These Podcasting Features Will Save You So Much Time

0:00Alban:Moments ago, I just hit a professional milestone, a new accomplishment. All right, I'm gonna be using air quotes for this, but the first code that I ever wrote, and I'm now using air quotes for I wrote is now live in Buzzsprout as of like four minutes ago.

0:15Kevin:Oh, your PR got accepted and merged?

0:17Alban:It's merged.

0:18Kevin:Hey, congratulations. You do not have to put coding in air quotes just because you didn't write like Ruby or C or Rust or JavaScript. Languages have always worked like this. There's been like certain commands that you type and then they get compiled into computer code, like into machine code. And now it's just that that language is English.

0:39Alban:Yeah.

0:40Kevin:You're still coding.

0:41Alban:Then I've been coding my whole life in English.

0:44Kevin:For sure.

0:45Alban:It's just none of those uh programs ever got executed. So yeah, this is out there now. One of the pages that I always wanted to keep coming back to and like make some updates to is the podcast details page. It's called the podcast details page now. We called it actually, we called it multiple things. We called it settings and info. Uh, but it's where you change your podcast title and your description and your artwork and your categories. It's like the main details about your podcast and how your podcast shows up in podcasting apps.

1:15Alban:And we always were trying to solve the problem of explaining to people hey, if you change podcast creator, where does that show up? You make it explicit what happens. And now we built this preview over on the side, similar to what we did with the embed players, where you're building the embed player on the left and you're getting a preview on the right. Now you get a preview of a podcast app. And so as you change things like your podcast name or your artwork, it's going to update inside of this, you know, simulated app so that you're able to see, okay, that's what it's going to look like if I make these changes.

1:50Alban:And my hope is that by showing rather than telling, people are going to go, okay, I didn't know what podcast creator was or where it gets used. But now that I can see it's changing the thing under the title, I know what I want it to be.

2:04Jordan:I love it because it illustrates a point that I've made so many times when I'm trying to explain the podcast description to new podcasters. Now you can see that your podcast description gets cut off in the podcast apps a lot of times. And then you have to like see more. And so now when they're updating their podcast description, they can see that like the top sentence is the primary real estate. Like that is so important. And then the rest of it gets cut off.

2:29Alban:We get to do that a few different times. You get to show, you know, the artwork is right next to the title. So like you don't need your title to, I mean, this Buzzcast is a bad example because it just says Buzzcast, Buzzcast. But you kind of get a feel for okay, when these are next to each other, what do I want to have in the artwork? Uh, when I can see the creator next to it, what do I want to have in each space? You only really one category only shows up in the preview because one category is all that really shows up in any podcasting app.

2:57Jordan:Yeah.

2:58Alban:I'm sure there's a design principle that's out there about show people rather than tell them. And you can try to explain it as long as you want. But if you can just show people, here's what it's going to look like, they'll probably make the right decision.

3:10Kevin:I like it. I mean, it's a it's a tough problem to solve, right? Because every podcast app looks a little bit differently and displays things a little bit differently. And I like what you've designed here as sort of a kind of a catch-all between a bunch of different podcast apps, is kind of what it looks like. So every podcast won't show all of this information. It might show it a little bit differently, but it's enough to make it fun, to make it like come to life and it can make it real.

3:32Kevin:I love when you're doing things and it's like as real as possible. And so when you're writing a title, you can roughly see how wide like a mobile device is. Now it's not all mobile devices, but it's representative of mobile devices, how your podcast artwork looks. If you, like Alban said, if you check explicit, like how does that show up? Some things get badges, some rate the word, whatever. But you get a better idea, like right here when you're setting up your podcast, how it's going to look roughly in a bunch of different podcast apps.

3:58Kevin:And that's just it just feels fun. And the more fun that we can make our software, the better. Because we we're doing something that a lot of people find a lot of fun. Podcasting is a lot of fun, and I love bringing that to the product and just starting that excitement and starting that fun journey as soon as possible.

4:16Jordan:We should just change our tagline to keep podcasting fun.

4:19Kevin:Podcasting is fun.

4:21Theme:Here we go.

4:27Jordan:Welcome back to Buzzcast, the podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzz Sprout. I know that we opened this episode with uh something that we that you built in Buzz Sprout, but we actually have more great things to talk about. So we're gonna have to get into it because there's a lot to cover here.

4:44Alban:There's a lot of small things that we've done over the last few weeks that I feel like we just have not fit into an episode. And so we kind of need a mailbag of improvements. I don't know, mail not mailbag, what's it? Just like a grab bag.

4:56Jordan:A grab bag, yes.

4:57Alban:A sampler platter, something, the combination of multiple things.

5:02Kevin:Alban, why don't you walk us through? We made some changes to the episodes page, which is the page within BuzzBrout that lists all of your episodes. And that got a bit of a, I don't know, a glow up.

5:14Alban:Glow up polish. That actually is the internal thing that Dennis was posting when he uh when he built it. He was like the uh episodes page glow up. So with the episodes page is probably the one of the very oldest pages in Buzzsprout. And it's where you can see all the episodes you have. And as we kind of pressed more and more into video and especially had uh uh custom artwork or audio episodes and thumbnails, we wanted to include those on the episodes page.

5:42Alban:And then we started going through old emails, and you know, people had really asked for, I want a way to sort episodes, I want a way to jump into the uh stats for individual episodes. And we kind of just took a fresh approach to the episodes page and said, How can we make it look nicer and make it easier to use? Uh, made some nice improvements so that you can see when you're working on an episode, it's kind of it's not live, you're kind of working on it.

6:08Alban:You know, one person adds artwork, the other person adds the episode. Uh, it's very clear, it stands out. When you've got episodes scheduled, it's a little bit more obvious when it's gonna go live. And overall, I just think it looks a lot better. And I think Dennis did a really good job with it, and now it's out there for everybody.

6:25Kevin:It really is a nice visual improvement, especially for anybody who's doing video, for anybody who uses episode artwork. That now displays in a real beautiful way. And I've always found it a little bit hard. We once in a while we use episode artwork in our Buzzcast shows, but we, you know, for the past months, I don't know how many, three or four months now, we've been doing video. And so it makes it really easy just visually to come on this page, scroll down real quick, and kind of find that episode that you know that you're looking for.

6:50Kevin:Because I can usually recognize the artwork really quickly as opposed to just a bunch of words or having to use the search command or something like that. Something also that that you kind of glossed over is that the the columns are now sortable. So if you just want to find like your most popular, you can kind of use this as a report too. You can just hit downloads and kind of see the episodes that get a lot of downloads, or your longest episode, or your shortest episode.

7:11Kevin:Or if you just want to see your all your episodes in alphabetical order, you can just click on the episode row header and it'll do that. Um, or by date, which is the default. So it's really nice. It also improved the search functionality. So the search is now super fast and it loads all of your episodes, not just the ones that are displayed. Because you know, if you scroll to the bottom, it only loads like, I don't know, 50 or something at a time.

7:32Kevin:Right. Hit, you know, show more if you have hundreds of episodes. So just a really nice, like quality of life update to the episodes page. And Alban's not going to mention it because he's being humble, but he was the one who led the charge on this. He came up with the initial design and then handed it over to the product team to implement.

7:49Jordan:Great job. And then there's another update that we had that is going to make my life so much easier. So I was really pumped when I saw that we were deploying this today.

7:58Alban:I think you're talking about the transcript editor.

8:01Jordan:I am. I am talking about the transcript editor.

8:03Alban:Oh my goodness. This is one that's been in the works, I feel like for six years, maybe even longer. The first time we ever said, could we start doing transcripts on episodes? had to be, I mean, it was like 2020, 2019 or something.

8:17Kevin:This is this is the like the long-running joke around the BuzzBread Office. Do you remember um what's the show? It got canceled, then it came back on Netflix.

8:28Jordan:Arrested Development?

8:29Kevin:Oh, yeah. Do you remember the joke in Arrested Development when the dad always says, like, whenever they need money, there's always money in the banana stand, there's always money in the banana stand. They said it for like for years, and you didn't find out until later. The joke around the BuzzBread office is there's always work to do on the transcript editor. Like, if you don't know, if you don't have something to do, go work on the transcript editor.

8:47Kevin:There's always work to do there. I feel more than ever that the transcript editor is at a really, really, really good place. I jumped in and started doing some work because I wanted to add what I originally started out as like an idea for like a dictionary. And I soon realized that it was probably better to call that an autocorrect feature. But the idea that uh transcripts get words wrong all the time. So, like Buzz Sprout, for example, it often writes buzz as one word and sprout as another.

9:15Alban:Bulk sprout is another one.

9:17Kevin:Yeah. To us, that's one word and it's capitalized. And so I just wanted a feature where I could say, hey, every time you see Buzz and Sprout as two words, make them one and capitalize it. What it turned into was basically fix uh a million other things that were slightly wrong with the transcript editor. Um but the autocorrect is the big feature and it's it's really nice. I've already put a bunch of words in there for our show. Jordan, I preloaded it for you.

9:41Kevin:So Buzzsprout is Buzz Brow and Buzzcast is you know the correct capitalization and two words.

9:47Alban:Alban is Alban.

9:48Kevin:Yeah, Alban is Alban now. So they're all in there. It's loaded up. The idea here is that if you just spend a little bit of time probably fixing one or two transcripts on the words that it just normally gets wrong, all of your transcripts going forward will be so much better. And you might be able to get to a point where you have to do very little or no editing on your transcripts. If let's say there's 20 words that it could ever possibly get wrong, you might have now one or two new words every episode, but one or two words wrong in the transcript is not a big deal at all.

10:16Kevin:It is kind of a bummer if you have 20 words that are consistently wrong across all of your transcripts. So now you can go on in there and start building some rules, and all of your future transcripts will be so much better.

10:27Jordan:Does that mean that I don't even have to go in there and trigger it to make those changes? It just is going to automatically fix it for me.

10:33Kevin:Correct. It's going to be automatic.

10:35Jordan:Amazing. Yes. I love this. I'm so excited. The other thing that I saw that we added to the transcripts was the ability to edit the chapters within the transcripts too.

10:46Kevin:Yeah. You can edit the chapters, you can add new ones. Um, everything got a little bit of polish and love.

10:53Jordan:So nice.

10:54Kevin:Uh adding speakers a little bit slicker and smoother. Um, as you add chapters, they now show up on the scrub bar at the bottom. It has an autosave feature now that you can toggle on and off. It's on by default, which is nice because if you're just going through your transcript and making a bunch of edits, you don't want to, you know, save every couple minutes or if you walk away from your computer, it'll autosave that.

11:12Alban:So again, everything's just getting nicer. I love the quality of life improvements. The sometimes we'll we'll build some big feature like Fan Mail, and then we spend, you know, it takes months to can help people understand what it's used for, how to use it, why we keep making improvements over time to get it to some point where it's getting a lot of adoption. Things like the episodes page, things like the transcript editor, things like the podcast details page.

11:37Alban:Those get used all the time. And so over the years, we've heard so many ideas for hey, here's a little thing that feels rough. I wish this could be improved. We know what the success team hears, we know what we hear. Jordan, probably more than anybody, is constantly coming in with like, here's something that just doesn't work great for me. My co-host name is Alban and it says Alban. I work for Buzz Sprout and it says bulk sprout. And so she gives you those ideas and then we get to go do it.

12:06Alban:And it's so I love it because it's impacting a ton of people and it's making everyone's life a little bit better. And I think the goal of software should be constantly making people's life a little bit better, making it a little bit easier, a little bit smoother, so that you don't have to go through kind of the painful parts of, okay, now I have to go do a 10-minute uh edit on my old transcript.

12:27Kevin:Yeah. I spent a lot of time on two little things that play into exactly what you're saying, Alban. You used to, you would um, any work time you double-clicked a word in the transcript editor, it would start playing from that point, which was a nice little shortcut to be able to like scroll down, find the section that you want to work on, double click, it starts playing. But the problem is that like most of the time in word editors, if you double click a word, it's because you want to select that word to change it.

12:49Kevin:Exactly. And so it never felt exactly right. So now when you double click a word, you can just start typing and a little play now button or play from here appears above it if you actually want to start playing from there. So that was a huge quality of life enhancement. And the other thing I spent a lot of time on was the find and replace. So find and replace worked fine. It just didn't work like you would kind of expect it to, because we've all been trained on Microsoft Word or Google Docs or whatever you use of how these things are supposed to work.

13:15Kevin:So now if you tap the little magnifying glass, you get a find field. You can type a word in there. If it finds matches, it shows you how many matches it found and it lets you scroll through those. If you hit tab from there, it automatically opens up a replace field. You can type the word you want to replace. And if you hit replace all, it tells you how many it replaced and it gives you an option to add that to your autocorrect dictionary and save it for the future.

13:37Kevin:Oh making web software work in the way that our brains work, more like native software, these are really nice things. They just take a lot of time. So all that stuff doesn't always get in the initial deployment of a new feature, but I love going back and making sure that we get all those nice refinements put in at some point.

13:53Jordan:It's so funny because those are those are little things that you don't necessarily think of. But as you were talking about the double clicking on the word, and instead of it automatically playing, it's going to actually edit because I've done that so many times where you know it's at the end of the day, I'm done editing, I'm at like the final stretch of getting this episode out, and I'm like brain dead. And there's sometimes where I'll be like trying to edit the transcript, and it's just like accidentally starting it and then going, dang it, no.

14:22Alban:So all right. And uh last but not least, um this has been a while coming too, is Dave kind of did a total cleanup and overhaul of our embed players. So embed players have been in Buzzsprout since 2008, before Buzzsprout ever launched. Kevin built it. And we had over the years added embed players and we changed how they worked, and we'd added a full customizer. And Dave was like, all right, I'm going back to the drawing board. I'm gonna keep all this functionality, but I'm gonna make it better.

14:58Alban:And so now the embed players page has a way to build your own player. You can pick single or multi-episodes, you can select exactly which episodes you want in a player. You can pick for it to all be a color, you can do an accent color, you can do dark mode, you can pick a custom color, you can select different styles of players, you can show her and hide your artwork. It's awesome. It feels like you can do so much that we couldn't do in the past, and it looks really, really clean.

15:31Alban:And we know that uh embed players are not getting as used as much as they used to. You certainly should have embed players on your own website, but lots of people want to now use the Buzzbroute website or they're kind of using YouTube or some other page as their main page online. Um I don't think that's the best plan. And this is a really nice way to encourage people, hey, create a really nice custom player and put that on your website because you want to be kind of the canonical source for your podcast online, should be your own website, not somebody else's rented space, you know, a YouTube channel or, you know, a Spotify listing.

16:13Kevin:Yep. And if you use chapters like we do on Buzzcast, you're gonna want to use that new player style, which is called the bar player, which has a progress bar with little slits for where all your chapters pop up. And it also displays the name of the chapter on the player, which it has never done that before either.

16:29Jordan:It's so funny, like the the trajectory of or like the evolution of our embed players, because I remember when I first started at Buzz Sprout, I was like debating between like the line or just the bar player. And I went with the bar when I was like first starting my website and I had it like pink and blue and like all these different things. And then I loved when we revamped it not that long ago and just stripped everything away and it almost felt like a clean blank canvas, and now it's given us like the freedom to add these extra things that are again improvements.

17:03Jordan:So it's like we stripped it back and then now we're giving it like a little bit more of like creative freedom, but it's it's just so pretty. Like if if you if you see the the image that uh uh Alban shared in like the Facebook community group and it's on, I think the BuzzBrout social pages and stuff, it just it's gorgeous. It looks so good.

17:21Alban:And it allows for a lot of customization for people who want to have their own branding. You can use Apple Podcasts or Spotify's players, which look good, but the big downside is they're pushing all of your listeners to their one app. So if somebody likes to listen in Overcast or they like to listen on YouTube or wherever it may be, they should be able to go find your podcast there and not have to listen in Spotify just because you used the Spotify player and you liked that style.

17:48Alban:So this is a very nice improvement. I hope lots of people take advantage of it and customize their player. Um, if you do, shoot us a text. I would love to go see this on your website and see how you got it to kind of fit in with the styling you have.

18:33Kevin:Yeah. And and this builds on an update we did a couple of weeks ago. I think we talked about on here the WordPress update that we did, which the WordPress plugin, all that's really doing is taking your embed code and just throwing it into your WordPress site for you automatically, so you don't have to go back and forth and copy and paste between two sites. And so if you change your embed player settings in your BuzzBread account, it will go, it'll automatically apply to all of your WordPress embeds if you're using the WordPress plugin.

18:56Kevin:So that's really nice. You can come here, change it once, and you might have hundreds of embeds across your entire WordPress site, and they all get updated automagically. Automagically.

19:08Alban:Yeah, the alternative is the way YouTube does it, where they allow you to copy like an embed code that only is for that one video. And when we've decided, you know, when there was a point where I was working on the Buzzsprout blog and was like, you know what slows all these pages down are these dumb YouTube embed videos. We want to have the videos on there, but the just the YouTube player was slowing it down. And so I found this uh way to speed it up, but you have to do the embed in a certain way.

19:37Alban:But then we had to go update every single video because if we didn't, because they're all done separately. Yeah.

19:44Kevin:So I was like, the the super ironic thing about that, wasn't it like Google's search tool that was telling you the page is too slow? And the reason it's too slow is because it's our codes running on your page.

19:56Alban:I think I wrote about this at one point. Um but the I'm like going there and I'm like, what's wrong? And it's like all it's there's two big things on Buzzprout sites that slow everything down. And the Google page score is like getting dinged. And I'm like, what are they? And it's like, first off, you've got all this JavaScript tracking. And I'm like, we really don't. And I go, look, and it's Google Analytics. And I'm like, okay, dude. So you don't like Google Analytics?

20:23Alban:All right. I don't like it either. Let's take it off. And then I go look and I'm like, what's the other thing you don't like? YouTube embed player. And I'm like, are you kidding me? So Google is complaining about two other Google properties. And they're like, yeah, these things aren't very optimized. And I'm like, we all know we're all on the web using this stuff, and we would like the web to be faster, and it's in your power to fix it. Please do it.

20:45Alban:Like, what I don't know how this is the world we've come to live in is like an internet that is slow at all. Nothing on the internet should be slow anymore. The web is so fast, like the internet speeds have gone so fast, and yet we're like, hey, I'm just waiting around for the entire YouTube video to load up here in the background with all this JavaScript. I don't think we need to do that. All right. Anyway, this is something I'm passionate about.

21:10Alban:I remember when as a kid, we got DSL and I was like, this is amazing. The internet's fast all of a sudden. And yet I feel like we're we're spending all of our speed improvements on loading up like third-party ad services and all this other tracking crap.

21:27Kevin:Sorry, didn't mean to trigger you.

21:34Jordan:We're doing a little bit of a shorter episode today. We just had so many things to talk about with the enhancements and the improvements that we've added to the Buzzsproutes Society. And so uh now we're just gonna get into Fan Mail.

21:47Kevin:That's great.

21:48Jordan:All right, first up, we have a message from Michael from Brothers Reading Books. And Michael said, I've been looking for better ways to picture a podcast to guest on other shows and grow our audience. We have lots of great Buzzcast episodes about this. Um, one that came to mind immediately was when we had Alexan Filippo from PodMatch on. And he talked about how to find great podcast guests. But I know it's titled How to Great Find Great Podcast Guests, but it's also like how to find great podcast to guest on.

22:19Jordan:Little asterisk in there.

22:22Alban:Yeah, I think probably the best um resource we have, Jordan, because you won't say it, is a blog post that you wrote about how to get booked. Other podcasts, and we talked about it in at Buzz Sprout, and we're like, we really need a good resource. And you're like, okay, well, if we're gonna do it, why don't I go and I'll test out all the different softwares and I'll pitch myself. And your takeaway was at the end of the blog, is like, yep, you can do this via email, even if people know you and like you, you can do it via email.

22:50Alban:But pretty much your takeaway was just to use podmatch because then you know people are like everything's gonna be organized in a way that it's done, and you don't have to sit there and you know figure out hundreds of back and forths over emails and send each other calendarly links and everything else. Yeah.

23:07Jordan:I mean, really, I didn't even have to write that blog. We could have just like how to get booked on other podcasts and just say, just get pod match. And a story done.

23:17Kevin:Well, uh both of those things, getting guests on your show and guesting on other shows is like far and away the most consistent and reliable way to grow a podcast that we've ever heard. We've been doing this for many, many years. And the people who usually have the biggest shows or experiencing the most growth are doing a lot of that. They're they're both guesting on a lot of podcasts, they're getting her out there, they're getting their name out there, and they're being like really good guests.

23:39Kevin:And Alex is service podmatch doesn't just find you shows to get on. He also has great resources of how to be a great guest once you're there. And then also having people on your show. Like, we don't do this a whole lot on Buzz Buzzcast, but when we do, these shows are usually our most popular, as is evidenced by uh Courtney Elmer, who was just on July 17th. I would say between five and eight hundred more downloads than a typical episode of Buzzcast.

24:04Kevin:For that one show. I mean, number one, Courtney is an amazing guest, but also just like having new interesting people on your show, and then they promote the show, they expose it to their audience. People search for those people sometimes in different podcast players, and then they pop up and they find your show. It's just, it's like, I don't know, we can't say it enough. That's like the number one. It's not the easiest, but it is probably the most effective way to grow your show.

24:26Kevin:And if you decide you're gonna try that strategy, you need to be using Podmatch to do it.

24:30Alban:All right, we've got one from Dave Jackson at School of Podcasting.

24:34Dave:It's Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting, and Alban had asked if a podcast had ever changed my mind. And I listened to Jen Briney. Uh, she does a show called Congressional Dish. She does her best to try to stay in the middle of the road. It's a political show. But what I love about it is she will talk about bills. For a while, she was trying to do all the bills, which is almost impossible, and explain what the bill was about and then who voted on what.

25:02Dave:And there were many times that people from the party I'm typically the one I typically identify with, uh, voted in ways that I would never vote. And so consequently, when it came time to go to the polls, I said, Yeah, time for a new one. So that's one example of a podcast changing my mind.

25:20Kevin:Dave, you know I love you, man, but you are a yapper. He's a podcaster, Kevin. Made for podcasters.

25:27Jordan:He is a Hall of Famer, he's a national treasure.

25:29Theme:I love it.

25:30Kevin:Yeah, she usually talks about the bills, not all the bills. She tried to talk all the bills, but you know, it's kind of hard to talk about all the bills. There's a lot of bills out there.

25:40Alban:We're gonna spend more time uh giving feedback than actually listening to it. I like the story, Dave. Um delivered. And also, I think it's a it's a good example. Like, you know, you're you have a political party, you listen to a podcast about some bills, you go, wait a second, I don't know if my interests are all being served here. So that's great. I love that example.

26:05Kevin:Yeah. It's it's hard sometimes, but it's it's good for all of us to listen to things that stretch our minds and open our minds to new ideas. And podcasts are such a great way to do that because it's very hard to, you know, have an open mind in like a 30-second clip or something if you're doom scrolling. But when you listen to somebody for an extended period of time, you are actually opening your mind and saying, like, I'm I'm you can convince me, but it that's not gonna happen in 30 seconds, right?

26:29Kevin:Yeah. And so I appreciate that. And I think it's one of the great things about podcasting.

26:33Jordan:We also had a bunch of uh Fan Mail about our Buzzsprout conference discussion. I think we got a lot of people pretty excited about that idea. So um, we actually had Matthew from GirlDon Nation. Matthew sent a follow-up email to this. Um, and he has some like awesome ideas. But he said, excited for the possibilities of a Buzzsprout conference. Let us make BuzzCon happen, which I love BuzzCon. That's super fun.

26:59Alban:BuzzCon sounds like what happens when we hire people out of like a sec, you know, like a halfway house or something.

27:06Jordan:Like an start our own like comment store thing. Um, yeah, Matthew did send an email. He's got so many ideas. So I think if we do make this happen, we've we've got someone who's ready to jump in and help out with it.

27:20Kevin:Got our first volunteer. I remember when Matthew brought us donuts at a podcast movement, I think.

27:25Jordan:Yeah.

27:25Kevin:So maybe uh Matthew can be on our sweet treats team and make sure that sweet treats.

27:31Jordan:And then we also got a message from John Corey saying, Cool, given the buildup to how great Jordan is at the company's top as the company's top speaker, this will be fun. By the way, I did like hearing about the topic and how the talk was built on the earlier episode. Cool, that's awesome.

27:47Kevin:Yeah, we Jordan is one of our top speakers, but we've got like a bunch of people. Um, Tom is an amazing speaker, Alban's a great speaker, John's done some really good sessions. Almost the only person who's not a great speaker on the team is me. I like the podcast, but I don't like public speaking.

28:02Alban:Priscilla as well. Yeah, Priscilla is amazing too. Yeah.

28:05Jordan:Oh, yeah, she is, yeah.

28:06Alban:She just spoke at a uh customer support uh conference.

28:11Kevin:Yeah.

28:12Jordan:Yeah, in Chicago.

28:13Kevin:Yeah, I don't like the live thing. I get very nervous when I have to do something live, if I don't have Jordan as my backup. Jordan makes me sound so much better than I really do.

28:21Alban:It it is so much nicer when you say something dumb and then you go, ah, that's dumb. Edit that out. If you think that this podcast, let's just say the the raw edit isn't this good.

28:33Kevin:I know. Uh a Dave Dave Jones from Podcasting 2.0 Show, and he was just on Podnews Weekly Review or or Sam Sethy was on the, I don't know. He was talking with Sam and they were talking about how much they both love the live tag. And I'm like, I just cannot get there. I would never want to do live podcasting because like it here, this, this. Yeah. Like I sound stupid right now. Jordan's probably gonna intentionally leave this part in because I'm stumbling over my words to prove my point, but I can't do live.

29:00Kevin:But if I wasn't talking about live right now and intend making this point, Jordan would clean all that up and I would sound like the the genius that you think I am, but I'm not.

29:08Jordan:You just got stressed out even thinking about it. Yeah, I didn't like froze up and can't even handle it. Yeah.

29:13Alban:There's something that you can just be a little bit calmer and a little bit more free when you know, yeah, we can edit out anything dumb that I say. And you can kind of just like riff, and then you go, okay, one of those three things sounded good, and then you move on.

29:27Kevin:Could you imagine how much of a better life I would have like with my wife, my wife, if Jordan just followed me around everywhere? And every time I said something dumb to my wife, Jordan would just be like, Oh, it's all right, scratch that. I'm gonna cut it. He was like, Why don't you talk to me anymore? So, like, I never said it. I'd be so happy.

29:45Jordan:He just never says anything again.

29:47Alban:I feel like Jordan, fix that. He's like, Why don't you say anything, Kevin? I think Jordan's editing out a lot.

29:52Jordan:She's she's cut all of it.

29:55Alban:All right, we got some Fan Mail from Jenny Lambing from Alaska Uncovered.

30:01Jennie:I'm just listening to this episode about conferences, and please do a small, approachable conference where you can talk to people that's affordable, that's not like totally over the hop. And I would love that so much. Just like real talk with other indie podcasters, especially people who are doing it to like earn a living and making it work, but not doing some of the big corporate stuff. I have two podcasts that are hosted on Buzz Sprout. Um, one is the Washington State hiking podcast, the other is the Alaska Uncovered podcast.

30:38Jennie:And oh, that would just be so amazing.

30:42Jordan:You know what I love about this is I can feel Jenny's like excitement and energy through this voice message, which is part of why I love the voice messages so much. It's awesome.

30:53Kevin:Yes. I think that was like so much more compelling and convincing than if it had just been written.

30:59Jordan:Yeah.

31:00Alban:I feel it too. When you go to a conference, you're trying to find people who kind of you're gonna connect with, people who might be a step or two ahead of you, uh, people are doing kind of a similar thing as you, and you want to make friends. You know, people who put on conferences say it's not just what happens on stage, what happens in the hall, but it really is true. You're gonna make some connections that are probably more valuable than the best talk you hear.

31:25Alban:And if you can make an approachable conference where it's not just like a giant hype for whoever put it on, instead it's helping foster community. I think that's so much better. And if we did a Buzz Sprout conference, I think that would be kind of priority number one for us.

31:42Jordan:I actually think that segues nicely into our next uh FAMO message, which is Sid Meadows from the Trend Report said, We miss seeing all of you at the Empowered Podcasting Conference this year in Charlotte. It was so good. And the Empowered Podcasting Conference, I feel like all the podcasters, like the really cool ones I'm like friends with on like Facebook and stuff, they were all posting pictures from that conference. And I was getting a little bit of FOMO.

32:05Jordan:So I think I will have to go to that next time.

32:08Kevin:Yeah, that needs to be on the list. Yeah. I love Charlotte, it's close by, and I've never heard like anything but good stuff about empowered. So I think we have to add that on our list. We need to be there.

32:18Jordan:Absolutely. And then um, Sid also said that uh if you talk anymore about TSA touchless, that we are to put you on mute and we can't let everyone know how great it is.

32:29Alban:So yeah, uh, fair point. I the amount I went back to the I've been at the airport again now, and there's nobody in that line. I'm like, why am I talking about this? All I'm gonna do is move people to this line, and then they're gonna have to invent some new, like even more takeaway my privacy lane, and then I'm gonna sign up for that one.

32:48Jordan:So get a microchip like inserted into your wrist.

32:52Alban:Maybe, maybe not the microchip, but up to that point, I think I'm in. Uh yeah, so put me on mute next time I talk about it.

33:00Jordan:And then finally, we got a message from Richard saying it would be cool if Buzzsprout joined with all the other major hosts to form a conference similar to what E3 was for the gaming industry. Spend the first day or two with the other hosts and industry providers talking on ways to move the industry forward, then two days of public conferences, including a round table from reps of each host talking about current industry trends and obstacles. This sounds like one of those like economic summits or Davos for podcasting.

33:31Theme:Yes.

33:33Kevin:Yeah. We do some of this for sure. We're we're friendly with most of the other hosting companies. We know people at all of them. And we usually do get together to talk about uh PSP stuff. Most everybody from the other hosting companies, it would be fun to get together and plan a conference with them, but it would also probably make the financials a little bit difficult unless we all like chipped in and decide not to because then like we're usually the ones that foot the bill for most of these conferences.

33:56Kevin:All the sponsors show up, and it's usually a lot of other hosting companies. So we've got to figure out the sponsorship side. I think the financials behind conferences are pretty rough. Yeah. And if you want to keep ticket prices low because people are already paying for um travel and accommodations to get there, I don't know. We'll we'll like we got to figure out a way to do this.

34:14Alban:I there were years I think that the podcast conferences were basically being funded by venture capital that was like dumping a ton of money into random apps that then would show up with a $60,000 sponsorship. And I talked to some of the people who are putting on the conferences, and I'm like, what are they getting out of this? And they're like, I have no clue but the check work. So just keep your mouth shut.

34:36Jordan:We could probably get sponsors that are like the like me undies and Casper Mattress for a podcasting conference.

34:42Alban:Yes, we need better help to show up and uh send some money. And Jordan, there's one piece of Fan Mail that's not on here because it's pretty old, but I wanted to highlight it. The episodes page, some of the improvements, all the sorting, that is in there 100% because of a piece of Fan Mail.

35:00Jordan:Oh, really? No way.

35:01Alban:Yeah, it came from Dave. Um, he's in Ontario, Canada. He's the host of Living the Next Chapter, and reached out at one point was like, hey, I want to be able to sort my episodes. And so when we were thinking about that episodes page refresh, uh we were able to add that in. Though now I'm looking, and the reason I was not finding this Fan Mail is because Dave has now sent in other feature requests. So maybe the lesson we're gonna learn is we appreciate the feature requests, but then maybe we're gonna end up opening a floodgate of ideas and we'll have to be pretty strict about which ones make it in or not.

35:35Jordan:All right. Well, if you're really excited for any of these updates, go ahead and let us know by sending in Fan Mail by tapping the send us Fan Mail link in the show notes. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.

35:52Alban:You can't go online right now without getting about a thousand different people giving you a thousand different recommendations on how to use AI, blah, blah, blah. And it can like at some point it kind of gets overwhelming, but also it can just get kind of tiresome. But let me give you one more that I think will like cleanse your palate. I think this is like a this one's a winner. This one's a winner.

36:14Kevin:This is the one that's the exception. I get it.

36:15Alban:This this one is an exception. Yeah, and if your stomach turned when I said AI, then you gotta listen to this because I think it was a good one. Um, I was talking to one of my buddies, and his wife was out of town, and so he had his kids, and he was like, I wanted to come up with some ideas of stuff to do with the kids. And he's like, and we did this and we did this and we did this, and it was International Batman Day, so we were at the Lego store for their build, and then we went downtown and we did this at the library, and it was like four or five things that he'd pulled together, all of which were free, all like uh sparsely attended, and they were all within like 25 minutes of our house.

36:58Alban:I was like, How did you find all this stuff? And he's like, Oh, I put it all into Chat GPT, here's the kit, here's what kind of things we're into, here's what wanna do. We're looking for free events, we're looking for stuff for the um these dates. And it went and searched the web and pulled together like an itinerary of all these ideas. And that was one that I was like, that just feels so good. It's using AI for the very best thing to get you out of your house, uh, into the world, and off doing something that's really fun, and you're connecting with your kids, you're connecting with the community with real people.

37:36Alban:Uh I don't know, it's it felt like a palette cleanser for me.

37:39Jordan:I love that. That's so cool.

37:41Alban:Like, what's the nutshell of the idea? The nutshell is like I think it there's a lot of events out there. There's a run club right near my house, and I like running, but I didn't know about it until I happened to see someone wearing the hat and went and looked it up online. There's tons of things out there, and yet it always feels like here's what I'm hearing.

38:00Kevin:Like, I've done this for places I'm going to. I'm gonna be in Nashville for the weekend, what's going on? Help me plan an itinerary, me find restaurants. But you're saying you could actually apply that to your hometown too.

38:10Alban:I mean, I did it the other day. So after I hear this, I go and I type in like, all right, we're going out for a date night. What's in an area? What's a good restaurant in my like very near vicinity? Yeah. And it goes, Oh, you've got to check out this spot. And I'm like, I've actually never heard of that, but I know the building. So we go and they're like, oh, tonight's our cold open. So or our today, today's not our cold open, our soft open. The restaurant soft open.

38:37Alban:And so they we go in and we're like, what are the first few people to eat there? We're getting great service. And I'm like, how did Chat GPT find us? Well, apparently there's some website that I'd never heard of that talks about new restaurants and it found that was near my house and blah, blah, blah. But I didn't have to think about all that. All I did was say, I want something new and different, and found it.

38:58Jordan:That is so cool because there's so many it's kind of the thing that I complain about a lot, like being in Idaho. It's not, it's not as like heavily populated. There's not a lot of like cool stuff going on all the time. And it's so frustrating because we have so many venues just like blocks away from our house. And we always miss when there's like shows playing or when they have like improv night or when they have like open mics or when they have like trivia nights.

39:22Jordan:Right. We always miss it. And I'm always like, why are they not advertising? And then I'll realize that they actually advertised using like the local news calendar that's like an online calendar instead of like actually posting their socials or you know, things like that. And it's so hard to seek out these kind of activities in your town. And so I love that using this to as like a one single source of finding these.

39:49Alban:Yeah. There could be some space for like a product that would just be like, hey, you tell it what you're into, you tell it about your life a bit. And then it's just once a week you're getting an email and it's like, hey, here's the six things I think you'd like the most right nearby. If you want to go check them out and you've got some ideas, like get out of your house, go touch some grass, go live a real life life. And there's stuff out there, you just got to go find it.

40:17Alban:Well, now you don't even have to go find it. There's no excuse. Chat GPT will go find you stuff.

40:22Kevin:Yeah. I'm uh this week in particular, I'm going the other direction. So I started taking some big steps just yesterday. I was like, uh, you know, OpenAI gave me my dot. I got my dot. I named it. I was like, oh, it wants access to my email, my calendar, and my computer, and it wants access to everything. I'm like, all right, on this computer, this is my work computer. I only have work stuff on here. I'm gonna give it you access. So I opened up my calendar and I had gave it my email and I was like, you can do stuff on my computer, and it has its own computer and all this stuff.

40:55Jordan:And this is great.

40:57Kevin:Uh the the first thing it did was it said, okay, great. Hey, looking at your calendar, I noticed your double book next Wednesday. Do you want me to go ahead and and reschedule this meeting for you? And I was like, okay, all right. Dot loris. I'm in. I'm going to let you do this. Wait, what'd you call it? Dot Lawrence? Lawrence. Like Dolores, but dot Lawrence. That's your secretary. Dot Lawrence. Well, go for it. Reschedule the meeting. And then a few minutes later, I opened up my iMessage and I see that.Lores has sent this massive text to this person who I'm supposed to meet with next Wednesday.

41:34Kevin:And in the beginning, it says, sorry, I messed up. We're over, I'm overbooked on Wednesday. Can we do Tuesday or Thursday instead? I'm like, that's great. And then a wall of like terminal commands underneath it. Nailed it. I'm like, what in the world? So I like long pressed it and undo this and hopefully it wiped it off their computer. And then I'm like, now I've got to undo this. So then I'm sending, I'm sorry, I don't know what that was. Um I know exactly what that was.

41:58Alban:I gave a open AI complete access to my computer and it started sending weird messages. Yeah.

42:04Kevin:And then I spent the next 30 minutes like revoking all access from everything. I'm like, you're you're not ready for this.

42:12Alban:I'm not advocating for you letting it run your life. I'm saying, hey, give me some ideas of cool things and I'll decide what I want to do. You don't have to report back to the AI and tell it what you did and what you liked. Just like, you know, you can see my Spotify. You have an idea of which bands I like. If one of them's in town, shoot me a message. Like that would be nice, right? It would be, but yeah.

42:36Kevin:I don't know. I'm just I'm just going the other way. Just this week. Next week I'll go back again. I'll get I'll probably give it my bank accounts next week. But this week, I'm pulling back.