Apple Podcasts Puts Episode Artwork in the Spotlight!

In this episode, we're excited to share updates to Co-Host AI, a feature that's received outstanding feedback from our podcasters and Facebook group. We discuss the advantages of this integrated feature, how it differentiates from other services, and improvements made to its transcription editor since its launch, covering the quality of the transcription engine, AI technology, and the innovative new editor functionalities, such as assigning speaker roles. Plus, we delve into the importance of episode artwork and how Apple Podcasts is making it a priority in the podcasting world, with unique and memorable artwork being the key to standing out.

Lastly, we touch on YouTube's potential impact on podcast advertising and the consequences of their new approach. With YouTube's lack of pass-through RSS ingestion, will podcasters still be willing to distribute to their platform? Join us as we explore this fascinating topic, share our pre-recording rituals, and even discuss the challenge of decluttering our homes and extreme approaches to cleanliness. Don't miss this insightful conversation!

View the DISCUSSION THREAD on Twitter!

COHOST AI
https://www.buzzsprout.com/help/189-cohost-ai

APPLE PODCASTS UPDATES
https://podcasters.apple.com/5303-ios-17-whats-new-apple-podcasts

YOUTUBE'S RSS PILOT LEAK
https://podnews.net/update/youtube-rss-plans
Adam Curry's leak confession on Podcasting 2.0: https://overcast.fm/+6A0DAZ3CQ/14:42

📣 SOUND-OFF QUESTION: What podcast got you into podcasts?
To have your response featured on our next episode, leave a 30-second voice message at podinbox.com/buzzsprout, send a boostagram, or tweet the answer @BuzzcastPodcast!
Podcasts mentioned by hosts:
Alban: This American Life & Philosophy Bites
Jordan: Spirits
Kevin: This is Love: Something Large and Wild

Chapters

• 0:30 Cohost AI Update & Improvements to the Transcription Editor
• 15:48 Apple Podcasts' Emphasis on Episode Artwork
• 31:55 YouTube's RSS Ingestion & Podcast Ads
• 46:25 Sound Off: Boosting and Pre-Recording Rituals
• 58:52 Post Show: The Purge

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

Are you the first guy or the second guy, Jordan?

Jordan: 0:03

Say what?

Alban: 0:03

Are you the first guy or the second guy? Are you Batman or are you Robin?

Jordan: 0:06

I'm trying to like volley it to you.

Alban: 0:09

So you're going. This is the start. We're starting here. This is the start.

Jordan: 0:12

No, no, no, You started, and then I'm.

Alban: 0:15

I started.

Jordan: 0:16

Yeah, you started and then I am volleying it back.

Alban: 0:19

All right, I got the bump. You've got the set. Kevin, you ready for the spike? Sure, that's how this podcast goes. All right. Co-host Ai is officially two weeks old. We soft launched it with the last episode of this podcast and I'm super excited because we've sent out our big email blast to everybody. People are starting to check out the YouTube video, people are signing up and giving us feedback And it's just so much fun to see something that 10 weeks ago was only an idea and now we've got a bunch of people using it.

Jordan: 0:57

Yeah, it was a little nerve wracking sending out that huge email to everybody and the response has been really great. I think that people are really enjoying having this feature integrated into their workflow, as opposed to going to different platforms and stuff to finish up or polish their podcast episodes.

Kevin: 1:16

Yeah, i'm enjoying reading feedback that's coming in, whether it be through the support channels or our Facebook group or whatever. It's a little bit all over the place. We could categorize it as all positive. I think Albin said it best, as he was talking about what's the general feeling. And the general feeling is that having this AI stuff integrated into your workflow is a bit of a game changer. Gets thrown around a lot, but it really does make a big difference.

Kevin: 1:42

Yeah, I'm not trying to, Game changer. Say, Oh, this is game changing. That feature is what differentiates this type of AI offering from what you could do on your own, working through either prompting ChatGPT yourself or using a third party service. There's a massive level of convenience. I think what we're hearing is some people have been a little bit skeptical of trying it out. Little feature tease here.

Kevin: 2:07

We understand that would be great to be able to have a free trial option. That's something that we're trying to figure out and work through, just like we did with Magic Master and we rolled that out and then we figured out a way down the road to do a free trial with that, something that we're trying to think through and figure out for cohost AI as well. But if you were looking at a feature comparison chart of what does cohost AI give you versus what is some of these other third party service offerings provide, what it's missing is this integration of this workflow, the simplicity of being able to upload to one place and then have all these suggestions right in line with the podcasting workflow that you're used to. When we were scoping and designing this feature and figuring out, we wanted to hit the most important things on that list. One of the things that was really high was making it simple and making it integrated into your workflow and really being a time saving tool instead of just a replacement for other AI solutions that are out there.

Alban: 2:56

There's this very common critique. I think we've got a little bit of this and obviously you and I I think we anticipated it based on our conversation last time That well, can't I just do this myself? The answer to almost every product ever is yes, you can probably do this yourself. Could you host your own audio files and hand create an RSS feed and get it into the? Yes, you could do that yourself. Could you master your own episodes? Yes, you can do that yourself. Do I really need Buzzsprout for anything? No, you could do it all yourself.

Alban: 3:31

And so cohost AI fits in the same category of an infinite number of things you could just do yourself. And I saw somebody said you know, this only saves me like three to five minutes. It doubles my hosting. I'm totally comfortable with saying to that guy this is not a feature for you If the title description is only taking you three minutes and you aren't interested in doing the transcript and the chapter markers and you're pretty cost conscious, like of course, this isn't for you But for people, and I think I fall in this category if you're saying I just don't like I'm getting on And at the end there's all these extra steps.

Alban: 4:08

If I could take those off my plate and, instead of hiring someone to do it, I get Cohost AI to come in and do it. Well, that's a big difference, and so I'm excited that we're finding some people that this is perfect for, and we're finding some people that it's not perfect for, and that's OK. The goal is not that every single person has to use it. The goal is the people who decided this right for them, that we do a really good job of taking care of them and making sure it's worthwhile for them.

Jordan: 4:38

You know I fell into that camp of, you know, I never transcribed my episodes. I didn't really worry about descriptions and stuff like that. I probably am not the perfect person to use cohost AI. And then, once I used it, I was like, oh, this is it, I need to have this, I love finally having transcriptions. It was just one of those things where I didn't want to pay the extra money to do a transcription, have all this stuff, and then I don't have time to edit that with Dreamful, and I don't want to worry about that. It doesn't matter, Everyone's going to bed whatever. And now that I have it, I was like so excited. And then now we've updated the transcription editor as well.

Alban: 5:19

Yeah, one of the big pieces of feedback we received was the transcription editor we had. Doesn't make it easy for me to switch the names of all the speakers, it's just a big form field. That's what we launched with. We knew that the transcription editor was coming close behind, but sometimes you just got to get things out to the world and start doing it. You can't just wait for everything to be perfect before you start. So we launched Cohost AI.

Alban: 5:43

We've already got the first big update, which is the transcription editor. If you have a transcript and you've already edited it, we aren't going to give you the new editor, because then you would lose your progress. But for anybody who's running a new episode or hasn't changed it, you've got the new editor in your account right now. So it's a lot cleaner, it's a lot easier to use. It's easy to change the speakers. You can even assign different speakers' roles on the podcast.

Alban: 6:09

So for our last episode, i was able to pick out three of us as the hosts of the podcast or, I guess, the co-hosts of the podcast, and then I was able to get the three or four people that we had during our sound off segment who left us voice messages, and I was able to identify them as callers, so it's really nice to be able to go through, clean up the transcript and the whole goal again being this doesn't have to be perfect, perfect, but you want it to be 99% accurate, so it's very easy for people to see. Okay, I know what they said there. Oh, there's a hiccup, but I know what that actually meant when they said it.

Kevin: 6:47

Yeah, One of the big differentiators with co-host is this is the first time that we're putting our own stamp of approval on the transcription engine that we're giving access to through BuzzFrout. And so what got us to the point where we're comfortable doing that Like? for years and years we've offered third party. I guess they're kind of integrations, but they're kind of like soft recommendations, Like if you want to use Temi, here's the link to do that. If you want to use Descript, we let you push your transcript from Descript into BuzzFrout.

Kevin: 7:15

But we have never gone ahead and said, hey, here's an upgrade package that we will bill for and we will take care of the transcription. Now it's not tech that we built ourselves, but we've been vetting the technology for a very long time. The closest thing we've come to that is Otter was running, had a pretty solid transcription engine and kind of like the value for the quality of the transcription versus the price that they were charging was in line enough that we're like it's pretty good solution And a lot of people ended up using that. This is another level like the quality of transcription that we're getting. Now. This is not just listening to the audio and trying to guess the words, actually using AI technology and language models to predictively guess and tie that and it's listening and it's using prediction technology together to try to get the words more accurate. And so the amount of editing that's required is a lot less than it ever was. And now, with this new editor that we have, I mean it's going to miss, especially in a 45 minute hour long episode. It's going to miss a few words here and there, a few things that you're going to want to clean up, a few things that are just like oh, that wasn't exactly right, but it doesn't really matter.

Kevin: 8:15

Getting the speaker names was a big deal. The little UI around choosing speaker names is really nice. It plays a little segment of that person talking so you can be like, oh, that's clearly Jordan, that's clearly Albin, that's clearly Kevin. Then there may be some punctuation errors and stuff all stuff that we're working on, But last week we felt like it was good enough and it's time to replace it so that now you can do legitimate transcript editing and speaker assigning. And again, we're still working on stuff. We want to be able to give people an option to download the final transcript themselves with timestamps, so that maybe you want to upload that to YouTube. Maybe you have other use cases for the transcript that's produced, So that's something that we're talking about doing as well. But, yeah, it's a great enhancement to the transcript, which, for a lot of people, is just a bonus.

Alban: 9:00

You're not going to be able to get good title and description if you don't have a good transcription, or else it's just kind of a shot in the dark and it's very likely the title won't even be on point. But can I ask a technical question, because you said something there, kevin, that I'd never heard before? Is the new engine we're using actually using predictive models to try to figure out? it's more likely you said this word than that word, and thus when there's ambiguity, we're going to lean towards the more common word.

Kevin: 9:29

So transcription for the longest time since it came out. The engines would assign like probability scores to every word it transcribed And so, if you remember, I think Otter used to do this. They maybe they still do, But there's an option like to turn on low confidence, word highlight. So then it kind of points you in the right direction. Of these are if you have to make corrections, these are probably the words that need to be corrected because our confidence that we got the word right is like below 80% or something like that.

Kevin: 9:54

Now what you can do is you can take anything that falls below a certain threshold like, let's say, it's below 90 or 95% confidence that it got the word right And you can take the context around it. So take a few sentences before that and a few sentences after it, pass it into like a language model and say what word do you think would be here? And if the word that it comes back with matches the word that you have like 90% confidence in, then it's like 98% chance that that is the correct word. It's a little bit more involved but it can take a little bit more time, But the quality of the transcript and the chances that it's getting more words right goes up significantly.

Alban: 10:28

Yeah. So in real words, at the beginning of my podcast I say the words welcome back to the show. We might have had a garble in the words that the old transcriptions would have come up with welcome back to the glow because that last word sounded the most like glow And we could say even statistically like it most likely sounds like glow based on the waveform. But now the new engines are looking and saying look, if I look at the whole context, people rarely say the phrase welcome back to the glow. People often say the phrase welcome back to the show And even though glow is the thing that sounds the most like what we see there, welcome back to the show. Being number two and being super likely to be in that location Changes which word we're going to put in.

Kevin: 11:21

Right, and we're lucky that computers run a lot faster than our brains, because just listening to you process that in real time is like that's taking a long time. We need to figure this out. Yeah, so the computers do this really fast. Humans do it pretty slow.

Alban: 11:35

Can I tell you this is an interesting anecdote. Oh no, jordan, please don't cut this. There is a person who had to do that in real life. All of this is a subset of information theory, which Claude Shannon, i think, is like the father of information theory. He figured out how much redundancy there was in our language by I promise this is true. He would pull out like a dictionary and he'd say the first letter is a. What do you think the second letter is to his wife And she would have to guess the next letter. And he was figuring out, like how many guesses does it take to see how much redundancy there was in words and word choice? All it to say, there is a woman who did that. She sat there and guessed for her husband and it ends up being this like scientific accomplishment. And I always just think like there's nobody in the world who has that much patience as Claude Shannon's wife.

Kevin: 12:29

So no no but I bet she's like really good at wordle now.

Alban: 12:33

I don't think she's still alive, but she would crush wordle if she were. She would crush That is wild.

Alban: 12:41

I think all these stories of people who make these big accomplishments, you often didn't notice like their spouse or their parents just were like incredibly giving and caring and like sacrificed for you know somebody to make this big accomplishment And I remember reading this in a book and just being like there's no way, even if I knew my spouse was going to be Like kick off this new science. I don't think I could handle hours and hours of. I bet the next letter is a D. No, it's not Guess again.

Jordan: 13:13

I actually have that conversation many times with my six year old. She's just like constantly trying to do like riddles, but she mistakes jokes for riddles. So she like tries to tell really bad jokes and she's like I have a riddle for you. So I might have the patience for it, who knows. So this is a listener question, but it's actually a question that I've seen come up a lot in the Facebook group. And then we also got a tweet from David and he asked why can we not apply co-host AI to past episodes when we enable it? Yeah, i think it's a good question. Let's talk about the value that you would get?

Kevin: 13:52

Could we hook up a way where you could choose old episodes and you could like, depending on how many you want to apply it to. Could we give your price and if you could pay for it? Because, again, this stuff costs us money, so we have to be able to cover all the bases there. Could we do that? Certainly, is the value proposition the same? We don't think it is. So you already have a title, you already have a description. Now you might need better descriptions, you might want a better title. I don't know how many people want that. I think mostly what people are saying for is I really like the benefit of having great transcript and I like the benefit, maybe, of having chapter markers as well, and so, yes, we are looking at offering possibly, a transcription only option. We already have some transcription options, so why not at a minimum, present this one as well? Should we include the option to run a full AI prompts on the rest of that once we have the transcription? Maybe, maybe not, and so that's where we are in that process.

Kevin: 14:41

This stuff is all brand new. I do think that there are more serious use capes, applications Sorry, that's a technical way of saying it's more useful than it is like with magic mastering. So magic mastering we never let you go back and apply magic mastering to all your previous episodes. We're like your audio quality now sounds better. That's great.

Kevin: 14:58

I understand people are like I want my old episodes to sound better as well, but there was a lot of complexity in figuring out how to charge for that and bill for that and yada, yada, yada, and actually the noise around that died down pretty quickly around the number of people who really actually wanted to do that. This has more long lasting implications, like there's actually a huge benefit of having your entire back catalog, have a high quality transcript, not just for accessibility purposes and SEO purposes, but then, once all that stuff is in text format like as AI continues to get better and better you might want to go back and promote old episodes, and it's easy to have AI help you come up with ways to promote your stuff if it's already transcribed. So it's a great question. It's something we're thinking about. The question just comes down to like what's the value, what's the cost for us? And then how do we put that together in a package that makes sense for everybody?

Jordan: 15:49

So Apple Podcast is getting some updates with the iOS 17. And I'm really excited There's some really good updates in here, Yeah.

Alban: 15:58

I was too. I always watch these things and I know everybody was watching going like, oh man, the Apple AR glasses or whatever are going to come out, and I'm always the one looking there, going, oh man, what's going to happen with Apple Podcasts? What updates are we going to get to the Notes app? I feel like the small things are always the ones that get me so excited. I mean, for the new phone, my most exciting thing is I'm going to be able to travel and have a USB-C phone so that I'll be able to plug in like the same cord to everything. So I'm excited about the small things and Apple Podcast made a lot of really good small updates.

Alban: 16:35

The main thing is like the now playing screen looks so much better. It just looks really pretty. It's like a great lock screen experience. You can go down and see your cue and it looks really easy to reshuffle your cue and pull up old episodes to the top. Chapters are getting a bunch more exposure. They're being highlighted quite a bit. Custom artwork for chapters and custom artwork for episodes are getting a big highlight.

Jordan: 17:04

Now I was a little confused because they said creators can continue to add chapter-specific artwork which is displayed in real time, and to me it almost sound like they were saying it's already in there, but it's not right, it is in there?

Kevin: 17:18

No, it is.

Kevin: 17:19

I can't find it. You have to include the artwork in the MP3 file itself. So remember there's two different ways to do chapters. There's the old way, there's the Podcasting 2.0, podcast Namespace way, which is the newer way, and Apple added chapter support years ago, even before the new spec was out, and they have not updated it to the new spec. So it has to be the old way. And if you create your chapters through Buzzsprout, we'll put the chapters in both ways because it doesn't actually take up a lot of file space just to put the name of the chapter and the timestamp and stuff. But if you start adding artwork into the MP3 file now that MP3 file can get a lot larger, it starts to bloat, which is one of the reasons that the new spec accounts for that and gives you a way to have chapter art outside of the MP3 file.

Jordan: 18:04

So that's the same problem, that is with the episodic artwork, right, which is why they don't show episodic artwork, except for only for certain shows.

Kevin: 18:12

So episodic artwork, you can do both ways. You can put artwork in the episode and you can link to that episode artwork in the feed. Buzzsprout does both for that, because that would only be one image. So it's one extra image, so we go ahead and add it to the MP3 as well And really what you're doing is you're replacing the default artwork, which is the podcast show artwork for a specific episode.

Kevin: 18:33

So we didn't feel like that was bloating the file. We will go ahead and do that for you. So if you do episode artwork, it should show up an Apple podcast And if it doesn't, then that's something that we'd want to troubleshoot and fix. But chapter art will not. If you use the Buzzsprout tool to create chapters, there are other tools you can use to create chapters and add artwork that will add it. But you'll notice like if you start with the 30 megabyte MP3 file and then you go and add 12 chapters with 12 different images, you might end up with a 40 or 50 megabyte file at the end, because now your file has gotten a lot bigger, because holding all that artwork And the big trade off here being in the header of the MP3 file that you're going to be serving up to everybody, not just people on Apple, but everybody.

Alban: 19:12

There's going to be these big image files And if there's big image files in there, that's going to just take up tons of bandwidth And only the people who are looking at Apple podcasts or the few other apps I'm not sure if there are any that support chapter artwork this way that everybody's going to download it only for a few people to get the benefit.

Alban: 19:32

The irony of this is, when I was researching it, because I was really hopeful they were going to be using the JSON to pull in these images The irony is there's a help article on Apple that tells you how to use chapters and Apple podcasts, and that's where it says put everything in the header, and it gives you some tools you can do it. I scroll down and there's a piece of related content that I just recommended to me Audio requirements And it pulls in a clip, a little quote from that section that says to create a podcast that is easily streamed without straining listeners, bandwidth encode and compress your audio in a format that produces the smallest file size possible. So on the page that's saying like you got to put all these images in the header, we've got the recommendation down below that says but for the audio piece, like come on, man, make sure that this isn't some massive audio file.

Kevin: 20:24

Yeah, and it's not just chapter artwork, It's also. It's also episode artwork. That's really kind of the big thing they're pushing right Was episode artwork.

Alban: 20:30

Yeah, episode artwork is way more supported than chapter artwork. That's going to show up in the queue on the lock screen control center Up next, if you send a episode, a link to an episode somebody in like in messages or mail or social media, it's going to pull in the episode artwork And so it's pretty much like episode artwork is about to be everywhere for Apple podcasts And they're going so hard that they're even saying if you are submitting a episode that you want to be featured in, new and noteworthy, episode artwork is encouraged for creators submitting requests to be featured on Apple podcasts. So if you want to be featured, they really want you to start supporting episode artwork, which I think is really cool. I like episode artwork and I'm excited to see more apps kind of bringing it front and center to put it in front of everybody.

Jordan: 21:22

Yeah, and it seems like a lot of work to do that for every episode. But I mean, you know we have that canva integration, so if you just like, hop over to that when you do your new episode. You have like a template already loaded up. It's not that hard, so that'll be really great. I wonderful see an uptick and people using that feature that we have. That'd be cool.

Kevin: 21:41

Yeah, I almost feel like that feature is more geared towards larger podcasts that have, like full production teams. It's very hard for people who podcasts out of, out of like a passion or for fun or for a hobby or prosumer podcasters whatever to come up with individual artwork for every episode. I mean, I even think about Buzzcast. Like what would we do for individual episode artwork, unless you start going into the realm of oh, let's put a big episode number on the artwork for this thing, or let's put some words on there to say, like what we're talking about, well, like well, now you're kind of merging artwork and title together. I look at Jordan, what you do on your Dreamful podcast, and you don't always change the artwork, but sometimes you do.

Kevin: 22:23

And sometimes if it's a series, yeah sometimes you do a series and so they have artwork that will reflect that series And I think that stuff is great. But Apple is pushing it almost like from this aesthetic purpose of like we want it to look beautiful, whether it helps you grow your show or not, and I don't know just feels kind of against. Like the majority of podcasters, if you're on a team, if you have a budget, if you have a graphic designer on your staff, their job could be every week, create great, new, interesting, creative artwork for this week's episode. For the normal podcaster, I just don't know how much that applies.

Jordan: 22:54

There's two situations where I really love seeing episodic artwork, and the first is, I think, of Tenderfoot TV.

Jordan: 23:01

They have Up and Vanished, and what they would do for each episode is they would have this like really beautiful illustration of the topic of, like maybe this point of evidence or a backstory sort of thing, and so the episode artwork was in the same style as the up and vanished artwork but it had like, I'm making this up because I can't remember what it was, like a shoe on it, you know, and it was like this specific point of evidence that they were examining during the episode.

Jordan: 23:27

But then you also have shows, i think, of Pod News Weekly Review. They have that template and they put their guest image in every single episode, and I think that's really great too. So, yeah, there's definitely two different things. Like, you can either go up and vanished version, where you have these beautifully illustrated episode covers every single time, which would be you either have to be very talented or it's going to be very expensive for you, or you can try to do the sort of like route where you just have the template and you're like interchanging, maybe, images within the template on canvas, so it's a lot easier for you.

Alban: 24:00

Let me give my counter argument to this right now. If you go on to Apple Podcasts, there is a section called Top Episodes, and so if you scroll down to that, it's the list of, like I don't know, the top 12 episodes are on the front page And then you can click to see more to see way more. Number one on that list is the daily, and that's the same artwork they've had since the daily launched. And then number 10 on that list is the daily from yesterday and Further down the list is the daily from the day before that and there's nothing being added by additional Showcasing of this artwork, you know. In the same way that I don't know, number 11 is Ben Shapiro's face and, like I don't know if I need to see that four more times in this list of top episodes, i would like if the main story for the daily like they had kind of a template So it really stood out that it was the daily, but maybe the image, like Jordan saying, is being changed in the background to highlight What the main story is about that section becomes a little bit more interesting And it does convey a little bit more information, and if people are listening to this a ton and their phones are locked And there's one image there.

Alban: 25:10

I think you want that one image there to be something that's a little bit different, and so if they're going to highlight these episodes inside of Apple podcasts, i think they're just saying, hey, we'd prefer for you. If you're going to be on millions of devices, let's not just have back to back to back to back the daily, the daily, the daily imagery over and over and over. Let's get something unique in there.

Jordan: 25:31

I think the other thing that people need to be really careful of just Just picturing what you're describing, albin, i think something people need to be careful of is making sure that the images that they use Still have the same kind of like color scheme and branding as their podcast. Because if you were to just put in like random photos similar to what we make may do with like Chapter artwork like last episode we were talking about the polar plunge thing And so we had this fun chapter artwork just of you guys in the in the polar plunge pool And I'm picturing people scrolling through the list of your podcast episodes And if you have random photos like that as your episode artwork, it's gonna look a little chaotic, i think.

Alban: 26:14

If that was I, we would not have had very many down. I think that, yeah, it might be. Why episode artwork? I would say that definitely needs to be on brand chapter artwork. That's a perfect time to say. Here's a piece of imagery that explains what I'm talking about. So if I used maybe a screenshot of Apple podcasts I'm looking at right now to show how the same image is showing up over and over, that helps illustrate the point I was trying to make. So that's how I would differentiate between this two.

Kevin: 26:43

Yeah, well, two things. I mean it's a big burden already for People who want to step into podcasts and create a podcast just to get that first piece of artwork together in the first place. So to now get them to a place where they're thinking about creating custom artwork every time they drop an episode is just a massive, massive burden and lift. So, maybe image editing applications and they are getting smarter and better and again, maybe something AI can help with at some point down the road. Canva is a great solution, but setting up a template like that's not, that's something. You know somebody who has some graphic design expertise Sure, that doesn't sound like a heavy lift for them, but for the rest of the world that doesn't have graphic design expertise like, how do I build a template That's? it's not just something. It's not just like oh, i'll go do that in an hour in the afternoon. It's kind of a big deal.

Kevin: 27:24

The other thing is that most podcasters are not showing up in these lists. Right, we're talking about, you know, top 100 podcast episodes. If you're in that list, higher graphic designer, you probably have some budget. Where you are showing up is search. So if somebody's searching for podcasts about podcasting, i hope that buzzcast might appear in that search. Now, i don't think we're gonna appear multiple times in that search. We might appear once or twice. If we do appear twice, i would like people to see oh, this podcast is getting the same podcast, because I see the same artwork appearing three times in this list. This must be a good podcast about podcasting. If we had different art for every episode, maybe they wouldn't make that same connection unless there was a really good template that carried our branding through. So then every time you knew well, this is buzzcast and they talked about this and this was buzzcast and they talked about this.

Kevin: 28:07

Hard to do without words. I really feel like this is a feature and a push and a direction that's Apple going. Apple is going Which is really catering more to professional podcasters and podcast studios and houses. Then they are really caring about individual podcasters, which there are millions of, versus hundreds of, you know, production studios that are actually putting out this massive high production quality content. So it's not a big deal. I'm not making a big argument about it. It's just a little bit frustrating that I feel like the Apple team could be doing more for the independent podcaster. Seems like a lot of the features lately are kind of pushing more towards. These are features for the professionals. They're not the features for the world of podcasting, the huge podcasting community that lives out there.

Jordan: 28:47

Yeah, and I think for the podcasters that maybe are concerned about I, need to have an episode artwork in case I'm featured on Apple Podcasts or, you know, to get feature on Apple podcast. Being featured on any of these podcasting platforms is not the end, all be all. You might get a small spike in downloads, but it is not like a long-term marketing tactic. There's plenty of podcasters who have gotten on the new and noteworthy and it didn't benefit their podcast as much as they hoped Usually. So I think that maybe don't put too much stress on yourself If you want to be featured or something like that, because it's not the most important thing.

Alban: 29:21

All right. So three more things that I wrote down to talk about that are new and Apple podcasts To, i think Kevin, you'll be happy to know I think applied to everybody. One is a little bit more focused on the top-end podcasters. We'll start with that one. This is called app subscriptions connect. There are a lot of apps that you might subscribe to, like Wall Street Journal or Apple music or something They're actually paying for, that now have premium Apple podcast subscription feeds or podcasts Inside of Apple podcasts a little bit of a word salad, but I think I got all this work.

Alban: 29:56

Now, when I open up Apple podcast, the app, i might see Wall Street Journal. Apple can see that I pay for that and because I pay for it, i get the premium feeds for all the Wall Street Journal shows. Nice feature, especially if you're already paying for some of these apps outside on your phone. Another one was performance updates, and When I read this, it sounds like this is going to be. They upgraded something over at Apple podcast and this will be really good for all of us. Listeners can expect to see new episodes quickly after they are published, along with faster and more consistent playback syncing between devices, so maybe Apple podcast, will start checking more often for episodes or Maybe getting pings somehow and pulling them in. I think that would be cool. And the last was this thing that is across all of iOS 17 called interactive widgets. Did either. You see these?

Jordan: 30:49

No.

Alban: 30:50

So you know how you can add a widget. I mean I've got one of my phone from like a habit tracking app that it just shows Like how many times I've done this habit, and I click it and then it opens the app and says like, oh, add some more. You know, click that you worked out today. Well, now Apple say widgets, kid, not only just be a link that you click it and it opens the app. You can actually take actions from the widget. And one of the examples, which I think Steven Robles found a friend of the show, was Apple podcast And there's a little play button if you add that widget and so your next episode is queued up and you just click play from your home screen And there you go.

Jordan: 31:28

That's awesome, because I have that widget and it opens up the app and then I have to like go through, like it just shows me whatever is like the most Recent episode being updated, and after a while I think I finally deleted the widget, cuz I was like, well, this is pointless, like I can just open the app anyway. Right, oh, that's great.

Alban: 31:44

So couple cool things being added and yeah, i'm always happy to see Apple podcasts get featured in these keynotes and see all the good work They're doing. A.

Jordan: 31:57

Document from YouTube was leaked to pod news and it had their RSS pilot ingestion information.

Alban: 32:04

First, i think we know who the leaker was. Everybody knows who the leaker was.

Kevin: 32:09

He admitted it on his show.

Jordan: 32:10

I don't know who the leaker was.

Kevin: 32:12

The leaker was Adam Curry. Yeah he said I sent this. I sent this document to.

Alban: 32:16

James, we should clip that or drop the link. that whole segment I thought was very funny.

Jordan: 32:21

Okay, all right. So in this they said that, unlike other RSS based podcast platforms, YouTube will not offer pass-through, which means RSS feed is just going to take the episode in order to put it into The platform and they will not be updating with any changes thereafter. And then also they said that YouTube requires that podcasts must not contain any ads, and regular ads are not allowed to be uploaded To YouTube. We request feeds to be ad-free, and I think that this raised a little bit of an alarm for a lot of podcasters, because they were saying, like, well what? I have to go edit all my episodes, and I think that we need to clear up what kind of ads they're talking about and what might be Okay for your podcast when it's being ingested into YouTube, if you decide to do that.

Alban: 33:10

I think the way best way to describe this is YouTube podcasts are going to work like YouTube, not like podcasts. It's going to be exactly the way they do YouTube videos. You can upload a video, but then it's hosted by YouTube. You can upload a podcast, but then it's hosted by YouTube. You cannot ever make a change to something once it's been uploaded to YouTube. Like you can't change the video file, you can't change the sound of the video.

Alban: 33:38

I just ran into this issue literally yesterday when I uploaded a video with two quite a sound. You can't make changes. So they say no ads are allowed in there because they're like oh, we want to be able to swap in and out YouTube ads. So it's exactly the same as the way that YouTube works. And I think that if we went into this YouTube world, youtube podcast world, expecting them to start acting like a podcast app, not like the way YouTube has worked since it first launched, i think we are kind of kidding ourselves Now raise a lot of questions about whether or not this is things that people want to do and whether or not we want to disagree, then say we're not going to participate. But it's going to act like YouTube, not like podcasts.

Kevin: 34:21

So you can absolutely have ads in YouTube videos and you can have ads in podcast episodes, as long as they are host read like endorsement ads, and then that needs to be flagged when it's uploaded to YouTube. So if you're, i imagine RSS ingestion is not rolled out world like widespread yet, but I imagine if they're doing RSS ingestion, since there's not a flag and RSS There's not a tag that says whether this contains sponsored content or not You probably have to go in manually and tick that box. If they find out that you have episodes that have Host read ads or sponsored content and you have not checked that box, the YouTube system for dealing with that is giving you an X or something like that. Right, they put a check on your account, become mark I A demerit. Yeah, you get written up, you gotta go see the principle, but that happens. If that happens three times, i think. If you get three strikes, strike, there we go. They like can demonetize you or they can ban your channel completely. So it's something to be aware of, like when they roll out RSS ingestion, and if you do sponsored, host red ads, you'll need to go in on a regular basis and make sure that you're checking the box that says that these do contain sponsored content. Otherwise, if you're doing dynamically inserted ads, you cannot really use your RSS feed unless your host provides you an ad free version of that feed to give to YouTube. So, like if you're using Buzzsprout ads, for example, buzzsprout ads will drop ads in to your episodes on a regular basis and it will remove them. If YouTube happens to ingest your podcast while one of those ads is in there, that would be against their terms of service. You might get a strike.

Kevin: 35:51

So my understanding, based on what Pod News is reporting, is that for podcast hosts like us, we would then have to provide podcasters an ad free version, something without dynamic ads, for them to be able to use for this ingestion stuff. Again, it's very speculative at this point. We really don't know because YouTube is just testing this, but it seems from the report that James had, from the leaked information, that that's the direction that they're going, and so the story here is like how is podcasting 2.0? They were very vocal in their last episode about this is not a good idea. They're suggesting, they're asking for podcast hosts to not support this, like don't provide these feeds, don't make it easy for YouTube to come in and take over the podcast hosting space. So it's something that we're thinking about. We've got to figure out where we land on this. I mean, obviously, if YouTube just wanted every podcast and they didn't necessarily care whether some had dynamic ads in them or not at the time of ingestion they could just go download the whole podcast index themselves, throw it all into YouTube and then say oh, so everyone's podcast is now on YouTube. If you don't want it in here, you can request it to be taken down.

Kevin: 36:56

Remember Spotify? Spotify launched four or five years ago and did the same thing, and this is where the term pass through comes from. This is a Spotify invented term. Like before, we just called it podcast hosting and podcast listening. And Spotify came in and they said oh, if you want to be in Spotify, we're going to rehost your files. Enough people said that they weren't happy with that, that this is frustrating, that their analytics were now, you know, not consistent. Enough people complained and they were vocal enough that Spotify came around and said fine, we'll do this thing. And they called it pass through.

Kevin: 37:25

I think it was the first time I ever heard the term used, which was just basically, we're going to do it the way that everybody else does, and now almost every hosting company has a pass through integration with Spotify. Maybe YouTube gets that point, maybe they don't, i don't know. It's early and we don't even know what the value is right now. So if we first find out that there is some value in being in YouTube, then I think the second question becomes can we convince YouTube to play nice the way that everyone else has been? Or can we come to terms on how this is going to work? Like we need to be able to get some stats back into the UI. We need to make sure that podcasters, who were maybe monetizing at lower levels before in your ecosystem, are happy, like living with your monetization limits. There's a whole bunch of questions.

Jordan: 38:06

As far as the value of YouTube goes. It reminds me there was a report done by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill And it's their podcast downloads spring 2023 report, and they said content where, as a crown, consumers are not tied to one platform, and what they found in this study is that consumers will stick with YouTube for the video, the community comments, stuff like that, but platform exclusivity is less important to them, because what they do is they discover podcasts on YouTube, and I think that's a big thing. That people are touting is like oh, podcast discoverability on YouTube is just, you know, so high And that's where everyone finds podcasts. Yeah, but they're not listening to podcasts on YouTube. They're actually taking that recommendation that YouTube gave them And then they're going to Spotify, they're going to Apple Podcasts to actually consume the podcast and subscribe there.

Alban: 38:57

Yeah, that makes me remember when we were in Dallas and Kai Chuck, the head of podcasting in YouTube, was on stage and someone mentioned it podcast and said you know, everybody discovers and then they go and they listen somewhere else. And he says yeah, i don't like that setup. I want to keep people on our app, right, and obviously that's what YouTube would want to do. Is if they are the ones who are like hey, we've got the audience And that's what people really want, and we've got all these incredible creators who do video, which is what every audience wants. And then people go and they get exposed to a new podcast on YouTube. I don't know. The Huberman Lab is one that I found on YouTube. Youtube does not want you to now go. I love this, i'm going to go subscribe and Spotify or an Apple one of their competitors. They're like no, let's add this stuff to YouTube music And if you want to just listen to it, then go listen to it there. We want to keep you in that YouTube ecosystem.

Jordan: 39:54

We had speculated on this a long time ago, back when YouTube was kind of like hinting that they were going to be doing podcasts and stuff like that. We had talked about how they're going to do advertising with podcasts, like it can't be the same as their YouTube videos, where they're just like putting in ads willy nilly. It can't be like that. And so I thought maybe if you marked your podcast as a podcast, they would only put ads at the beginning and the end of it. But now, with the way that they're doing this, where you can't put in podcasts that have ads and they're not, they're not allowing that necessarily. You know, obviously this is how YouTube makes their money, so they might be putting in ads wherever they want in your podcast, which I think is going to be upsetting to listeners as well, and so they might still just go somewhere else, even though YouTube saying oh no, we have YouTube music, but if they're doing their own ads throughout the podcast episode, listeners are going to go. Nah, i'm good.

Alban: 40:47

Well, yeah, Jordan, you just said they're not going to put in ads willy nilly. I think that is going to go in glee faults. That's exactly what they're going to do If Buzzsprout was able to build this smart insertion point finder and say we can identify spots for mid-rolls, i guarantee YouTube can do it. They do it for YouTube videos already, so they'll be able to do it for audio and they'll put in audio ads.

Kevin: 41:09

And I think they'll care less about the quality of it. Like if you watch YouTube videos now on a non premium account, so you get ads in the middle of stuff, they do not transition nicely to that ad, they just cut it. It's just pink. And where they focus their algorithm is where's the best place to put an ad that somebody will watch the ad and not click off the video. So they don't care about finding a natural like speaking break or a nice break into content, or somebody teed up a nice question and let's do it here before the answer comes. What they care about is if we put an ad here, how many people click off and don't watch the rest, versus if we put it here, how many people Oh, less people click off here. Then we'll put it there, they don't care. It's all about optimizing people staying engaged with that content, staying on their platform so that they can serve up another ad shortly after.

Jordan: 41:51

Yeah, and you're completely right, there's no transition, it's just like a hard cut. And then suddenly you're hearing about car insurance and it's like whoa, it's very jarring.

Kevin: 41:59

Yeah, i mean you'll listen to five minutes of something like oh, you're building up and now you're going to give the secret away. That's where the ad's going to go. Everyone's like I just listened to everything to get to this point And now you put an ad in. That's exactly what YouTube is looking for. Again, this is not based on any inside information. This is just based on my experience of how I've interacted with YouTube ads, and so I imagine they bring the same type of thing to podcasts.

Alban: 42:19

This is something we wrestled with when we built the Smart Insertion Point Finder, because the podcaster has not identified this as a spot. We've identified this as a spot, but the best experience is for the podcast host to say let's take a break. And so we built this way of bringing in the host voice, bringing in another voice, having music rolling in to set the stage for there's about to be some ads, because what's happening on YouTube is that hard cut right to an ad. But that's not as jarring on video as it is on audio, because at least when you're watching a video, all of a sudden you see I'm watching an MKBHD video and I'm learning about some cool new tech, and then hard cut, now I'm in a Ford F-150 commercial. It's very clear to me that something changed. Like this is a different person talking to me and they're talking about something totally different. But if you're on a podcast and that happens and you do hear this with dynamic ad insertion, sometimes it's so jarring because it's not immediately clear that the content has changed.

Kevin: 43:24

It's kind of surprising that they didn't take the time. Even when you're watching network TV network TV, i mean obviously the shows are produced where they know where the commercial breaks are going to be, but still the network takes the time to fade to black before they fade up from black to show a commercial. Youtube doesn't even do that And I can't imagine that they didn't test it. I can't imagine that they didn't have versions of the ad system where it faded to black before it came back up. And now you're in an advertisement And I guess the analytics showed that the hard cut was the most effective, because YouTube is just a very data-driven company. So I'm sure they've tested all of it, but I wouldn't expect that whatever they end up doing for podcast advertising is necessarily in tune with the best experience. What it's going to be in tune with is the most effective experience or the most like financially profitable experience, like those will be the factors that drive them and on the experience they provide, not necessarily what's the nicest or what sounds the best or what feels the most natural. Those metrics, i think, are less important to a company like YouTube. So maybe the more important question for podcasters to start thinking about is how can I use YouTube to help me achieve my podcasting goals? And right now, what we know about YouTube is that if you have a video version of your show, people are using that to discover podcasts, and then oftentimes they're moving off to a more convenient platform for podcast listening. Because again, the difference between the mediums YouTube takes a lot of your time and attention, because you need to be focused on watching something, and podcasts offer a different experience where you can be passive listening. You can be doing something else while you're listening to a podcast, and we've talked about this many, many times. But I think what's happening is that people are discovering things on YouTube that they realize I actually don't need to be engaged with the video to enjoy this content, and so if it's being called a podcast in YouTube, i can enjoy this in my podcast player, whether that be Apple Podcast or Spotify, youtube music, whatever, any cool third party app like Overcast or PocketCaster, whatever And then so they move over there and search for it. They'll find it, they'll queue it up and then they know this is a great show that I like listening to and I don't need to be fully engaged to be able to enjoy it. You can do that with YouTube today. You don't need RSS ingestion to be able to do that, and it's really the best way to take advantage of the discovery of benefits of YouTube, because they are going to promote video content over audio only content with a static image.

Kevin: 45:39

I think that's going to hold true even if they start doing RSS ingestion. I don't think you're going to go from watching videos and clicking on one silly video cat video then learning something like how to fix my pressure washer in my garage, to a static image of a podcast. I don't think they're going to do that because I think it'll drive more people off the platform than they're comfortable with. So I don't think much changes in the near term. If you want to use YouTube to promote your podcast, it's a good strategy, but it's kind of expensive because you have to invest in being able to create video content And then you're using that as a discovery driver. You're using it as a marketing channel to drive people to your audio content. So I think that all stays the same, regardless of what happens with RSS ingestion or not, and it's a good strategy, but only for people who have the ability to make that investment and creating high quality video content.

Jordan: 46:27

This time for sound off the segment where you send in your tips, tricks and podcasting advice and we actually have our booster grams fixed, but because they were broken, we didn't receive any, so we'll have to wait for next time.

Alban: 46:39

Whoa whoa whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa, whoa, whoa whoa, whoa whoa whoa. How do you know they're fixed? Because we have three booths. I feel like you're you're skirting right past some very important content.

Jordan: 46:50

Jordan, let me I am racing past some really important content.

Alban: 46:55

Let me read you some important booths 1000 sats from no one knows who this is, but Kay Finn saying boost. Kay Finn, thank you so much. Kay Finn followed up with that. Again A thousand sats cohost AI for the win. Thank you, kay Finn. Anonymous podcaster. And then Kevin boosted 1000 sats and said boosting from cast-a-matic. All these came in five days ago and Kay Finn slash Kevin. We are so thankful that you listen to this podcast and enjoy it. Sounds like a great person. Sounds like a great guy.

Jordan: 47:28

I'm sure listeners are so thankful we got those fixed now.

Alban: 47:32

People are gonna be writing good like. Actually, the boosting rates are gonna get worse now.

Kevin: 47:36

I'll tell you what. there's a chance they're not working. So we kind of need everyone to send the test boost make sure that they're working. We've tested the 1000 sat boost, So we're kind of looking for 10,000 sats or more in your test boost to make sure those are working.

Alban: 47:47

Oh, yeah, years ago there was the most popular post ever on Reddit, and this was the case for years. This was something that said test post, please ignore. Just somebody tried to test out how Reddit worked And, for some reason, the internet just was like. Everyone was like yes, upvote this. So that's what I want Test boost, please ignore.

Jordan: 48:09

It's genius.

Kevin: 48:10

I've never gotten the answer to my question Where does sats go when they don't get delivered? Because I never got them back, as far as I know. When I heard that when Jordan's like I don't think our boosts are working We haven't had a boost in two or three or four weeks I was like, oh, i'm sure it's working, no problem, i'll go ahead and send like 5,000, 10,000 sats and see if it works. Didn't work. She was 100% right. It was broken And I don't know where they went. Like they're just gone And I've asked this question. No one's answering.

Jordan: 48:36

And once we got hooked up again, like anyone who had ever boosted us for like the last month, it didn't show up. So I don't know, I thought for sure once we fixed it it would just like kind of recalibrate and like update with that stuff and we have all these boosts of grams and it was just nothing.

Kevin: 48:53

Yeah, you know how, like sometimes you can. It hasn't ever happened to me, but I think there is a system in place that, like if you overpay your taxes or something and then you move, and then there's like unclaimed government funds with your name on them. Like there are systems set up that you can go claim your funds. Where do the unclaimed sats go of the world? or unclaimed Bitcoin or wherever Like? is there just sitting out there somewhere? Somebody needs to put a system together and be able to claim these things. There's literally tens of dollars at stake.

Alban: 49:19

It's tens of dollars now, Kevin, but you're going to be like that guy. You remember that there was the guy who had all these Bitcoin on a hard drive and then he like threw the hard drive away and was like, whatever, it doesn't matter. And then years later, it's like worth a billion dollars And now he's digging through the garbage and raising money for this stuff to try to find the hard drive. Like that's going to be you.

Jordan: 49:41

Okay. Well, let's get to last week's sound off question What is an important part of your pre-recording ritual? And we got some really great answers. So our first answer is from Tom Raftery.

Tom: 49:55

Hi Bus Cast Crew. So many things Getting the headphones ready, having a drink to hand, making sure the office is closed. people are warned to be quiet, But probably the most important thing that I forget far too many times is to set the do not disturb on my computer so notifications don't come up. I tell guests to do it and I've forgotten to do it so many times. it's embarrassing. So, yeah, do not disturb. Thanks, folks.

Jordan: 50:18

Kevin, we were just talking about this.

Kevin: 50:20

We were just talking about that. Yeah, i was saying the do not disturb feature is falling short for me because I only have the options of indefinitely or for one hour and I need more options And indefinitely doesn't work for you. Why? Oh, because I will forget to turn it back on and then there'll be a kid waiting somewhere in a dangerous area for me to pick them up, texting me. And why are you not getting me? I'm just on do not disturb. That's why.

Jordan: 50:42

Yeah, that's a great tip and one that we definitely use. The next answer is from Leslie.

Leslie: 50:48

My name is Leslie and I am the host of the Sick and Seeking podcast, and one of my important rituals that I do before I start recording is ground my energy into the earth. I set sort of a protective layer around me and I set an intention, and what I set is that the topic that we're discussing, the conversation that we're having, is going to reach out and help and serve the people that need to hear it most. So that's what I do.

Jordan: 51:16

One of the things I really love about this is that I tell people all the time that one of the most important parts of podcasting and being a podcast host is having intentionality, and it's making sure that you are constantly thinking about your audience. You're constantly thinking about what the message you want to get across is, and I think that this is a really great method of doing so.

Alban: 51:37

The thing that I'm taking away from this, which I might incorporate into my own pregame ritual, is the protective energy, but mainly for me it's against my co-host, kay Finn. I feel like it's just coming after me every episode. So you know, got to set that intention protective energy and I'm good to go.

Jordan: 51:56

You know what? Yeah, there's a couple of episodes where he's like extra rambunctious And I think we could use a little bit of that.

Kevin: 52:02

I'm interested in the grounding stuff. I've heard people talking about this. I don't know much about it myself, but I do know that every evening I go out and I play with my dog in the backyard And oftentimes I'm barefoot when I do that, and I think that has something to do with grounding, like touching your bare skin to the earth. Yeah, and it, for whatever reason. I do feel some I don't know how to describe it. It feels good. I like being connected at least once a day for a short amount of time, to the earth.

Alban: 52:26

I'm not anti grounding, but what you're doing is not grounding, kevin, because I know your backyard. and that's not grass, that's true. That is an earth.

Kevin: 52:35

That is artificial turf backyard That is not grounded? Does it count if you touch concrete or artificial?

Alban: 52:41

No, you have to actually be in the dirt, on the grass You're touching like microplastics or something. Yeah, but they came from the earth.

Kevin: 52:49

All right, whatever, i'm going to get better at it. I'm going to get better. Yeah, but I think it's over.

Jordan: 52:54

All right, and I have saved the best for last. This next one is from Floyd.

Flloyd: 53:00

Floyd Kennedy. That's Floyd with two L's, and the podcast is called Am I Old? Yet It's an audio fiction and I play several of the characters. So it's part of my ritual before I start recording is I have to do a jolly good vocal warm up, because at my age if you don't use it, you lose it And you have to work even harder to get it back. So, yes, i have to do some sighs and some humming and, of course, some trills And some of my very special lady voice exercises. Don't do this if you're young. Oh, it's exhausting. And then I probably have to go make a cup of tea to recover my strength before I do actually start recording. Anyway, that's how I entertain myself these days. So thanks for asking. That's my ritual.

Jordan: 54:01

Floyd you.

Alban: 54:04

That was the sweetest thing we've ever played on this podcast.

Jordan: 54:07

Floyd is. I don't know I got to meet Floyd. Please come to podcast movement please.

Alban: 54:13

I like that all three of the people who reached out have just incredible voices.

Jordan: 54:17

Yeah.

Alban: 54:18

I am very self-conscious when I hear like Tom Rafferty get on and he's doing his voice and I'm just like man, i sound terrible compared to this guy.

Jordan: 54:27

You know what's funny is Floyd's response about the vocal warm ups is actually like exactly what you do. I 1000% do all of that before I record my podcast and it sucks so bad when people are actually home with me because I feel like a maniac. I'll be in the kitchen just like do my trills. I feel like a crazy person, but you know what? It's fine, it's whatever, it's my job.

Kevin: 54:53

I think it's interesting that Floyd described it as exhausting. Do you find it exhausting after years too?

Jordan: 54:57

No no.

Kevin: 54:59

What I thought when I heard that, though, is like sometimes doing intentional movements whatever Tai Chi or yoga or Pilates or whatever They just don't seem like big movements, but they do take a lot of energy out of you. I didn't know if that was something similar. Anyway, love it, great feedback. Okay, so it's my turn to ask the question for sound off, and the best thing I can come up with and you guys helped me shape this a little bit, but I'm really interested to hear what was the podcast that got you into listening to podcasts? Oh, i love this question. Yeah, for me, i feel like there's been several that I've really enjoyed, but if I think back to like, there was one episode that really got me excited about just listening to more podcasts. Like, when I heard this, i knew I wanted to hear more stuff like this.

Alban: 55:41

First two podcasts I can remember being important to me were This American Life, probably about 2006. That's where I would load onto my iPod for a run. And then I got into a podcast called Philosophy Bites and started listening to that, maybe like 2007, 2008. And I recently just heard one of the hosts on an episode of another podcast, and it's been 15 years since I've listened to that podcast. Instantly recognized his voice and knew where he was from. So it just shows you, like, how deeply ingrained those voices and those important podcasts are.

Jordan: 56:14

Yeah, i think mine was. it was back when I was working at the accounting firm and I was trying to find something to like keep me entertained while I did some bookkeeping. And I remember being on Spotify and I just was recommended this podcast called Spirits I actually still listen to it by multitude productions and it's a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. And I was like, oh, i love mythology, legends and folklore And I listened to it, binged it, and then it led me down this like rabbit hole because I started searching like topics I was interested in and I couldn't believe like my mind was blown that there was a podcast for like everything. So I remember that very, very clearly, just being in my office and like not getting work done because I was like, what is this?

Alban: 56:58

What was it for?

Kevin: 56:58

you, kevin. I'm going to answer slightly differently because I mean, i fell in love with podcasts years and years ago, back in, you know, 2008, 2009. I fell in love with them, but I was always into tech podcasts, right, and kind of like using it as a source of news and inspiration for the work that I do. But then in 2018, there's a new podcast that came out that is called This Is Love, and I don't know how I stumbled upon this episode. I think it was an ad in another podcast I was listening to that promoted this and I looked it up and I wanted to hear what they did.

Kevin: 57:30

And the first episode at that time was an episode called Something Large and Wild, and it describes a story of somebody who's swimming, i think in San Francisco, and they encounter a whale, like a young whale that had been separated from its mother, and it tells the story of how this swimmer and whale interacted. And I don't want to spoil it because it's a super compelling story, but it opened my eyes or ears, to the idea that there are podcasts out there that are just totally different than everything I'd been listening to for the 10 years up to that point, and that's when I really started diving into this whole other world of podcasting. That's like there's more to podcasting than just tech news And it's like I'd gotten very pigeonholed until I stumbled upon this wildly different podcast and that's just stuck with me forever.

Alban: 58:12

I remember Evo Terra telling me the first 10 years of podcasting were just guys talking about Wi-Fi routers. Yeah, And like it's not 100% true, but it's like 85% true.

Jordan: 58:27

All right. So next episode's question is what is the podcast that got you into podcasting? So, to have your response featured on our next episode, leave a 30-second voice message at podinboxcom, slash Buzzsprout, send us a boost of gram since we got it fixed, or comment on the Twitter thread with your answer. And, as always, thanks for listening and keep podcasting. As you can see, the bookshelf behind me in my office I share with my kids and it's been getting increasingly more full every single week as my kids seem to be spending time with family and accumulating knickknacks and things that they go shopping with grandma for And for children. It's really hard to get them to let go of those toys because even if it's like a McDonald's, a little Happy Meal toy is precious to them and they want to keep it.

Jordan: 59:23

And so I actually came up with a game for my kids and I have a grid that I made on Excel and I printed it out for each of them And there's boxes on the grid and it's numbered one through 30.

Jordan: 59:36

And I told them if they can bring me items to get rid of, whether that be like little mini poly pocket figurines or their Pokemon cards or anything like that, or it can be big items that maybe they want to let go of clothes, shoes, just anything that they want to let go of. They bring it to me And for the number of items that they bring me, i color in one of the boxes And when the entire sheet is full, i'm going to take them to the zoo And I have never seen them so gung-ho to get rid of everything. My daughter purged like 250 items on the first day And it seems like 250 items is a lot until you actually go through your junk drawer or something like that And then you go, wow, i just gained like it's crazy how many items we own in our house. And it's just like it's a little scary actually going through this and realizing like, wow, my kids have like 12,000 things, like, if I include their beads and everything.

Alban: 1:00:35

Well, if you're counting every Pokemon card or something, I think the numbers are going to stack up pretty quickly.

Jordan: 1:00:40

Yes, yeah, we got rid of, i think, approximately like 60 Pokemon cards.

Kevin: 1:00:45

I don't know. Curse and a blessing, but I married a woman who is completely allergic to clutter of any sorts, and so it's nice in that the house is always somewhat put together. There's not a lot of clutter. It's bad in that if you leave anything out that she does not know is highly important to you, it's gone, it is in the trash forever.

Alban: 1:01:07

That's my dream, that's your dream. Oh yeah, i feel like there's so much clutter growing up that I am allergic to clutter and I'm the one who throws it away at my relationship, and then I just it's like where's this important document that we need to take? So we're like, ah, threw it away. It didn't seem like it was in a good spot.

Jordan: 1:01:27

That was me growing up like my parents, I think they're like level one hoarder with antiques and stuff like that, And so there's just stuff everywhere like their house. If they die, I'm just going to get commercially zoned and open up the doors and see what happens, because it's Oh, I did that Yeah.

Jordan: 1:01:42

So many antiques and stuff Like I am dreading and I'm an only child so it's all going to me And I'm actually very, very minimalist. You can't tell from my office because I have like lots of fun stuff in here and stuff, but my house drives people crazy because it is empty. I have a very like Kim Kardashian minimalist house. There's not a lot of stuff.

Alban: 1:02:05

Except for the 12,000 book aim on cards.

Jordan: 1:02:08

That is on the shelf behind me. Everything I own is on this back shelf. I swear on my life And it's the same thing. Like I'm very similar where if anyone leaves anything out like it's going in the trash, my spring cleaning I will sometimes open a drawer and put it in a trash bag. Like I will just open the drawer. If I haven't gone in that drawer in like the last six months, i'm opening it and I'm dumping it.

Kevin: 1:02:29

I can't do that.

Jordan: 1:02:30

I love having things empty and clean And so, yeah, i think that's why I'm starting this like purge with my kids, because I'm slowly going insane.

Kevin: 1:02:38

I can be hardcore about, like going in a drawer and being hardcore about we're throwing out the majority of this, but I have to put eyes on it. I have to, like consciously, make the decision. It drives me crazy when I'm looking for something. I don't know if it's been thrown out or not, and so I don't know if I'm wasting my time looking for it or not. And so now I have to default, because I'm married to this woman who throws everything out. I have to default to if I can't find it in like 10 minutes. She threw it out. But it's a terrible way to live because it's filled with this Like I really don't know. I mean, it might stumble upon it a year from now, but I just can't waste time between now and then looking for it because the probability is that she threw it out. It's terrible. There's constant anxiety in my life Is it misplaced or is it thrown out?

Alban: 1:03:13

I think it's so funny that we always like we all characterize like extremes based on how we want to live in the world, and so, like the person you're with, you're like oh, i'm very, i'm a clean freak, and they are like so against, they're okay, they're level one hoarder, and you know, we characterize people by how far they are from our optimum. But I'm realizing that Kevin and I I know how Kevin is too, and from this conversation it sounds like Kevin's wife is the clean one and Kevin's the one who wants to keep everything. Kevin and I have cleaned our office before together and it was a true purge, like everything getting pulled out of every closet, and Kevin's like these things have monetary value and I'm throwing them directly into a dumpster Tons of stuff that we could have tried to sell or give away or something. He's just like look, unless someone's taking this right now, it's going Today's the purge. Yeah, so if that's where you are, kevin, and you're saying that your wife is the next level. She's a four more level to see what's happening.

Alban: 1:04:17

That's like one of your AirPods falls out and Kina's sweeping it up going.

Kevin: 1:04:21

no, it happens all the time. I'll walk in the house with something. I'll just like take a hat off and I'll just like set it on the counter or something and I'll turn around and the hat will be gone And I'll be like where's the hat? And she's like I didn't like that. It had sweatbands on it. I was like so you threw it out, that was your solution. And she's like it was. either I put it in your office or I put all your other crap or I throw it out.

Kevin: 1:04:42

But that hat was nasty and needed to be thrown out. It's like I have nothing. I can't ever let go of anything because it could be thrown out at any moment.