Speaker 0: Well, thank you very much, and we're thrilled to be joined by one of the most successful business leaders and people anywhere in the country. Whether it's technology, no matter what business you're talking about, there's really nobody quite like him. Michael Dell, very much of a legend who's here with his really exciting announcement. It's, so amazing.

Speaker 1: When I was a young boy, there wasn't any Internet. There wasn't any World Wide Web. There wasn't any egghead sending you texts saying those are the same thing. You don't have to say Internet and World Wide Web. They're the same thing.

There weren't any video games when I was a boy. Well, there was Pac Man. That was a game, I guess. And Asteroids, Wizard of War, Scrambled. Defender was a hell of a lot of fun.

Those were what we called video games. Did I say we didn't have video games? Because that would have been a mistake. But there is one thing you have now that we didn't have when I was a boy that I wish we did.

Speaker 2: Like Dell's World. Yeah. That's me. Hey. You guys still subscribed?

Hey. Appreciate it. So, yeah, it's been an interesting year so far for sure. Not as interesting as last year, but still the same. So I guess, I got two major topics tonight.

One being that there's there's something going on in technology, and I and I don't mean, you know, computer processors and hard drives and that kind of thing. But a lot of stuff in, you know, just basically, you know, how tech works and, you know, what tech is used for, and, you know, just my normal rant. And, plus, you know, I got some personal updates. Yeah. That's always fun.

But, yeah, it's true. You know, life goes on. Life is interesting. Of course, the last time I talked to you in February, I was complaining about customer service. Well, yeah, that that hasn't really changed.

Speaker 1: You know, a lot of

Speaker 2: customer service stuff isn't, isn't that great. But, you know, let's get back to the personal updates. I mean, there's a lot to tell, and there's not a lot to tell. Unfortunately, I've been to now three funerals in the last six months, or two. I'm about to go to another one in in, Detroit this weekend, but it's neither here nor there.

Of course, you know, my, founder of Blueberry, Todd Cochran, he passed away, late, you know, last late summer, early fall, you know, which you guys know all about or might know all about or don't know all about. I don't know, but it just seems recent enough to include. And then my wife's best friend, Mary, down in Grand Haven passed away. And that was kind of a shocker because she's younger than us. And but, yeah, she was not in good shape and finally succumbed to to, lung problems mainly.

But, again, you know, that's it's one of those things, but, man, it's just, you know, wow. Well, you know, somebody younger than you passes away like that. It's, it's a little bit of a shocker. Plus, of course, like I said, my wife's best friend or one of her best friends. She has several best friends, but, I think Mary was probably right up there at the top of the list.

And so that was a little rough. Kathy spent most of February and March, going back and forth downstate and, you know, helping the family out and and all that. And then, a couple weeks ago, we had an 80 birthday party for my uncle, Bill Busby. He was instrumental in starting Motorola Semiconductors back in the day. And, anyway, we had his 80 birthday out at my mom's house.

He was doing pretty good. Monday morning, he passed away, in his sleep or soon after waking up or something. I, you know, I guess I don't know all the details, but, he was 88 years old and, had a really good run. So you know, he was in really good shape, you know, up until towards the last year. He had a little, cancer issues.

So and, you know, was fighting it, I guess, okay or, you know, I don't know. I guess the treatments really took some oomph out of him. But, yeah, last summer, he helped me move a couple campers, rode with me in the truck and, you know, helped out and, you know, had a nice conversation. So I was glad to have that, that going on. He was also a US Air Force veteran, crew chief on the, b 57, I wanna say, or b 58.

Might be the b 58. I don't remember. One of the one of the fast bombers, from, you know, fifty, sixties. And, anyway, he passed away, so we're going down, to the Detroit area for for a funeral on Saturday. And, ironically, my 98 soon to be 99 year old grandmother's riding with me, so that'll be interesting.

And as far as the the health stuff goes, I, about a little over a week ago, developed a torn retina in my right eye and had to go in for emergency surgery to repair that. So, it it's been a bit of a recovery because the first week I had to be face down. You know, they put a bubble in your eye and you gotta keep your face down to, to hold everything in place while it heals. But, I just had my second post surgery checkup today, and everything's looking good. And I can, function more or less normally.

The vision in that eye isn't quite up to par, again, because they put an oil bubble in there. So that's a little weird. It kinda looks like, you know, when people, blur their zoom background on camera, well, that's what I see in the foreground as well with that eye. But, twenty twenty in the other eye, so we're we're highly functional. And he tells me once that, oil bubbles out of there, vision should clear up just fine.

So that also has me grounded for probably the next six weeks or so, which I guess is alright. It's cheaper not to fly than it is to fly, and I don't have anywhere to go in an airliner. So that's that's a thing. Sorry. I had to hit the cough button there.

Kinda not fighting off. I think I'm just kinda having lingering crud because all, over the last month or so, I've had kind of a low level, cold going on. Whatever that bug was is, taking its time leaving. But, I don't know. A couple weeks before, I don't know.

I guess the middle of last month went down to Arlington, Texas and participated in the military creator con. That was quite, quite a nice outfit. You know, couple 300, I guess, 400 people came to that, all veterans or active military or, you know, military spouses, you know, all talking about, you know, creating YouTubes and and podcasts and authoring books and starting businesses. And, yeah, it was, it was quite nice, and I knew a lot more people there than I thought I would when I went. Jamie Jay, and Christopher Lochhead, Gordon Firemark.

He's the podcast lawyer. He was there. Of course, the creators of military creator con, and I'm drawing a blank on the name the names. But, anyway, it was, it was definitely a fun event. It was one of those events, though, that had something scheduled from eight in the morning till eleven at night, all three days.

And so it was quite busy. Didn't get a lot of chance to, do anything other than event related stuff, but, it was all good. And yeah. So that was that was fun. I've since got gotten promoted at, Blueberry.

I'm now the VP of operations, so I kinda oversee the, the teams, working together and and do a lot of the day to day stuff. Also, you know, external external industry connections and and all the stuff. A lot of the stuff that Todd did as CEO, but without the title. So that's okay. You know, our CEO now is, or one of our other cofounders, Barry.

He's he's doing pretty good at that. Trying to keep the, cats all herded up. So we're we're doing okay over at Blueberry. That is good. So, yeah.

Not, not complaining at all. It's a it's a it's a bit more work, a bit more responsibility, and definitely feel a lot more hands on now, than than in the past. So if you are a podcaster and and want to start a podcast, move a podcast, whatever, get a hold of me, and, we'll make it happen. We've got all the all the tools you need over there. I'll make this a commercial for my employee or employer, but, hey, it's all part of it.

And, of course, I use Blueberry hosting for this show and PowerPress plug in and, you know, all the stuff. So and and speaking of technology, you know, I I had a whole thing I spun up, you know, about, you know, doing an episode, all about, you know, the different scams out there and all that. But, you know, I think it's a bigger problem than that. Of course, there's what a lot of people call AI slop out there, and AI is really, really, really good at what it's really, really good at, but it's not good at everything. And, also, you know, AI created content.

I don't know if you watch a lot of YouTube. I tend to watch a lot of YouTube. I consider that kind of my main TV. I don't really watch a whole lot of regular mainstream TV or streaming, streaming TV or or anything like that. You know, I watch a few things, obviously.

Star Trek, kind of, like, you know, having all those available on Paramount. And and, you know, my wife and I usually pick some sort of series to watch or rewatch on Netflix or something like that. Currently in the middle of watching The Blacklist. That's a interesting show. A little gory.

Kinda surprised it was on NBC, but, hey. You know, it's a it's a it's a pretty compelling show. But, you know, I tend to avoid things that have a lot of advertising if I can. Yeah. You know, you still get advertising, you know, even on YouTube channels.

I pay YouTube so I don't have to watch all the the, poorly injected ads that, they throw in there at exactly the wrong time. But, you know, there's a lot of ads that are done by the creators. That's fine with me. But, you know, when you're flipping through YouTube, you could get on to oh, this looks interesting, and you hits, you know, hit the button to play it. And you you get what's obviously an AI narrated slideshow is is what I equate it to, or maybe they might have real video, something like that.

And,

Speaker 1: you know, it's not that

Speaker 2: I don't wanna watch it. Some of it's really compelling. Well, here's my I I wouldn't call it a secret because I talk about it, but there's definitely a lot of, or def how should I say it? I I definitely like one one type of AI content that I actually enjoy. It's kind of my my dirty pleasure, but I watch or listen to mostly even though it is a YouTube video.

AOA Karen stories. I know that sounds crazy, but, yeah, they're oddly compelling, so I do watch it. But I know full well it's 100% AI, and that's fine. But I did, just now or not just now, just tonight, see an article over at MacRumors that YouTube will now automatically label AI videos even when creators don't. So apparently, and I haven't seen this yet, but in YouTube, it's gonna be, marked as an AI creation.

So I I applaud them for that because I'm gonna guess that the vast majority, of views on YouTube are going to switch to the non AI stuff. You know? I I know I'm gonna I I'm not gonna totally avoid it because some of it is actually pretty good. But if I have a a video on sub on a subject I want to watch or listen to on YouTube, and there's two. One of them is AI generated, and one of them isn't.

I'm probably gonna lean towards the non AI generated one. And that kind of brings me to podcasting, in general as well. There are a lot of AI voiced podcasts. And let's let's let's get one thing off the table here. Yes.

I know podcast can be video. That is a, that's just true. That's okay. It's been that way since the beginning. But just having a YouTube channel does not necessarily constitute a podcast.

A podcast is a distribution method and not necessarily a genre. So we'll just get that off the table. When I talk when I say the word podcast, I mean generally audio. But there's a, you know, a lot of AI generated audio podcasts, and some of them are really quite clever. You know, I I I get it.

I get why they wanna do it. But there's a a company out there called Inception PointAI. I believe that's what they're called, and they are generating an enormous amount of AI generated content on podcasts. And they were at Spreaker, and then they moved now to, well, Spotify, but it's Megaphone, which is owned by Spotify as their hosting platform. And and they've taken out the monetization so far, I I guess.

I haven't really listened to any of them, but, you know, they're actually quite good to a point. But as AI is good at doing, they hallucinate. And a lot of the information that is put out by it is factually untrue or, you know, something like that. These AI Karen stories that I like on YouTube, which, like I said, my dirty pleasure, whatever. I know they're AI.

I know they suck, but they're mostly fiction, and they're not reported to be true stories. Whereas, some of these other podcasts out there are reported to be true stories, true shows. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that except for just the sheer volume of it and they're not necessarily saying that these are AI generated. Now there's sure telltale signs, not nearly as many as there once was, you know, to tell it it's AI, but, you know, and they're like I said, they're quite good. The quality is good.

The voices are good. The inflection they sound pretty darn close to human. So, yeah. So that you know, that's what's kind of going on in, you know, with AI and podcasting. And, again, you know, I use a little AI here and there.

I you know, my artwork is somewhat AI generated, although I did a lot of, tweaking to it. I do a lot of tweaking to it, so it's not a 100% AI generated thing. I don't use any AI voices except for the one episode I did just to try it. A couple years ago, I did one episode that was all AI. It was a clone of my voice, and, it it just didn't sound quite right.

And, you know, AI is getting better all the time and, you know, pretty soon we may not be able to tell very well. But, you know, I could sort of tell. And, you know, there's some telltale things that AI does when it's writing, you know, because, you know, how they do this. They write a script and then use AI to write the script and then they use an AI voice to read the script. And so the writing sort of sticks out.

You know, they always like to say something like, not only was it this, it's that too. Or not only was it this, it's that too. Or in conclusion, you know, there's some telltale things you can hear in the in the script that tells you that it's AI. You know, you can hear by my little broken delivery here that it's just me sitting at the desk talking into a microphone. There's no hey.

Excuse me. No AI, involved with this part. The transcript, of course, will be AI generated, but it just takes what I said and types it. And that's what it's good at. It's not necessarily good at generating that stuff.

And I always like to say never ask the AI its opinion. You know, it's it's just weird. It's just weird. But, and that goes along with the scam stuff. Used to be it was really easy to tell a scam email because, generally, it was somebody that English wasn't the first language or their first language.

So they would, you know, misspell things, use weird grammar, all that. Well, with now these large language models, that's exactly what they do right is they, you know, they they clean up the, you know, clean up the the grammar, the pronunciations to a point. Some of the pronunciations are kinda wacko. But if you type it out a certain way, they'll say it the right way. So, you know, that's not always the case, but, you know, it's with with the voices.

But, you know, like I say, you get a spam email nowadays. It's really hard to tell, you know, by the broken English that it's a scam. Of course, you know, if they're asking you to pay something immediately or something bad will happen, it's a scam hang up. If they're asking you to pay them in iTunes gift cards or any gift cards, it's a scam. They're asking you to send crypto, it's a scam.

I hate to say it. There's nothing particularly wrong with crypto, but, that is one of the ways the scammers get people. And it's too bad because, you know, it is kind of a an interesting technology and interesting way to move money for sure. So, yeah, just, you gotta watch the the scams. And and, you know, getting back to the ad stuff, you know, you watch YouTube.

If you're not a member, you don't you're not paying YouTube for YouTube premium. You know, they'll cut you right off at mid sentence. You know, cut off the video in mid sentence to play you an irrelevant ad or sometimes irrelevant ad, but still, you know, it's like, really? I just wanted to hear the rest of that guy's sentence. And, you know, it's just maddening.

Watching regular TV, which I do periodically, the ads on TV have gone down in value a lot. You know, it used to be you watch your local TV station, and it was ads for something you might be interested in, you know, the local lumber yard, the car dealer, the the this or the that. But now, at least here in Michigan, and I I guess that probably is a regional thing, but at least here in Michigan, it's all the online gambling stuff. And, oh my gosh, you know, BetMGM and, you know, just all the different online casinos, are just advertising the hell out of, local TV. I guess it must work because they're doing they keep doing it, but, you know, I I've never once did any online gambling, and I never once will do online gambling.

And then social media. Oh my gosh. You know, the the amount of AI on Facebook, and not that it's all bad. Again, you know, I'm not ditching on AI because it's really good at what it's good at. But now they have a thing like in Facebook groups, which is probably the most useful thing on Facebook is the Facebook groups.

You know, you join a group about, you know, whatever niche you're interested in, and you you can get some information there and discuss things and ask questions and all that. And that is all fine and dandy, but now they have these AI users that go in there and try to start conversations. And it's so obvious that either they're trying to stir up crap or, or just get conversations going, which is not a bad thing, but some of it is just inane. It's insane. It's crazy.

It's nuts. Oh my gosh. You know, I I follow a couple of carnivore Facebook groups and, or flying Facebook groups, you know, airplane stuff. And, you know, if you're on a group that's, you know, not very high volume, meaning there's not a lot of posts there, sometimes an AI agent will pop in and ask a question or say something controversial. You know?

And especially with the carnivore stuff because, you know, carnivore people are just about as bad as the vegans. Like I said, no no shade on either, but, they they definitely take their way of eating as the only way and how dare you. But, you know, somebody goes in there and asks if, you know, pure maple syrup is is acceptable on carnivore. No. It's all sugar.

You know, that's obvious. But these AI's don't really know that or that maybe they do and just wanna stir up crap. So I don't know. It's, it's pretty interesting. Or they'll they'll have AI video shorts.

Facebook's just full of these AI videos that are airplanes doing impossible things, and and it looks pretty damned realistic until you realize, yeah, there's no way that airplane did that. You know, just no way. And and then, you know, the the other one that really bugs me on Facebook. Okay. I'm on my soapbox.

One that bugs me on Facebook is they have this thing called threads that, competes basically with x, Twitter. And they'll post something on your timeline on Facebook that, you know, it's just a blurb, and it says hit read more. You read more. It says read more on threads and tries to get you to sign up for threads. I don't need any more social media.

I don't even like the social media I'm on. I'm, you know, I'm on it for specific things. You know? Like, Facebook. I'm on it for the groups that I deal with and and and, you know, a little bit of work stuff.

I'm on x a little bit. Like I said, don't use use that for a whole lot, but it is kind of an interesting place to look up news, especially something that's actively happening. But I'm not gonna get on Instagram. I'm not gonna get on threads. I'm definitely not gonna get on blue sky, which is another Twitter competitor.

Not gonna get on truth social. That's another Twitter competitor. You know, I I I've got all the social media I want. I I have to be on LinkedIn professionally, so I am on LinkedIn. Not particularly fond of that either because that is a mostly spam generator.

And I'm on Reddit a bit, but Reddit is kind of the best of Facebook groups, but more just on the web, which is I don't consider that really social media and, you know, you could find some interesting stuff on there. It's worth doomscrolling, but I've often said I am gonna switch to a flip phone when I retire. You know, if you wanna call me, call me. If you wanna text me, I I may read it on my flip phone, but I'm definitely not gonna get into a conversation with you. And don't think of texts as real time.

Texts are like emails. I'll get to it when I get to it. If you really need something in real time, dial the number and talk to me. And if I don't answer you, leave a voice mail, and I will call you back. Don't just call over and over and over and over again.

You know? I guess I'm gonna be a tech curmudgeon. You know? I'm Gen x. I started before all this tech, and, you know, I think I wanna go back to that at some point.

Although, I always listen to podcasts and probably watch YouTube or whatever replaces it in the future, you know, as long as it's indie creators. You know, that's the thing with podcasting. It's definitely sort of I don't know if it's bifurcating, but they're you know, the the beauty of podcasting has always been that anybody and everybody can do it. And it's getting easier and easier and easier and easier to do. You know, there's, you know, myriad of hosting companies out there that'll help you generate an RSS feed and get you distributed everywhere.

Of course, I like Blueberry, but, you know, there's a bunch of them that do that. And that's all that's required is generate an RSS feed, record something, you know, sit down talking to the microphone. And we read a study, or I don't know if it's a study, but a report by, Tom Webster from Sounds Profitable formerly from, oh, what's the company? Anyway, a research company that he worked at for years and then now he's, you know, got got a thing called Sounds Profitable, which is kind of another sort of research and monetization thing. And he was saying that, you know, a lot of people look to podcasting for authentic sounding audio, you know, information.

You know, the the indie talking into the microphone, you know, I'm sitting in a shed in my backyard. Yes. I have some fancy equipment and all that, but that's not even necessary either. You know, I'm just a gearhead, so I like it. But the thing is that the more podcasts that sound like broadcast and you know the the sound.

Hey. We're here

Speaker 1: at the White House today. You know, where they're just broadcasting at you. Well, you know, I'm talking.

Speaker 2: Okay? And, casting at you. Well, you know, I'm talking. Okay? And, you know, I tell you anytime you want, you can email me, mike@mikedell.com, and talk back to me.

Send me a file or or whatever, and, you know, we can have a conversation. I'm not sitting here trying to make a broadcast quality thing. It's just not what it is. You know, this is, you know, some dude sitting in a shed in his backyard just talking into a microphone. You know?

I don't expect to set the world on fire with it. You know, I'm not trying to get advertisers to, pay me a gazillion dollars to talk into the microphone. Now that would be good. And if that ever happened, I wouldn't do it here, but I'd do it wherever they wanted me to do it. Whatever.

Sure. You know, write me the check. But it's not the same thing, and I think that's the thing in podcasting. There are professional level shows. Not saying they're better.

They're more broadcasty. In fact, a lot of people that for were formally in broadcasting, which, you know, radio is dying. You know, it's a dying art form. I I kinda hate to see it because, you know, radio has its place and it's and it's pretty awesome, but, you know, some of it is just really, you know, you you go in any city and flip through the FM dial, and there's, you know, the same 20 or 30 formats that sound exactly the same as the 20 or 30 format formats in your city. And there's really not a lot of differentiation between them now.

In every city or at least every broadcast area. There there are a couple of, indie sort of radio stations. You know, we we have a good example of it here in in Michigan. You know, we've got a a group of radio stations owned by a family and, you know, they have a rock station. They have a talk station.

They have an oldies station and and a country station, and they, you know, they're they are locally generated radio. They might be in syndication for some of the talk station, of course, is an indicate is in syndication for part of the day, but they do have local locally generated programming. Their morning shows on, you know, on all the stations, their morning shows have live people in the studio from, you know, whatever till 10:00 in the morning or whatever. And and, you know, there's some personality there where there's not in some of the, you know, some of the other stations. You know?

There might not even be anybody in town that works for that radio station. It's just, you know, plugged into the satellite and just another outlet for Bob FM or whatever they call it. You know? We have one here called Bob FM, and it's just a format. But, you know, podcasting is kind of going that way.

You know? A lot of lot of podcasts, you know, have a team of 30 people working on production for this thing, and it's highly produced wall of sound, sound design. And, you know, they read the credits at the end of the podcast, and it's, you know, it's just a myriad of people. And, again, nothing wrong with that. The water's warm.

Come on in. Make a podcast. But I can get just as distributed as the one with a team of 30 with my team of one. And that's the beauty of podcasting, and I think we're losing that somewhat. Now, again, there's probably just about as many indie podcasters out there that are doing something similar to what I'm doing or maybe stepping it up a bit because I'm not consistent as you know.

But for the most part, you know, there's not a whole lot of difference in distribution. So my show is available right beside Joe Rogan. Yeah. More people are gonna listen to Joe Rogan, of course. But my show's there.

And, you know, if I was a little more consistent and and promoted it a bit, maybe I'd, you know, gain some more audience. That's great. But, you know, that's not my goal here. My goal here is to have a place where I can jump on the microphone and and talk for however long about whatever I want. And, you know, it doesn't cost me that much.

You know, and that's, I think, the beauty of independent podcasting. You know? Even if you get 20 listeners, well, you know, if you have, you know, a room with 20 people in it, does that seem like a small amount? That would keep you pretty busy if you had to entertain them, for an hour or whatever, however long your show is. So, you know, there's there's room for all of us, and that's the beauty of it.

But I I don't want people to think now that, oh, well, you know, if I don't get 5,000 listeners an episode, you know, what's the use of doing it? You know? Or you're not gonna quit your job. The the most heartbreaking thing I can hear on the phone when somebody calls Blueberries, hey. I I just got laid off from my my job, so I wanna start a podcast to make money.

It doesn't happen that way unless you're already famous for something. You know, podcasting takes some time. You know, if you really work at it and, you know, do all the right things, which, obviously, I don't. But if you do all the right things, yeah, maybe you can make a few bucks. But you're not gonna quit your day job or replace a day job with a podcast tomorrow.

You could get started on it tomorrow, but I would be making some other plans to make some money for a while because that's just generally not gonna happen. And you have to have three things to succeed in podcasting. You have to have a a you have to be consistent. That's one thing. You have to yeah.

I don't know. Be authentic, I guess, would be the best way to put it. I mean and on top of that, your information has to be either interesting or informative or compelling in some way. You know, a friend of mine, Dave Jackson, the other day on a webinar, he says he says, you know, everybody tells you you gotta be consistent and you, you know, and and you've gotta be oh, I forget what he said. Jeez.

See? Brain farts. You know what? I'm gonna leave that in there. I'm not gonna edit because, hey, this is authentic.

We're just having a conversation here. I just happen to be the only one talking, which sometimes happens in real two way communications, which I'm working on. I'm working on. But, you know, he he says I could scream into the microphone for five minutes and then put it out every Tuesday at four, but who's gonna listen to it because it's not good? So, you know, there's there's three elements to that.

The technology, I I would say, you know, with a tiny bit of learning, you can tackle the technology even if you're not very technically advanced. And that's the other thing. It's not required to be technically advanced anymore. It used to be. Everybody when I started twenty one years ago, everybody had to be a geek, and that's everybody involved.

Everybody that listened, every anybody that created a podcast had to be a geek or hire a geek. So and that's not necessarily the case anymore. You know, learn a little bit about audio production, which it's not super hard, you know, make it not sound bad, Compress it to an m p three and upload it to a podcasting host or your WordPress website or some way to get it into an RSS feed. Don't do stupid stuff by naming the files all the same. Keep get a piece of artwork.

You can go on Fiverr and for 10 or $15, have somebody design you some cover art and, voila. You're there. You know? Not not really all that hard to do. Whereas, you know, if you wanted to start a radio station, that, takes years.

You know, your construction permit, you gotta buy a ridiculous amount of equipment, you know, towers and transmitters and studio equipment and studio building and somebody go out and sell ads for you and and, you know, some ridiculous electric bill in two or three spots depending on how your transmitter and your studio work. You know, plus you probably gotta bribe a bunch of FCC people to approve the license. So, you know, it just takes a ton of money. With podcasting, you you go to go to Best Buy, buy a $50 microphone, plug it into your computer that you already have, download some free software, record, and then, you know, get a hosting plan. You know, a Blueberry, $15 will get you on the air.

And, you know, you know, there's there's other places to do it as well. Like I said, I'm not not here to make a commercial for Blueberry, but it's not particularly hard anymore. And, you know, the hard part is get it out there because, you know, there are, in theory, four plus million podcasts out there. Now you're really only competing with about a half a million realistically, and you're not competing with anybody that is you. That's the other thing.

People come to podcasts and listen to podcasts because of the person almost more than the subject matter. And and I can think of a couple of examples of that. I actually listen to a couple of podcasts about about subjects that I don't really care all that much about. I just like the host. They have a lot of other information and and, you know, and I am learning about that subject matter, but it's, you know, they're they're just a compelling person and they're authentic and they give good information or at least what I think is good information.

That's the other thing. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever believe anything you see, hear, or read, and that could be on the Internet, on TV, anywhere unless you see something with your own two eyeballs. In my case, one eyeball at this point just because the other one's still healing. But you know unless you see it personally or hear it personally without technology, you can't believe it because everything is manipulated. And I go into a whole tirade about the news business, but I won't.

That's not what this, this episode is all about anyway. So I know I was all over the place. Been a while since I podcasted blah blah blah. I say said every time, but, you know, I'm compelled to to talk into the microphone. I've got one, and I can do it.

And we are gonna be restarting the podcast insider show. We're kind of revamping that as well. You know, for quite a while, we were just doing generic podcast topics and, you know, just cranking them out every week, and and it was just getting redundant. So we're reformatting that into more conversational, kinda what I'm doing here, but with, you know, it's gonna be two or three of us at a time doing that and talking about, you know, some thing going on in the industry or, you know, some trend. You know, there's a trend towards video right now.

You know, what people don't understand is videos always been part of podcasting. But now it's getting a little more front and center, and that's fine. But don't feel like you have to do video. Video is so much more difficult. You know, video yeah.

I mean, sure. You can hold your iPhone up in front of your face and do shorts and all that. That's easy. But, you know, doing long form videos, if I was doing this in video, I'd have to worry about my lighting. I'd have to, you know, shave.

I I haven't shaved in a couple of days. You know, probably put on a shirt that's not not this rough t shirt that I'm on. And, you know, I'm sitting here enjoying an adult beverage. I wouldn't want to do that on a video that I put out. I could do it when I'm on the microphone.

So, you know, there are some advantages to doing just audio. A lot easier to edit. You know, if you screw something up and you want to edit. I don't edit these very often, so this was not edited. But if you wanted to edit, you know, say you said something stupid or you flubbed something up and you wanna cut that out, it's a lot harder in video than it is in audio.

So, you know, just keep that in mind. You know? I don't think video for the creator side is gonna be as popular as everybody seems to think it is. But hey. You know?

We at Blueberry, we're, we're actually working on a video product. We've always supported video, but we're gonna support it a lot better, coming soon. And, you know, make it, affordable and and make it to so that, you know, if that's what you want to do, you have that option. And if you don't wanna do it, you don't have to. You know?

It used to be, you know, a long time ago when we first started this stuff, if you built it, somebody would come. You know? There was a 100 podcasts when I started. You know, most podcasters and most podcast listeners listen to a fair number of those 100 shows because that's all that was out there. Now there's, you know, millions of them and, you know, some of them are active.

You know? Like I said, I I'm guessing around 500,000 active podcasters, and active is defined different ways. I've I figured if you haven't put out an episode in ninety days, it's not active. So this one really wasn't active until today. So I probably got counted in the inactive list there, but, you know, we'll try not to do that as as long.

But I I say that every time and it never works. So, you know, hey, you know what to expect. If you've been with me long enough, yeah, I put out stuff when I put out stuff, and, no pressure. That's, that's kind of a nice way to do it. Of course, I did the I've been doing the daily, you know, cup of Traverse City, and then I ended up taking a month off.

And I tried to restart it this week and just things got in the way, but I I'll get back to that. And it'll be five days a week, five minutes. And that's fun. That's fun. You know, I don't mind that pressure, and especially since, you know, I've said all along, you know, if this doesn't this this isn't fun, I'm not gonna do it.

Or if I'm, you know, indisposed at some point, you know, I'll take a day or three or a month off. But, you know, I'll try. And and the same with this one, you know, I'll I'll flip on the microphone more often maybe, maybe not. I I I I'd like to because I enjoy it. Jeez, I've been talking for forty five minutes, and I figured that's enough for this round.

And please let me know. Are you still listening? Are you still subscribed or following or whatever? And and more importantly, you know, what do you think? Do you think, you know, technology is just going off the deep end, or am I just being a a crusty old man sitting here, you know, shaking my hand at the kids on my front lawn?

You know, that could be either. So I'm not opposed to being wrong or, or at least having a different opinion. So with that, everybody have a good however long it is till I talk to you again. Catch me later.