprint they leave behind. We share our experiences grappling with these ethical dilemmas, balancing the desire to reach a wide audience with the need to safeguard listener privacy and content integrity. Whether you're a budding podcaster or a savvy listener, this episode promises a thought-provoking journey through the cultural currents shaping our beloved medium.
View the discussion thread on Twitter!
📣 Sound-Off Question: What are your podcasting Keys to success for the year? To have your response featured on our next episode, send us a text at 855-951-4230!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Contact Buzzcast
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
I bought these Under armor socks and I way overspent on them and they're the worst socks I've ever owned. They slip down in the shoe and they're under my heel.
Alban:I went through this process a few months ago. I went and researched the best socks. I spent a lot of time researching socks and I ordered four different contenders and I ran in all of them. I wore them normally and then I got rid of the three losers and I bought 12 pairs of the really expensive the ones that won. Are you guys done with this? This is not a bit, Kevin, this is just Jordan and I talking while letting you read.
Kevin:I know it's not a bit. Thank God, we're good of all time. Gosh so grumpy.
Alban:Here we go.
Jordan:Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast where the people at Buzzsprout try to stay on topic about all things podcasting. I'm Jordan, and joining me are my co-hosts, Alban and Kevin. Hey guys, happy Valentine's Day.
Kevin:Hey, happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day, Jordan.
Jordan:We always end up recording on Valentine's Day. We recorded on Valentine's Day last year too.
Kevin:Did we really? Yeah, we did. I did not remember that at all.
Jordan:Yeah, so Valentine's Day, Super Bowl Sunday. This is so embarrassing. I didn't know that it was Super Bowl Sunday. My husband literally came home from the grocery store and he was like did you know it's a Super Bowl today? It was crazy. I was just like what. I had no idea.
Alban:I don't think that's embarrassing.
Kevin:I got to watch the first half of the Super Bowl in the car.
Jordan:Why.
Kevin:So I listened to it like a podcast, the audio only experience.
Alban:Podcasting NFL isn't the best.
Kevin:It was fine I'd listen to football games on the radio.
Jordan:I was going to say it's just like listening on the radio, isn't it?
Alban:Wait, were you listening on the radio or were you listening to the?
Kevin:No, I was listening to the stream. I don't know how to work a radio anymore, so it's like I didn't even know where to begin. How do I find the Super Bowl on the radio? It's probably an AM something, but when you're driving through random states.
Kevin:Where do you even begin? Where do you go? Kevin, you were driving. I was in Virginia driving back Sunday night and I hadn't planned on driving back during the Super Bowl. I thought I was going to stay in Virginia but decided to get on the road. So first half listened to the audio experience and second half I made it home, so I got to watch it.
Alban:What did you think of the Super Bowl, Taylor's edition?
Kevin:I mean, it was a great game.
Jordan:That's what I heard. It was a nail biter. It was a great game.
Kevin:I was actually cheering for the 49ers. I was too. I mean, dynasties are cool and three-peats are cool and back-to-back that's all cool, but none of that is for me. It's all cool stuff, but I'm not into any of that.
Alban:I feel like it's cool for the people who are doing that stuff. It's not cool for anybody else. I feel like in later years I ended up being like, oh, Tom Brady's kind of likable. But for my entire life I was like this is the worst person. He's just winning everything. He's dominating up there in New England. He ruins all of Jaguar hopes and dreams. And then he came down to Tampa and I was like, oh, this guy's actually pretty cool. I'm okay with him.
Jordan:Once he started playing for your state you liked him.
Alban:Florida Tom Brady is my favorite version, so yeah, I guess so.
Jordan:Why is it that people always root against the people who win a lot? Clearly they're talented, clearly they're athletic and successful, and yet people just don't want to see them win. They're just like come on, give someone else a chance.
Alban:I think it's that you want there'd be different winners.
Jordan:Yeah, you just like rooting for the underdog.
Alban:Yeah, sometimes underdog but also. I mean I was very excited for the Ravens to win. I would have been excited for the Lions to win. I guess that would have been an underdog.
Kevin:Yeah, I think I get more excited about individual players. I don't care about the Chiefs or the 49ers, I don't care about either team. I have no loyalty to either one of those. So then I have to start looking at who are some players that I can get excited about, and I don't feel like Mahomes needs any more fans. He's doing fine, he doesn't need me. And Travis, winning life right, had the number one podcast, dating the most successful female of our time.
Jordan:I like how having the number one podcast was like top of the list for you. Yeah, he's winning at life, he has a number one podcast.
Alban:Dating Taylor Swift, winning multiple Super Bowls. Those are dumb, but I believe that.
Jordan:Like in order of importance.
Kevin:Yeah, but then you look at like Brock Purdy, likable guy, Christian McCaffery likable guy. I'm like we need more people cheering for them.
Alban:I think both of them have a lot of cheering. They really got a lot of fans.
Kevin:They have plenty of cheering. I think that the Mahomes and Kelce would tip the scales. They probably have more fans.
Alban:Yeah, so Kelce in particular. I think that I went from a Travis Kelce super fan to a little bit of a hater only because so many people like him now and now I'd see him like he's on YouTube, he's on podcasts, he's on NFL, he's everywhere and I'm like I think I'm I hit my limit. However much of Travis Kelce I wanted, I went past that.
Kevin:Yeah, you can get too much of it's like eating something that's like really good and then all of a sudden you're like that's where I am with Travis. I could take some more Jason Kelce though.
Jordan:Yeah, Jason's so funny. I keep seeing clips of him on Instagram and I love him. I want to be friends with him.
Kevin:He's the best yeah.
Jordan:I keep seeing online that this was like the most watched televised event since, like the moon landing. Did you guys hear about that?
Kevin:No yeah.
Alban:Was it really? I think if you look at like the top 10, it's moon landing number one as far as US audiences, and then like the next five are all Super Bowls and it's mostly the most recent Super Bowls. I mean one population's going up, so the newer Super Bowls are handicapped, but I think it's one of the few things that everybody is doing. You know, it's like a kind of a unifier, at least as far as like American culture it is. But moon landing two is going to be pretty big.
Jordan:Moon landing, two electric boogaloo.
Alban:I mean, I know there's been other moon landings, but like there's hopes that we go back relatively soon. If we go back, you know, maybe the president will be like, just to be clear, the first one was totally fake. This is it. This is like the legit one. No, no, no, this is the first one. It's really good as focus.
Kevin:I was going to say you just dismissed a lot of conspiracy theories there. Okay, so to bring this back to podcasting. It certainly did not take long for new heights to get the be thrown as the number one podcast. Oh, what happened as soon as Rogan's feed went live again, he's not number one, oh yeah.
Alban:Joe Rogan is out there in the open podcast ecosystem available on Apple podcasts YouTube not Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Kevin:Misinformation alert. Oh sure he's on YouTube. Is that wrong? I think it's wrong. I'm going to do some real time. That's Jamie. Jamie, can you look that up real quick for us? You, jamie, you're going to be Jamie. I'm playing the part of Jamie, today's album.
Jordan:Well, I know that call her daddy is not. The video is only available on Spotify, so I would imagine that they would do the same with Joe Rogan, right?
Kevin:Right, this is an angle, this. I think we're breaking this, because I don't see anybody in podcasting talking about this. Right? The news of the week last week was Joe Rogan experience and call her daddy are no longer exclusive to Spotify. They're now available wherever you get your podcasts. But I don't think that's exactly true. That's not the whole truth, because a lot of people get their podcasts on YouTube and they're not on.
Alban:YouTube. All right, well, real time follow up. This is a post from Joe Rogan on Twitter. Podcast is now officially back on Apple podcasts. We should be back on YouTube with full episodes in the coming weeks. Shout out to Spotify for absolutely being the coolest and smartest people I've ever had the pleasure of partnering with. I'm very excited. The podcast will now have broader distribution and it's also available on Fountain. That's at least the number one response I got.
Kevin:So he's saying, within the coming weeks, full episodes will be on YouTube.
Alban:Good, potential conspiracy theory.
Kevin:real-time follow-up didn't happen, but I wonder why Caller Daddy's not? Yeah, I don't know.
Jordan:For anyone that's coming into this and doesn't know the information Spotify has been in the news a lot lately, especially regarding their strategic pivot in the podcasting space, and so for years, as we all know, spotify was investing in these exclusive podcasts and putting all this money into exclusive podcasts, and now maybe they realize that the money isn't in people coming onto their platform. The money is actually going to be in getting a more maximized reach for their audio originals, and so the Caller Daddy podcast and Joe Rogan Experience have been announced that they'll be available on other platforms. Does this mean that Spotify is being more open to open podcasting? Does this mean we can finally put Buzzcast on Spotify? I don't know. I'm hoping we can finally get it on there, kevin.
Alban:I feel like Jordan is trying to set us up for a debate. Jordan, I think you would have had better luck maybe a few days ago.
Jordan:Why's that?
Alban:I'm guessing that Kevin and I are going to probably end up being closer than we were maybe a few days ago.
Kevin:Well, I don't think my position's changed. So maybe, Alban, your position has changed. What have you read or discovered over the past couple of days that makes you think that we should still not be on Spotify?
Alban:All right. So this is big news. I'm very, very happy. I'm very happy for open podcasting. The combination of Spotify saying, look, we're not going to do this exclusives thing anymore, apple saying, hey, we're going to adopt this community-led transcript tag that is so wonderful and I got very excited. I'm very happy with both Spotify and Apple, and so I'm happy to tweet things like that. But then, as I started getting into it more, I was like, oh, maybe we can get back on Spotify now.
Alban:And yes, all this Spotify trying to be the only place for podcasting, to try to consume the entire podcast ecosystem. I think that's over. I think that period is done. Spotify has shifted their strategy over to something else. We can talk about what that is now, and I had to sit down and think about it and over a few days I went wait, this wasn't all of the reasons why we were concerned with Spotify. We had other reasons and we're not there yet. I mean, I don't think Spotify is ever going to meet us where we want to be, that our show would go back into Spotify. But yeah, some of those have not changed.
Kevin:It's funny how it kind of sounds like we're holding out, like we have any poll with Spotify, like they care yeah.
Alban:Well, kevin, I mean I shouldn't say this, but Daniel reached out on Twitter to Kevin. I was like look, I'm just getting beat up in the markets. Right now, buzzcast is not in Spotify. What do we have to do? I'm so upset about Joe Rogan being exclusive.
Kevin:He's like I got an investor call, I got to do the shareholder call. I really want to announce that Buzzcast is in Spotify now.
Alban:What Kevin just wrote back Joe Rogan and he goes, got it. And then this all broke and I'm like, all right, we're in and I think there's another follow up before we really give in and help Spotify out. But the other piece is maybe actually have a little bit of the history. We were never in Spotify in the beginning because they didn't have something called Pass Through, which was the ability for podcasts to work normally. Spotify used to cache all of the podcast data and episodes and after a while they changed. They said, okay, we're going to work like a normal podcast directory. We said awesome and we put our shows and I don't know if Buzzcast was ever in that group, but definitely our old shows were and then in late 2019, early 2020, they did two things.
Alban:One was this podcast domination strategy, which was we will own podcasting and that came through in many ways lots of acquisitions, lots of talent acquisitions, trying to get bring in things like Gimlet and to make their own shows.
Alban:And they said everything's going to be on Spotify.
Alban:And we really did not like that and I'm sure if anyone's listened to more than like half of a Buzzcast episode, you've heard a rant about that.
Alban:But the other thing was a lot of their ad tech stuff started getting much more prominent and you started paying attention to what they were doing in the ad space, and it was very focused on collecting data, matching it with other databases, learning more about people, targeting with very specific ads in a way that I mean, it's kind of what we see with Google, it's what we see with Facebook, it's what we see with many of these ad tracking conglomerates. So those two things we went all right. We got to pull out of Spotify. I think over the last four years we've talked so much about the podcast domination strategy because that's what we had a we're in that world that for a while I was like, oh, they met our demands, but there's still this whole ad play. That is still very concerning, and so I think I was excited to come in here and Kevin and I debate open podcasting whether Spotify was part of it now, but I don't know if that will end up meaning anything for how this show is distributed.
Kevin:So I agree mostly with that. I also think that there has been a hostility from the strategic moves that Spotify has made towards open podcasting, and I think that that hasn't been undone. So if we think about things like transcripts, chapter markers, pinned episodes, polls and surveys, no RSS feeds by default when you sign up for Spotify for podcasters, and the fact that a few years ago, spotify publicly stated that they believe RSS is limiting and they're not embracing it as they build out new features for podcasting in their platform, that stuff has not changed, and so that is, to me, my biggest issue with that. Spotify is actively harming open podcasting. So it would be one thing if they weren't just if they just like we're not adopting new tags. There are some new barriers out there that don't adopt new tags or not keeping up with the way that the industry is moving. But there's nobody else, I believe, in the industry that is actively sort of doing the same things their own way. They're trying to buck the system they're pushing against, and the only way for podcasting to stay open and continue to thrive and move forward is either you get on board or you don't, but don't actively work against it, and that is what Spotify. That seems to have been their position.
Kevin:We don't care about podcasting, we care about Spotify. We care about making Spotify profitable. We care about and sure they've got a responsibility to their shareholders. They want to make their company profitable. I get all that. There's different ways you can do that. You can do that by embracing open and moving along with the community, or they've decided that we could care less about that. We just want to try to find profitability however we can. So again, if you're a shareholder, maybe you agree with that strategy. I would imagine you would. Otherwise, you'd probably dump your stock and move on. I don't think that's good for podcasting, and so that's my biggest issue. It's not just that they're moving, they're moving in a way that is against what I think is the healthiest direction for podcasting in general to continue to thrive long-term.
Jordan:So you mentioned that the reason why you didn't originally submit your podcast to Spotify was because they didn't have the pass through RSS. But YouTube doesn't have that either. So we're not really holding YouTube to that same standard. Is that because they're just a different sort of?
Alban:I think we definitely need to talk about it, because it's not just the pass through piece for YouTube. They are also the surveillance capitalist maximizers. They're the very best at this. They scrape every piece of data, from your Gmail account to your search history, to every video you've ever watched on YouTube, and they combine it all together into a profile to serve you ads. Youtube is the very, very best at this, at least probably better than Facebook, but up there. And so all of these concerns that are on my side, they all apply to YouTube. Some of Kevin's, I think, being hostile to podcasting almost all apply directly to YouTube as well.
Kevin:Yeah, I don't know that I 100% agree. My version of the history of this podcast, buzzcast, being on Spotify I don't know if I remember it the exact same way that Alban does. I think we were in Spotify for a little while and I think there was a point at which we agreed that this is just feeling too hostile to open podcasting and we don't want to be there anymore, and I think we took ourselves out. That's how I remember it. So maybe I'm right, maybe I'm not. Maybe that's the version of history. I want to exist, but that's kind of how I remember it, and I don't know that I had the biggest issue being passed through or not passed through. I mean, I know that Alban is 100% right. They started by copying your episodes and then passing us stats data. That was problematic because the data was delayed. There were a whole bunch of issues with that. It was much harder for podcast hosts to be able to push shows to Spotify and then they had to build a lot of code to be able to ingest stats back so they could display them. So Spotify was having a hard time getting the volume of podcasts into their platform that they wanted, and so, again, I don't think that was them saying oh no, we're going to embrace open, we'll go ahead and do this pass through thing. I think it was a volume issue for them. They wanted to have every podcast. There was an Apple podcast. They wanted to have it in Spotify. They needed to make that easier for hosting companies to be able to do it, and so that's why I think they came out with pass through. But again, I don't want to have a cynical take on everything. But in order to not have a cynical take on something, I need to have something that I can try to put a positive spin on it. And in all of what we've seen Spotify do in the podcasting space, it's very hard for me to ever point to something and say, oh, that was actually healthy, that was actually positive. I don't see an ulterior motive here. I don't see how that was self-serving and it doesn't seem to help them. Anytime they've had somebody write something about podcasting. Mike Manjaro, the guy who was one of the co-founders of Anchor, used to write a lot when he was involved with the company and all of his stuff was none of it was about the health or embracing open podcasting or keeping it healthy for the long term. It was all about how are we going to move podcasting forward. Spotify is going to move it forward. Here's how we're going to do it.
Kevin:You don't need to be open. You don't need to think about hosting your podcast anywhere else. You don't need to be able to own and control your stuff or worry about getting deplatformed or demonetized. Don't worry about any of that. That happens to a very small percentage of people probably not going to happen to you. Just embrace this platform. Look, it's worked fine on YouTube. Lots of people making money on YouTube. Don't worry about the 10, 15, 20 people who got demonetized or their life's uprooted because they said something controversial. Don't worry about that. That's probably not going to happen to you. This is a better way and I just disagree with that Fundamentally.
Alban:Jordan. This would be so much more entertaining a few days ago because I was pretty opposed to Kevin, and so I went back and I actually went through old transcripts of Buzzcast and turned out was eventually convinced by 2020, Kevin, which is why I knew we would end up agreeing. Since Kevin's going to bring up the history, this won't be as funny, but it's interesting. I pulled up the transcript. We haven't had any of the Buzzsprout Produce Podcasts on Spotify for quite a while. This is Kevin, soon as probably February 2020.
Alban:We didn't have them on in the beginning and when they switched to pass through, we said, okay, we'll give you a shot. And then they launched this whole ad targeting thing and they're touting it. We're like well, we don't want the people who are listening to our shows to be targeted in profile. Great point, actually. So we pulled it back out and now they're doing this stuff with JRE again. I don't fault them for making smart business moves If I was a shareholder I'd be very happy but these business moves are not in the best interest of open podcasting.
Kevin:Wow, that's good stuff. We said that.
Alban:I listened to it kind of the way, man, this is a. I was pulling quotes, I was doing depo prep pretty much and I was like, all right, I'm going to have all these pieces pulled together. And I was almost immediately convinced and I was like, oh yeah, I remember how much I was bugged by the ad stuff and when I started digging into it, how concerning it was. It's just that the podcast domination strategy that Spotify jumped into right after kind of took up most of my brain space, at least for what Spotify was doing. That I found concerning, because so many other groups are doing the ad tracking stuff. That's this tasteful Now.
Kevin:I recognize that I might be the only person in America that does this, but whenever I find a new podcast, one of the first things I do is I look up where it's hosted and if I see that it's on megaphone, usually that's where they end up. If they're a bigger show that I've heard about, they're on megaphone and I won't subscribe to it. I won't listen to it because you're giving up a lot of your privacy. And again, it's not about whether I have stuff to hide or not. It's whether I believe this is healthy for podcasting for the world in general.
Kevin:There are people that say that like the ads of these social networks. So every social network does this right. They profile you and then they try to serve ads that they believe will have the greatest ability to be effective, and for me, I don't like that. Now I know a lot of people are like well, if I'm going to see an ad, I'd rather have a relevant ad than an irrelevant ad. But I don't believe that I need help figuring out where I'm going to spend my money and I think more times than not maybe this is just a weakness in me is that they do convince me to buy stuff, and I already have enough stuff that I don't need, and so, like I, don't.
Jordan:Yeah, you've got like a whole podcast sponsor package at your close.
Kevin:I don't need more help spending money Like I'm fine at it and wherever my deficiencies lie, my children make up for, and so we're good. I'm perfectly happy going through life not knowing about this extra cool thing that I would probably spend money on and then never use, and so the fact that these ads are super effective, great for them. I don't necessarily want more of that in my life and so I'm trying to steer clear of it. And the fact that we would then put our podcast and again, we don't have the world's most popular podcast, it's not that big at all but the fact that anybody who listens to this show because they like some of the things that we're talking about would then be subjected to having this other thing in their life, where you might be manipulated into buying or spending money that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise do, because these really effective ads get put before a show, after a show, around our show, whatever. I don't like that, it just doesn't feel great.
Jordan:So you mentioned, like you don't listen to podcasts that are hosted on a megaphone. I'm confused, just from a technical standpoint, as I often am. If someone is hosted with a podcasting company that does that kind of like data mining sort of thing, like if I listened to it on Apple podcast, does that mean that my information is getting transferred? I didn't think that that's how it worked.
Kevin:Yeah.
Jordan:Yes.
Kevin:Yeah, so they'll have less information than if you listen through Spotify. If you listen through Spotify, they're going to get a lot more, so that would be like first party data. You're listening through their apps, so they're getting all the information that the app can collect and they can also get whatever. There's a whole other section of information that they can get just based on your IP address. Right, if you listen to the Joe Rogan experience just through Apple podcasts, they're just going to get your IP address. But it would still probably shock you to figure out how much they can glean from just that little bit of information. So they can pull that with other data. Because, let's say, you listen to Joe Rogan on Apple podcast but you do something else on Spotify. Now they got your IP, they can cross connect you so they know exactly who you are. And with Spotify, when you sign up for the service, even if you don't pay, you still have to give them your demographic information. You give them your name, your email address age gender age.
Kevin:Yeah, they ask some optional questions. So, depending on how much you give them there, and then if you sign up to pay, then they have your credit cards, then they're billing address and all that other kind of stuff. So they get a lot of information both ways and then they can pull that together. Plus, you can buy large data sets that take IP addresses and correlate them with other web data. So you're just surfing the internet and people have trackers all over the internet that are collecting and pooling IP addresses and then they sell those data sets to other people who want to know more about the people who are visiting their websites. So all that stuff is available and I'm not saying like this is not.
Kevin:Oh, Spotify is the worst because they do this. No, Spotify is just like a million other companies that do this. But much of this has not infiltrated podcasting until the last five years or so. It's really kind of ramped up over the last five years and podcasting historically has not been like this. The rest of the internet has been like this for a longer time. But there's something pure about podcasting, but we're losing it and I don't want to participate in the losing it process.
Alban:It's very easy to say well shoot, if you're this worried about what Spotify is doing, shouldn't you be worried about what YouTube's doing, and even more worried about what Gmail's doing? And more, even more worried than about what Facebook is doing? The answer to all those is like yes, those are all as bad, often much worse, but this is our thing. We are podcasters, we work for a podcasting company, we are trying to influence the podcasting ecosystem. This is our home and it's now being changed to be more like the rest of the web. And so, yes, there's plenty of problems around the web, and some of the exact same type of problem, even worse, and yet it's not all right, all here yet, and so we're not going to be the ones to change it. Like, no, daniela is not going to call us and actually try to get Buzzcast into Spotify, but it's still principled.
Alban:It's not moral, but it is principled to say, look, we don't like this and so we're not going to participate in it. It probably won't matter to accept for like 300 people who would like to use Spotify as their main app and they don't really want to listen, and now they don't want to listen to Buzzcast. That's okay, 300 people will notice it For Kevin to not subscribe to a show that's on megaphone, that really doesn't matter to almost anybody, but it's still taking a principled stand and we do need to take some of these. Or else you just let the creepiest marketers dictate what's okay, and then we hope that the EU will step in with some GDPR that is not completely, totally disconnected from reality. Then they come in, they'll fix it all for us and we have to be a part of fixing it.
Alban:And so the very, very, very tiny bit that we are a part of fixing it is saying I just don't think we should put our shows in there. It just doesn't feel right and it probably I mean, I will say definitely applies to YouTube as well. We are not against using YouTube as a marketing channel, but when it comes to podcasting, do we really want to put our weight towards, hey, let's go in this direction? I think the answer is pretty easily no. We don't want to be a part of that.
Kevin:So I like what you're saying about principal positions. The thing that you should expect when you take a principal position is that it should cost you something. So maybe Alban's right, maybe it is costing Buzzcast 300 downloads per episode, maybe it's three. I don't know what that number is, but it costs something. We know it costs something and we're willing to pay the price. The bigger your show, obviously, the harder it is to pay that cost. It's probably more. But anytime you take a principal position, I think you should expect it to cost you something. Now, whether it has any effect long term, you're not doing it for that. You're doing it so that you feel good, and so we feel good that withholding Buzzcast from Spotify is the right decision for us. We're talking about it here on the show, but I'm not talking about it on the show to convince anybody that you should do that with your show as well. What I think you should do is you should think about it and figure out is this a principal that you believe in or not? And if it's a principal you believe in, I think you should expect to pay something to be able to take that principal position.
Kevin:Now I take it to the extreme. I know that Spotify is a better music listening experience because I've heard all my friends tell me how great Spotify is and how ridiculous it is that I use Apple Music. Oh my gosh, the music recommendations are so much better. I've tried both and you should really get on Spotify. I get it, but that is another small price that I pay that the music recommendation engine that I use isn't as good because I don't want to give money towards a company that is actively hurting something that I care a lot about. I believe that's my position. Unfortunately, for my kids, they pay that price too, because I won't let them subscribe to Spotify either oh no.
Kevin:So if you have a problem with things like Amazon I don't like what Amazon is doing with small mom and pop shots well then, shop local, like I know it's a little bit more inconvenient. That's the price that you pay If you don't like what Walmart's doing. Same thing If you want to support the local breaker, go to the local breaker. You stop driving down and getting all your groceries in one. You know the most efficient way. And so for us, it's podcasting, and so we really care about podcasting. We have a principled stand on it and for us, we've decided to withhold our show. So my encouragement to the listeners is this is not a shame session. This is just something to think about and decide for yourself. But no, if you believe that they're actively doing something wrong and it's bothering you, you might be happier taking that principle stand, but there will be a cost.
Jordan:On that note, we do have a couple of updates about YouTube podcasts. One of those is that we've added the ability to submit your podcast to YouTube to our directories page.
Alban:I would like to point out this will be confusing. We have at least three roles with podcasting. One is as the creators of Buzzsprout. You know that is just, we're making a product for people. Another one is that we have a show about the podcasting industry where we give hot takes on the podcasting industry, and another one is that we're actually podcasters and so some of these may seem in conflict.
Alban:You'll be like, oh, Alban's got one stand, kevin's got one that's different, so they don't have the show in Spotify. Well, kevin's taken it to the extreme. He won't even use Spotify as a music app, but then they're in YouTube. That doesn't make sense. Well, yeah, you can submit your show to Spotify through Buzzsprout as well. You can submit it to YouTube. You can have a podcast on Buzzsprout. That I would not agree with. Those are all OK. The stands are almost always going to be on the closer to the personal side. They're going to be on the we Are Podcasters or podcast listeners. Here's our decision or we create a show about this industry, so we're not going to put it on some of these platforms. So, everybody, now on Buzzsprout, you can submit to the directories that you are comfortable with. If all these things that we're saying now are not convincing. There's nothing wrong with you putting it on the ones that you feel best with.
Jordan:Yeah, I'm on Spotify and on YouTube.
Alban:Yeah, if you hate Apple for some reason, don't put it on Apple. Be true to yourself. Vote for what you like in the world. Vote with your wallet sometimes and this time, vote with your podcast directories. If you see somebody's doing what you like, go for it and support it.
Alban:That being said, I've got some updates on YouTube because we so we had to learn how YouTube podcasts work, and it is a convoluted process, to say the least. You went through it with your show, megan went through it with one of our shows, I've gone through it twice and we still have slightly different answers for what screens you will get when submitting a show to YouTube. So it's just a little bit convoluted. But we've now uploaded 300 episodes across three podcasts. It was a how to start a podcast, buzzcast and podcasting Q&A.
Alban:It was, I'd say, pretty messy process because there's a lot of putting up some settings right in the beginning upload all my episodes whether or not they go live or not, but then the playlist is live, but now the episodes themselves are now videos and those aren't live. So we had definitely some issues. I think of myself as being pretty tech savvy, pretty YouTube savvy, pretty podcasting savvy, and yet I got duplicate videos at one point and ended up deleting hundreds of buzzcast episodes and ended up, I think, probably deleting a few of the episodes that I shouldn't have. But we've got some results and the results are across 300 episodes with about a week of being alive, we have about 300 views, and that is on a YouTube channel with something like 120,000 subscribers.
Jordan:Oh well, when do you say it like that?
Alban:Yeah, the top video has 85 views. It's an episode of Buzzcasts pretty recent, has two comments, and one of the comments was oh my gosh, there's only like 35 views on this and they have so many subscribers. What chance do I have? So that's great.
Alban:That's not great and then I went well, let's look at those views. Are these people enjoying the content? What's the experience and that's been our concern is that YouTube is not the same as a podcasting app of average duration of watch time. This is the same episodes. The same podcast On YouTube 3.8 minutes, yikes. So you know they're listening to three minutes and 48 seconds on YouTube. On Apple podcast same time period, same episodes. The average is 18 minutes 30 seconds. These are like 22 minute episodes. So it's significantly different. There are going to be people, I'm sure, who will use YouTube to watch podcasts, you know, just the audio-only ones. There are people who will use YouTube music as their primary listening app, and for podcasts and for music. So I wouldn't discount those totally. But the durations are pretty, pretty different, yeah.
Kevin:I think ultimately the question is what YouTube is doing is any healthier for the podcasting ecosystem than what Spotify is doing? I tend to say no, it's probably not Now. The scale of which YouTube is doing it at least from my peer review right now is much lower. So maybe that leaves credence to say, well, then, now's the time to do it Like, now's the time to push back, because as they get bigger and more influential it's going to be harder to push back. So I don't know one way or the other, but this very much feels to me like a small team at YouTube that was maybe given a directive of this Google podcast thing that's happening within this other side of the company is not working out. We're going to shut it down. We still want to be involved in podcasting in some way.
Kevin:Where can we put this YouTube team says oh, we'll take it. They throw together some sort of hacky system to be able to get podcasts into YouTube, not as a podcast-first approach, but it's still maintaining their video-first approach. We'll just take all these audio files and convert them into videos and we won't even really embrace the podcasting thing. We're just going to make it a type of playlist within a video channel and then we'll take those video playlists and push them into YouTube music and make them available over there as well, because that's a better audio-first listening experience. It just all feels very janky and they're not really taking it seriously. It's just. They're just like dipping their toes in the water, but they also have this massive scale and so when it's a pretty big toe, because they are a giant Right. So how's?
Kevin:our knowledge it's great.
Alban:Yeah, keep it going, kevin. It does feel a bit and I think this actually will come up later again in the show it's a business problem that they're solving. The business problem is we probably don't want Google podcasts around anymore. Episodes are not going to show up in search engine results anymore. We're going to pull those out. This whole Google podcast thing. It didn't go exactly where we hoped. We're going to make a decision from the top, as Google often does, to shut it down.
Alban:Well shoot, we're already consolidating all other media type platforms under this YouTube brand. Now it's YouTube music, it's YouTube TV, it's YouTube premium and it's going to be YouTube music. So let's just put the podcast in there. And they came up with a very workaround type solution Uploaded RSS feed to make videos that don't have video that are in a playlist that we kind of call a podcast Like. It's just a workaround. I am not thrilled with the workaround, at the same time being like if I was on the YouTube team and I heard this, I'd feel pretty bummed because I'd be like man. I personally worked so hard. I can see they worked very hard to try to make this work. And yet, as a podcaster, as somebody who's in the industry and as a listener I'm like none of these really feel great to me yeah.
Kevin:Whether you choose to put your show there or not. That's a decision for every individual podcaster to make and personally I'm leaning towards. I don't think this is a good thing. I don't necessarily see us pushing our shows there or keeping them there long term. I really question, like, how long is this going to be a thing? Will YouTube go in and will they ride this out for a year or two? And they'll say you know what? It's never really taken off the way that we thought we would. Video podcasting is the thing that we're good at. We'll allow that, but this RSS ingestion thing it was an experiment, didn't pan out. We're going to pull it out. They may, they may not. You never know.
Kevin:Who saw Google shutting down Google podcasts, like a lot of people thought that this was going to be an inflection point, that that was going to be a default app that was installed on Android phones the most popular smartphone platform in the world and it was going to be default app. So it was going to be like the same inflection point that we saw when Apple added the podcast app as a default app on the home screen. Well, they shut it down. So like who knows what's ultimately going to happen, but I can tell you right now like it doesn't look like there's very serious about it. Is it really going to go anywhere? I don't know. If I had to bet on it, I'd probably say no. I might be surprised if, two years from now, podcasting like RSS ingestion is still available through YouTube. Maybe that means, hey, well, you better hook it up now, because if they pull it out later maybe they'll grandfather some people in and let it keep going. I don't know. I don't like playing all those games. Ultimately it doesn't feel like a win for open podcasting. But, as Alban said, we have lots of different roles to play and the most important one is that we are a podcast hosting provider for anybody who wants to do a podcast, and one of the promises that we stand behind is that it's your podcast, it's your content and we want to make it easy for you to be on the platforms that you want to be on, whether we like those platforms or not.
Kevin:So we don't personally love I don't personally Sorry, I won't speak for you, jordan I don't personally love Spotify. I know Jordan's a Spotify fan. I love it. But guess what? Jordan and I still get along just fine. That's how the world should work. We can have different opinions and still be friends, right?
Kevin:So if I personally decide I don't like YouTube and I don't necessarily recommend podcasters, fine, that's it. And Alban might say actually, youtube's kind of cool. There's a lot of discoverability that's happening there and they've got a great search engine. And, yeah, they do some privacy stuff, but that doesn't bother me that much. I'd rather reach more people. Ok, we'll still be friends. That will not come between our relationship. But we can make different decisions with our content, and so, as our role as a podcast hosting provider, we believe it is our responsibility to make it easy for you to be on the platforms that you want to be on. So that is why we're excited to announce that YouTube is now listed in the directory section. Now, we try to make it as easy as possible. Unfortunately, this particular directory, it's not super easy. So you will see, I think this might be the longest set of instructions that we have in all the directories.
Jordan:Yeah, I think it's longer than Apple.
Kevin:It's longer than Apple, and Apple has gotten a lot of criticism for how difficult it is to get listed in Apple podcasts, but YouTube has decided to make it very difficult. Whatever strategy you guys want to employ, we will do our best to simplify it as much as we can, and so that's what we've done, and so Alban is. Well not Alban, but Jordan. I think you headed up this project, so talk us through it.
Jordan:Yeah, to your point, it is the longest descriptor we have and we tried really really hard to kind of like file it down to like the bare bones information that you need to have to submit your podcast to YouTube, and so I'm concerned that it seems like it's daunting. But YouTube actually makes it pretty easy. They're really good at walking you through it. It's almost like those like setup wizard things you get when you install a new software and you just go like next page, next page, and they're just like okay, next we're going to focus on this and next we're going to focus on this. It's like a five step thing.
Jordan:But there are nuances where we had to break down little things that YouTube requires you to proclaim, such as with the paid promotion spots. We debated a lot on that because you know it's kind of a really difficult concept in that they allow you to have host-read sponsorships or like promotions baked into your podcast but you can't have dynamically inserted like programmatic ads. You know the things that you hear on the radio, and so it's like how do you simplify that statement down so that it's not scary for somebody who's trying to submit their podcast to the platform? But I think that we did it. Like I said, it's a long, long page about how to submit your podcast, but honestly, the process is not that hard, so I don't even know how to describe it. It's intricate but easy.
Kevin:Yeah, well, it's long but not difficult, and so, like I think the best suggestion would be to you know, get two browser tabs side by side and just go step by step and you'll make it through the process. Jordan and her team have done a really good job of saying you know, here's what you do next, here's what you do next, here's what you do next and here's and explaining in simple terms what you're doing at each step. So it's a perfect guide to set side by side as you're walking through that YouTube submission process. Now, at the end of that process, there's this step where you've tried to get your YouTube URL right and you put that URL into your Buzzsprout account and save that so that on your share page and on the any pages where we display, this podcast is available and all these different listening platforms that we can display.
Kevin:Youtube is one of them. Unfortunately, it's not a super friendly URL because it's not just like your YouTube channel URL, it's actually a playlist off of your channel. So the URL is kind of ugly and kind of long, but that's the URL that we need to be able to show a button that says, hey, click here to listen on YouTube and jump straight into that playlist or the same thing. I think we're going to do this in the future we didn't do it in V1, but we'll also display YouTube music. It would be a separate icon, but it would go to the same URL. It just has a different like string on the beginning that says launch in the music app versus the YouTube proper app.
Jordan:Yeah, so I think I've done something more like YouTubecom slash like channel name, slash podcast. Slash the podcast name, because I think the reason why they have it broken down into the playlist is because you have a channel and within the channel, similar to Apple, you can have multiple different podcasts. So what they do is they do this like really long, aggressive slash playlist. Question mark UAV like.
Alban:FR2, whatever it's not friendly, it's a mile long.
Jordan:It's a mile long, it's so long. So this is pretty much the same between YouTube and YouTube music, but I do wish that they had made the links a little more pretty. You know, when you click to share that.
Kevin:But I understand from YouTube's perspective. I mean, they are like their roots are in search engines, that's their who, they are at their core. So they don't want you saying, oh, go to YouTube, slash yada, yada yada data. Go to YouTube and search for blank and then you'll find it. They're really good at that and so if you go to YouTubecom and search for dreamful, you'll find the dreamful podcast, and I think that's the messaging that they want out in the world. So this podcast is available on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. You can also find us on YouTube. Search for dreamful, you know, and then you're a fun show. So different strategies. The podcast world is changing. Maybe some old schoolers like us might not love some stuff as much as the others, but we're just doing our best.
Kevin:We're just trying, we're just trying, we're just trying.
Jordan:It's time for sound off First episode. We asked you to send in questions for a mail bag sound off segment, so we got a whole bunch of questions from listeners, so let's hop into it. All right, the first one that we got is from Molly from the small business hustle, hi buzzcast. I'm wondering if you can help me understand all the differences with subscription podcast feeds. There are so many options. I am struggling to understand how many I should offer. Also, what overlaps there are. I can help with that. I actually have a lot of subscription feeds and I can tell you that you should offer one subscription podcast feed for your podcast, just from experience.
Jordan:There's a lot of really great options. We have buzz sprout subscriptions where you are able to toggle on the ability for listeners to either support your show with recurring support or you can do premium content where you upload bonus episodes for your subscribers, and that's really nice because it actually publishes to all the podcast feeds and all the listeners can see a link to support your show directly in your show notes. That's inserted by buzz sprout and it's really nice because it's all ingrained in your buzz sprout dashboard so you don't have to log into another platform every time you have to do a bonus episode, so that's really nice. There's also the option of Patreon, where you can offer different tiers, and I have found from my experience that Patreon is really complicated. It's really popular for podcasters, but sometimes when you start getting into it and you start offering more things, it actually just winds up adding more work for you and is not as valuable to your listeners. They don't get as much value out of it as you're putting the work into it.
Jordan:There's also Apple podcast subscriptions, which is really great because you're able to populate the bonus episodes directly in your Apple podcast app and, again, that's right there. Apple puts a banner on your podcast page when you do Apple podcast subscriptions. However, I don't recommend that for someone who's just starting out with subscriptions, because you do have to pay a $20 annual fee to be enrolled in podcast subscriptions, on top of the fee that they take. So it's one of those things where you're kind of taking a gamble if you're putting money in hoping to get people to support the show. So there's tons of different options. There's Supercast, memberful. I recommend, obviously, buzzsprout subscriptions because that's my favorite, but you can do Patreon, apple podcast. Just make sure that you do research each of these platforms a lot to figure out which one works best for you.
Kevin:All right. The next question is from Travis at the Family History Drama podcast. It says I produce dramatized history episodes that are fully scripted before I produce them. That script is then pasted into the proper place after my audio has uploaded to Buzzsprout. Am I understanding correctly that my script will not be usable? I'm assuming, like in the Apple podcast transcripts world, because the words are not time stamped through a digital scripting program? That is correct, travis.
Kevin:Unfortunately, just copying and pasting in with no time stamp data will not be a way for you to update your transcript that displays an Apple podcast. Now, the good news is that you don't really have to. You don't have to do this. You don't have to supply your own transcripts for a display in Apple podcasts. They will produce one for you. If you want to continue the system that you're doing, that transcript that you're putting in will display on your Buzzsprout website. You can use it on your own personal website. Anybody who uses the podcasting 2.0 transcript tag will see that in your feed and be able to fill it and display it in their app.
Kevin:Now, they won't be able to highlight it word by word. It won't be like a closed caption transcript, it'll just be a regular transcript that people could click on and read through Apple podcasts will generate their own. They'll probably do a pretty good job of getting it pretty accurate and they will highlight it word by word. It's only going to be. If you needed to change that, if you see that they're getting a lot of the names wrong or a lot of things they're saying wrong and you wanted to edit it, then you have to get a time stamped transcript, upload that to Buzzsprout and that is how you update Apple podcasts. Those are your options. I know it's not the best news in the world but, like I said, the good news is that you're going to have a transcript either way. Hopefully it's accurate enough for you and it just works out of the box.
Alban:Next question is from Tate Pan to Penn, a storytelling podcast. Thank you so much for your podcast. As a new podcaster, your information is invaluable. Tate tells us that they've been using an AI voice clone because of a medical issue. It's hard for them to go through a whole podcast without coughing or clearing their throat constantly and receive the feedback from somebody that they're not a true podcaster because they're not directly speaking. Their question was what are your views on using AI voice for narration in podcasts? Does a podcast have to be a human speaking into a mic or interviewing another person?
Alban:I think that AI voice is perfect for this use case. If, for some reason, it's hard for you to speak for long periods without clearing your voice, or your voice is getting really hoarse, or maybe you can't speak, then those are all great reasons to use AI. I would also just like to say anybody who's gatekeeping podcasting is totally lost it this like you can't sit with us mentality. You really want to grow out of that by like third grade and move on. So whether or not you want to define somebody else's show as a podcast is kind of lame. So I would say Tate, you are a podcaster, congratulations on doing well. Sounds like you're getting a lot of good reviews, and keep up the great work.
Kevin:Yeah, I agree, tate, you are a podcaster. This is just. Trolls are going to find you if you're online and a troll found you, so shake it off and move on, but you're definitely a podcaster. Keep up the good work.
Jordan:Because the haters going to hate, hate, hate, hate. All right, and we got another one from Doc from the podcast Heroes of Science Fiction and Fantasy man. We've got a lot of fiction podcasters writing in. This is awesome. My question is can you go over advertising for your podcast on Buzzsprout? How successful on average can you be? I'm not super sure. Okay, I don't think that there's really like an average success for advertising your podcast on Buzzsprout. There's a lot of variables. It depends on how good your podcast promo is. You have to be sure that you are giving really good information on your ad when you create it. You have to make sure that there's really good sound quality and that you're giving a compelling reason for people to go find your podcast and make sure that you're doing like the correct call to action, and I think that if you are able to do that, then you're able to increase your chances of success in running an ad. Would you guys agree with that?
Alban:I don't think that's what they're asking.
Jordan:Is that what they're asking?
Alban:I think they're asking what kind of monetization options are there?
Jordan:I don't think so. Can you go over advertising for your podcast on Buzzsprout? How successful on average can you be?
Kevin:Yeah, I think you're right, jordan. If you're reading exactly what they wrote, then that's the answer they're looking for. I think Alban and I are saying what is the meaning? Not necessarily what they wrote, and I think most people are asking how do I make money with my podcast, with advertising?
Alban:Yeah, it's hard to. I mean it could be read either way.
Jordan:Well.
Kevin:But it could be either way.
Jordan:All right.
Kevin:I think Jordan's right in that, the way they wrote the question is about. I want to advertise my podcast on other podcasts. How successful can I be? But it could be either one.
Jordan:Well, if you are talking about running ads or doing sponsored host, read ads on your podcast. I actually wrote a really great guide to how to secure sponsorships or do ads for your podcast and I will link to that in the show notes. It's called 11 Ways to Make Money on your Podcast, or Make Money Podcasting. Do you remember what we called that?
Alban:How to Make Money Podcasting.
Jordan:How to Make Money Podcasting and that gives some really good insight into that. If I do say so myself, I think that it is very well written. So, depending on what your question meant, I hope that I answered that question. Got two answers.
Kevin:All right. The next question comes from 1792 and says Kevin said he had a healthy conversation, a friendly discussion about politics. How would Kevin describe the other side's point of view? I think this is loaded. Someone's trying to trap me here.
Jordan:It's probably the person you were talking to. They're like was it friendly, though, Kevin? Was it?
Kevin:Yeah, and that's what I'm wondering. Are you wondering if they would describe it as friendly also, or do you want me to describe their viewpoint versus my viewpoint? But I think you're asking the first, which is do they describe it as friendly as well? And I would say yes, absolutely, because the person I was joking around with and we're having this conversation, her name is Katie, and I want to say, Alban, did you walk up on this conversation towards the end and I introduced you to Katie? I think Katie said that we were just talking about politics, but we're still very friendly, or something like that. So I think we're in perfect alignment on our views of this friendly conversation from both sides.
Alban:I got an email from Matthew McLean, who listens to Buzzcast. He's one of the people who does the podcasthostcom and he sent in an episode he said we'd really enjoy. This was called the Power of Long Form Audio with Kinda Studios. It's an episode on a podcast called Fresh Ears, and what they did is they interviewed two women who are researching the neuroscience of aesthetic experiences and they talked specifically about listening to audio and podcasts and a couple things from a 15-minute episode which I'd highly recommend.
Alban:80% of our sensory hierarchy comes from vision, and so when we take vision out of the equation, we just listen. That frees up a ton of mental capacity. People are much more engaged with audio because we are constantly imagining what people are talking about. There's a lot of context that's missing Since we don't have video, and so we imagine what people are looking like, we imagine what they're referencing, and all of that creation in our mind actually means people are more focused and more engaged, and so, however many times I've said, podcasting is the most intimate way to connect with your audience. People feel like they know the hosts Well. This explains a lot of the neuroscience behind that, so we will link to this in the show notes. Thank you so much to Matthew for sending it in.
Jordan:That's cool. I'm gonna have to check that out. All right, and then we also got a couple of boost grams One from Gene Bean saying Bravo for your early work on the transcript tag. I think that's directed to you, Kevin.
Kevin:Well, thank you, gene Bean. It wasn't me, it was a whole team effort. In fact, we got a tweet last week from QR code art. That said, by the way, if you look on the GitHub, I'm pretty sure I proposed the transcript tag first. That is very possible. I did go back and look in GitHub and I tried to find the earliest discussions around transcripts. I couldn't find one, but maybe you have a different handle or a different name on there. So I replied back to you on Twitter, qr code art, and I asked you for a link. But regardless of whether you were the first or the second or the third, thank you for helping and thank you for being a part of that. But if I can find that, or if you can ship me a link to it, I'll definitely read it out on the show next time we record.
Jordan:We also got a boost of gram from at creativity found. It was a great party bus route I must lead on a table with Brian and Shawna of killer bee who show in the metaverse I'd heard of when Tom talked about going on it a while back. Oh, they were there. Cool, this stuff fascinates me. So brilliant connection and new friends made to. Brilliant job on the balloons, bracilla, although I didn't see any of the buzz cast team helping out the poor guy who had to deflate them all.
Kevin:Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, the poor guy. No, he was paid. Well, he's not a poor guy, he's a well compensated balloon deflator.
Jordan:Also, we retired from cleaning up the room for the party to start. We were there for an hour before Lovely to meet Jordan, Alban and, most importantly, Brian. So this is from Claire at the creativity found podcast, who was on pod news weekly review and I loved her interview on that and she mentioned, kevin, that you were just too darn popular for her to go say hi.
Kevin:Yeah, I was bummed when I listened to that episode. I was bummed that we didn't get to meet, I don't know. I don't know if I agree with her that I was too popular, but I am a little introverted, so I do take breaks regularly throughout the night. So if you see me talking with anyone for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time, that's usually followed by a five minute break outside, by a recharge, and I come back and do it again. So well, thank you, and next time we're together at a conference, please shovel your way into the conversation and make sure I meet you, because you sound like a lovely person. So, thank you so much.
Alban:And we got one last text from Derek Brough, host of the intentional teaching podcast, and this is a podcast that's targeted at college faculty. Derek said one non-stat sign of success for him is when he reaches out to somebody he'd like to interview on the podcast because they're doing really interesting work, and he finds out that they already listened to the show.
Jordan:Oh, cool that is such a cool experience.
Alban:Derek, I'm glad that you are regularly finding that measure of success. That's really cool.
Jordan:And Alban, do you have a sound off question for our next episode?
Alban:I do so. One thing my friends and I often do for football games is we always say what are the keys to success? You know what needs to happen in this game for our team to win. And we'll pull out just kind of jokingly like, oh, we need to see this happen, we need to see this happen. And the same group of friends recently we said what are your keys to success for the year? What things do you want to focus on? And that actually brought in a lot of really interesting conversations. What two or three things are important to you for the year? Well, I'd like to ask it to our audience what are your podcasting keys to success? What are the two or three max things that you should be focusing on for your show to be successful? Not for everybody. Don't give advice. Give yourself a piece of advice. What are the things you should be focusing on? We'd love to hear what success will mean for you in the coming year.
Jordan:Great, so to have your response featured on our next episode, send us a text at 855-951-4230. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting. Do you ever have like those times when you see someone doing something and they're not doing as good of a job as you can do, and so you just drop? A hint that maybe you have a little experience in this.
Alban:Let me answer for both of us, kevin and I. This is a significant positive and extreme weak point for both of us the inability to let anybody do something at a level that we think I could do it better. That is something Kevin and I struggle with. Yeah, I get it, kevin gets it.
Kevin:Yeah, this is one of the hardest things you got. To be careful, though, because you're constantly weighing in your mind, like if I step in it, I'm in it, versus can I just be okay with it the way it is?
Jordan:I'm in it, I'm in over my head, guys, you're in it.
Kevin:What'd you step in?
Jordan:Oh, I stepped in a musical theater department.
Alban:Oh no.
Kevin:That is the worst, oh no.
Jordan:Okay, my daughter. She's kind of like a lone wolf type, you know like she doesn't have many friends at school, and I was like, listen, you just got to get in a school play, You'll make so many friends. And I convinced her to audition for Annie.
Kevin:Does she want friends? Let's ask first Is she a Sigma? See a Sigma female.
Jordan:Well, she kind of acted like she didn't.
Kevin:but what A Sigma? Yeah, you know like a Sigma male. There's like Alpha male and Beta males and Sigma males are the ones that are introverted but they're totally fine with it, like they thrive as being lone wolves. Are you a Sigma male? So I'm just asking is your daughter like she doesn't have a lot of friends but you know a few, and is she thriving there? Is it Mama Bear that wants her to have more?
Alban:or is it her, I don't know. It's kind of got very deep very quick. What about this school play? What about parenting?
Jordan:Okay, I was always like the social butterfly. I was like friends with literally everybody that I could possibly be friends with. That's still the case. But she just like has like a friend, and so we have a birthday party and I would like spend like $300 on this like extravagant party, and then like one kid would show up and she'd be so happy and I was just like ah.
Kevin:Yeah.
Jordan:So I just I need more kids to show up at her birthday parties, right? So that's, this is the root of this. I need more kids to show up when I spend lots of money on birthday parties, yeah, so she auditioned for the musical. She got in the musical, great Okay. And then I started getting the like parent emails from the musical and I was like, oh, this is really unorganized and I would not do it this way. I don't like the graphics that they're using for the play and I could just see where it was going. I could just see where it was going and I was like you know what?
Alban:I could see where this story is going.
Jordan:I'm just going to send an email and I was like, hey, I was at the major in college, I have some like marketing experience and I do some like graphic design stuff and I can help you know if you need it. That's all I did. Next thing, I know I'm in a meeting with the director of the PR manager and I'm just like telling them all the things that they're like doing wrong and they're like, yes, this is great, you can do this. I have spent like 12 hours in the last week like putting my stagecraft and set design courses to work.
Jordan:I am like designing flats, I am like tracing things and it's so funny because I'm just in this auditorium while the kids are like doing their musical numbers and I'm just like making it work. And I'm working with like the tech kids and we're like making sure the lights and the sound are good and we got like a new like microphone system. I'm making sure that, like we're getting out the ads for the programs. So I'm ready for this to be done. And I realized that I just got in too deep.
Alban:Jordan. Could I just do a quick recap of what's happened?
Jordan:Okay.
Alban:You threw a birthday party for your daughter that you would have really liked as a kid. They invite everybody, get all your friends, and she had a great time, but the biggest issue you had was you spent money on a birthday party and not enough kids came. So instead of next year being so excited and being like, yes, we can throw a really smaller but even more exciting party for the few friends, you were like no, no, no, no, you're on a friendship plan.
Kevin:You need to go get friends and you need to get into school play.
Alban:And then now you're sucked into the school play.
Jordan:I mean yes. So yes, you're correct. But to be fair, I asked her what she wants for her birthday and she gives me these things that cost like at least $100 deposit, not including food and cake and all that stuff and goodies, and of course I have to have the right decorations for it because it needs to fit the aesthetic. So she wants these things, but then I get like one kid showing up and this happens year after year and the struggle has got to get more friends. So this is my plan and now I'm paying the ultimate price for it you talked about. Everything comes at a cost. This is my cost.
Kevin:There's a cost. Oh, I understand the struggle. It is hard sometimes to sit on the sidelines and watch something like mediocre. If it's something that you, if it were under your purview, you were leading, you would do it a lot differently. I don't have any good advice for you, except I can tell you this that I have learned through being a parent for a little while that being okay with mediocrity gets easier. The first time is so hard. You're sitting there watching the play and you're like this is just so not good on so many levels. It's really hard. And but by the time you watch that fifth play or the sixth play or the seventh mediocre play, you're like, yeah, it's totally fine.
Kevin:It's totally fine. But you got to practice for it, you got to not step in it anymore, you got to just let it happen.
Alban:It's not going to happen, kevin. They now know. They know who helps with plays. They're going to go oh, there's somebody who did an amazing job, because George's doing a good job. You're locked in and you don't just have this one daughter, you have a younger daughter, and the younger daughter is going to go to the same school, and they're going to be like, oh I know who to call for her place too. So I think this is going to be a recurring issue.
Kevin:Here's the strategy. The best strategy I can give you is you need to reset now.
Jordan:I got to move schools, I got to move schools, don't move schools.
Kevin:Don't go that far. This is just like you know, when the when the husband doesn't like the way the dishwasher is loaded, so he loads it right, and now his job is forever loading the dishwasher. How does he get out of it? He starts breaking the dishes. You need to volunteer for the next school play and drop the ball on everything.
Jordan:Oh, you know what that's called? What weaponized incompetence.
Kevin:Yes, I like that name. Let's go with that. Weaponized incompetence. That is your strategy for the next school play. So you got to get through this one. It's got to be awesome. And then the next one, you got to do a hard reset. That's your incompetence.