Oh g is folks, it should die.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want clod sodas, pop popcorn and no monsters in the projection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Got it off.
My name is Fred Arnison and I'm a comedian. Are you a big.
Uh no looking podcasting?
What a ship name that is?
This story will change the way you think about podcasts.
Morning, everybody. It's Adam Curry here.
With you and Adam Curry from MTV.
The technology of podcasting was invented in two thousand.
It's really simple syndication. Before anyone was podcasting, before there was an iPod, I got a call from app.
Here's an Adam Curry is one of the guys that invented podcasting.
Steve wants to meet with you and he says, I want to put podcasting into iTunes.
Is that okay?
I'm like, yeah.
Long before you know television, film, radio, the printed word, we've been communicating with each other in sound.
When you make a radio documentary or you make a podcast, I feel like we're playing with fire.
It's elemental to who we are.
I'm a podcast host and this is a film about audio storytelling.
I know that the world is waiting to find out how.
Cool this is.
Thirty eight percent of the US population twelve plus listen to a podcast in the last month.
That ain't nothing right, that's bigger than Twitter.
But there have been some growing pains.
The podcast is moving to Spotify.
When a company with money is interested in you, they're not interested in you, and they're not even interested in what you create. They're interested in your audience, and you can sell that audience exactly once.
That's when things got complicated.
Business has finally found what's going on with our little secret world.
I hope that well the money floods the space that the integrity of the medium is able to stay.
It's really hard to keep humanity at the center of everything when you scale.
I feel like we've been in a bit of a wild podcast bubble.
I think the bubble is hopping.
Yeah, how companies fund shows are de risking.
I think podcasting is the medium. It's sitting around a fire telling stories.
It's what we've always done.
And the thing that was magical to me is that with a voice and nothing else, you can create anything. For more information, go to aoamovie dot com podcasts. All right, welcome to the Projection Booth. I'm your host. Mike White joined me once again as mister Chris Tashue.
You guys like to talk about movies.
Also joining us all the way from the pod News daily newsletter is mister James Gridlin.
Hey, thank you so much for asking.
On this special episode of the Projection Booth. We are looking at the twenty twenty five documentary from director Jewn Michael Cologne Age of Audio. The film is narrated by and stars Ronald Big Ron Young Junior, the host of numerous award winning podcasts, who talks us through his story as well as the history up to now of the medium of podcasting. Quite a big task for an eighty
two minute film. We will be spoiling this movie as much as we can, so if you don't want anything ruined, turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen the film and experience the entire history of podcasting. We will still be here. So, Chris, I want to start with a question about how you came to know about podcasts and how you decided to start making one.
I'll keep that to the five minute answer.
The Earth formed, then it cooled.
Fish then crawled out of lakes.
No, I can actually tell you the first podcast I remember listening to was in two thousand and probably six with Film.
Spotting, and that was the first time I'd ever heard a podcast.
And I mean, that's kind of I guess maybe not so much anymore. That used to be like the standard bearer for movie podcast. Now I would say it's the Projection Booth podcast with Mike White oof.
Oh wow, wow, shameless self promotion everybody.
But that was kind of the first movie podcast or first podcast I had ever ever heard. And I didn't get into podcasting proper until two thousand and fourteen. So about eight years later, I had started a movie review website on my own because I was just looking for something to do in the month of October, and a friend of mine reached out to me. It was like, hey, you should do a podcast, and that that is kind of what it feels like. I've had one, two, three
different co hosts. The person who helped me start the show I haven't talked to in almost a decade, you know, And that's just you know, it's part of this, it's part of the journey of podcasting. Nothing is ever static, and if things are static for too long, you might becoming complacent, which is kind of a thing that I'm struggling with right now as somebod who's been podcasting for going on eleven years now.
Yikes, that's horrifying. I mean, there's not much to it.
I mean, the documentary makes it pretty clear, like if you want to do it in this day and age, you can just do it. So ain no pomp and circumstance here, you know, other than just liking movies and wanting to talk about movies with my friends.
And that's kind of what this ended up.
Being, because there are no other types of podcasts other than movie podcasts.
I mean, as far as anyone who listens to the things we make might be concerned, there would be nothing else.
That's not true. I mean I've done other stuff.
I did a paranormal podcast for a while that was pretty successful actually, But the movie podcast is kind of what I've gravitated back towards this whole, so can't get away from it.
Movies are just too intrinsically linked to who I am.
But yeah, they don't mention that at all in this documentary, so don't worry about it, folks, and James, howbout yourself.
I first got involved with podcasting in two thousand and five, a long long time ago. I was working for a radio station and I saw that podcasting was the thing, and so I turned our breakfast show into a podcast, and it was doing I think at one point it was doing somewhere in the region of fifteen thousand downloads and episodes. It was doing really well. She is astonishing these days. I started writing pod News, which is a newsletter all about podcasting, in twenty seventeen, and have written
it every day since. So, yeah, I should say two things. Firstly, I'm in this movie. I hope you noticed my excellent cameo for three seconds. But also, secondly, I do not watch movies. So I used to joke that the last movie that I ever saw was Superman three. That may not be entirely true, but it's nearly true. And so I was there and I was thinking, I should go and listen to an episode of this show to make
sure that I understand how this show works. And so I went through your more than one thousand episodes desperately trying to find a movie that I had actually seen. I hit on Day of the Jackal, which is two and a half years ago. But nevertheless, it was a good show. So yeah, So if you're expecting movie critique from me, you are going to be sadly mistaken.
I'm not sure there's any movie critique to be had with this movie, Like it's a documentary. I mean, I was under the impression this conversation was going to be more about podcasting. I don't know, like it's weird to watch a movie about podcasting. James, you mentioned you were in the movie. I was at that Amby's where he won all of his awards. I was sitting in that room because that was last year in Los Angeles. Tracy Mattel was there, so yeah, I was in that room.
I remember him winning all of his awards and him coming back up like it was like four.
Times, I think, something to that effect, to the point.
I mean they show it in the documentary where he comes back up a couple times. But that was pretty crazy because I was like, oh my god, are they're going to be at the Abies in Los Angeles last year?
Yes, And in fact they are like, Okay, did you watch this movie?
No, yes, I do, of course I.
Did before too, on a thing we've co hosted before.
So I saw it on the big screen indeed, or the big screen in my front room. So yes, absolutely.
Sean even says that you were supposed to be in this film at some point.
I was.
If you listened very carefully. Just before the Ambies sequence, they clips a bit of the pod News Daily podcast, which I also do, so yeah, so you get to hear my exciting English accent in the middle of that
for about three minutes. I've noticed I'm not in the credits, and all the way through there's lots of clips of you know, this happened, and then there's a screenshot of the Hollywood Reporter, and then this happened, and there's a screenshot of Bloomberg, and I was there, going, there must be a screenshot of pod News, right, there must be a screenshot of Oh, there isn't a best Last movie.
You would think there would be, but there is.
In the entire podcast movie. But still there we are. So yeah, but it was. It was a great watch, and I mean, I know a number of the people there, I think, so I think the first thing that I noticed in the in the movie is that it is clearly a movie that was recorded at two totally different times.
So quite a lot of people look weirdly six or seven years younger than they really are, you know, so very clearly this movie was filmed and shot in twenty nineteen and then again in twenty twenty three, twenty four, And so you've got this sort of a slightly odd juxtaposition of you know, Adam Curry, for example, and Dave Winer clearly interviewed a while ago, Tom Webster clearly interviewed
a while ago. And I think you know that that's the sort of the thing that I guess I would only notice given that I'm in the industry, But it was it was an interesting watch.
Well, you probably recognized a lot more people than I recognized that. Even when I was talking with Sean, he was really impressed with Roman Mars, and I was just like, I don't know who that is.
You've never listened to one hundred percent one hundred percent invisible, No, no, I I can't believe it.
I've never listened to an episode of Cereal either though I know.
Also ways I know, and also and also by the way, it's ninety nine percent invisible. It's it's not one hundred percent invisible. So that just goes to show how often I listened to it as well. Now I was watching this and going, oh, look there's Julie, Oh look there's Adam and and all the people who I know well. And then there are a couple of people in there, and I was thinking, why have you been put in this movie? Which is always the way, But it was nice.
I liked the Act one is all about the origin of podcasting.
It's not.
The history of podcasting is a bit of a contentious and this follows the relatively standard history, which is that Adam Curry and Dave Weiner invented it, and they may have invented the technology, but actually the first podcaster was Robin Williams, the comedian. He was doing podcasts. He was recording interviews with guests in his house and then putting them out on Audible onto the Audible player, which you could then download and have a listen to while you're
walking the dog in the year two thousand. So actually it's a little bit more complicated, but it probably needs to be, you know, a relatively simple story for the film. But it was, you know, it was nice to see, nice to see Dave. Nice to see Adam the conversation, I think, you know, I rather liked the bit where Adam is telling a story of Steve Jobs and you see Steve Jobs. It's not but you see him miming
to the words that Adam is saying. And I thought that that was a very clever I'm sure that's on all the time in movies these days, and I've not seen it, but I thought that that was a very clever tool to help tell a particular story.
It's very drunk history in that way, the whole mouthing, the thing that the person is telling us the story. But they don't think that the person telling the story was drunk. In fact, I don't think anybody in this movie is drunk, even Joe Rogan.
Yeah, where is Joe Rogan and all those They couldn't get old Joe to sit down for five minutes?
Well, they use a lot of clips of them, that's for sure.
You're going to have to given the proliferation of Joe Rogan's podcast. How could you not It's impossible to not mention Joe Rogan, you know.
Watching Leo there, Leo very famously doesn't get on with Adam curry at all, and it was very entertaining. First a few minutes of Leo Laporte saying, ah, you know the MTV guy. I was thinking, oh, wow, okay, here we go. No, but it was, it was. It was a nicely told history. It's a little bit heavy on the apple stuff. It's a little bit heavy on the Ben Hammersley stuff. Ben may have coined the word, but
he didn't really get it into the public usage. As an overview of the history, I think it was quite a good yeah, quite a good watch.
Yeah.
It's very interesting that they set this up as a podcast episode, and it didn't really click for me. The first time I watched this, I was a little overwhelmed just with all of the information coming at me. And there's a moment in the film where it feels like they just make this huge jump and I think it's kind of a like a sidebar or like a you know, a little bit of a tangent and then they come back.
But when they make this one leap and I'm trying to remember exactly where that is, I'll have to look at my notes, I'm just like, whoa, what just happened? Like we just jumped like ten years, and I think it's that thing that you're talking about. As far as the marriage of the newer footage plus the older footage, some of it jives pretty well. Using big Ron as our narrator is pretty interesting and having him walk us through this whole history. But sometimes that marriage doesn't necessarily
gel as much as I think it should. But I think overall it is a clever use of him as our host and walking us through this and really letting us have one person. I was calling him a narrator, whereas Sean is very much No, he's more of a podcast host. He's the host of this film. Even does an ad read, even does his Patreon drop all those kind of things. We even yeah, we have a live ad read in the middle of this film for Square Space,
which you know. I was impressed by that, though I think that Casper Mattresses probably should have done better help dot com me on these That's another one.
Jesus, they are and they are.
They do not have a good repute either, which is not great. That's why I was square Space because Square Space is rather inoffensive as it.
Were, surely manscaped, Surely that's under.
Groom or whatever the hell Their product is called I think is what it's called.
I mean, luckily I'm familiar with This American Life because this feels very much like and I think they even call act To a love letter to This American Life, because they really go into that. And I only knew of them as a radio show. I didn't even know that they had a podcast for a long time. You gotta love Ira Glass and what he's brought to the game. I think he really helped shepherd some of these other things like Cereal and my God, once Cereal took off.
I know that true crime podcasts existed before that, but it just felt like true crime podcasts took over the industry for a long time after that.
This American Life is interesting. This is definitely the US history of podcast.
Thank you also for mentioning met Chief.
There's no European stuff in there. There's no Australian stuff in there or anything else. And This American Life is one of those shows that has clearly influenced an awful lot of people, and people have made, you know, relatively poor copies of it. You can tell how old the Ira Glass clips are because he is clean shaven. He isn't clean shaven anymore. You can very clearly see that, you know, this American life has that whole you know,
focus on radio storytelling in the US. I mean, one of the points that was made in it, which I thought was really interesting, is that there is a different ethos if you're a public radio maker. There is a different ethos. You are there to make something, to make something of high quality, to do something great for your audience, whereas the majority of podcasters, the majority of other podcasters frankly,
are there to make money. And there is a different sort of thing that you bring to podcasting if you come from the rather stayed you know, dull US podcast US public radio industry, you bring a different thing to podcasting than you do if you are a more commercial podcaster. And I thought that that was an interesting point that was amplified all the way through this particular thing, because you know, it just made that difference quite clear, I think.
Well, and you can also tell the age of the documentary because China and India are like the biggest podcast markets now like for most like in terms of commercial like that's where a lot of the listeners are that doesn't even get mentioned in this at all, Like at all and I understand why. I mean, James to your point, like, is this being made for people that are podcasters? This being made for people that want to podcast? Is this being made for people that want to understand? I don't
understandho it's being made for. And I think that's both a good thing and a bad thing, because at times I feel like the film is like grossly unfocused, because yes, I understand that there's a history of podcasting, but if a podcaster is watching this movie, I'm not sure I need to learn that I know the like James already mentioned the basic tenets of what I need to know, But at the same time, it leaves a lot of stuff out that feels important and focuses on things that
it's not that it's not important, but those are like very I wouldn't say myopic, but kind of like laser focused specific things like this wasn't about podcasting holistically. This is more about like specific avenues in podcasting that I mean again, like you've heard of like you've heard of Cereal, like I think most people have heard of Cereal, like or you know this American life, Like those things are
mainstream enough or definitely Joe Rogan at this point. But there there doesn't seem to be like a lot of information or intent beyond just kind of giving us like the most surface level maybe going a little bit rather than a Wikipedia article into the history of podcasting.
What story is it trying to tell? I mean, clearly it's trying to tell Big Ron's story. But Big Ron's story ends with him winning lots of awards but not necessarily getting the money that he is expecting out of it. That doesn't appear to be an awful lot of story. Aren't there other than Big Ron winning a ton of awards and that's great. You know, it's an interesting thing.
I think the conversation is supposed to be. Podcasting starts, it's very small, then all of a sudden public radio gets involved, then all of a sudden everybody makes their money, and then all of a sudden, everybody goes broke. And it's not it's not quite as simple as that.
We're still podcasting right now.
Like they mention a thing in there that I know we've all talked about privately or in you know, in our own private circles, but the celebrity of it all, like you'll notice, there's not a lot of that. In the movie, they talk about it, but they don't really tell about it. They're just kind of like, well, you know, celebrities got involved and that's where the money came from, and then the celebrity is fucked off and then the money left. It's like, that's not actually how it fucking happened.
The celebrities are still here now, they have not left. They're not going to leave because that money is there, like they know that. At the end of the movie, I was like, are you trying to convince people to get into podcasting by saying that there's room in the space, because there's always been room in the space. I want to say that there's I don't know how many podcasts
at this point, but it's in the multi millions. I would assume like that the money was never here, like Big Ron found that out, Like we all found that out, We got our own pod, we start our own podcast networks. Like the money just magically started flowing in, like.
Give me, I'll give them out wigs.
There is a ton of money in the industry, but the ton of money is concentrated on the big shows, and once you're out of the top fifty to one hundred shows, which is where all of the money goes to. I've been claiming a number with absolutely no thinking behind it, but I've been claiming a number that ninety five percent of all podcasts out there don't earn money. It's the five percent who does. Yeah, And most people say, yeah,
that sounds about right. I've got no, you know, no research to back that up, but I think that that's probably fair. So, you know, and looking, you know, I mean, we're recording on a day where another part of the gold rush has just killed itself in terms of wondery. The big purchase from Amazon has just been announced that is closing. Amazon bought that for three hundred and something million dollars, and all of a sudden they've gone, yeah, you know what, Yeah, we're just going to close that now.
But I think quite a lot of this is the reset of greedy time in podcasting, where all of a sudden, we had nothing to spend our money on during the pandemic apart from podcast equipment and podcast stuff, and then all of a sudden, now we're seeing the reset of that happening. Afterwards, we see a bit of the reset of that in this show, a bit of the reset happening in twenty three twenty four, and we're seeing a bit more of that reset now.
It feels odd that there's no mention of the whole Megan Markele debacle, with all of that money that was changing hands, and I don't even know all the details of that. I mean pretty much, I was just following the story through pod news and just hearing of, Oh, yeah, here's all this money, and there's no shows that are showing up or very few, and what the heck's going on with this? It just felt almost like it was a little bit of a money laundering scheme for a better Yeah.
I mean, I don't know about that, but certainly when you look at Spotify, because that was originally a Spotify show, when you look at Spotify, basically, the TV people came in with their TV budgets and they assumed that they knew how to make great podcasts. And the secret that no has told the TV people is that podcasts don't run in seasons. Podcasts are always on. Podcasts need to be there every single week because a podcast is a habit. I have a particular podcast that I listen to when
I'm walking the dog. I have a particular podcast so I listen to when I'm in the supermarket doing the shop. Those are all habitually driven and you don't all of a sudden, you know, get your way in if you just release eight shows as part of a new amazing series. It doesn't work that way. And I think that the TV people who came into podcasting didn't understand the difference between how we consume audio and how we consume a
TV show. And we're seeing that again right now with a lot of people talking about making podcasting into video and all of this kind of stuff.
So just why why like we can't have one, can't like it can't be enough?
OK?
What's like?
I don't understand? And I think this, you know, and this is just my opinion, nobody else's opinion. It really bothered me that they tried to give credibility to the ambies because the ambis are, in my opinion, what is a problem here?
Like when I was at the Aby's, I.
Looked at how the awards were being given out, and the people that were nominated in every single one of those categories was populated with companies that did not need any of that publicity whatsoever.
Bloomberg, Forbes, and you know who the fuck ever.
And it's like, look, if you want to pretend like this is a gorilla industry or an industry that's grassroots that like you said, James, people are doing this weekly. There are people that do this weekly, like yourself, people doing things daily for the industry. It's not these kinds of shows that people I mean, like, people will listen to this show maybe, but they're not listening to it every week. They're not listening to it every day because there's not enough of it and they know that because
that's not the point. And it's so weird because there was like a I think big Ron actually wins it in the in the in the movie the Best Indie Podcast or award, Like what does that even mean?
What does that even mean?
Yeah, what does that even mean?
I just remember sitting in that room watching that award thing going I'm not nominated. Nobody I know is nominated. Nobody I know who knows anybody is nominated for any of these And we have a fairly expansive network of people that we know.
How is that possible?
And then when you see who's nominated, it's because, like you mentioned, James just money was just being dumped into this industry with wanton abandon.
The idea behind the Ambies is very much supposed to be, you know, it's the Oscars, it's the big exciting thing. The idea is that you put that show on TV because it's full of people who you know, who are winning awards. That is a very difference. No, no, no, But it's a very different awards ceremony too. If you look at the Oscars and bear in mind my experience in movies, which I've already explained is not particularly exciting.
But if you look at the Oscars, you've got the day before where they give all of the craft towards out, which never makes it to any any you know, TV or anything else. And then you've got the TV show with all of the you know, Conan and all of the fancy stars and everything else. And I think the Ambis has focused very much on the on those showbiz
and on the glitz and on the glamour. Actually what we need is kind of we need the day before in the Oscars for podcasting as well, to actually recognize a lot of the people behind the microphone, a lot of the production work, a lot of the people that aren't Amy Poehler or the.
Kelsey Brothers who want yell the podcast that's not the best sports podcast, Like it's a self governing body that gives me like goosebumps and it causes the hair on the back of my neck to raise, Like you're a self governing podcast award body. Okay, Like it's fine, like you said, it is the Oscars, And I feel the same way about the Oscars as I know a lot of people that watch movies do, Like, we don't think the oscars are the arbiter of any sort of taste
at all. Like they're just, in a lot of ways the arbiter of Mike Waters. They the arbiter of mainstream movie culture.
But it's a popularity contest mostly.
Right, And the Ambies felt the exact same way.
It's like the Kelsey Brothers, Well, wasn't Taylor Swift in the news for like the entire year she was, so you know one of them was involved. I don't know, Like it's it's very cynical, but that's gotta be kind of hard not to be cynical in this, in this industry, in any creative field, really.
I just be honest to be honest here, like it's hard not to be.
I think anything about podcasting is a positive though in the long run, Like more people are going to see this and hopefully get engaged with podcasting in a substantive way, and that's not a bad thing. That's actually a very positive thing for the industry as a whole, I think in the long term.
To a degree. But I think what you get out of this is you get out of it that podcasting is a big industry. It's got lots of loads of people working for it, you know. I Mean the first thing that big Ron starts talking about is finding a sound editor, finding you know, you know, a producer for his shows and everything else. That is not how the majority of podcasts are put together. I mean, I mean, I know, I know that I can see on the video.
You're talking to the editor and producer, right well, yeah, yees, all of us.
Yeah.
Like the same thing with James. I mean, I hear James when he's recording stuff in a freaking airport, you know, and it's like you are recording stuff on this.
Isn't it nice?
It must be nice to have a sound editor, like a you know, storyboard person a story editor, like whatever.
If you think that that's what podcasting is all about, then fine, but that's not what the majority of shows are about. And so I think from a point of view of you know, I mean, yes, there are some of these big showbiz things. I think I last calculated. If you look at fresh Air, which is a podcast and a radio show from NPR, and they interview somebody new every day, every weekday, a bit like Joe Rogan, they have seventeen members of staff that get a credit
at the end of the podcast. Seventeen members of staff, And I'm there thinking, what do these people all do? What do they all do?
Send them our.
Way thanks to our web editor and our social media manager, and yeah.
This season is edited and mixed by Evan Viola, our social media research and production assistant is Brandon Whalen, and our logo was designed by Teddy Blinks.
You compare that to, you know, Joe Rogan. I don't think we know how many staff he's got, but I'm guessing it's going to be less than seventeen. The only people that get the credit is Joe and two producers, and that's it. I'm guessing there are a few more,
but not that many. And for most people a podcast you have to be skilled in researching, in interviewing, in audio editing, in you know, social media, in all of this stuff because because frankly, podcasting doesn't work financially if you start adding sound editors and producers and a social
media manager and all of that. And that, I think is the difficulty that you see over and over again in this movie, is that you see people coming to this with a TV or public radio viewpoint of you know, this needs fifteen people in order to make it work, whereas actually, financially, you know, much of podcasting only works if you've got two or three people or maybe even one person doing that particular show.
That still blows my mind when people ask me like who edits your audio?
Like what do you mean? Who?
At least you edit?
I like the emails that come in and they say, hey, James and the pod news team.
Look around, man, you're looking at.
I do enjoy occasionally turning around to somebody that's sent me some miserable email and saying and saying, I have fired the person responsible.
They were given short shrift with something like what they were doing. I understand why they would need a story editor,
I guess. But I think James, you know you probably as much as you said you don't watch movies, like what you do podcasting wise is more in line with what Mike and I do than what Big Ron and the friends of the kind of group, the friend group of these people in this thing that can they keep kind of like showing up or these kind of working friend group, Like they're doing something a lot more like
specific and narrow focused and like narratively driven. Like that's not what I'm not saying, that's not what Mike and I aren't doing. We're not trying to craft a narrative or you but like it's a little bit more free form because it has to be because we don't have that much time. Like if we're not releasing stuff every week, like we are going to lose our audience. That is what is going to happen. We have to feed the machine like we have to. We don't have a choice.
You can't have seasons, you can't have four months between shows. There are a few shows that do that, but most of the time that that doesn't really work. The thing that I loved in this movie was that brief digression about editing. It was in the middle of act two, this American life thing. I think it was an introduction to their editor and just this beautiful piece of work that looked a bit like library clips explaining what editing is,
explaining how editing works. It's only a couple of minutes long. That to me was awesome. I mean, that was a that was a great piece of video that I really enjoyed. And I think, you know this, this movie has little bits of you know, genius like that that I really enjoyed.
Not to try to rewrite the movie of the cuff, but I kind of would have liked to have seen an episode come together. Like it's nice seeing Big Ron's journey and hearing more about him and seeing you know, clip of the clips of his TED talk and his TRL live or whatever he was trying to go for with his audition tape, all these kind of things. I'm like, that's kind of cool, but I would like to see how does one episode of one of your shows come together.
Here's a little brief thing about like a friend asked me if I did a movie review podcast, and so I went to the theater and I saw this, and I came up with this thing, and I'm like, Okay, how many shows do you have? You know, it's kind of wild, but it's like I would like to see, like how do you come up with the subject? You know, like they make a mention of the NPR zine when it comes to how I think Ira helps write that and you know how he does his stuff, and it's like, yeah,
that's fascinating to me. How do you actually come up with this stuff? How do you do your research? How do you do the technical part of it? But again, that's not what this documentary is. This is so much like if sometimes it feels like Big Ron's kind of on the outside and the rest of it is, you know, here's Paul Tompkins, Here's Mark Meron, here's you know, all of these very well known people and very well known to me and I think to a lot of other
people too. It's not just some host of a NPR News I mean Chad ab ab and Rod and love him because I'm a huge Radio lab fan. I don't know if my mom would know who he is. My mom would probably know who Joe Rogan or Mark Maron are.
I think the ultimate disappointment for me with the documentary is that it doesn't touch on the thing that doesn't get talked about enough, which is if you're doing podcasting, and like James you mentioned, if you're doing it the way that we've done it, which is the way that most people are doing it, it is very lonely. It is not something that it's like, it's so lonely, like we're like, yes, we're sitting right now talking to each other on Zoom, but I'm ostensibly sitting in an office
by myself, talking to a computer screen. Like anyone looking at this would be like what in God's name am I looking at? And this is expected to be recorded and then edited, and it's like a lot of especially if you're doing it by yourself and you're editing and doing social media, like that's done by yourself with no
one else in the room. Editing is not a group task, like promoting is not a group task, like doing a lot of the other extraneous things that one has to do to get things out for, you know, whatever platform they're posting their podcast on, Like, it's a lot of work, and it's done mostly by yourself, and when you turn the recording off, like most of the time you're just left in a room by yourself, unless you're recording with people in person, which I.
Have not done a lot of.
Most of my recording has been digitally. Like Mike and I have known each other for damn near eleven years and I've met him once. We have recorded in person zero times, but we have recorded digitally one hundred percent of the time, and that's hundreds of hours of time. But at the end of the day, like I've never gotten to hang out with Mike in person and like be friends, we're like working friends.
It's like a different thing. And that's that's something that they.
Just don't really touch on, is like podcasting is very much a community thing, but it's also a very lonely thing, and it's not again unless you've got somebody editing your audio for you, like you're sitting and doing all this yourself, Like it's it's a lot.
And he's there, you know, constantly on the move talking to people, meeting other people and everything else. That's not really what podcasting is like most of the time. And I think you are absolutely right there. The one thing that the podcast industry has conspicuously failed on for the last twenty one years is to complete the feedback loop
between the podcast creator and the audience. The only thing that we have as a podcast creator to see whether or not we're doing a good job or not in the absence of any feedback from the audience, which we don't normally get because it's not built into anything, is by you know, logging onto our podcast host and looking at some numbers, and that's about as far as we go, and so everybody frets about the you know, how many how many hundred downloads have I got for this particular episode,
and we don't focus a little bit more on what the audience actually thinks because all of that isn't built in to the podcast apps that we use, or if it is, it's built in in about fifty separate pubs, and we have to go into each pub to check whether anybody is talking about us. That simply doesn't work.
So it would be lovely if there was a way of fixing that, in a way of making sure that we get feedback from the audience that we have, which you know, and feedback is always good to hear from our audience, but feedback in a way that actually comes into one place, so you know whether you're doing a good job or not, But we don't really you know,
but we don't really have that. So we are in this sort of very lonely experience quite a lot of the time where yeah, you know, I mean, I do a weekly show with a man called Sam who I have met three times, and we've done it. We've just done episode two hundred and fifty.
It's fucking insane.
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think what this the movie is because quite a lot of it is filmed at places like Podcast Movement and the Ambis and the on AirFest in Brooklyn and you know, various other of these big podcast events. I think you get the feeling that podcasting is a very social industry and we all know each other and we all talk to each other all the time, and really it is a social industry, but don't we don't have in real life meetings almost ever.
The first time I had ever gone to anything like Podcast Movement was last year, and I've been podcasting for a decade at that point. Like there, you know, like that that was like kind of a mind blowing experience for me, and James. I wanted to speak to something else, you said, so you said ninety five percent of the
podcast don't make money, Mike isn't there. I for forget what The website is where you can punch your podcast name in and it shows you, like what percentile you're in based on listens.
You know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Mike's show is in the top less than one percent.
Everybody's showing.
That's the Yeah.
I mean, if you go to the buzz Sprout website, so buzzprow is the number three podcast host, and you go to the buzz spro Out website buzz sproout dot com slack slash stats. Right at the bottom of that page is something that says episode downloads, and it's for the entire buzz spro Out catalog, all of the shows which are in there, and there are hundreds of thousands of episodes in there, and it shows you what a
typical podcast gets. And for the first seven days, a typical show on buz spro out fifty they you know, if you look at the big list, then you can see that twenty seven downloads is what the typical medium podcast gets. After seven days, twenty seven downloads. So as soon as you start talking about one thousand downloads for an episode. After after seven days, you're in the top five percent, and you're in the top one percent if
you're doing more than four thousand. We forget. I think that there are a lot of shows with not very many downloads.
Oh no, we have a lot of shows that don't have a lot of downloads. Saying we know there's a lot of shows with not a lot of downloads.
We work, we're making them all the time.
But that's all that we've got to go on because we don't have because we don't have the feedback.
You know.
I mean when I used to be on the radio, people would send me things through the post because there was no such thing as email, because I am that old, and people would send me things through the post and I would get postcards and things, and I would get cards and it would be amazing, And of course we don't get any of that now. So literally, the only thing that we are doing is sitting there going, oh, have I broken the top ten percent yet with four
hundred and fifty downloads. You know, that's literally all all that we're doing. And I think that's a real that's a real shame. But the technical term is cross app comments, and we are so far away from cross app comments, sadly.
I just would love a comment. I mean, that's why I'm begging people for ratings and reviews on iTunes. It's like, please just give me any sort of feedback here, because I put stuff out and I just never hear anything.
But I guess that's just the way it is. I love that meme of the kid eating cereal in front of a picture of these three laughing girls, and it says what it feels like to listen to podcasts where it's like I'm there with these people, but they're just a poster and I'm the one eating the serious.
Yes, it's a strange thing, but you know, again, there is that sort of parasocial relationship that you have with the podcasts that you really enjoy, and you you know, it's very strange. There are some podcasters out there who I genuinely think are my friends, even though I've never met them. True, And yeah, it's just the way that this stuff works. And I think, you know, quite a lot of the quite a lot of the movie talked a lot about making a podcast, but there weren't any listeners.
There weren't any people talking about some of the stuff that they had heard, and I think again, you know that that's a bit of a shame. We heard a lot from creators, but just it might have been it might have been fun. I'm I'm not a film director, I don't watch films, but it might have been fun to have occasionally cut to just people listening to podcasts, doing the doing the dishes, walking out the door, you know, driving.
Well, they've got some stock footage people vacuuming, and.
There's a woman running at one point with some headphones on. Like why would they? Why would we?
You think again, like James, no one listens to anything we do. So who's who's they? Who they're gonna interview?
Who is there interview?
It is weird again, unrepresented sides of the equation here, Like I don't understand who the documentary is for in a way because like it doesn't it doesn't cover one half of what I think is the half of the big equation here, which is the audience, an audience engagement and getting the audience to engage, like begging, I know people listen to my show. Why is it too hard for anybody to write a review? Like why am I begging you to write a review for my show, like again.
And it's weird because we don't see the audience in this movie. We just see a bunch of podcasters, which is fine, makes sense for a podcast documentary.
All right, we're going to take a break and we'll be right back with an interview with the director of Age of Audio, Shawn Michael Cologne, right after these brief messages.
Hello, everyone, this is Malcolm McDowell. I just want to say that this is a request to listeners of the Projection Booth podcast to become patrons of the show via Patreon dot com p A T eo n dot com slash Projection Booth. That's pretty simple.
I think you can do that.
It's a great show and my he provides hours of great entertainment. So now it's time to give back my little drovies. Settle down and take a listen and have a sip of the old Malacco, and then you'll be ready for a little of.
The old in Out in Out real horror show.
Bye bye.
How did you get interested in filmmaking?
Agent Body is my second feature.
The first documentary we did was called a Fat Wreck, and it's about this punk rock record label. And before I had started that, I was a marketing director for like a talent development school. There's a lot of kids that were trying to be pop stars and they needed music videos, and the music videos were going outside of
the business. So as part of a package that created a social media package that included the music video so we'd keep the quality control inside the house and basically started doing the music video stuff, and through that I I started doing some editing Rich Kids, by the way, I should mention that. And the third music video I produced was like a twenty thousand dollars music video where we hired a production company, read cameras, location, the whole thing,
and I produced it. I didn't direct it. I just was making sure everything happened. And the day of the production there wasn't much to do, so me and my buddy who's also the cinematographer that I've worked with for a long time, Jewell her Era, I was like, Hey, why don't we grab some cameras and just interview everybody
and do like a little behind the scenes documentary. And at that point I had not really I've done a little live performance editing, but hadn't really edited together anything with a narrative or that kind of thing, and so.
We did that.
We shot it and we put some jokes in it, and you know, really thought about it. And the family was premiering the music video in a little theater, so he'd rent out of theater and we showed the miss thing because it was just an extra thing. It was just a fun little thing we did. They liked it there, so like, hey, can we show this at the screening of the video.
We're like, well, yeah, sure. And the audio wasn't too great. I don't know how well is edited, but people seem to like it and laughed when they were supposed to laugh, and I was like, ooh, I like this feeling. It's cool.
I had played in bands for a long time and one of the things about playing a band is that you never can experience yourself live because you're playing. But with film, it was like this thing that I made and then I got to experience it with the audience. So it's kind of this dual feeling of performing but also watching.
So it was really interesting.
And when people laughed at the parts you want him to laugh at, that was like a really cool feeling. And so after that happened my cinematographer Joelle. He was also played drums and bands with me, and we were a band practice and I was like, why don't we do something that we were more interested in, like something that we have a deep passion about. And this is a record label called Fat Records. We're like, hey, no
one's ever done a documentary about Fat Records. And this is around the time Netflix was showing a bunch of punk rock documentaries. I was like, no one ever talks about the mid nineties punk rock that we grew up with, you know, so why don't we do something talk to our friends and so basically he had started doing some cinematography stuff and he was like, here, rent this camera, rent this, and I just went out and started shooting stuff without really knowing much about what I was doing.
That eventually led to a crowdfunding thing that we did that was wildly successful. Hit four hundred percent of our goal. We were asking for like seven grand, and basically.
In the first day we hit our goal.
And I had never really edited anything bigger than this fifteen minute little thing, and yeah, so we kind of spiraled and I ended up doing a trailer and people liked it. The guy from the label ended up agreeing to be interviewed and fat Mic from his band No Effects. If any of your friends punk rock fans, they might know who No Effects is. And it just kept going and we ended up doing a documentary called a Fat Wreck.
People seem to like it, and when it was done, it did a bunch of film festivals, it got picked up, it was on you know, we sold itubes as well, but then it eventually got picked up and was on Amazon prop for a few years. We had distribution in Japan, and really it was kind of like the first really I'm doing my second film. I realized that maybe I had success too early, if that makes sense, like cause it's really challenging, Like it's that's not how it works.
It usually doesn't go that quickly and that fast and raise that money that fast and for it to be I think we did like twelve film festivals at the time. So it was just like this experience that was really too big for our breitches. Maybe, you know, doing that was like, oh, it was really hard. It was way more work than I expected. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done creatively, physically, emotionally and financially, and I was like, oh, let's do another.
And so that's how it kind of got started.
I think I did a couple of music videos prior to that, like basic, some basic things, and it really kind of went to the deep end really quickly, and with very lucky in a lot of ways to have something that had a lot of success right away, and I ended up with a sales agent and someone who connected within that space. And the film right now a fat wreck. If anybody's listening, if they want to watch it, it's on Documentary Plus streaming for free right now, So
if you want to watch it, it's available. And then to follow that up, there's a couple of other projects. Whenever you finish a documentary, everyone's like, oh, I have an idea for a documentary.
I was like, well, that's great me, it's a good chunk of my life.
That first one took five years, and this one came about we were working on a different documentary that dealt with this band called The Wilhelm Scream and I ended up interviewing Dallas Taylor.
He does a podcast called twenty thousand Hurts. If you haven't.
Listened to it, it's amazing it's all about sound and sound design and just really about the things we hear. It's kind of like this American life for nine nine percent invisible for sound and things that surround that. And we were interviewing him about the sound of Wilhelm scream. Someone's not familiar, they should go look up at Willem scream. It's this famous sound that shows up in like Star Wars and Indiana Jones and like, I think it's like
three hundred movies or something crazy like that. I should preface by saying during that filming, I as far as punk rock band. And we ended up filming in Brooklyn, and that night that we were filming, this band that I really like called Propaganda was playing and a friend of ours was opening up for them and knew we were filming, so asked us to come film their first set.
And I want to see Propagandi, so of course I agreed, and on our way to go to that show, my friend basically was like, Hey, my uncle's going to be at the show. I was like, oh, great, I'll get to meet your uncle. And he's like, my uncle's Ira Glass, And so I ended up hanging out with Ira Glass at this punk rock show in Brooklyn really a kind
of weird world's combining. I was a big fan of this American life and Radio Lab and all those things and thought of that as like NPR and that kind of world and kind of saw it separate from the punk rock world. And to just have those two things in the same space was really I was like, we earn some kind of weird timeline.
I don't I don't know what's going on here.
Ended up hanging out with Ira, and it was more it wasn't just like I met him. It was like we ended up hanging out like where I chattered with him for a few hours. He was asking us about the movie working on. He came to the show of the band we were filming as well, and so it was like this whole evening and so I got this really interesting experience and fast forward to me interviewing Dallas. He knew that I knew Roman Mars as well, because Roman Mars had actually done the pull quotes for our
first movie on the back of the Blu Ray. Because I had shown him the movie, I figured out he was a punk rock fan and sent him the movie on Twitter, and he sent some nice things back about I was like, hey, can.
I use some of this for the back of the Blu ray?
And so after I had interviewed Dallas, Dallas was like, hey, man, you know I Ara Glass now and you know Roman Mars, why don't you make a podcast documentary? And I was like, you're a jerk man. Why did you just say that to me out loud? I clearly have to do that. I want to say sometime like January or February of twenty eighteen, and I reached out to Roman. I was like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this podcast documentary. If I did, would you be interested in being interviewed? He said sure,
of course, you know, I'm down. I think a month or two later if that's In March, I go to south By Southwest. I run into my sales agent who's also my friend, Jeff Clark, and he's.
Like, what are you working on.
He's like, oh, I'm working on this project with this band and about you know, support systems and all these things.
He's like yeah. It was like that's cool, Like do you have anything else that you're thinking about.
It's like, well, I have this idea for this podcast documentary, and I you know, I met Ira Glass and Roman Mars said he would do it.
He's like, dude, I could get some money for that. I was like, WHOA.
And I think the next day was the PRX meetup Radiotopia PRX. They were doing a meetup and there was Chris Bannon from at the time Stitcher. There's some people there from Stuff you Should Know Network. Julie Shapiro from Ridotopia was there and basically I pitched everyone and I was like, Hey, I think I can get the money. Roman said yes, I met Ira Glass and thinking about doing this podcast documentary, and everyone gave me their contact information.
We're really excited about it, and I think by May we were filming some of the first things for the documentary, so it was kind of within a matter of months we were filming and that's how Age of Audio started. So it's kind of like this kind of thing now. Age of Audi took seven years. That bath start.
Very challenging to get it over the finish line.
You had a global pandemic in there too, so I can catch you a little slack.
Yeah, that definitely puts some speed bumps in there of what we could film it.
We were able to edit a little bit of what we had filmed.
We actually started filming in Earnest in twenty nineteen, the day we landed to start filming in New York with Ira Glass because I reached out to him he said, yeah, I'll do it. It was the day that Gimlet sold to Spotify for two hundred and fifty million dollars, And although there had been a few other big acquisitions, that was like three to four times larger than anything else and really was kind of like the starting gun of this kind of like lash of money that started swelling into podcasting.
So we were, in some ways at the right place, at the right time, with the right project, and we're able to kind of capture some of that moment and talk to those people. I think we did almost like thirty interviews that year, including Kevin Smith and Roman Mars and Jesse Thorn and host of other people that year. So a lot of the movie was shot in twenty nineteen before the pandemic. Just before the pandemic, I think
we were finished. We were going to do another round of interviews as we were heading into twenty twenty, and as we all know, things changed dramatically and couldn't really do a whole lot of in person interviews at that point.
So how did you go from working with Fat Mike to Big.
Ron Ronald came in the last about year and a half through filming the documentary. We had a few other subjects that we had focused on that were independent, but I really wanted there to be a aspect of an independent person working on there. Originally, my idea was to follow an independent podcaster and also follow along one of the lower producers in our freshman producers at Radio Lab and parallel those two pitch Radio Lab on it, but they declined.
I had another subject that I worked with.
Over the course of seven years, things change and ideas change, and where people are changed. I had a couple subjects drop out, and in twenty twenty three the film was kind of floundering. It didn't feel like it was going anywhere, and momentum had gone. I was really worried that we would be in a situation where the film would fall apart.
At that point, we applied for some grants, got some more stuff edited, and I was really gearing up do a crowdfunding thing because I was like, would keep things moving. Lo and behold, we submitted I think it was in April, and then in August I found out that we had gotten the Awesoin Film Society grant.
It's about ten thousand dollars.
It wasn't enough to complete the film by any means, but breathe a lot of new life into the project. And when that happened, I reached out to the subjects that they'd been working with for about two years and the film had kind of gone dormant for about six months. I reached out and they're like, Hey, we're in a
different place and we're not really interested, which is incredibly disheartening. However, it was actually probably the best thing that could have possibly happened, because what happens is I get the grant, I use it to actually buy a computer I can edit on. My other computer was almost ten years old, I could barely edit on it. I was able to
get something I could really start editing on. And then I used a little bit of it to go to a podcast conference called Resonate, which was I think doing their second year, and I reached out to Chiochi from Resonate and was basically like, Hey, I'm working on this documentary, I would love to come to the festival. I she really can't afford the passes. I would love to be. You know, they had like a scholarship program, so I
asked to be part of the scholarship. And my thinking was if I got the scholarship, I would definitely go and I could use a little bit of that grant money to pay for the hotel and the flights.
And so I end up going to Resonate.
So my idea was I want to get some allies or some momentum going about the crowdfunding thing I'm about to do. So I really go there and talk about the movie and see if I can get people interested in what I was working on and the film that had kind of been around for a time, so some people knew about it and kind of knew about the
production that were there. And I ended up running into Ellen Horn, who was actually on the team that helped create Radio Lab and is also an NYU professor and she handles the podcast studies and audio storytelling, And it was on the last night of Resonate.
She was like, Hey, I heard about your project.
How can I help and really wanted to participate in a high level. So we had a really great time chatting and she really came up on board on the project at that point as a producer and a story editor.
But a little bit prior to that, I had started hearing about Ronald Young Junior. There had been some people in the film that had worked with him. I had seen him pop.
Up, and when we were shifting to a new subject on our website, I had put basically like, hey, if you're an independent podcaster, please reach out. We're looking for someone to work with that be a part of the film. And very honored to have a lot of people submit their story and their podcasts and things about being independent creators. But one of the names that when I was looking at the list was wrong Junior really struck out to me.
It's like, hey, this guy's having you know, I've heard a lot about this guy lately, and he's wanting he's would be willing to participate in the film. So I reached out to Ronald, and Ronald's really cool guy, like really like. We jibed right away and I was like, Hey, I'm interested in chatting with you.
I'm going to you know, albe at Resonate. Were you going to be there? He's like, dude, I live.
There basically where I live like he's you know, that's the college he goes went to, Like he's part of that.
So he's like, I'm going to be there. So I was like, okay, that's a good sign.
So basically, you know, he wanted to be a part of it, and we met, and then I think with the addition of Ellen coming aboard, that really really is what.
Got the movie to over the finish line.
From that point, I think that December of twenty three leading in at twenty four, we actually I had gotten a little bit of money from the crowdfunding.
It wasn't overly successful.
But due to all the outboring of marketing that I did for the crowdfunding, a production company reached out.
I got connected with I.
Should say they're now called Substance, and they were like, hey, we're interested. What do you need. You know, we have production facilities. It's like, dude, I really need money. I need money so I can edit the movie. And I had Amy grumbling, who actually did I should mention did the grant writing that and helped with the grant writing. We collaborated, but she's the one who really kind of put down the first things for the and help really
was a big part of that grant side. Basically I had been paying her out of pocket, but at a certain point it self funding reached a limit. But basically they were like, hey, so, yeah, how much do you need? And I was like, I told the number. They were willing to come pretty close to it and also offer
services and also their filmmakers as well. They do a lot of commercial work, but they came on to be a co production partner where they're not just giving me money, but they're actually invested in the film in a lot of different ways and the success of the film, and really from that point in twenty four is when we went and filmed with Mark Marin.
That's when we went to the Ambi's.
We went out on AirFest and followed Ronald and got a lot of the cinema their tay stuff. Prior to that, a lot of the stuff was really just talking head and I really wanted it to be a mix of the two, and we were able to really kind of catch Ronald as he was kind of on this big upswing, you know, in December and of December, after he agreed
to be part of the film. He had been on the list for the New York Times best podcast I think a few other lists that're getting right now think culture as well, and was top independent podcaster to watch and had been nominated for the Amby's, So we really had this opportunity to capt him in this moment where a lot of things were happening.
That we could capture.
So it's really lucky that those other subjects dropped out because the stuff we had captured with them, it was really kind of them at their house, maybe them doing some production meetings, but really wasn't as dynamic, I think as what we were able to capture with Ronald, including being at the Ambyes when he swept spoiler alert when sweeps the Ambes, and we're there to capture those.
Moments, and you've seen the film.
The film is not about him necessary, it's not about winning the Ambies.
The film is really about what does it take.
To be an independent creator and the struggles that entails, and the commitment and the juxtaposition between claim and financial wellbeing, as I think most independent artists can probably sympathize with. But as well as like a history lesson on where podcasting came from, we try to highlight some of it.
I think we can't highlight everything that's important that's happened in podcasting, but I think we were able to highlight some of the really big moments that kind of broke through into the mainstream that most people may have heard about. The film is really one of the goals is to show podcasting as an art form and as something to be respected in the same way as film or novels or television or any kind of art form that people put time into and love and have a passion for, as you probably know.
Mike, Yeah, No, it's a really fascinating mix of those stories. And then to have Ron be your narrator for so much of it that really injects him into the story a lot earlier. There you go.
I even pushed back on that terminology. Consider him to be the host of now.
The first documentary we did about Fat Records, it's fast, it's grungy, it's got a lot of energy to it. And because it was really the production, a lot of it had to do with Spig Scrappy and building on different cameras and all this kind of stuff. But we leaned into that and made it where it kind of represented what you kind of get the feel of a punk rock album is Short has that kind of frantic energy. It's especially that kind of punk rock that we were
trying to give a feeling of. And with this film, one of the great things about having Ellen come on was she's a storyteller and worked with narrative production storytelling, and we really wanted to introduce those elements into the film.
So it's not the structure and a.
Lot of the production, the sound design and even some of the choices we made, we're more in line is like, we wanted it to feel like it could be an episode of this American life, or at least sections of it, or it would feel like a narrative podcast because there's a lot of what we're the story kind of storytelling we're talking about, so that if we did our jobs right, and I hope we did, it should feel different than
a regular documentary. It should feel a little bit like if someone is a fan of narrative podcasting, you're getting that self aware host that's not just a narrator, but they're commenting on the things happening in the film, but also they're guiding you in a lot of the same way as a host would guide you in an audio only narrative podcast. So it was really built as a
hybrid between those two kind of philosophies. There's a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily do in a traditional documentary that we did and hopefully an attempt to create something that felt a little different and kind of honored a little bit of the kind of production that we were trying to represent.
Well, not only does the movie sound like a million bucks, but it looks like a million bucks just the cinematography and the quality of the images. It looks fantastic.
Oh my gosh.
I think it's one of those things when you work on something so closely like it's hard to have perspective on her anymore.
So I'm really glad to hear you say that.
That was one of our goals, is we wanted to bring cinematic qualities to the production, And yeah, I have something that was high quality, you know. And I'm so glad.
She you use the technique too, which I found interesting. There were certain shots that felt a little like stock shot stuff you buy. But then as I'm watching it, I'm like, no, I think they've shot these for the film, because those kind of comment on what's going on in the movie as well.
There's definitely a mix.
There's stuff that we shot, definitely, but there were just things that might have been impossible to shoot, so we tried to find things that kind of felt like that.
So I don't know if I'm telling too much, but yeah, we used some stock footage in there, but we also did things where we shot stuff ourselves to mix in so it felt blended and it gave that appearance that we hopefully couldn't tell the stuff that we shot versus what we did, because we did use some city shots and people running and things like that.
But we try to be thoughtful about what.
We're using, how it looked, and did it match the vibe of all the other things we were trying to do. One other thing that we did, and I was a little nervous about this, we did our premiere at the Oak Cliff Film Festival, and that was really the first time I got to see it on a real big screen. And one of the things that we did, which is kind of breaking a little bit of a rule and really a film, is.
There's a lot of close ups.
It's a close and like an extreme close up rather than what would be in film terminology like a mid shot and a close up. I didn't want to do the thing where you saw the person sitting in the chair and it's nice background and very netflixy kind of thing, which is gorgeous. I'm not putting that down by any means, but early on with my cinematographer, I was like, I think we should do something close and closer so we
can visually represent the intimacy of podcasting. They're in your ear, and I really wanted it to be kind of mouth and ear. That's where a lot of the close ups are their mouth and ear. The thought being we're trying to visually give a sense of closeness with the subjects.
You know.
I got a little pushback for my service because, like I said, we're breaking a rule which could make people uncomfortable. It's one of the dangers of doing something that close for that period of time. But I also felt like what we would do is eventually make it so you're not that close all the time.
Even with Ronald we do a lot or really close stuff with.
Like super close, where it's like really just his mouth and the microphone, then maybe the side of his face, but you're not really seeing his eyes as much.
You're really just seeing his.
Mouth talking, and that was also a you know, a little bit of a risk. But the feedback that I've gotten so far as people like it and they felt like it was a cool choice and it creates some visual language for the film that I hope translates well. Like I said, when you're deep in the thick of it for seven years, I just get used to seeing it.
So I don't know how it feels to someone new, but it seemed to work, I think, for what we're doing, and also hopefully make something that doesn't feel like something you've seen over and over again. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to have that little differentiation.
It's a risk. Everything's a risk, you know. I mean, hopefully it works.
You get so sick of just seeing white guys in suits looking off into the middle distance talking to somebody that you don't even know who they are because the camera man's over here and they're looking over there, and you're just like, can you look at me? So that you lose that intimacy. But yeah, getting those nice shots of Ron's mouth, I'm just like, oh, yeah, that's really nice. And then even when it comes to some of the
other close ups, that you're doing. It feels like I was talking to me, feels like these people are talking to me rather than just the director.
Yeah, it's And then we have a few moments where could we do a little bit of the off center thing, but we all have a few moments where people will look into the camera right down the barrel and it's used for comedic effect, and there's I hope it's funny. That's I mean, that's one of the goals we want to Especially early on in the film, we're kind of set up how this technology came to be, and the important part isn't necessarily technology. The important part is the
fact that this technology allowed anyone to do it. We felt like it was important to have an understanding, at least at some cursory level, for people to understand like, oh, this kind of code that these people did allowed for anyone to make this that no one controls it now. You know, nowadays there's a lot more money into it. But right now, anyone can start a podcast. And this was before YouTube, but anyone can do a YouTube now, and n can do a TikTok now, and I think
that's a wonderful thing. I think that that's a really cool thing. But podcasting was kind of one of that first thing that you could make and distribute all over the Internet and didn't have to pay anyone. There was no advertising, you weren't enriching another platform.
At the time. It was platformless.
You just had to have people subscribe to this little bit of code.
And we had it much longer in the film at one point.
But if he were like, it's too much technical, but I really pushed back when we were trying to do we need to even talk about RSS?
It's like I think we do.
I think people even if we need, it's just a basic level without being too boring, how can we make this fun? And it also explained like this little piece of code really allowed for anyone's voice to be heard over the Internet, and I think that allows for independent creators to exist because a platform doesn't own RSS. And even though I would say RSS hams limitations and there's podcasting two point zero and there's these technologies that they're not as widespread, RSS still is what.
The backbone of what's going on.
And even though YouTube is the number one place people listen to podcasts, what did they do? They ended up integrating RSS into their thing eventually, and I think there's something to be said about that open nature. Someone doesn't want to go on Spotify, if someone doesn't want to go on YouTube, if someone doesn't want to give money to TikTok for whatever reason, and I'm not suggesting they do.
I'm just saying, if they want to, you can still put out a podcast via RSS and have it distributed all over.
So I think that's the thing.
Like I said, we don't try to in the film try to make it just about that. We want there to be the technical, but also the emotional And what did that allow? What's the point of talking about RSS? And I think hopefully by going through Ronald's journey you can see what that allowed for someone to just say, hey, I want to do this and just start doing it.
Man. I was very rewarding, you know.
It's also to get to that point was extremely intense. As you are heading towards a world premiere, you know, there's so much work that has to happen, and it was really hard to enjoy it fully because it was so intense getting to that point, like a couple months of just thousands of hours of work and really just
being so close to it. I was able to enjoy it, but I'm hoping as I get to see it with other audiences, now that pressure of the first one is gone, that I can enjoy it without having that tension, you know, and worrying about like, oh, there's going to be a black frame, or there is there going.
To be an audio cutout, or what did I miss?
Because leading up to that screen it was to get it over the finish line.
We were just really working on it up until the last minute, which tends to be how I operate.
Unfortunately, having that deadline really pushes you to really lock in. But now subsequent screenings, we're hoping to do some screenings here coming up. It's looking like we're going to have a big one at some of the podcast conferences coming up. I don't want to say too much until I know one hundred percent, but things are in processed for some of the bigger podcast conferences.
I'm being vague on purpose.
But I think the next screening we get to do, I'll get to really enjoy it because I think it'll be to our core audience, which are I think it's a love letter to podcasters, to be honest with you, I've had some feedback from some people that are podcasters, specifically Dalve Taylor and some other people that I've heard from, saying that they felt really seen by the documentary that they like, oh, this is the struggle of doing this and showing not just the front end of the podcast,
showing a little bit of what it takes to make it happen, and the kind of dedication and the kind of commitment to doing that kind of work, which I have a tremendous respect for podcasters.
I mean after doing this.
Because at least when I was making the movie, I'm doing it behind the scenes. It took seven years, but I'm not presenting what I'm doing every day or every week or every other day or depending on your cadence of your podcast.
And I can stop. I could stop for a.
Couple months at a time to try and raise money or do whatever I needed to do, but I wasn't committed to publishing something every week every day.
That's a huge commitment.
That's why I have a lot of respect for YouTubers as well, and anyone who's showing up every week every day.
That is a different kind of thing.
Because I get to as a documentary and I've worked on my thing till I felt it was ready, and that's just not the case. If you're a podcaster, it has to go out that next week. You have a deadline, and if you miss that deadline, no one's gonna punish you, but you're going to have a drop off an audience, because if you're doing something every week or once a month or whatever, that cadence is your audience that you've built up. They're expecting that, and if you've done a
good job, it's become part of their life. And if you don't show up that first week, that second week, it's very easy for someone to go to something else, not because they're mad at you, just because they're going to fill that space with something and you have to show up over and over again.
And I have a big respect for that.
It's kind of nice you not only can show stuff at podcast festivals, but then also film festivals as well, which is great to have two forums there for you.
My thinking and I think podcasting is really you know, we started podcasting with becoming mainstream for sure, but I think now isn't necessarily convincing someone why they should listen to a podcast. I think the film should show why you should respect the people that are doing this and like the joke that everyone has a podcast, I mean, hahaha, funny, funny, yeah, but the people who really do it and take it seriously. It's an art form to be respected. It's something that
people shouldn't take for granted. If they their favorite podcaster, they can see what it takes to do this, maybe they're like, hey, maybe I should contribute to that Patreon.
From your mouth to their ears.
I mean, I like it, and the film, like as you, I don't want to spoil too much, but we have the host drop his Patreon in the film. And when we were recording Ronald's parts and he was like, no, no, no, drop your Patreon. We're talking about Patreon. You should drop your Patreon. Because that's what a podcaster would do. If they're talking about Patreon, they would mention that they have a Patreon. It's like, and we should show that, like, we should show that kind of thing.
You know. One of the other things we do in the film is we have.
A host read ad where the host turns to camera and basically stock what he's doing and does an ad basically, which we wanted to include that because we wanted to have that kind of feeling like, oh, okay, yeah, this is like a host.
That's what I say. He's not a narrator as much as a host. He's active within the film.
So, Sean, where's the best place for people to keep up with the movie and where it's showing?
Aoa movie dot Com is our website, which, to be honest with you, just really takes you to our Instagram for now. I have a website that'll be going up here in the next week or so that'll have some of the press that we've gotten in links to all those kind of things in the trailer. But if you go to our Instagram, there are the links to the trailer and you'll be able to see what's going on.
We've been a.
Little dormant since the screening as there's kind of things happening. There's people we're talking to, but I think through August and going.
Forward to Price see a lot more stuff that is going to be happening. Also, to be.
Honest with you, leading up to the premiere, it was so intense that I needed a chance to step back a little bit. And we have a new poster that's going to be coming out. We have a really really great poster that we worked with an amazing artist with that really kind of leans into Our current poster is our art poster, which is very metaphorical and artsy, but this other one really kind of leads into the podcast side of it all and has a more familiar thing
that people might recognize. It really kind of speaks to some of the content of the film as far as.
A little you'll see it.
It has an iPod in it, and it really leans into that kind of side of it and excited people see that, Yeah, a AOA movie. If that's our Instagram, that's our TikTok, that's our sessh. Twitter not super active on there, but we still have a count there and if.
You go to AOA Movie.
For now, it'll go to Instagram, but eventually in the next couple of weeks it'll probably lead to a website that has more content on it.
You can follow them where the film is going.
We will be announcing some of the podcast conferences that we're going to be at.
We're trying to be at the place where podcasters are.
Film festivals are great, and really want to be as many film festival as possible, But I think our core audience. The people who I think are really going to be the first people to really appreciate the film are going to be podcasters, and so you want them to have a chance to see it. So we'll probably be at some pretty big podcast conferences coming up.
I hesitant to announce anything.
Everything's fully locked in, but I would say with a lot of confidence that will be at some of the ones that you would imagine we would be at. And also I'll say, you know, reach out if anyone's listening, reach out if you want to set up a screening.
We are open to that.
We're trying to take that into account because we really want to reach out to our casters and people interested in the space and have them be able to see the film and talk about it. Because I think that podcasters, specifically, if we did our job right, will feel like they're being honored, They're being seen that this is a film that is for them, but done in a way that can bring everyone in to see what they do.
Well.
Shawn, thank you so much for your time, and thank you so much for the honor being able to watch. I really appreciate it.
Hey, Mike, I really appreciate you giving me the time to talk about the movie and also appreciate the kind of things you said about how it looks. You know, as a filmmaker, I'm hoping that it translates the thing that I wanted to and I hope the quality comes across. But as a filmmaker, you see all the flaws. So it's great to hear from a perspective that you enjoyed the film but also felt like it's a high enough quality that we are shooting for.
Oh definitely. Well, I hope we can talk again and hopefully maybe less than like seven years or so.
What we're hoping to do is if the film really connects with people. We have a lot of stuff that isn't in the film. We did an hour and twenty two minute movie. It's really short. We try to make it really digestible, and that's with credits, So there's so much content of people we talked with that is not in the film. I would hope that we might be able to tell the stories of some other podcasters as well,
so it's not just limited to the film. Hopefully it may become a thing that we expand beyond just a film, maybe a podcast, maybe an age of audio podcast sounds cool or something on YouTube that shows a little bit more and we can bring in people. So yeah, I'm hoping that if it really connects with people, we can expand it into something that's a little bit more than just a film and really just kind of a movement that is centered around the celebration of what makes us medium great.
Thank you so much, sir, This was such a pleasure talking with you.
All right, Mike, appreciate you. Man.
All right, we were back and we were talking about age of Audio and one guy who gets a lot of spotlight in this is Kevin Smith. And Kevin Smith really took to podcasting so much so that he what was it, Chrisky was kind of riffing? Was it with Scott Moser or people on this show?
Is that discussion that that podcast had effectively the first movie based on a podcast because Tusk came out of that podcast episode where they were talking about that listing for the guy who wanted a roommate but you know, dress up like a Walris and then you know Walris, yes, Walris?
No, Like where was that? Like that's I mean again, like because movie podcasts don't exist, That's that's.
Why, Well, Kevin Smith exists, doesn't exist.
But it's not a movie podcast.
I guess like this podcast, I think is just like a broadly like a pop culture discussion podcast with Kevin Smith.
I've never listened to an episode. I've heard enough Kevin Smith that I don't need to listen to much more of him. I mean, it just feels like it would be a brocast to me, where it's like, yeah, let's talk about smoking weed and how much I love my wife's taint, like those kind of things. I don't really need that. So Yeah, and when Tess came out, I was just like, what the fuck.
Is this.
Movie based on a podcast?
Yeah, and it's interesting to talk about how well they talk about how podcasts are reflected via Saturday Night Live, but they didn't really go into like, for me, I'm not that familiar with Cereal, but I'm familiar with Cereal insofar as the parodies of Cereal, not that SNL skit.
But I remember there being like a I don't even remember if it was a YouTube thing or what it was, but it was basically like living the life of Sarahcanig and this whole thing of like different pronunciations of male chimp and that whole male kimp thing that they were doing.
What.
I never understood that shit, But it is fascinating for me because I'm always interested in how things are reflected back through pop culture. So yeah, things like Tusk was fascinating insofar as it was about a podcaster only murders in the building. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Godzilla series like King of Them, Oh, I know you're not James, but King of the Monsters and Godzilla X Kong, there is a character in there who is a conspiracy theorist podcaster.
Hello, loyal listeners, Welcome to TTP Titan Truth Podcast, Episode number two forty five. Today's today maybe the last podcast I ever record. And look, I know I said that last week, and yeah, maybe maybe the week before and if we were the Toms. But look, this is the point, after five years of deep cover at Apex Cybernetics, I'm finally taking my shot. Something bad is going on here. I don't know what it is, but I'm about to walk in and download hard evidence and expose a vast
corporate conspiracy. Yeah you could call me a whistle blower, but I ain't just whistling. I mean, this is more than a leak. It's a flood. And believe me, this flood it's going to wash away all apexes lies. You can believe that.
It used to be funny for me, but then watching it now and in the age of you know, QAnon and all these things not very funny. Even if he's right that there are giant monsters, but there are things in the one with oh Russell from uh Dead Deadpool, that one where he showed up where they're talking about like using bleach to clean yourself and all this stuff, and I'm like, I was telling.
Me about one or two gallons won't cut itage. I need my bleach in bulk because by just as real people and it come on on thing.
That's how we find him.
The bleach bleach.
He consumes a ton of bleach, drinks bleach, showers with it.
Oh show you I shower bleach. You know what prevention against organic tracking technology?
You see that podcast is filling your head with garbage and it just makes podcasters look awful. It makes us look like we're absolute nutcases, which a lot of us are.
The beginning of the Halloween reboot, the David Gordon Green movie, they're like true crime podcasters that go, you know, to bother Michael Myers and then bother Jamie Lee Curtis, and then they get fucking murdered because they're because again, like they're being portrayed as obnoxious and look, like Mike said, I know plenty of obnoxious podcasters.
I remember when Only Murders in the Building came out, and I was I was very snoozy about it because it's not a great portrayal of either podcasters or podcast fans in that show. I have watched a few. It's almost as if the skits that we see in SNL, the skits that we see and Only Murders in the Building and other things about podcasting and of course you know, Joe Rogan and all that kind of stuff, don't paint podcasting in the best light that you that we possibly could.
And that seems to be a bit of a shame, you know. I Mean what I found interesting is in September last year, Only Murders in the Building came back for a fourth season, and so the and so the Wirecutter site actually went through all of the audio equipment that they used to make their podcast, and guess what,
it's all chosen for looks. There is no, there is no You do not want to buy any of the stuff that you see them using, of course, because it's a it's a TV, it's a pestich, it's a comedy show, and that's kind of you know, how it should be. But it doesn't necessarily paint us in a particularly good light, and particularly when you then have a look at I mean, what what is the main sort of view that most
that most humans have of podcasters? It's either true crime weirdos, or it's people like Joe Rogan, which is not a good a good view either, or Bill Simmons or whoever that might be.
What did Bill Simmons doing? Anybody?
James?
And then you've got people like Ira Glass or Guy Raz you know, people that will be comfortable wearing a bow tie. And you've got those three sets of people, and I don't think, being fair, either of those people necessarily paint podcasting in the light that we would like it to be painted in, which, you know, it all looks a little bit weird from my point of view.
I mean, the joke that I always make about podcasting is it's just three white dudes in a room bitching all the time, and we're fuck, we're here with the equation here we.
Are spoken into existence.
And I actually appreciate that the movie doesn't focus on like a white content creator, Like I appreciate that, like you know, yeah, like you know it it it's a lot of POC, a lot of women as well, Like I like that, Yes, there are plenty white dudes in the podcasting sphere, like if not most of these hyper successful podcasters are just white men or women, Like we've mentioned Joe Rogan, we mentioned Katrina Longworth, like the last podcast on the Left, guys Bill Simmons, like they all
have one thing in common again nothing I mean again, like they can't help that.
It is what it is.
But like it is kind of a deserved stereotype, but an unfair one because I think a lot of people, I would say, probably the three of us, bristle at that being the case because it makes me uncomfortable because I would never want anyone to think like I'm an
exclusionary content creator. I'm involved in an industry that's exclusionary because if anything, what like with weirding Way, like we try to be inclusionary, if not go out of our way to make sure that people are included, because, like we've already mentioned, this industry can't get by on the five percent alone. It just can't or whatever. The number is probably even smaller than that.
Frankly, I was appreciative that there were, you know, like you said, people of color. I very much make a point when it comes to like setting up the schedule for next to your shows and those kind of things. It's like, Okay, let's get some different voices on here. Can't just be white guys all the time. I mean, especially when it comes to like movies. Everybody loves movie except for James. Everybody loves movies, so it's like, let's
get all these different points of view. Movies are made for so many different people, and watching them you can come to things with different perspectives. So I thought that was good that there were a lot of different well not a lot of different, but some different perspectives in this spy.
Yeah, are there are some. I would say, if you watch the trailer, you will get the wrong impression because the trailer is almost all white blokes. But as long as you actually watch the movie, I think it's very clear you know that there are a lot of great women have been involved in podcasting all the way through. It's a history that's not reflected in the trailer, and I think that that's a bit of a mistake.
Yeah, I would like to have heard from Brook Gladstone as much as Ira Glass. You know, I think that she brings a lot to the table. You know, I mentioned Katrina Longsworth like she is as far as I know, the most popular movie podcast are out there again, amazing production values, stuff that I'll never be able to attain, that's for sure. But yeah, I mean she's knocking it out of the park. Well, she's also seasonal, so I know because people will come to me when a new
season starts and say, oh, have you heard the new season? Yeah, have you listened to my show?
No?
I listen to other people's podcasts. It's a weird question to ask me.
Yeah, yeah, I do try. I do try, But yeah, people always recommending shows and I'm just like, I'm sorry, I can't. I'm too busy doing my own thing. Not only are podcasters portrayed in different media, but then also you've got the idea of TV shows or movies being based well kind of like Tusk, but being based off of podcasts, which is also an interesting thing for me where it's like, how do you adapt a podcast to a movie or TV show? But they're doing it well.
If you do something like Loare, it's very easy. I mean, when I think of podcasts being adapted into things, I think of low other than Tusk and like Lore. I mean, I think they did a great job with Lore, but it was one of those things where I was like, wow, are.
You going to do that?
But again with the format of his show, it made perfect sense, like almost again, like people are probably like, why isn't this a YouTube video? Like, well, because it's an Amazon Prime thing instead. You know, now there's a point anymore, like just do it on YouTube.
The most successful company for taking podcasts into movies and into TV is wondering what one but they have done. They have done a really good job of taking some of their shows, both translating them into other languages and doing that properly, but also turning you know, I mean, Doctor Death was you know, made into a great TV show.
Lots of other of their shows have been made in integrate TV shows as well, and I think, you know, there was thankfully not much talk about podcasting going into video on this on this movie, and I'm pleased about that. That's one of the things that concerns me an awful
lot about where this industry is a going. But very clearly you could see that serial being made into a TV show that's called a documentary, and we have those, whereas Joe Rogan is just it's just two people talking and it's very easy and cheap to put cameras in there, and hey, presto, you've made some video out of it.
If I was a video content creator, I'd be more upset the video podcasts are cutting into what I do than the other way around.
I love hearing James on his show when he's talking about what is a podcast? You know that's still a debate. There are a lot of videos that I watch or video shows that I watch where I guess it would be reclassified as a podcast.
Now.
The comic Tropes, I love comic Tropes a lot. It's a guy talking about comics, and occasionally he cuts a way to pandles and shows things that way, but the majority of it is kind of like I'm looking at you guys right now, dude in front of a microphone, Well,
I guess you would call it a podcast. I remember the Red Letter media guys going frickin' ape shit a few years ago when William Shatner's people reached out and said that he will not do your podcast, and they're like, we're not a podcast by and I'm like, well, kind of like these days, I bet you that's what YouTube would put you in as well.
I'm looking forward to go into puncast movement in a few weeks. I've got some stickers, and the stickers that I've got are all very fancy, and they say something for your ears when your eyes are busy. That's what a podcast is. It's something for your ears when your eyes are busy. It might have some video attached to it, that's absolutely fine, go gamebusters on that. But if it doesn't work in audio form, it is not a podcast.
And the thing that is concerning me an awful lot is listening to shows where you suddenly realize, oh, this is just audio from a TV show, really, isn't it, And they keep on saying, have a look at this, isn't this amazing? Well I can't have a look at it because I'm just listening to the podcast. And I now feel like a second class citizen because you know, you've you've foisted me off on something that doesn't work
as a piece of audio. So I think we just have to be very careful, you know, in terms of that as we move forward. Thankfully they didn't dive too deeply into that in this particular movie, which was probably a good thing.
It's a very positive movie. Like it doesn't it doesn't talk about like I don't know, like not the dirty side of podcasting. But there's a little bit of like a less exciting part of this to talk about, like the stuff that we've dealt with, like the things that you deal with with hosting sites and not your people, not being upright and honest with things, or just you know, running into creative differences with people, like all kinds of things, Like none of that's mentioned. Like this seems like a
very fun and upbeat thing. Like look, I think they said it best in the in the documentary podcasting right now is like the last frontier the of like ultimate democratization of media is podcasting, like literally anybody can do it, like and as long as that continues to be.
The case, that is a positive.
But to your point, James, like the idea that like somehow now we all have to have video. Like when I came back from Podcast Movement last year, Mike and I had a conversation and one of the things I talked about was like, this is all video now. They all want video and they wouldn't shut the fuck up about video all the time.
I did a video podcast for a while. It was fine, but I would rather just do this.
This is what I signed up for, this is what I want to do, and this will always have a place. It's just figuring out a way to make this more accessible. And I think as something like this documentary would show. My hope is that something like that makes this more accessible, And something like Podcast Movement, which I am also going to in like a week and a half, goes a long way to that, I think in getting people engaged
and directly engaged. But it's whether or not those people leave that box that they're in, because it's not about, like you said, the echo chamber that we're all in.
Like podcasting is great, and I.
Love podcasting, Like, yeah, if you fucking listen to podcasts, Like how do I get the person that isn't already on that train onto the train with me? For as little cost as possible, and we as a collective industry still haven't figured that out. We haven't and I don't know what that looks like or what that takes. Because if I did, trust me, i'd be doing it right now, and I'd be sharing it with the people I work
with directly, so we could all be successful. Like I wouldn't keep it from people either, because that's how the other industries became the way that they are as well.
Yeah, correct, And it's one of the reasons why I am much less interested in seeing. You know, fifty three percent of the US pop listeners to podcasts every month. That to me is not an exciting number anymore. The exciting number for me is seven hundred and seventy three million hours in the US is spent with podcasts every week. Seven hundred and seventy three million hours. Now, if we double that, theoretically we double the amount of money coming
in into the industry. It's not that easy, but theoretically, at least, this is a number which is tied into the revenue that we can earn. And it's that number, seven hundred and seventy three million that we should be having a look at every single year. It should go up every single year, you would hope, but certainly seeing
that going up as our bell weather. And one of the ways that we can increase that is to cross promote other podcasts, to make sure that people find new shows that they're interested in, but also listen longer to the shows that they really enjoy and do all of that stuff. I mean, it's it's it's the usual way commercial radio works. But we don't seem to have focused on time spent listening in the podcast industry at all. The only thing that we've been chasing is how many people.
I mean, you know, there's the useless stat how many people have ever listened to a podcast. I mean, I don't know about you, Mike. I have stood using with bare feet. I have stood on a lego brick and that really hurts, and I'm not going to do it again. But I'm still in that list of people who have stood on a lego brick with their bare feet. That's not a particularly useful stat. But seven hundred and seventy three million hours spent with podcasts every week in the
US alone is an amazing stat. And as long as we focus on that and continue to grow that number I think we're in for a great future in terms of where the industry's going.
Some of my episodes are so long that I think I'm at least one percent of that number.
Well, that's the other thing that's nice about podcasting is it sticks around forever.
You know. We are the arbiters of that.
You know, we have all of our own files, we have everything, we can move our stuff. You know, they don't talk about it. In the documentary of like the Hosting Debacle, and you know, Kevin Smith talks about like, well I had to pay for podcasting, Like, no shit, dude, We've been having to pay for it this whole time. Like it's nice that you thought it was free, though, my friend, like, how about of that dozen bananas, thirteen dollars?
Yeah, sure, just give me the thirteen dollars.
I love that that is part of this, that we are the arbiters of our own fate in a way, like and that's kind of on us, like as not figuring out how to do this.
But at the same time, like I'm kind of okay.
With that because I think as an industry, I would rather be in a group of people feeling like we can still do better. And there's still room to grow. Then there is no room for anyone like us we're trying to like dig out and carve out our spot here as opposed to like there's plenty of room for everybody. And podcasting still feels that way, like I've only been doing it for a decade. It's been around for twice as long as I've been doing it, and there's still plenty,
like there's still so much room to cover. And I think that the documentary does get at that a little bit, but I think that's another like huge thing that needs to kind of just be like yelled at the mountaintop, is like there is actually room for everybody in this and you can be successful.
There is room. And I think Chris, you were saying earlier how many podcasts there are. There are four point seven million podcasts, and that sounds, oh my goodness, unattainable. But you look at two things. You look at the amount of books that are published every single year, way more than four point seven million. But you also look at the amount of active podcasts podcasts that are being made right now, and that number is as low as
three hundred thousand. That's the number that you're really competing with if you're competing with an always on show, and I think from that point of view, there's plenty of room and the benefit of podcasting it's called podcasting for a reason and not broadcasting, because the benefit is you can really talk to people with a common interest. You don't have to be broad you don't have to reach millions of people. You can focus on you know, the ten people in the world who like blue Trains and
make a Blue Trains podcast. You can do that and you can have one hundred percent reach in the people who love blue Trains. I mean, that's what podcasting can do. And that podcast can sit on the same platform next to Joe Rogan, next to Amy Poehler, next to This American Life, and that's really exciting. And that's something that you can't do in terms of Netflix. You can't really do in terms of YouTube because of the way the algorithms and all of that work and the cost of
doing video in the first place. But you can do that in terms of podcasting. And that's what I still think that podcasting is one of the most exciting media because you know, at the end of the day, you can do that and you can earn money by simply asking your audience. If you like this, if you get value from what I'm doing here, then please think about giving us value back, either value with your time of
listening to it, value with your talents. Maybe you might want to help promote the show or value with your treasure money and you can send it over here. And there are podcasters out there who are earning a living from literally doing that, from asking their audiences. If you like what we do, here's where you can help support that particular show. And you know, I think that's a very exciting place to be well.
To that end, I think I'm going to ask you guys to say where people can hear you and where they can give you money at I want to thank my co host James and Chris for joining me. James, what is the latest with you?
Sir?
Podnws dot net is where you should go and get the daily newsletter that I write all about podcasting. If any of this has sounded interesting to you, it's completely freepodnews dot net. That's very good. If you want to hear new podcasts, then try new podcasts dot net. New Podcasts dot net is a ton of interesting trainers for you.
Shows every single day, and it's a place where you can push yours as well, and if you want to learn more about me personally, I've got no idea why, but anyway, James dot Critlin dot net is my little home on the internet.
And Chris, let's lad this with you, sir.
Still taking that little bit of a personal sabbatical from my main show, just for personal reasons, as one might say, but I'm kind of getting back into the swing of things with it, and so expect back to weekly content
with my show. The Culture Cast over in weirding Way Media, where you and I do all the things that we do other than the one thing that is a bonus, and that's on my Patreon or your patreon, patreon dot com, slash Culture Cast or Projection Booth where we talk about James Bond once a month with our dear friend Richard HadAM. And it's a small donation on your part to get
some extra content in your life. If you're hard up for not having a thousand episodes of Mike's show or six hundred and ninety one episodes my show, and you need more, that's where you would go to find it.
Well, thank you again, guys for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth, like Chris said, check out the other shows that I work on. They're all available at wirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to the Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth or go on over to patreon dot com slash culture Cast. You can get
some good stuff there as well. Every donation we get helps the projection Booth take over the world.
Screw cute, I got nothing to say. Quit bugging me. Go away.
That time.
I didn't come in to scial last.
I'm sick, sick good, and I love the value.
Human sycrifice.
I like staring at two glass eyes, keep them stuffed museum style, got alarm set all around.
And kiss them around.
I'm sick, sycai aerical, and I value
Human sycrifice.