Big Takeaways From Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025

Alban is back from Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025, and we're breaking down what happened at the conference—what felt inspiring, what felt off, and why video dominated nearly every conversation. 

We also talk about the impromptu Buzzsprout meetup, a surprise panel appearance, and the heartwarming rise of senior podcasters. 

Sound Off Question: What features do you wish your podcast listening app had?

Chapters

• 0:00 Sugar-Free Challenged
• 3:40 Podcast Movement Evolutions 2025
• 9:04 The Unrelenting Push for Video Content
• 23:46 Understanding Podcasting vs Video Economics
• 35:03 Preserving Audio-First Podcasting Identity
• 43:39 Marketing with Podcast Editorial Lists
• 51:42 Podcasts By 90+ Year Olds Gaining Popularity
• 57:34 Sound-Off!
• 1:15:30 Post-Show: Jurassic Lark

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

All right, confession time.

Jordan: 0:01

Uh-oh.

Kevin: 0:02

What's up?

Alban: 0:02

How did the sugar-free week go?

Kevin: 0:04

Confession, that sounds like you're going to tell us you weren't able to do it.

Jordan: 0:07

I was going to say.

Alban: 0:08

I was going to say you didn't report on it when I wasn't here.

Kevin: 0:11

No, no, no, this is a full show topic, it's not a quick cast topic.

Alban: 0:15

All right well my confession.

Alban: 0:18

This was so much harder, Dee, than I anticipated.

Kevin: 0:21

Yeah. So two weeks ago we committed on the show to doing seven days with no sugar. And then was it on the show or shortly afterward Alban told me that also includes no like sugar substitutes.

Alban: 0:32

I just thought that was like the goal is. It doesn't feel good to me to be like I'm not going to have sugar, so I'm going to have a bunch of aspartame or something.

Kevin: 0:40

Yeah, no, I agree with you. And so I was like that's fine, I can totally do that. And then I realized that a lot of the stuff that I eat does have sugar substitutes in it, including, like my protein powder and stuff, and so I was like, oh my gosh, this is more disruptive than I thought it was going to be. It was hard.

Jordan: 0:53

I honestly think it was super duper easy. I did not struggle with this at all. I thought it was going to be difficult, but I just I don't like sugary stuff anyway, Like I hate desserts and stuff like that. I think my biggest thing was soda.

Kevin: 1:05

Well, I didn't struggle with craving any sweets or desserts or anything that that wasn't hard for me. What I was shocked by was how much just regular stuff that I eat that I don't feel as sugary at all, that has a very small amount of added sugar in it. Yeah, like I was shocked, I have like just dry roasted peanuts. I will take a handful or two throughout the day. It's a normal part of my day and I think right after the show I went to the kitchen. I was like I'm going to have a handful of peanuts and I looked at the back and it has one gram of added sugar. Why, they're not honey roasted or anything, they're just dry roasted peanuts. It should just be peanuts and salt. That should be all that's in there in there, but for some reason there's one gram of added sugar, so I couldn't have that there's a lot of stuff that's like mildly sweet.

Alban: 1:45

You wouldn't notice, but I didn't even get that far because the first meal after we recorded, my family all got together as my brother's birthday. So we all go out to eat and it's like a nice meal. I'm like, oh, I'm not going to have that added sugar, I'm not going to have that added sugar. Well, I got coffee at the end of dinner, not going to put any sugar in it. And then desserts come out and I say no, thank you. And I'm like I'm doing grea t. And as we walk out, my dad offers me a piece of gum and I pop it in and I go this tastes good. And then I went added sugar.

Jordan: 2:19

Guys, I think I'm realizing that this was easy for me because I wasn't thinking about the added sugar and just like everyday things. So I was like this didn't really disrupt me at all.

Kevin: 2:31

I checked the label on everything. I had to steal my son's creatine powder, because he has real creatine that you mix in the water and tastes terrible. And I take creatine gummies, but I couldn't take them because they have artificial sweetener in them.

Alban: 2:44

I mean everything Jordan, anything that comes in a package. Pretty much is now eliminated as soon as you say no artificial sweetener.

Jordan: 2:51

Yeah, I'm like thinking about like the spaghetti that I had, like the sauce probably had sugar in it, I don't know.

Kevin: 2:56

Yes, yes, yes, yes. My wife made spaghetti squash one night and she put tomato sauce on mine and handed it to me and I was like wait a second. And I went and I looked at the jar and it had like two grams of added sugar per serving, so I couldn't have it.

Jordan: 3:07

Oh no.

Alban: 3:12

What did you do?

Kevin: 3:13

I just went and got more spaghetti squash and I didn't put anything on. I just ate the spaghetti squash Plain, no sauce. But eye-opening for me in terms of how much stuff contains a tiny little bit of sugar or artificial sweeteners. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Alban: 3:25

Well, good suggestion Dee. It's eye-opening, I think. Hopefully we learned something. I think mine is just. Anything that comes out of a package is probably not good for me. Here we go.

Jordan: 3:40

Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout. So our last episode we didn't have Alban on because he was at Podcast Movement Evolutions. So, Alban, we need to get the full report on how Podcast Movement Evolutions was.

Alban: 3:56

Yeah, podcast Movement Evolutions is a bit more of like the industry side. I think I might have explained this before. The old theory was it was in LA side. I think I might've explained this before. The old theory was it was in LA. So it was like connected to all the big studios and, you know, kind of like the actors and Netflix and all that stuff. So mostly it's more industry focused. But last year I went by myself or all these indie podcasters and so I was pretty excited about it and I was like you know, I want to keep going. You know it's great to meet new podcasters. It kind of become a bit more of like an indie scene.

Alban: 4:25

Chicago this year it kind of flipped back. It was very industry focused. It was a pretty big venue. The image I kept getting you know in like a cartoon, where there's like a really massive table and like a rich family's house and like the kids sit at one end of the table and the parents sit all the way at the other end. That's how the conference felt a bit, just that we were like in a hotel. You would walk, walk, walk like half a mile through hotels and bridges and stuff and then you'd end up in a big venue and it always felt to me a bit like the other half of the people haven't gotten here yet. Even though I think it was pretty big, like 1600 people came, it probably was a venue that could have accommodated twice as many people.

Jordan: 5:10

Yeah, I love going to conferences, but this was one I was kind of relieved to not go to, because I have not been marathon training like you've been, Alban, so it probably didn't affect you as much to be commuting so far. I would have been griping about the whole time, I'm sure. Well.

Alban: 5:24

I spent most of my time at the Buzzsprout booth, so I'd make that trip once a day. It really wasn't too onerous, but it's just. It felt big. This maybe was a good thing for me to remember. It's so hard to plan a year out how many people are going to come to this event, and then you've got to try to sell the exact right number of tickets. So it feels full but not cramped, but not empty. It's probably a pretty difficult thing to land.

Jordan: 5:48

So, even though it was like really industry focused, were you able to meet some indie podcasters there.

Alban: 5:52

Yeah, absolutely. I met one podcaster who probably was like one of the most inspirational podcasters I've met at an event and she was launching a podcast about taking care of her parents at end of life when they have dementia. And just like the way it worked out, she was the only person at the booth for 15 minutes and just had a long conversation about how people change. My grandmother has dementia and it was a really cool story that she was sharing and it'd been pretty tough, and so her outlet was I want to record this as a podcast for people who are also going through it, because there's so many things she learned about. Her parents' personalities had changed and things that they used to connect over were kind of disappearing and it was feeling like they were going away day by day and I was like what a powerful thing that she's gone through this, pretty much alone, learned about it, and her answer to it was I want to do a podcast so other people who are dealing with the same thing feel like they have somebody there.

Alban: 6:53

So, yeah, moments like that you go, oh, there's not many people here, and then you talk to somebody who's got a real important thing to share and they're doing such a beautiful thing with their time, and I go, oh wow, this is why I'm so thankful that we're here.

Jordan: 7:08

It's fun when it's really busy and you're talking to all these different people and you're trying to remember all the faces that you've met, but when you have those smaller conferences, it's a lot easier to connect on like a deeper level and I feel like that's more meaningful in some ways. So that's really cool. And then you mentioned that you were wanting to do a Buzzsprout podcaster meetup. Were you able to do that?

Alban: 7:28

Oh yeah, a few people reached out because I said that on the show. And then, just as I met people, I said, hey, let's do a meetup. And we picked a night and we just went down to the hotel bar and I grabbed tables. It was nice. It felt like the old days when we used to just tell people we're going to meet up and we'd show up and then people would be there. So we have like 15 people, we got food and drinks and we just hung out for a few hours and basically had dinner and spent time together. It was so much less work than setting up a giant party it was like a hundredth of the cost and it was almost just as much fun because everyone there was much more connected to Buzzsprout, the brand, or listen to this podcast. I met so many Buzzcast listeners.

Jordan: 8:11

That's so wild.

Alban: 8:12

And that made me so happy. And it's funny that people know so many things. They're like oh, you get to get up tomorrow morning and work out. No, you're supposed to.

Jordan: 8:20

I was like, oh great, now I'm being held to it to, I was like, oh great, now I'm being held to it. Yeah, on the Podn ews Weekly Review, when James Cridland was going live around podcast movement evolutions. It was so fine to me because when he went up to you he mentioned that there was a sugar-free Alban Brooke in there. And then Sam Sethi asked about the RV company for America.

Alban: 8:43

That was the key to me that a lot of people in the industry, or at least like a number of people, listen to the show, cause that's the very end of it. I was going to say, yeah, the post-show multiple people were like man, I'm really sorry you had such a bad experience on your vacation with the RV. I was like oh man, I forgot I talked about that. Everybody talked about that. One of the things that rubbed me the wrong way in the event, though, was the just unrelenting talk about video.

Jordan: 9:13

Oh yeah.

Alban: 9:17

It kind of built up throughout the week. You know, you start with one talk and video is important Okay. And then another talk why you should be doing video. And then Netflix is sponsoring the coffee Okay. And then other talk why you should be doing video, and then Netflix is sponsoring the coffee Okay, Well, that's a video platform. And then YouTube's got a stage that's video. Then we do the podcast report card and there's video talk in there, and it was just like everywhere I went we were talking about video.

Kevin: 9:40

Yeah.

Alban: 9:40

And by the end of it I was like but we're at a podcasting conference, you know like they're video conferences.

Kevin: 9:48

Yeah, lots of them. Lots of big ones too, like VidCon, and even South by Southwest does tons of video content. And yeah, if podcast movement starts leaning into video too much, it's going to be a problem.

Alban: 9:58

And I'm like why are we at the only podcasting conference, spending 40, 50% of our time talking about video to each other? You know, we're pitching talks about video, we're giving talks about video, we're listening to talks about video, we're chatting about video and I mean it makes sense to me for YouTube and Netflix and Riverside or anybody who's engaged in video content to be educating around it. I don't fault any of those companies, but I'm like if you were feeling passionate about video, I think that you should go to VidCon. Like it was weird to me that we all were showing up to like the wrong party and kind of like wishing we were at the other party the whole time.

Jordan: 10:41

Oh yeah, that's been the theme around all of these like surveys and studies going on right now too, like Edison Research, the Infinite Dial you know they were pushing a whole bunch of video stats on that. And then we had that thing from like Oxford Road that Kevin and I talked about last week. Is podcasting going through an identity crisis and is it video now and it's kind of exhausting.

Alban: 11:02

Well, the thing that kept coming into my mind was how much I used to love Twitter, like 10 years ago, when it was pretty much text only. There were some images, but, like, even that was few and far between. It was pretty much just a text platform. And as they tried to get more and more engagement, they started adding images and they started adding video. And now short form video is dominant on X.

Alban: 11:25

And then I thought about Instagram and how much I absolutely loved it when it was just square images that I shared to friends, and then they added and added and added. And where did it go? It ended up like it's gone down the same pit into vertical video and Facebook, same spot and everything. I think when we just focus on engagement, at least right now, the pit that everything is drawn towards is video. And then it goes to short form video. And now I'm at the podcasting conference and we're all talking about if you want more engagement, you've got to go video, and I'm like, but I've been down this path now three, four times with the other platforms that I cared about. I don't care too much for them anymore because X is not really text-based anymore, and Instagram I have to take it off my phone because there's no cool images of friends. It's short form videos all the time and everything has just kind of degraded into the same homogenous, highly addictive content.

Jordan: 12:25

Yeah.

Alban: 12:26

And now I'm looking around the industry that I care the most about, the medium that I care the most about and we're all talking about I can see a little bit into the future. It looks like it's all video and I'm like, yeah, and then we're just going to not be what we like anymore. We're not going to be audio focused, we're going to be doing video. So if that's the case, why don't we just leave this platform and go do the one we want to do? Because otherwise we're just going to drag this whole industry down the exact same path that everybody else has gone now.

Jordan: 12:56

So Epic Universe the theme park had opened and all of these influencers congregated to film a bunch of like the rides and all the things that you go to. And lately it's been so frustrating for me because, no matter what platform I go on, I'm being fed the exact same videos of people touring Epic Universe. So if I go on like Instagram, my feed is completely flooded with it. Facebook, same thing. If I go to like YouTube, same thing completely flooded. It's just all the algorithms are serving up the exact same thing. Youtube, same thing completely flooded. It's just all the algorithms are serving up the exact same thing. And it's like I don't want to be on any of these platforms because they all have just started doing the exact same thing. I can't go somewhere else for different content when I feel like it.

Alban: 13:34

Yeah, there's something like depressing about we got online because you know mostly people's 150 person friend group or the people you knew real in life. You were like, oh, there's parts of me that I don't share with someone in real life, but now if I go online I can get on a forum and I can connect to people who are very different and we're different in the same way, and now we can share our love of Pokemon cards. For me, that was the thing You're like oh, I'm really into this thing and now I can connect with people online. But lately it feels like we're getting pulled down the same path into video first and then eventually it's like 30 second podcasts. The only difference is that people hold the mic in their face and they do a quick little hit and that's what podcasting is to people.

Alban: 14:20

Everything that I like about podcasting is the audio component. It doesn't have an algorithm, so you stick with shows for a long time. You build a relationship with the audience, it gets much deeper engagement and vertical video. Eventually, most of it or all of it will be created by AI and it's just going to be a bunch of junk churned out that's just so highly engaging that that you just swipe for eternity. That's the most dystopian future I can imagine. It'll be highly enjoyable, and yet not something that I will be proud of scrolling through.

Kevin: 14:56

I'm thinking platforms have to evolve because you got these closed ecosystems that are funded by advertising dollars, and so the business model requires you to get as many people into that ecosystem as possible and then stay in there as long as possible so that you can serve up as many ads as possible. That's the machine that has to keep running as soon as another platform comes along or something else comes along that starts to pull more people in a different direction, because they have a slightly different offering. In those platforms' best interest to either copy or innovate and not get people to leave Instagram to go to TikTok or not to leave TikTok to go to YouTube Shorts. And this is the battle that they all have to play with each other, because when somebody has free time or downtime, they're going to open something on their phone, and so they're incented to create the most addictive thing that they can that keeps people looking at their screens, as opposed to some other apps. Screens as long as possible.

Kevin: 15:48

And podcasting is very different than that One. It's different in that it's not owned or controlled by any one platform or entity. Two, it's not algorithmically driven. That's a very hard word to say. So no podcast app, at least none that I am aware of have really at least cracked the nut anyway yet on solving discoverability. So as soon as you get done with one show that you really liked, it's not serving up another one and like auto playing into it, like it's all self-selected content, you have to build your own playlist, you have to find shows, you have to subscribe to them, and so it's different.

Kevin: 16:21

Now, I don't fault individual platforms for having a business model and then adapting and changing, like the example that you just gave, Alban, of Instagram, you know, starting with square pictures, but then, as soon as TikTok came along and they found something more addictive, that Instagram starts to follow their lead. Right, because they're like we're losing people over here. So now Instagram doesn't feel like old Instagram and Twitter doesn't feel like the new X and all that stuff. But these are platforms. They're not really mediums Like. Podcasting is a medium. If anything, it's closest to you know, like AM radio, more than it is like a technology platform, and so I don't have any concerns about us losing in the traditional sense. Podcasting is a format, you know basically saying audio first, like.

Kevin: 17:07

One of the definitions that Jordan threw out for me to think about over the last week was if it works with your eyes closed, let's call it a podcast. That idea will be around forever, but it might not always be at the top of the trend list. It might not always be the hottest thing that's happening online for creators to jump into and I'm very comfortable with that. I'm very comfortable with, like I don't have to work in the industry or be passionate about a certain part of technology that is the hottest thing, or it's the thing that all the creators are moving to, or the hot new trend that they're jumping on. I don't know if that makes me a purist or if it just makes me somebody who's found something that they'd like right, and whether it's hot or whether it's the full new thing to jump into or not, it doesn't change the fact that there's always going to be enough people in the world who, I think, have a similar line of thinking that they appreciate it for what it is. And maybe podcasting is flat for a few years. Maybe it's growing at 10% for a few years. Maybe it's decreasing at 10 or 15% year over year for a few years. I think that's okay, but I don't have a pessimistic view on podcasting is going to become something else or it's going to go away or it's going to get destroyed. It might be more popular 10 years from now. It might be less popular 10 years from now, but I think it's still going to exist. I think it's going to be more popular.

Kevin: 18:17

Honestly, I just I think more and more people will find this audio first format of stuff that's convenient and respectful of your lifestyle and lets you enjoy content passively and they'll work it into their lifestyle, but I don't know that it's ever going to make the transition into the big platform that tech giants promote a lot, because I think it is again like they can't keep you engaged in that content, like they can you know video content and they can't quickly serve up the next hot thing that you're going to love, because this content isn't 30 second soundbites of funny clips or rage bait.

Kevin: 18:48

It's 45 minutes of content, and sometimes the content is a little boring and sometimes it's not, and you kind of have to figure that out yourself. It's hard for algorithms to figure out what to serve up next for you, so I think it just doesn't fit the mold. There's other technologies that work better in terms of hey, just keep people engaged on our screens so that we can serve the most number of ads. I don't know that podcasting fits into that perfectly. It feels like those tech giants have tried to make podcasting that over the past couple of years.

Jordan: 19:13

Yeah.

Kevin: 19:14

Haven't really cracked the nut on it. So they've said but you know, what we have cracked the nut on is video. Let's just take podcasting and say in order to be a successful podcaster, you have to do video. Now, so, and it's not because we're improving podcasting, it's just because we've already figured out video and we can't really figure out podcasting. So let's just make podcasting video problem solved.

Alban: 19:34

Yeah, I think I'm speaking to all of us that go to these conferences. I like the podcast movement team, I like a lot of the people who go to them and I'm like we all got here because we like something, we like podcasting, and we just spent most of it talking about hey, maybe what we should be doing is video first, and then we ripped the audio, mostly for the podcast. But we do video because video is important. But video is a thing. It was called TV. You had that before this. There were TV shows you could have been doing and you got into podcasting for some reason.

Alban: 20:08

Why did you do that? I think it was because you liked audio, for some reason. And if that's the case, like we should feel more confident in what we really like, not insecure because there's more money or more attention. Even if all that's true, which it might be true it seems like a lot of podcasts grow with video. Even if it's true, that doesn't mean you have to do it. It just means like there's other things out in the world that are good, great, but like why are we going to a conference called a podcasting conference and spending all of our energy talking about how we really should be doing something else. Wasteful, feels misguided, and I don't want to spend my week of connecting to the industry and rehash the same conversation day after day after day after day.

Kevin: 20:57

Yeah, right, I get it. It reckons back to the conversation Jordan and I just had last week, which is there is some danger and harm in us in the podcasting industry allowing people in the video space to take over the use of the word podcasting and define it for purposes that meet their goals more than serve the general podcasting world.

Jordan: 21:19

Yeah.

Kevin: 21:19

But we know that the shows that, whether we call them their podcast type shows or not, we know if they're doing good on YouTube it's mostly because they are YouTube formatted shows, like they're playing towards the algorithm, they have good thumbnails, they're doing all the things that make a YouTube channel successful, not all the things that make a podcast successful, and that just happens to carry over into the YouTube world.

Kevin: 21:41

That's not the formula to succeed over there. There's a whole industry around. What does it take to actually succeed and stand out and grow on YouTube? And the shows that are podcast-like, shows that are appearing over there that are succeeding, are following those best practices, not podcasting best practices. And so for podcasters to feel like the best way for me to grow my show is to add this video component is, at best, maybe misguided advice. I don't think anyone's trying to deliberately sabotage anyone. I just think the people who are giving the advice themselves most of them of what I've seen aren't successful on YouTube Like they've been decent podcasters. Now we have some people who listen to the show and our personal friends like Steven Robles, like he does great on YouTube.

Jordan: 22:25

Yeah.

Kevin: 22:26

And he keeps telling us like you have to be careful when you're telling people don't get into video, because there is some really great growth opportunities here. And I do not think he is wrong. What I do think is that he's an exceptional video producer and he has a lot of skills that he's developed over many years and he's an exceptional standout. And it's a little bit like when I hear Adam Curry say live is so fun and every podcaster should try live. And I'm like you're a professional broadcaster, One of the best the world has ever known. You started as an MTV VJ. You could go live and talk about anything and it would be engaging because you're so talented and you've honed your craft for so many years. Live works great for you. You don't ever have to edit. I also know if Jordan didn't edit this show, we would have zero listeners. Nobody wants to hear this show live. Right, we are getting a little bit better. So I look at it like that, like Steven Riverside video. I get it. You make a good point. I also think you're very exceptional and that's not an on-ramp for many people who want to step into podcasting. I don think you're very exceptional and that's not an on-ramp for many people who want to step into podcasting. I don't think that pressure, like putting that pressure on them, is the best thing for us to be doing in terms of encouraging new creators to step into podcasting, Just like I don't think pushing them into doing live podcasts is the best thing, but I know it works great for Adam.

Kevin: 23:45

I'll also say something that we don't talk a lot about, but we probably should talk a little bit more about it, because we know, and a lot of people in the creator space don't know, but because we're on the technical side of podcasting and we're on the business side of providing a hosting service, we know the costs involved with hosting audio versus hosting video, and so to do a video show, not only does the ecosystem have to grow in terms of apps that support video and can provide a good video experience, like we might just think nothing of it as consumers.

Kevin: 24:14

If you open up the YouTube app and every video that you click on, kind of regardless of where you are whether you're at your home on strong Wi-Fi or at the office, or you're driving in your car or even like if you're in an elevator or at a Costco wherever you are the videos load pretty quickly and they look pretty good.

Kevin: 24:31

The amount of bandwidth and infrastructure and app development that goes into creating that level of experience is massive. It's a huge technical achievement In order for a company like us to be able to provide a similar level of service to podcasters so that their audience would match the experience. So if somebody clicked on one of your podcast episodes and you had video in order for it to load quickly and for it to look good kind of, regardless of what bandwidth constraints we're trying to negotiate at the time on the backend, it would be very, very expensive. So right now our customers pay us anywhere in the ballpark of $12, $18, $24 a month, which is extremely cheap. Like probably not a good topic for the show, but the prices are too low.

Kevin: 25:11

Everybody in the podcast industry needs to raise our prices Like we're getting killed, Okay, but regardless of how cheap it is right now, even if it's a little bit more expensive which it should be video is going to be substantially more.

Jordan: 25:24

Oh yeah.

Kevin: 25:24

Right. Even if you're only have 10, 20, 30 people who download an episode, you're still talking about 10x the bandwidth requirements than it is to serve audio. And that doesn't include any of the additional infrastructure and tech that we would have to build Like. We have to build video players and those video players need to be embeddable and we have to encode the video in multiple different bit rates so that it can switch between them on the fly. All of that stuff is very expensive. So think about hosting your podcast with us right now, like I said, $12, $18, $24. To host a video plan with us would probably be more in the ballpark of $50, $70, or $90 a month. It would be substantially more expensive to do that.

Jordan: 26:03

Yeah.

Kevin: 26:03

And is there a business model there?

Kevin: 26:05

Because we already compete with some free podcast hosting solutions and we've figured out how to differentiate ourselves enough to be able to carve out a business for people who are serious about their show and really value customer service and high quality podcast experience and all that kind of stuff.

Kevin: 26:18

But YouTube has done the same thing on the on the video side and they host it for free because they figured out we don't need you to pay us, you know, a hundred dollars a month to host your video, because we're just going to throw ads all around it. And for people who don't want ads, they're going to buy YouTube premium for $20 a month and we'll share a few pennies on the dollar with you for doing that. And because that's our business model, we are going to invest heavily in making it addictive and create all these algorithms to keep people on platform and if they don't like your video, we don't care, We'll just serve up another one and all this other stuff. That really isn't about the creator experience. It's about making sure that there's a business model here that allows them to host videos for free.

Alban: 26:55

I think that's a good point, kevin, that the formats that we consume content in they always end up with like similar type monetization, and those are products of how expensive it is to create that content. And so if it's video content, it has to be heavily monetized, and that monetization can either be in the format of lots of ads or a high subscription cost or, if you're renting a video, a decent rental fee. Whatever it may be, it's got to be a few dollars. It costs money to make high quality video and to distribute it, and audio, being much easier and much more lightweight files, gets monetized. Much lower ad loads, much more likely that the premium subscription is much cheaper. And then, if you go all the way to text, which is going to be the lightest of all, like some of the best blogs in the world, are totally not monetized, and I think that's because, like the time that went into, it is mostly the person who created its time. Everything beyond that is almost free.

Kevin: 28:04

Yeah, but pricing is all based around. What does it actually cost? What are the hard costs behind serving that content? So you could host a really nice blog site right now that's pretty highly performant for anywhere from five to $10 a month. You can get a really good shared hosting account for that. That could take tens of thousands of views per month. So you could have a pretty successful blog and host it for five or $10 a month.

Kevin: 28:24

Now on the podcasting side, you can host your audio content again on a on a high-performance shared server like a Buzzsprout subscription or something, for $12, $18, $24 a month. Not bad. But for video, like I said, it would be much more expensive. So let's just say you have a pretty successful show where you're doing a couple thousand downloads per episode. That puts you in the top 5% or 10% or so of all podcasts. If that was a video show, that would cost $ plus dollars a month just to be able to serve up that amount of bandwidth.

Kevin: 28:49

But you might not be monetizing to the level. Like, even with that level of audience a thousand downloads per episode you'd be hard pressed to find an advertiser who's going to pay you that. Now YouTube doesn't have to find one advertiser that pays you that because they're not reliant on your one show to make up their ad revenue. They're going to load that thing with advertisements before it, in the middle and after, and as soon as somebody gets bored and clicks on someone else, there's another ad, and another ad, and another ad, and so it's like lost leaders. They are Walmart, where the end caps are all things that Walmart doesn't make any money on, but it draws you into the aisle where they do make money on stuff. It's a totally different business model. So I don't think there's a technical solution right now that I think scales enough to sustain a hosting business that is video first, that doesn't rely on some sort of advertising as part of the business plan, and if that's the case, then YouTube's already won that space.

Alban: 29:41

So one of the things I did do while I was there, kevin, is I went to a PSP meetup. This is the Podcast Standards Project and we spoke for a good bit about I think it's called HLS, and it's like a video format and helps you serve up multiple bit rates of a video so that it can adapt based on you know the bandwidth available at any moment. What are your thoughts there? How is that not the solution?

Kevin: 30:08

Well. So HLS stands for HTTP or HTTPS live streaming, and all it is is a. It's a format that allows you to do live streaming without setting up a dedicated web server. That just does live streaming. So the original versions of this technology were, like you know, real server had a product that would do like a real media encoder and a real media server that would allow you to do live stream video, but it wasn't like a standard web server. Hls is just allows you to do that same type of thing over a standard web server, so you don't have to go change out all of your infrastructure, all of your web servers, to be able to live stream video, or audio for that matter.

Kevin: 30:41

So it's not going to change the business model at all. It might make it a little bit less expensive in that I can stream video content off of my standard Apache web server as opposed to setting up a separate box. But at the end of the day, that's not the big expense. The big expense is the bandwidth and the processing time. So when somebody uploads one high quality video, we still have to create six different versions of that. We have to create, you know, the 480p, the 720, the 720p, the 1080, the 1080p, the 4k, the 6k, like all those different formats. Then you have to create this playlist manifest file and then HLS allows you to, instead of linking to one individual file, you link to the manifest file, so then it can bounce in between all of those different types of video, depending on the bandwidth that you have available, any given second that you're watching the video.

Kevin: 31:22

That's all it does, and it sounds a little complicated, but it's really not that complicated. This was a solution that I want to say Apple invented as a solution to video streaming, because they didn't want to put MacroMedia's or Adobe's Flash on the iPhone.

Kevin: 31:38

So it's been around for a very long time. This is not a new thing. I don't know why people in podcasting are just talking about it like it was invented yesterday. It has been around for a very long time. I want to say it was like iOS 3, 2 or 3 or something that this came out. Holy cow.

Kevin: 31:52

Anyway any of our competitors who want to step into the space and say, oh, HLS is the solution, knock yourselves out. It's been around for a long time. I don't think it changes the fact that you're still talking about a lot of bandwidth. I do think it's a good solution in terms of it's better than downloading. Downloading video files to your phone is not a solution Like. Youtube knew this back in 2005. They said, hey, if mobile is going to be the thing and a mobile is going to be where people consume our videos, we can't have people going from one video to another and, like, before they know it, they're going to have alerts on their phone that it's out of storage. Right, we can't download all these videos. We have to stream them. And that's a big difference between how typically podcast apps today.

Kevin: 32:29

When you are downloading, you're downloading it over HTTP, but it is living on your phone for some period of time. Right, you click play. It's a progressive download. It might be playing back as it's downloading, but at some point the download finishes, whether you're done playing it or not, and it sits on your phone for some amount of time. Maybe you complete the episode and the phone auto deletes it. Maybe you never come back to the episode. So after two weeks or 30 days or whatever settings you have, it says oh, you're probably not gonna pick this up again, I'll go ahead and delete it. If they ever wanna resume, I can always download it again Again, because audio is not a big file. It's not that big of a deal.

Kevin: 33:00

Video is different. If we start subscribing to 10 or 15 or 20 video shows and every night my phone is trying to download, you know, two or three terabytes worth of video podcasts so they're ready for me to play on the plane tomorrow, I'm going to wake up and my phone's not going to work. It's like out of storage. Yeah, Sorry, we deleted all your photos so that we could download the latest Joe Rogan. You're like no, I didn't want the latest Joe Rogan, I want my photos. What did you do? So we have to stream if we do video, and HLS does solve the streaming side, but it doesn't solve the bandwidth side. It doesn't solve the costs associated with it. What solves the costs associated with it is the advertising model that YouTube has perfected and that Spotify is starting to try to figure out because they want to compete with YouTube. But it's not going to be, I don't think, an effective business model that independent podcast hosts can pick up and follow, because our business is about.

Kevin: 33:49

You pay us $12 a month to host audio. How many people in the world want to pay us $100 a month so they can serve video? Our typical customer on a podcast they get somewhere between 20 and 50 downloads per episode and they're happy. And the 20 to 50 people that download their episodes are happy. But it's a hobby and it's a passion and those hobbies and passions are funded by 12, 18 or $24 a month. How many people have 50, a hundred $200 of expendable income to throw into a hobby? I like that these numbers just keep escalating.

Alban: 34:22

It started off as a $50 plan and now it's a $200 minimum.

Jordan: 34:26

Inflation's crazy right now. Minimum Inflation's crazy right now.

Kevin: 34:30

But the reality is that YouTube and Spotify and some of these other services have figured out that there are people who want to do this, but they're not going to be able to pay for it, so we have to figure out how to fund it, and what they figured out is the advertising model can fund it. Now, it's not a great experience, and we have to create addictive algorithms and other stuff in order to make it all work, but at the end of the day, it does work.

Alban: 34:53

Yeah, I feel like you're making the argument, if anything, to our competitors and to maybe people at Buzzsprout. I don't think we should be making video into our apps. I think I'm somewhat trying to make this argument for creators that it's okay to do the thing you want. If what you want to do is audio content, you can do that without doing video, and if you want to do video content, you can do that too. Either is fine, but like, follow your heart and do the one that you're into. What I don't love is when I'm listening to a podcast and it's podcast content until the moment they say so right now, we've got this up on the screen, here's what we're doing, and you go oh, so now I'm like the second class citizen. Now I'm missing out on something. We're missing out on the core thing. But I really came back from the conference feeling like I don't know if I'm gonna go to another conference that is focused on video content.

Kevin: 35:50

Well, you might not have a choice, because it seems like they're ambushing you. They're calling it podcast movement, but it's really VidCon. But you had no idea.

Alban: 35:58

And I don't know if I would do any different if I was podcast movement, because they're like well, the podcasters are pitching these talks on video and they seem to show up to the video talk. So it seems like that's where this is going. We've got to follow this industry where it's going and I'm saying like I don't know if I want to spend my time and our money to go and be like talking about video all the time. It'd be so much more fun for me to go to VidCon and talk to like the high end people who are making great videos, the people who are teaching video.

Alban: 36:32

Besides, maybe, Steven, who spoke on the YouTube stage, most of them are not video professionals. Most of them are podcasters who are dabbling in video. But years ago Podcast Movement had Andrew Huberman on stage, I think, with the YouTube team talking about how he grows his podcast with video. That's like a high big video person also doing podcast content. Then I would feel like man, I'm learning from the best. It kind of felt like we're all podcasters who are reinventing ourselves into video creators and kind of cheering each other on along the way. This does not feel right.

Jordan: 37:25

Well, I think a lot of podcasters feel like they're killing it when they start a YouTube channel and they put out some like videos and they get you know 800 views, when their podcast only gets you know 120, and they're just like I'm killing it. But you have to realize when you're in YouTube land, that's nothing.

Alban: 37:43

Yeah, and you've started. Now you started the video treadmill, which is very different than the podcast treadmill.

Jordan: 37:48

Exactly. It's completely different, and so you might be thinking like these numbers are crazy huge and I should talk about this because I am doing really well right now, but really you're not.

Kevin: 37:58

Right, and no one talks about this because it is completely closed off. So when you do a thousand views on a YouTube video that you put up, nobody questions how accurate that is. Yeah, because there's no opportunity to look at that data from a different perspective how accurate that is yeah, because there's no opportunity to look at that data from a different perspective.

Kevin: 38:12

There's no standard, there's only what YouTube has decided is going to count as a view. Now, I'm not saying YouTube's doing anything shady. It's totally their platform. They can decide exactly what a view is, and they really only have to be accountable to the advertisers and then to to the creators, and they have to make sure it reconciles on both sides good enough so that the money keeps flowing, like that's their whole job. I think that probably highly influences what they determine is a view and what isn't a view.

Kevin: 38:40

But in podcasting it's not like that. It's like oh well, you could host your podcast on Buzzsprout for a little while, but then you can move to somebody else and then you can come back and you can see that your numbers change. Well, why is that? Well, they might count a little differently than we count, and so we've had to figure it out. Well, how should we all be counting? Can we all agree on a standard set of rules and guidelines that we follow for counting and all this kind of stuff? But none of that takes place in the YouTube space.

Alban: 39:03

Yeah, there's something about as soon. And yet the audit should make you feel more confident the fact that you can set up OP3 on your Buzzsprout account and then you can go and pull your Apple podcast stats, and then you can move over to Libsyn and get the Libsyn stats and move to Captivate and get the Captivate stats. And now you've seen the same show perform and had six different people measure it and IAB standards on top of all of them.

Kevin: 39:27

Yeah, and stats prefixes that you can add on there, so you have two people counting at any given time, or three people are.

Alban: 39:33

And you should be able to go okay, like this is actually pretty consistent. But every once in a while I go into YouTube and they do say like, hey, during this two day period we noticed some anomalies, so these areas might be off. Those anomalies does that mean like like they were off by a factor of 10 or off by a few? I think it's just like YouTube is determining it on their own. Nobody else is coming in auditing. I mean, maybe there are some advertisers who have rights to do that, but not that I know of.

Kevin: 39:58

Weird, and I think all it typically means is we're not exactly sure if these views were 100% targeted or legitimate in the way that we want them to be, to be able to justify what we charge the advertiser whose content. We ran against your content, so we might monetize it differently, which means you're not going to get paid, maybe, for any of those views, or you might get paid less or whatever. But it's a very black box thing and again, this is not me being critical of them, this is just me saying like the reality of the worlds are just very, very different. So video podcasting good Lord, it's a whole nother beast and honestly, I just think, if there's some drive or passion that you have in you, that I like video content, I like consuming it and I want to see my face on the screen and I want to create video content. Unless you want to pioneer a whole new way of doing video online and that's not where Buzzsprout is right now, so don't really look for us to be doing it then I think the solution is YouTube For all of it, the pros and all of the cons that come along with it. They've figured out a business model to make it work. If you want to do a video podcast or any sort of video content, they're the solution right now, and maybe Spotify is big enough and smart enough to figure out a way to challenge them, so at least we'll have two players in the space.

Kevin: 41:10

But I don't see a great way for the open podcasting ecosystem. At least that's really worked well for the past 20 plus years in audio. I don't see a clear path to transitioning that at scale over to video. Not saying that there's not a video podcast shows that are distributing via RSS right now. They figured out a way to meet their needs.

Kevin: 41:28

I just don't know that there's going to be enough people for somebody like a Buzzsprout to come in and say, hey, there's a video plan now and we built all the infrastructure to sign up 200 customers paying $100 a month. We would lose our shirts on that, and so I think the solution, at least for the next year or two, the solution is not HLS. The solution is something different that no one's thought of yet. No one's figured out yet, including us at Buzzsprout. Just full transparency on that. We're not super passionate about it, so we're not investing a lot of time in trying to figure it out, but there are plenty of other people who are. But I'm just telling you, from a technology standpoint and from a business model standpoint, hls might solve some of the technology. It's not going to solve the money side.

Alban: 42:10

Something I would propose to everybody is follow where your energy is and where your passion is, and if your energy right now is behind video, full steam ahead. If your energy is not behind video, release yourself of that fake obligation and do the thing that you're into, and that is healthy, it's good. It's good to quit things sometimes, like you don't have to do stuff just because you heard a talk or you even listened to this show and you felt like I told you never do video. Like, go do what you want to do and feel confident in it. Yeah, I feel confident. Now I don't really want to do any more video, podcast stuff.

Kevin: 42:45

You know, maybe my last bit will be another rant on this show or a talk about why you shouldn't be doing video All right, and can we also make a pledge to anybody who listens to this show that at least like for the next month or two, like we're not going to talk about video anymore.

Jordan: 42:58

Nope.

Alban: 43:00

Jordan, that's easier, I think, for Kevin and I than for you. That means you've got to come up with outlined sans video.

Kevin: 43:14

Yeah, there is plenty of exciting stuff to talk about just in the audio podcasting space that we do not need to keep going on and on and on about Again. We've said that a million times now, and I'm going to say it one last time, just for posterity If you want to do video, we love it. We're not saying don't do it, but our expertise, our passion and the technology that we're building is focused around helping people be like audio first podcasters and being the best version of that they can be, and so, at least for the next month or two on this show, we're going to do our best to steer away from video content. Whether it be a rant or a rave doesn't matter. We're going to talk about audio podcasting for a while.

Jordan: 43:39

Okay, Alban, I heard you got tagged in on a talk at Podcast Movement that you were not planning on doing what happened?

Alban: 43:47

Arielle Nissenblatt I think got double booked and needed someone to fill in, and one of them was on podcast marketing, so I was like all right, if you send me the deck.

Alban: 44:07

She was doing it with Lauren Passell, who we're all at dinner, and I was like, okay, lauren, I'm willing to jump in and be a part of it, and I really enjoyed it. It was a talk about podcast awards and podcast lists. There's all these lists people put together at the end of the year the 10 best shows of 2024, 10 shows you need to be listening to and like New York Times does them and Vulture and the New Yorker, and there's all these big lists and there's lots of podcasters who try to get on them. And what they did is they looked at all these lists and they tried to find the common threads, what gets people onto these lists. And then they actually went and interviewed people and a few of my takeaways from it was like the world is not very big, there's like 15 of these lists total and you look at the bylines and they're the same people every year and so I was like there's like 16 people who are kind of like the tastemakers for at least these like best of podcast lists.

Alban: 45:02

Yeah, for at least these like best of podcast lists. Yeah, and it's really a PR game, making sure you get your shows in front of the handful of tastemakers. Then the other takeaway was the nicest part about the list is that it helps people feel encouraged and they're proud of their work and they're proud of their team. Same as Apple Podcasts new and noteworthy it doesn't always drive big listens. Some of the biggest shows were like we felt amazing. We had a really nice bottle of champagne. We were so proud and it didn't really turn into any big growth, but it was really nice to see.

Jordan: 45:37

Yeah.

Alban: 45:38

One of the things I thought was so interesting was a majority of the shows that win came out in June, July.

Jordan: 45:45

Oh, interesting.

Alban: 45:46

It's because the shows that come out in February, even when they're really really good, a lot of people have kind of forgotten about those shows. They don't feel as hot Right now. If people are talking about what's the big show from the last year, white Lotus gets a lot of love, but even Severance is starting to fade. And that was only a month ago, and whatever was nine months ago is going to get even further down.

Jordan: 46:09

And we don't really remember if it was this year or last year. Isn't that what movies do for like the Oscars. They'll release at like a certain time, just so yeah.

Alban: 46:13

And they re-release also. Yeah, yeah, for the intent of we're trying to get in front of the people who are picking the awards, or people who are picking the lists, so that they're top of mind. And it reminded me if you want to be on these lists or you want to get recognition first, you can do this PR yourself. There were not many people I'm talking 15 people are writing these lists, so it's not very big. You can make personal outreach to each of them. Also, if you really care about podcasting, you've probably got enough expertise to write your own list. What are the 10 shows that you really love? Because if there's not a ton of people putting out these lists, there's plenty of space for just small creators to say, hey, here's the five shows that I found this year that I love, that I've been recommending, and kind of vote for what you want to see in the world.

Alban: 47:05

And then, if you're ever doing PR, there's just a bit of luck involved, and part of that luck is catching the person who's writing the list at the right time. So if you see a list come out that didn't include you, maybe sending a nice email and saying I'd love for you to consider this one If you write another list, or consider us next year, reach out maybe November, when you think people are probably writing these. So if you're working on big shows and this is something you've aspired to I don't think it's as difficult to get in front of the really biggest names out there, you know. So maybe buzzcast we're going to to get on the New York Times best 2025 podcasts I don't know if we're gonna make it. You know, maybe we'll make number 11, you know, just got cut off from the list.

Jordan: 47:51

We could also make like iH eart and do a like 50 most influential people in podcasting and just put ourselves at the top every year.

Alban: 47:57

Jordan B lair wins again.

Jordan: 48:00

Thank you, thank you.

Kevin: 48:01

Were there any stats on like how effective this stuff is in terms of a marketing strategy? If you make one of these lists or multiple lists, does it actually help your show?

Alban: 48:09

They interviewed people who had been on the list. One of the creators was on five of the lists, so their show did really well and he said I really love the appreciation. It made the team really proud but, we didn't see massive growth from this.

Alban: 48:24

It seemed to me like the biggest growth lever involved was when the shows won an award, that they were able to then start posting that on their own marketing channels. They're posting it on social media. We're proud that we were just awarded this, and so people who were kind of on the fence about listening saw it as social proof, in the same way that, you know, every website in the world's like as seen in New York times, as seen in business insider and they put that on the homepage. It's just kind of social proof that people think we're good and we all are, you know, subtly influenced by seeing logos that we think are prominent and we're more likely to engage with the brand Right.

Jordan: 49:05

You know, I actually was a finalist on like a couple of those sort of things and I use that to guest on other podcasts and also I put it on prominently on my one pager to submit to like sponsorships and so I would say like, hey, I was a finalist on like the best podcast for this and I feel like it worked pretty well and it just made it look a little bit more official.

Alban: 49:28

Yeah, One creator mentioned something similar, Jordan. He said it didn't help them grow but it did help them sell future shows. Yes, so he won for other shows in the past and said each subsequent one just helped them pitch. Hey, we want to make this podcast. I know it sounds a little off the wall, but just go look at our track record. We won best show three out of the last four years for different podcasts.

Alban: 49:54

So you can trust us as a trendsetter, maybe in the way that the Oscars help validate the work of lots of great directors.

Kevin: 50:03

You know, I hear a lot of people who win these awards. They just say also they say, you know, just being nominated is an honor in and of itself, and it feels like a lot of these lists just to nominate yourself. It's just a form you fill out on their website, and so why not just nominate yourself for everything and then put all over your stuff. You know, nominated for best podcast 2025, nominated for best podcast in this genre so at least you've been nominated. You were nominated by yourself, but I don't think that's.

Alban: 50:30

I think you're sounding more like the awards. I don't think you get to nominate yourself for the best of list. Those are uh, they're editorial, so you can pitch it to them considered.

Kevin: 50:39

Maybe you can say you would say like, considered, for like, they looked at my email and they threw it away, but at least there was a moment of consideration.

Jordan: 50:47

I mean really, what's going to happen? Are they going to check? They're going to, like, call your references.

Alban: 50:51

All the time when people are like as seen in New York times, they have that logo on their website. I'm like, what if the as seen was like investigated for, like financial fraud, and you go, guys, put it on the Buzzsprout website. As seen in New York Times.

Kevin: 51:07

Dude, you have to be careful with what you say. You just said my first and last name investigated for financial fraud, which that will now appear in the transcript, which will now appear in all the Google's indexes and will appear in AI results and everything else. Jordan, could you please edit that out Kevin investigated for being super cool Nice.

Jordan: 51:26

For donating to orphans. Yes, I'll bleep out his full sentence.

Kevin: 51:32

No, keep out my last name.

Alban: 51:34

It's going to be so much worse if you bleep that out. Kevin Finn investigated for Redacted.

Jordan: 51:44

So here is a wonderful Fan Mail message we got from Salt Lake City, Utah. It says I am 92 years old and want to start a podcast. I want to talk about how today's news is similar to the past, using first-person knowledge. My son and grandson will be involved. I had a YouTube channel, but they canceled it, saying I broke the rules and I have no way to dispute it. Nice, so I think we already broke our no video thing here, but we're not going to soapbox about it. You are no more feeling about it.

Kevin: 52:11

We're not, but I can't imagine what rule was broken.

Alban: 52:14

That's so cool. 92 years old and starting a podcast, that's great. I also love the idea of comparing today's news to the news of 92 years ago.

Kevin: 52:25

Probably not. Probably not. 90, full, 92 years ago.

Alban: 52:27

Okay, the news of 82 years ago, when they were 10?

Kevin: 52:30

Yeah, I think when he was about 10 is probably about what he's remembering.

Alban: 52:33

That's phenomenal. And, jordan, you pulled in a few other stories here. You guys remember Maury.

Jordan: 52:39

Maury Povich.

Alban: 52:40

Maury.

Jordan: 52:41

That's the, the paternal testing guy on TV.

Alban: 52:45

You are the father guy, yeah.

Jordan: 52:47

Oh gosh, yeah, Is that what he's known for.

Kevin: 52:49

Yeah, it's his main shtick.

Jordan: 52:51

Pretty much.

Kevin: 52:51

OK.

Alban: 52:52

I mean, you just had like kind of that TV show and it was always like they'd get people on with like something bad is going on in their life and Maury's like I'll help a tiny bit by making this much, much worse on my TV show and they'd be like, oh, you are the father. And then they're like great, now I've been like humiliated on TV. I don't know if this is better. Yeah, so anyway, maury started a podcast at the young age of 86. Wow, and the press release said he's returning to his journalistic roots, which, from my memory at 10 of watching Maury you know, when I was sick and not working on school, I don't think he had journalistic roots Seemed a little bit more like media. But Maury's back podcasting as well.

Jordan: 53:36

Yeah, there's the Maury Povich podcast, so he's 86 starting a podcast. He's going to be like interviewing people. He's kind of deep diving into some of like his old episodes too. Like, I think he's going to talk a little bit about why this was a problem, but maybe what his thinking was at the time, which could be really interesting. But something I really want to talk about is how, in Argentina, a group of people over 90 years old created the podcast Noventa y Cantando, which is 90 and counting, and it's led by 97-year-old psychoanalyst, alberto Chob. And what's really cool is that they started this podcast because they were sitting around a table chatting with each other and I mean it's very much like how the podcast bros will start it. You know they're sitting around. They're like we should do a podcast about that, but they actually work this time Okay.

Kevin: 54:24

It works. A lot of times, surprisingly, it works yes.

Jordan: 54:29

But I feel like this, actually like he posted a clip of this podcast to TikTok and then, within days, got 2000 emails of people just like reaching out, and now he has like 290 something Instagram followers. And it's just so cool that at 97, you start a podcast and it just explodes.

Alban: 54:49

Somebody said at our age, the worst thing that can happen to you is loneliness. Being alone, which can be creative, is not the same as loneliness which really becomes an illness.

Alban: 54:59

The people around us die and we're left very alone. This group combats that loneliness. Yeah, I love that message. I mean it's one it's a podcast to, you know, anybody who's younger and just wants to hear, like, what's life like after 90. But I also love that they're reaching out to people their own age, and people who do probably feel a little bit alone are now feeling much more connected to people who are kind of going through the same thing. So I love it. I love the podcasting we're just did a video about. You know, should you start a podcast? And one of our points was that podcasting tech has gotten easier and easier. I think a 97 year old psychoanalyst launching a podcast means you probably can too.

Jordan: 55:41

Absolutely.

Kevin: 55:42

I think we need to start focusing some of our marketing efforts in this direction. Alban Like, we always talk about what's the next generation of podcasters, but rarely do we look upstream for that.

Jordan: 55:51

That's true.

Kevin: 55:51

So I think we need some marketing channels targeted towards At what point are you considered a senior citizen now, once you pass 50, you get free coffee at McDonald's, does that count?

Jordan: 56:00

What 50?

Kevin: 56:02

Yeah, get free coffee at McDonald's.

Jordan: 56:04

Does that count? What 50? Yeah, if you're over 50, you get free coffee.

Kevin: 56:05

You're a baby at 50. That's nothing I know, but I like this idea. I like that next generation of podcasters might be the 60 plus crowd, 70 plus crowd.

Jordan: 56:13

Yeah.

Kevin: 56:13

That's great. That's great for the industry.

Alban: 56:15

The generation that didn't never went down the dark path of vertical video. Yeah, all are like you know, there's better things than this nonstop phone usage. They're the ones who are going to lead the next wave of podcasting.

Kevin: 56:28

It's so right, though. You never sit down with somebody who's further along in life, like, let's say, 60 plus. You never sit down with them for 10 or 15 minutes where you don't walk away feeling like something interesting, something entertaining, something life-giving. You never know what you're going to get. You might get a wonderful, valuable life lesson that you're like oh my gosh, this totally changes my perspective and outlook on things and I'm going to change. Or that person is so kooky and crazy and nutty and they just say whatever comes to mind and that was just a fun interaction. But, whatever it is, you rarely walk away just thinking like, well, that was a waste of 15 minutes, never, never a waste. Yeah, like when you get an opportunity to spend some time with someone who's a little bit further along in life, it is always, always worthwhile.

Jordan: 57:11

Well, and like when you listen to podcasts, you get to know people a little bit better. It's like when you talk to someone and you get that glimmer of what they we have to call these like sage casts or something.

Kevin: 57:24

Yeah, sage cast, I like it. Yeah, sage casting. That's the next big trend in podcasting.

Jordan: 57:30

Let's go, I'm all for it. All right, let's get into our sound off messages. So first up we have a message from Scott, host of the Talk With History podcast, and this is in regards to YouTube designating content as podcast discussion. So Scott says when YouTube introduced podcast features through the playlist designations, it was great and the algorithm treated those videos differently. He's been posting video versions of his podcast to the main channel, but recently he noticed that YouTube automatically changed some of the old video playlists into podcasts without him doing anything. So he's saying heads up to the other creators Check your YouTube studio in the podcast tabs and make sure your playlists are labeled the way you want them to be.

Alban: 58:14

Well, that follows on all this news about. You know there's 20 billion YouTube plays for podcasts, plays for podcasts, and if YouTube is switching some of the content over to being labeled as a podcast, I'm sure that number is being pretty influenced. That 20 billion number I just pulled out of thin air, but whatever the number was, I don't think you're that far off.

Alban: 58:34

Oh, all right. Daniel J Lewis from Podgagement reached out. He said a great use for fan mail would be to put in your legacy and podcast 2.0 chapters. That would make the link immediately and contextually available when you're reading or asking for feedback, so that listeners could tap the link when it's relevant. So Daniel mentioned this to me at Podcast Movement and what he's saying is the link to text the show meant and what he's saying is the link to text the show. We could make the link for our chapter marker where we talk about fan mail, and so I actually went and did that for our last episode. So when you're listening to our previous episode, you could go in at any moment and where it says sound off or fan mail, that was a link and if you click that link it could open up your text app and text the show. So yeah, nice little idea from Daniel. Thanks for sending it in.

Jordan: 59:31

Are you able to do that when your phone's locked, like right from the lock screen, or do you have to open up the app anyway?

Alban: 59:37

No, you have to open up the app anyway. I think it would enable maybe a podcast player to make it a bit more prominent. Some make it a little bit more prominent the link to wherever that chapter marker takes the link just depends on the app, but they could maybe make it a little bit more prominent so that you could text the show. You're talking about texting the show, and now they could click it and do it. Right then?

Jordan: 59:59

Got it.

Kevin: 59:59

David from no Stroke Podcast wrote in and said we just had someone reach out wanting to know why support the show options on Buzzsprout are capped at $10 a month max donations. They want to support for more. How can they do this and why don't we have an other or a custom option? Keep up the great work.

Kevin: 1:00:14

You're not going to love my answer, but it is as simple as when we were building this feature, we needed the minimum donation amount to be $3 and not go below that, and technically there's just some validation that we'd have to do and then figure out how to give error messages. If somebody wanted to give you a dollar or $2, then we'd have to say sorry, donations have to be three or more and it's like they had to be three or more. Why didn't you just give me out? So you know, just software building in general and and general and trying to get a solution out as quickly as possible that's as bulletproof as possible is why we just started with some set donation amounts. But it's a good idea to revisit that and come back to it and invest more now that we have people using it and we've gotten great feedback like this. So it is good feedback. It's something we'll take under consideration, but yeah, there's not a good reason for some technology that we didn't build, that's all.

Jordan: 1:01:03

Derek from Intentional Teaching said if it doesn't have an RSS feed, it's not a podcast. Shake's fist at Sky. I think Derek had a little bit of like a premonition moment, because I think we got this message before I released the episode where we talked about what is a podcast, so I don't know if it's clairvoyance or just luck.

Kevin: 1:01:24

Yeah, derek, I wouldn't argue with you. I would tend to agree with you. But there's also a bit of me that says, like I recognize that for most of the world it's not that important. But if you're into podcasting, like we are, yeah, I think you're right. You should probably hold that opinion. Now, whether my friends and family who just enjoy podcasts have that same understanding or opinion, I don't think we have to convince them. But it is frustrating when things like we talked about on that quick cast and if you didn't listen, just click back one episode, when people say like, oh, I watched a how to video on YouTube, so now I listen to podcasts. That's not right.

Alban: 1:01:56

No, Dr Wolf, co-host of Life After Impact, the concussion recovery podcast, reached out and said I wonder if you could address the topic of release dates. A lot of weekly podcasts seem to get published first thing, monday morning. Is there any advantage to choosing alternative day like Wednesday? That might bump your show to the top of someone's feeds instead of getting buried by the time they get around to checking their library. I think it is a good idea to publish on different days. So when I first started working at Buzzsprout, there was all this research about the best day to send a newsletter out and everybody was locked in on like. Wednesday was the day. But then, once everything got published about how Wednesday got the biggest open rates, then everyone was sending on Wednesdays and all of a sudden Tuesday became the big day.

Jordan: 1:02:39

Oh yeah.

Alban: 1:02:40

And it just was. You don't want to be publishing the exact same time as everybody else, and my personal usage of podcasts is I have some shows. I know what day they come out on because it's different Tuesday mornings. I know I'm going to listen to Dithering and I used to have a show on Wednesday and there's a show that used to come out on Thursday in the afternoon, so I only knew I would listen to it on the drive home from work on Thursday, on Thursday in the afternoon. So I only knew I would listen to it on the drive home from work on Thursday. And the benefit for those shows is they start working their way into your actual habits and they're not constantly in competition with four other shows for the same general household chore time. So I like publishing them on different times, different days, and eventually people associate your podcast with that day of a week and so it'll work their way into their schedule.

Jordan: 1:03:29

Well, and if you look at the top podcasts, you know you're going to get a whole smattering of different publishing days and frequencies. So it might be kind of difficult to figure out which day to go with. But if you go look at other podcasts that are in your category or topic, maybe that'll help you to differentiate yourself from them a little bit more.

Kevin: 1:03:46

For Buzzcast. We always publish on Friday and originally I think Jordan, you had those set to publish like at midnight right Yep, just midnight Yep. Friday morning, and I noticed that a lot of shows that I happen to subscribe to and follow they also drop on Friday for whatever reason. Not a problem, but we were, since we published right at midnight, we were always like buried on the list of the shows that I followed, and so I asked Jordan to change that to like now what he said at eight or nine 8am.

Jordan: 1:04:10

I think 8am.

Kevin: 1:04:12

And so now all the same shows are there. We still publish on Friday, but we're at the top of the list as opposed to the bottom of the list.

Jordan: 1:04:17

Yeah, we are.

Kevin: 1:04:19

It. It worked. Yeah, just a simple change like that. And when you publish might, if there's a lot of shows in your same category or niche that publish on the same date, how do you get at the top? That's an easy way to do it.

Jordan: 1:04:29

Yeah, like you might miss the commuting timeframe or whatever people go by, but you know, whatever they can listen to you on the commute back, yep. So in our last SoundOff segment we asked you to tell us what was your foot in mouth moment. When did you say something that you wish you could take back and you couldn't? You just want to like fall into the center of the earth. And we got a few submissions. So the first one, my foot in mouth moment, isn't podcast related, but I was at a Halloween party when I saw a large person dressed in a Holstein cow costume. I told them I liked the cow costume and they looked at me and said I'm not a cow, I'm a Dalmatian. That one hurts.

Alban: 1:05:07

That hurts to read, not good.

Kevin: 1:05:12

I honestly think that Halloween is tricky, no matter what. Yes, because it's. I'm not thinking about adults, where you're going to have a big foot and mouth moment, but I'm thinking about, like when the kids come to our house just to get candy, I want. I feel like guessing their costume or getting it right is how I compliment them Like you did such a good job dressing up as Spider-Man. I immediately am like oh, spider-man's here, right, they're like I'm not Spider-Man, I'm Captain America.

Jordan: 1:05:35

Then I'm like yeah, that's how I feel about when, like, kids draw you a picture and you're like, oh my gosh, it's a puppy, so cute. And they're just like that's not a puppy, it's a polar bear, and you're just like oh.

Alban: 1:05:48

Anonymous wrote in who does a podcast about working in network news and had a guest on who told a story about choosing one cameraman over another for a pretty high profile show. Cameraman over another for a pretty high profile show. So anonymous, assumed the story was generic enough to avoid any issues, published it and the person who was passed over heard it, figured it out. It was them felt. The description was very specific so everybody would know who they were and reached out. So they pulled the episodes, edited out that entire segment and re uploaded. So they have a new rule, which is a good rule no disparaging colleagues or employers in any way on the podcast.

Jordan: 1:06:27

I mean can't go wrong with that.

Alban: 1:06:29

I think in my psychology classes the rule they had was if people could identify you were talking about them, the subject could identify it. It was too specific for you to share without violating some trust, so maybe that would be a good rule for us to have for podcasting.

Kevin: 1:06:46

Yeah, is there a word for I know like, if you're the type of person that always feels like you're sick, you're a hypochondriac, right? Yeah, is there a word for somebody who always feels like you're talking about me? Paranoid, just general paranoia.

Jordan: 1:06:59

I mean, I would think so or a little bit of like narcissism, narcissistic paranoia Is that what I would put it at?

Kevin: 1:07:06

Is that what it is? I think both of those have a little bit of a negative spin on them. I mean, they could be positive too. You could be sharing a nice story about somebody and somebody just feels like it's about them. Anyway, it just ties me back to what Alban said is, I think it's very easy for people to feel like especially if they have any connection with you or the show if you're talking about something you'd be like oh, are you talking about that? One time I did that and they'd be like no, it's a totally different story, but it's easy. As you know, if there's any sort of similarities between you might think oh, that's me they're talking about Again. Oftentimes it's bad, sometimes it's not, but yeah, that could be tough If you're listening to a podcast, like if I weren't on the show one week and you guys started telling a story about something that was close to something I did.

Alban: 1:07:49

I might get a little upset about that. Well, imagine if you were listening to like pod news and they're talking and they're like, oh, somebody in the industry is going off on this rant and they don't know what they're talking about.

Jordan: 1:07:55

And you're like shut up about video.

Alban: 1:08:00

I mean that that is not unlikely.

Alban: 1:08:02

That's true, I might just have to own that one. I'll do another one. Anonymous wrote in and they said they once sent an email to the wrong person years ago, when they were younger and a bit more foolish. They were working in an office with a young woman who was employed as an apprentice. One day their boss told her to dress more conservatively and she was really upset. So, trying to make her better, anonymous emailed her and said don't pay attention. What does Claire know? All she does is talk crap all the time. She's probably just jealous of you. And I sent the email to Claire.

Alban: 1:08:37

Oh no, I had to go and confess. She said she hadn't received the email, but I didn't believe her for a second. Oh my gosh, good for you for going and confessing, doing that on the as soon as you knew what you did and you sent it to the wrong person that probably diffused it so much more, especially if that confession had an apology attached to it.

Jordan: 1:09:00

I'm having like phantom tingling sensation in my chest, like going up to my face. I once did something very similar. I had a boss who was just awesome. But yeah, she was tough as nails and I thought she was super mad at me one time and I went to a meeting with her and then I texted my husband afterward and was just like I don't know. She was a lot nicer this time, so I think she's not mad at me anymore and I accidentally sent it to her. I wanted to like die. I just wanted to like crawl under a rock and then I had to like go meet her again and she didn't say a word about it. It was super awkward.

Kevin: 1:09:39

I have one more Years back. I bumped into an acquaintance who I hadn't seen since high school and congratulated her and asked her when she was due, which resulted in me getting the evil eye because she wasn't pregnant. So I have never asked that question again.

Alban: 1:09:51

Oh, now just wait until an official announcement.

Jordan: 1:09:55

I'm with you on that. So you just say you look great.

Alban: 1:09:59

I got to say. This segment just has made my skin crawl the whole time. Yeah, I hope everyone appreciates us editing out your names. I'm surprised how many people set the exact whole name in info. It's true.

Jordan: 1:10:12

All right, so what's our sound off question for the next episode?

Alban: 1:10:15

One thing we talked about at the Podcast Standards Project this week was things that the podcast hosts could implement. So maybe the apps would implement it so that the listeners could have an improved listening experience. And the more I've thought about it, the more I feel like it needs to come from the other direction. It needs to come from the listeners. What is missing from our podcasting apps? Because if we can identify as a listener here's what I want and then we ask the apps to implement it and the apps can work with the hosts and the creators to, you know, collect all of the data and build all the infrastructure that needs to be made, then I think it can all work.

Alban: 1:10:53

So what do podcast listening apps lack right now? What would you like? One thing I would really like is pretty much a normal podcasting app with just the easy way to like, click, you know, add a bookmark or clip, and it just goes and it grabs the transcript for like the last 30 seconds and it just gives you a note, because there's a lot of times where I hear something I'm like, oh, I want to remember that, but I just want to be able to tap something or double tap on my headphones and just grab the transcript from that period. So that's something I would like. I don't know if that's prevalent in the industry, but what are the things that you wish your podcast listening app could do?

Kevin: 1:11:33

I like this idea when you're listening to a podcast for educational purposes, which I do a lot, listen to a lot of business podcasts, listen to a lot of podcasts about podcasting stuff. I'm trying to gain knowledge as I'm listening to some of these things and I would love to have a quick action button in there. But like I like that, or I want to remember that, or do that ding, ding, ding, ding, ding and maybe, as I listened to an hour long episode, I have four or five of these and then I would like it to utilize the transcript or something and then send me like an email that summarized the context around those points and sort of tied them together. Maybe it even creates like a super cut of you know 45 second or one minute podcast episode that I could always I could listen back to after a period of time.

Alban: 1:12:11

All right. Well, now that I'm just dreaming, let me build on this even more. Yeah, here we go. I want to just be able to talk back to my podcast player and say, remember that. And even add like a little bit of a note. And now it transcribes the audio and it figures out what I just listened to and it saves a little note for me and so I've got it for that podcast.

Kevin: 1:12:34

Right. If it can do this, it has to do it privately. This is driving me crazy. I use X a little bit and now it's like anytime there's an interesting thought or thread or something that might have more context below it, everyone's. This is driving me crazy. I use X a little bit and now it's like anytime there's an interesting thought or thread or something that might have more context below it, everyone's writing at Grok do this stuff for me, and it's doing stuff in the thread of the tweet.

Jordan: 1:12:50

Oh, I know it's like yeah, it's public, it's so weird.

Alban: 1:12:53

It's so annoying. This is like Venmo, where something that never should have been public. They were like, let's add a social feature here. And they were like what if you could just share? Like what you were sending money to people for? And I remember there was an account. All they did was they just scraped public Venmo payments and they were like here's all the people who are sending money to their drug dealer for drugs and that's what's written in the Venmo receipt. Like why is this public to begin with?

Jordan: 1:13:20

One thing that I've really liked that hasn't been adopted is the like cross platform comments. However, it'd be super cool if it also tied into your idea of pulling the clips with, like a little transcript. It'd be super cool to pull a clip and then write a comment about that clip and then have people like start a discussion on that. That'd be so sweet.

Alban: 1:13:40

Yeah, I would love comments. Yeah, I'm not sold on cross platform comments.

Jordan: 1:13:46

Why not?

Alban: 1:13:47

The more I think about it. I'm like, if anybody ever gets enough comments on an episode that it's like hit some critical mass, that it's interesting, they're never going to send those comments out to the world. They're just going to say keep those for us. You know, youtube doesn't allow their comments to go out via API.

Alban: 1:14:07

Spotify is not going to let their comments go out via API, because they realize the comments are the content that people really enjoy. For a lot of stuff, they scroll down the funny jokes, and so I don't see the podcast apps. You know sharing this content freely between each other, so I would like to see somebody crack comments. The only one that's ever really given this a good go was GoodPods, and I feel like they never got enough market share to get a ton of engagement on episodes. But it would be really fun if Apple Podcasts had comments. I feel like that would end up being a pretty great place to have discussions around a podcast.

Jordan: 1:14:46

All right. So what was the question?

Alban: 1:14:48

again, Alban, we've discussed it, so we've given a few answers real quick. But, as a podcast listener, what would you like your favorite app to implement? Maybe tell us what app you're on and what you would like to see them make, and then maybe we can build on ideas for this in the next episode. What would this like? Perfect podcast player? What would it have already built in?

Jordan: 1:15:11

Oh, I can't wait for this. I want to hear, like some moonshot ideas. It's going to be great. All right, so to have your response feature on next episode, go ahead and tap the Texas show link in the show notes or in the chapter marker and let us know what you think. So until next time, keep podcasting. Did you hear that they brought the dire wolf back from extinction?

Alban: 1:15:39

So the dire wolf was real. I didn't realize that. What I thought it was just something that Georgia RR Martin put into the Game of Thrones books.

Jordan: 1:15:43

So maybe this means like dragons were real at one point too. I don't know, maybe he's onto something.

Alban: 1:15:48

So how are dire wolves different Jordan?

Jordan: 1:15:51

So dire wolves. I mean they're sizable. It's hard because I've only ever seen, like in museums, like their jawbones compared to a regular wolf it's like they're two to three times larger than an actual wolf. They're big, big boys. It's so cool that science has gotten us to a point where we can actually bring species back from extinction.

Alban: 1:16:14

The funniest thing I saw was that Jurassic World retweeted the story and say we don't see any problem with this. No way it goes wrong. Are you serious?

Kevin: 1:16:25

Right, they're all, it's fine. They're all females they can't breathe.

Jordan: 1:16:32

Oh, I loved the nod to Roman mythology, though we had Romulus and Remus as the names.

Alban: 1:16:38

I like that.

Jordan: 1:16:38

Oh so good. I don't know, I kind of geeked out on this a little bit. I mean very excited. I watched like a two-part documentary series about this guy in like South Korea that is working to bring back the mammoth from extinction, and so it's him trying to find the missing DNA blocks of the mammoth. So they've just been working on this forever and so you know, whenever they find like a tusk frozen in Siberia, and Russia yeah, they'll like bring it in and they'll like try to find these missing building blocks and I think they're like really close.

Jordan: 1:17:12

but it's one of those things like when you have 98 pieces of the puzzle, if you're missing the 99th, you can't build a woolly mammoth.

Alban: 1:17:19

It's exactly like that when you have 99 of a hundred piece puzzle, you can't build a woolly mammoth. It's exactly like that when you have 99 of a hundred piece puzzle, you can't build a woolly mammoth. You can't even have a hundred pieces of a puzzle either. I think that the dire wolf they did the Jurassic Park type thing too, where they don't have all of the DNA. They used a lot of the gray wolf DNA.

Alban: 1:17:36

So it's not like genetically full dire wolf. I think that they mapped on pretty close to the gray wolf with the pieces of the dire wolf they could get.

Kevin: 1:17:44

But I heard it was because they determined that those parts of the DNA were, like, genetically equivalent. They're exactly the same, so it didn't matter. Oh yeah, so I'm pretty sure these are pretty much dire wolves. Which brings me to a whole series of questions. Question one, question one Do we know at all the temperament of the dire wolf? Oh, we're about to find out. They're really docile, it seems like. Who's the person who's going to be like sure, I will take care of these two dire wolves, I'll give them their daily food, I mean we got Tiger King Joe.

Jordan: 1:18:16

I'm sure he'll take them in.

Kevin: 1:18:19

I just we don't know, Like we don't know anything.

Alban: 1:18:22

All right. So let me ask are you guys in favor or not in favor of trying to bring back the dinosaurs? If we ever have the technology, it's good to go. And Universal Studios is like we want to open a Jurassic Park. Do you say, go for it and we're coming, or you're on the picket lines. I think it depends on what species they're wanting to bring back t-rex is the main attraction I mean did you miss the movie?

Jordan: 1:18:48

well, the t-rex was not. He was a scavenger. He wasn't actually like a predator right, so safer bet with that velociraptor.

Alban: 1:18:56

Utah raptor is in the t-rex was a massive predator.

Kevin: 1:19:00

The t-rex is not a scavenger yeah, huh no, yes, scavenger no, t-rex is little.

Jordan: 1:19:08

His little like baby arms were not conducive to like attacking prey. It was more just for like clawing at a carcass that had already been killed jordan.

Alban: 1:19:16

I'm not sure if you saw the documentary, but it was flipping cars and stuff.

Jordan: 1:19:26

Not a feather in sight.

Kevin: 1:19:29

I think that's my main concern is that we have a lot of theories based upon old bones and where we found the bones and other bones that were found around them, but we have really no idea what these animals were like.

Jordan: 1:19:42

Yeah, like I wouldn't want to bring back the Megalodon, I wouldn't want to bring back any of the raptors. No, thank you.

Alban: 1:19:49

I'm 100% in favor of this.

Jordan: 1:19:51

Are you really?

Alban: 1:19:52

I mean it's pretty rare that animals break out of a zoo and like go on a rampage.

Jordan: 1:19:57

But when it happens like it's not good and it's not good and it's, it's happened.

Alban: 1:20:01

Yeah, but it's like a. You know, that's what happens.

Kevin: 1:20:04

All right, here's a question, and I think it tells me a lot about who you are based on how you answer it. Oh, no. In your opinion, what is the greatest threat to humanity, given these three options? Number one nuclear annihilation. Number two we bring back dinosaurs and somehow they cut loose and kill us all. Or number three, ai and the machines rise up and take us all out. Which one is most likely?

Alban: 1:20:27

AI nuclear war.

Kevin: 1:20:29

No, AI and nuclear war are not the same. Those are two different options.

Alban: 1:20:31

I know that's my order AI 100%, most dangerous Nuclear war number two. And then like 700 other things, including like choking on the top of a coke can or something everyone at the same time that gave me the weirdest mental picture like what? Like the pop top. I'm like like what's the dumbest thing? I?

Kevin: 1:20:54

could do like. That's how humanity goes out is we all choke on coke cans at the same time?

Alban: 1:20:59

oh, oh man, you choke on a paper clip or something I don't know, like something really dumb, and then beyond that is some sort of wild animal attack. There's no, you're not going to die from a wild animal.

Kevin: 1:21:09

No, but in this scenario we have already cloned dinosaurs, so the dinosaurs are back. So what are the greatest threats? Humans release nukes, ai machines rise up and kill us all, terminator style or Jurassic Park.

Jordan: 1:21:21

I would say AI being malevolent and like outsmarting us and then deploying the nukes. That scares me. If AI decides that it's going to be nice because I say please and thank you and chat GBT and I'm not in danger, I'm going to say nukes, thousand percent.

Alban: 1:21:39

What about if the AI gets out and uses the dinosaurs?

Kevin: 1:21:42

That's what I think. I think the AI is going to use the dinosaurs.

Jordan: 1:21:47

Cut the dinosaur codes.

Kevin: 1:21:48

What's your vote, kevin? I think that I'm probably more nervous about humans using nukes to kill other humans before I'd be worried about the dinosaurs getting us. Yeah, only because I think like dinosaurs would be dangerous for sure if they make it to the mainland, but I still think we have enough weapons to take them down. They're going to get a few good people, but I think ultimately we win that battle. If the machines rise up against us, we're in trouble, and if other humans decide to start releasing nukes, we're in trouble. So and I think the likelihood of humans doing something stupid is 100%, is a lot higher than the machines getting to the point where we can't rein them back in the short term anyway, Okay.

Jordan: 1:22:29

So Emmy asked me a question yesterday. She said well, what animal would you want them to bring back from extinction? I was like, ooh, that's a really good question.

Kevin: 1:22:39

What'd you go with Unicorn the dragon? I actually went with the dodo bird because I think they're so cute.

Jordan: 1:22:41

I was like, ooh, that's a really good question. What'd you go with Unicorn the dragon? I actually went with the dodo bird because I think they're so cute and harmless and it would be so cute to have dodos running around and they look like they're quite large.

Kevin: 1:22:52

I like that part of your criteria is how large it is. You don't want to bring back a small thing.

Jordan: 1:22:59

Yeah, I just I want something large and dopey around. I want to bring large, dopey things back.

Kevin: 1:23:02

And the husband doesn't fill that gap in your life Not quite, I would go with thylacine, like the Tasmanian tiger.

Jordan: 1:23:11

Yeah.

Alban: 1:23:12

They're not been extinct for all that long like 70 years ago or something and they look kind of cool because we've got pictures of them and yeah, it's kind of a bummer that we drove them to extinction. So let's bring some back.

Jordan: 1:23:26

Yeah, kevin, what about you?

Kevin: 1:23:28

I don't know. Give me some options.

Jordan: 1:23:30

Got saber tooth cat.

Kevin: 1:23:31

Yeah, I thought about that already. I felt like I don't know what it's contributing to society.

Jordan: 1:23:36

Oh, there's a North American cheetah that's extinct.

Alban: 1:23:40

I mean, there's that thing that's like half a zebra, half a mule, like on the front, half it's a zebra. Okay, and half a mule, so it's like it just looks like a horse that, like you, put on a zebra head.

Kevin: 1:23:54

Not sure I'm going to go all my marbles in on that guy. Hold on.

Jordan: 1:23:59

Let's see here Woolly mammoth. Oh man, why did see here woolly mammoth?

Kevin: 1:24:05

oh man, why did I say woolly mammoth? Those are the best. That'd be so cool. Is there any animal that existed that used to fly around but was big enough for me to ride on?

Kevin: 1:24:10

yeah pterodactyl that was friendly, so I could domesticate this animal that I could mothman, throw a saddle on and fly over to Alban's house, because that's what we need. Forget the self-driving cars, we just need to bring back an animal. I want the um, I want the thing from the never-ending story the large dog that could fly sebastian around what was his name? Falcor yeah, falcor, yeah, that's what I want to bring back yeah, I think a woolly mammoth dodo.

Jordan: 1:24:37

I agree with Alban, the phylocene would be super cool and falcor and falcor.