 My daughter is definitely an anime fan, so she's very heavily anime influenced. If you wanna see her work, she's at Acid Eyes. Okay. All right. We're ready, I'll count you in. Count us in. Let's see if I remember how to do this. Hey, it's time for Voice Over Body Shop. One more time. Believe it or not. And George and I are just gonna talk about the last 13 years essentially. Little reminiscing. A little bit of sharing some of the fun show art, the YouTube thumbnails that Dan's been making all these years on his own. You guys may not know that he makes them all himself, so he'll be showing some highlights and how he does it. And we have a very special announcement that everybody's gonna love. I think you're gonna love our little fun new feature that we've built on the website, which we'll be demonstrating tonight. That's right. So stick around for that. That's right. And if you've got a question, throw it in the chat room, depending on where you are. We're gonna answer it. We are, you know, we're on Facebook. We're on YouTube. How long will we run until we're done? Hour and a half? No, Sue only has an hour, so. You're having a hard out. I can keep running the show if you gotta walk out of here. Yeah. Anyway, time for Voice Over Body Shop. One more time, now. ["Voice Over Body Shop"] Voice Over Body Shop is brought to you by VoiceOverEssentials.com, the home of Harlan Hogan's signature products. Source Elements, the folks who bring you Source Connect. VoHeroes.com, become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training. VoiceActor.com, your voiceover website, ready in minutes. VoiceOver Extra, your daily resource for voiceover success. And by World Voices, the industry association of freelance voice talent. And now, here's your hosts, Dan and George. Well, hi there. I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whitton. And this is Voice Over Body Shop, or VOBS. So, back in before Thanksgiving. In the before time. No, not the before times. Yeah, no. Sometime last year. Now it's in the aftertimes. Right. Um, what happened? Well, we decided we were gonna take some time off. And we re-prescribed it. Yes, we said, okay, the holidays are coming up. Everything is just a mess. And let's just take it easy for a couple of months. Let's take a beat, let's maybe reframe the show. We were talking about it. We were talking about it. We were talking about it. We were talking about it. We were talking about it. We were talking about it. And then, the week where we would normally do the show came along. And I'm like, I'm not into it right now. After a bit of a vacation. And then- You started realizing that you didn't mind missing the responsibility of the show. My Sunday mornings were very busy. Yeah. Because we would get up, we'd watch the Sunday morning talk shows and I would sit there and I would put out the banners. That's what you're doing a lot of them. And promoting the show and stuff. And I want to really enjoy my coffee on Sunday morning. And because it's just the way things were lined up, I'm like, I've had enough. Yep. We've been doing the show since March 22nd, 2011. Holy cow. So we just passed that magic 13 years. 13 years, yeah. So, you know, it was- How did we get the thumbs up on screen? Is that a new Facebook feature? Yes. Or a new Mac feature? Mac feature. Oh, you must have Sonoma. Oh, maybe. No, I don't have Sonoma. Well, maybe Snow. Who knows what's on there? I don't know. I turn on the computer and it's there in the morning and it works. The feature, you have to say something upbeat. There you go. This is great. You can get fireworks there. OK. But, yeah, it just turned out that I'm like, the thought was is I was like ready to retire. I was about to turn 67. There was lots of stuff going on. If you read our message in Facebook about what was going on. And there was a lot of surgery between now and then. And, I mean, I had back surgery 10 days ago. I would show you my scar, but that would really be showing off. Yeah, it's the last thing you want to see is my Tochis on the air here. So, but, you know, I can't lift things. Yeah. But I can walk standing up straight. Yeah, that's huge. Which I had not done for years. I mean, everybody thought I was Roucho Mars. You used to see me that way, yeah. And, but now I'm like walking straight. I mean, the next, I was walking around the block the next day. It's amazing what they did. Incredible. Yeah, I mean, they had to take a big piece of my, you know, one of my vertebrae out, scrape off all the arthritis that's in there for all those years of playing hockey and sitting like this. The irony that being active all your life made you almost completely inactive. Right, right. And because of that, I couldn't do anything. I couldn't play golf. I want to learn how to play pickleball, although I'm really late to the party. I'm... You got to wait till it gets cool again. Yeah, yeah. Maybe like 75, 80 when you're in the retirement community. I'm in a retirement community. We're playing banana tennis. Banana tennis? Oh, I thought we were doing pickleball. What are you, you know, yeah. Trying to say something funny here. Yeah, the pickleball is what we used to play street hockey with. Oh, yeah, yeah. So now they're like, well, why don't we just play tennis with it? And now every commercial you see people playing, nobody's playing tennis anymore. Actually, I have a funny story about that. So I was hanging out with some young voice actors and one of them told me that she was looking for an apartment, but there's a pickleball court. But it had no, the problem was is that it did have a pickleball court. And the damn things are noisy. It's like tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, you know? And she literally said, I'm running outside. I'm so sorry for not having your name at the top of my mind right now. I'm gonna look you up because this is a great story. But she ran out, she went, she's like, I'm gonna look at my apartment now. I'm gonna, they're like, okay. She's like, I'm gonna go in there and shut the door and just see what I hear, you know? She's like, well, wouldn't you know it when I was in there, there was no pickleball going on. So I came back another time prepared. And she said, I came back, put a microphone in the room, brought her equipment, set it up in the apartment, hit record, ran out to the pickleball court and started hitting the pickleball just to see what it sound like. Then ran back upstairs. I was like, that is freaking genius. But that's what we do, like when we evaluate people's home studios for noise issues, we tell you to put up your mic, record the environment. What are we here? What are we gonna have to fix, right? What a hilarious. Why don't we go back and really talk about why we started this show. Some of the exciting things that led up to it, that was back in 2011 when the world was a very different place. But George and I met at a voice conference because you were brought in as a replacement for somebody who had been deported. So everybody knows who I'm talking about. You had a slide presentation on PowerPoint that was just a little over the top. A little bit too TMI. Right, there was just too much information in this slide show. And I was responsible for producing that room at that particular conference. And I'm watching these slides and I'm like, oh my God, he is gonna go way over people's heads. You could tell, you knew this was way off target. Right, because we do the same thing. We help people with home studios. Even back in, I started doing this about 2005, 2006. And I run like, listen, this is way over your head or over everybody's head. Let's go through these slides and let's take a few out. Yes. And we took about two thirds of them out as I recall. I said, you do this, they're gonna be kissing your feet at the end of this. Well, this slide right here, I'm gonna show you guys if I can. This was the first slide. I was gonna show everybody as this is what you should have in your studio. No guarantees I can actually get this on the show, but I'm gonna try. But if I go to share and stop screen and share screen again and present, it has to be within Chrome, doesn't it? Can you share other apps? I have no idea. I'll just share my whole screen. Let's just let it go. Let's just let it rip. Chaos ensues. Here we go. This is what I was gonna show to the students who I didn't know. The first 10 voice actors I probably set up were all promo people with ISDN and all this crap. So I was like, this is what you need in your home studio. Dan's like, oh my God, no. In fact, I still use the slide as sort of a joke. I'll show this as the first slide at the Atlanta. I did the Mike 10, P3, which is really kind of everything I know about recording within reason. And the first thing I would show is this one. Just be like, just kidding. People are sitting in the audience going, it's just a tad intimidating. Very intimidating. We can cut out about five or six things that are on that picture. Dan talked me down real a lot, and here's, look at his. Well, look at that, there's heavy George. This is slide one of that thing. And here's all the stuff we're gonna talk about. And it was gonna go off the rails quickly and Dan reeled me back in. And I'm so glad that you did, Dan. Yes, and we became fast friends after that. Couldn't I also remember you were promoting that mobile system? Yeah, VO to go. VO to go. And I was pretty impressed with that. And we stayed in touch and we did a couple of podcasts together, and then we decided, let's do this as an actual podcast, but let's see. I can't remember why we decided to do it on camera. Oh, so we could demonstrate stuff. Right. Well, no, it wasn't even that. We decided to do it on camera from my perspective because I couldn't find a way to do live shows that didn't have a video attached. There was no platform that I could find that was a, we used Ustream. And there was nothing as easy as Ustream. Cause we had to pay per viewer too, which was. Yeah, there was nothing really as easy and straightforward as that to just go live. And I was like, well, I guess we'll just have a static picture of you and me on camera or just sitting like there. And then that's it. And I was like, well, we have a camera. Let's just be on camera. Right. That was a huge mistake. Cause being on camera, a live streaming video is a big pain in the tuchas. Tuchas, you gotta say that. Just a more phlegm. Tuchas, tuchas, tuchas. A big pain in the tuchas. We have gone through more changes to how we produce the show. I mean, can you, let me see if I can remember all of the variations of how we've done our show. We did, we did. We started with Ustream. So that was me at my home on a desktop computer with a very complicated mixer, which I didn't even need, but I had for some reason. You called it the Medusa. And then whatever webcam I had and then you in Buffalo, me in Santa Monica, you in Buffalo, and we would use Ustream. And we would go live and we would actually, it was really complicated because we were taking calls from by Skype, right? So we were, or was it some other way? You and me were on Skype. That's how everybody was seeing us. But then we were taking calls by pots like landline phone. Maybe it was by, I think it was by Skype. I must've had another phone system. I think I had a second computer. I know guys, I'm sorry. It was 13 years ago. I think I had another computer that was dedicated to Skype duties. Right. And that was for the call-ins. Right, right. And so we had that set up because we were trying to be car talk. We wanted to take calls. Well, I mean, Dan's been in radio. I didn't know that the way these shows mostly work is it's 100% pre-recorded. You know, I didn't realize that like, what they do and the magic of how car talk is so seamless and so well run is that it's all pre-taped. Right, and they can edit it. It's all tightly edited. Oh, you're gonna be calling at such and such a time. I thought like we were trying to get callers to call in at the right time. It was a nightmare to do. It was really hard. And then, so pretty quickly we realized live call-ins wasn't gonna be a thing. And then we had Pat Freiland. Yeah, yeah. And a few other people that we knew. Bob Bergen was one of our very few. Bob Bergen, Pat was number one. Right. Maybe Bob was number two. Yeah, and then there were a bunch of other people we started bringing on as guests. That first, we had Tom Kenny. Yeah, Tom Kenny was a heck of a get. Yeah. I gotta think Tara's strong for that one. Because Tara invited me to this, it was like a fundraiser event for saving animals. And Tom is a huge animal lover like Tara. And she invited me and she's like, it's gonna be fun if you wanna come. Tom's gonna be there. I'm like, oh, I'd love to get Tom on our show. Long story short, I gave him my card. You know, when they were doing the, they had to line up where people were having their stuff signed. Right, right. And I said hi to him and I said, gave him my card. And he was super kind. And he was like, sure, I'll come on the show. Not only did he come on the show, he literally came into my house to be on the show in the flesh. Right. I mean, that was. And that's when we used to do the show where you and I would talk tech for the first half hour. Yeah, we would, no, hour. You and I did tech for a solid hour. Yeah. And the guests had to just wait. Right. And then we had two huge stars that did this. Tom, Kenny. And June Farray. And June Farray. Farray. Farray. Yeah. Very late in her life, but she was great. I mean, she was pushing a book at the time. And, you know, I had the opportunity to go, hey, Rolik, watch me pull a rabbit out of my sleeve. And she was like, but that trick never works. It was fantastic. She was the voice of Rocky Squirrel. And, yeah. And then people wanted to be on the show. So we got a lot of, you know, the top people in the business. If you're looking for the Tom Kenny one, by the way, that was before VOBS. That was East West Audio Body Shop. That's right. So you're gonna have to dig a little deeper to find out. Right. Eventually, the chatbot's gonna have everything from East West Audio Body Shop in it, too. Oh, good. It's gonna have literally everything we've ever done. It just takes more time to scrape it all. But anyway. We haven't told them about that yet. But we'll get to it. I know, I know, I know. I'm getting ahead of myself. It's that decaf. Oh, okay. Yeah. But it was fun and it was, I mean, nobody else was doing it. And certainly nobody was doing it about voiceover. No, there wasn't a talk show. I don't remember there specifically being a podcast. There may have been a podcast out by that point. I don't really recall. Right. But there certainly wasn't like a talk show. And there certainly wasn't like a show about just tech. Right. We really thought we were gonna do, what, two hours about tech. I think that's what we initially thought. Yeah. And then we realized that's just too much. Yeah, well, yeah, not only that. And we were doing it on a Sunday night. Yeah. We would do it live on a Sunday night. And I remember the Mrs. getting really upset because I was in a spare bedroom upstairs where my studio was. And Jacob's room was right next to it. And she got really upset because you're gonna keep Jacob up. Now, when you consider he's now 27 years old. It gives you an idea. Yeah, that was timeline. 13 years ago. So it caused tension. But some of the great, you know, remember my ear, nose, and throat doctor? Yeah. Dr. Joel Bernstein. That's when I literally learned about what an auto rhino laryngologist is. Right. And how to say it. That's right. And he's, you know. I don't know if Joel's still practicing. That was quite a classic. Yeah. I mean, we were singing on there. It was like the early days of television because there were no rules. It was actually more like cable access. Well, yeah, it really was. But we were doing it by Skype. Right. And then we were capturing that, which was pretty new technology. Well, that was another classic moment, right? So there was an episode where Skype died on my computer. Like in my studio, I couldn't get Dan back on Skype. So I got Dan on Skype on my phone. I had it on my phone. So there's a whole 40, 30, 40 minute episode where I'm holding Dan in my hand and talking to Dan like this for the whole, it is just his voice coming out of the speaker getting picked up on my mic. And that's how we did the show. Right. Because the show must go on. The show must go on. And it always did. Yes. I mean, there were only a couple of times when it just, it went totally kabloom. I mean, it would break up every morning. Well, yeah, I can think of maybe one show, one or two ever in our history where we just didn't go on the air that night. Right. I mean, maybe? I mean, we always got on the air. We went all the other. That's right. Even if it was late, even if it was static or like freezing. Right. There is actually a lost episode. There is. Oh, there is. There's a couple of those, actually. There's a lost episode and I'm gonna, this is a, I mean, you guys probably don't know. We did a whole episode with, you remember this guy? Say the name and then I'll remember the episode. I'm trying to remember it now. We're talking like 500 shows. Mark. Growl. Oh, yes. We did an entire, we tried to do an entire live show from his studio. His studio, right. We were touring people's studios. We were over at Dave and Dave and we were at West. We were at Wastrack's West. We were over at the Soundbox LA. Yeah. Tim Freedlanders. And we were doing remotes. We were just, we had no idea what the heck. We didn't realize that the internet was gonna be such a problem. We didn't realize that you can't walk down the hallway on a smartphone and have it seamlessly stream audio from the catacombs of a giant building. Yeah. No, it was a total disaster. It was so bad that we literally didn't air that one. Right. Maybe one of these days we should, glue it back together or recreate it. Really? Because Mark is now, you know, he's not retired, but he's not in California anymore. Right. I know that much. Studio's still there. Studio's still there and kicking, yeah. But that was an example of things where, where things went so poorly. Right. That we didn't even, I mean, because it was live. If you were there that night watching it. Really? You saw, well, you were the only ones that saw it. Right. And it was a total mess. Right. I was saying, you know, it's, you know, East West Audio Body Shop. Every week it's Apollo 13. Apollo 13. And then things stabilized a little bit. Yeah, for a while. Yeah. Not for long. So then, so then let me see the next iteration of the show after it really kind of went pretty much the same way until you moved here. Right. Right. We may have moved from Ustream to something else. I think that's when we moved to Wirecast. Wirecast. Wirecast was the sort of the pro version of Ustream, right? We moved to Wirecast and then things pretty much ran along and then Dan moved here. Yeah. And that's where things got very interesting. Well, one, because you and I were always doing the show from opposite coasts. Yeah. That was the East West. Right. There was the one time when I just sort of showed up in your studio. Yeah. Because I was out here for, fortunately my stepfather had passed away and my mom lived in Orange and I came out and where I was like. Yeah, Lee, it's working Lee. We see you. He's in the chat. And, you know, and then suddenly I just walked in and I'm like, hey, we're together. Then there was the party we had at Vanganguses, our third year anniversary show, where we had probably about 20, 30 people in that huge apartment of hers. Yeah. And we were decorating studio suit. And yeah, that was great. That's another classic. I'm realizing now a lot of these ones that we remember fondly were EWabs episodes. Yeah, they were. Because we had, it was still... We were fearless. Yeah. Let's see if this works. Yeah, yeah. It was a different era. Yeah. So, but that even, that episode even was before you moved out here. That was when I decided to move out. That was when you decided. Because Larry Hudson, who I know is out there, said, oh, you're gonna love it out here. If you come and move out here. So I convinced the Mrs. to come out here. He had a lot of reasons to move out here. Yeah, I mean, my son's at an animation school and this is the center of my universe. The business, the weather. Well, the weather, yeah. Remember, there was the one intro we had. I said, okay, go down on the beach and shovel some sand. With my kid, yeah. And then I had to wait for a snowstorm. And I went out into the driveway. So it was you flipping sand and then me going... Uh-huh, and shoveling. Shoveling snow. That was a great intro, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so... You know what we should do is put on the website, just have an archive of all the old stuff. Oh yeah. All the old intros. The old intros. Kind of like Mark Garau has a library of outtakes and stuff on his website. By the way, those are classic. It's Fix in the Mix, I think is their website, fixinthemix.com. And you have to go to the Bloopers area. There's some gold on there, man. Shatner, you know, like... Oh yeah, that one's a legend. Like there's some really good stuff on there. Anyway, use the thumbs up. Yeah. Now, one of the things that I would do every Sunday morning, because we would shoot the show on Monday night, like we're doing right now, is I had to create a banner for Facebook and for the promos that we would send out to our mailing list and in various other places. And there were a few that were my favorites. You know, and how did I do them? I would like, all right, I would just go and go, you know, Google, two guys doing this or two guys playing baseball or two guys, and I would, and I'd look at all these pictures and I'm like, okay, we'll try this one. And thankfully this is way before generative AI art. Right, no, this was me using keynote. Keynote. So you were using keynote all these years to make those banners? Yes. That's awesome. Because I knew how to do it. Exactly. It was easy. Let's look at some of those. Put that one. This was fairly recent. I love this one because I had a, you have to find the right pictures to go with it. You know, like the pictures of us. So I have to be looking this way and you had, and I would go through Facebook and all the pictures that were taken. Cause I don't remember, this one slipped by me. I don't remember this one. Isn't that right one? This is the Beatles on the roof shot? Yeah. That's fantastic. It could be. It's fantastic. And you know, there's things I had to fix. You know, I'm like, okay, I have to put the sky here, but make it look like we're actually there. No, that was the one I did with the Wright brothers. Some of them, it's people have no idea how much work you put into it to make it look better. Show the next one. And then Jacob started drawing these characters of us. And look how perfect that fit into those. Yeah. It was a no brainer. I think we did it with Yogi Bear and a couple other ones. Yeah. That's the next one there, Sue. Oh, now one of the things that I have a real propensity for, and this really came out of, I think a trip that Marcy and I took to Eastern Europe, we were in Czechoslovakia, went to the Museum of Communism, which if you're ever in Prague, go to the Museum of Communism. It's very revealing. It was actually quite interesting. But I had this thing for Soviet propaganda art. Yeah. Because it's great stuff, even though it's like big brother is watching. And this one was two guys, one guy's holding like a sickle or something like that. And then you had Lenin pointing like that. And I'm like, let's see if this one works. And that one worked really well for some reason. I mean, you are quite a history buff, so that makes sense. Oh, well, absolutely. Yeah. By the way, there's a great documentary on Netflix called Turning Point, The Bomb in the Cold War. Oh yeah. Watch it. If you guys don't understand what's going on in the world right now, watch that. It's a great review of the Soviet Union and how Putin came to power and why we're in the mess we're in today. It's all just a little bit of history repeating. Exactly. Shirley Bassey. Can't remember the name of the group that did that. It's... Oh, Propellerheads. Propellerheads, that's right. Boom. Listen to that one. Shirley Bassey was the one who was saying Goldfinger. That's right. Goldfinger! That just sounds great still. Yeah, no, she can still go. 60 years later. She's amazing. Yeah. What was that next one? The next one. It was like an airplane. Yeah, airplane. Yes. Heck yeah. Yeah, it was the 40th anniversary of airplane. See, was your mic on? No. Oh. It can be. Yeah, you're on line one there. You could be interstitially... It sounded like it was. Just one, two, one, two. Pot it up. One, two, one, two, see it sounds. Oh, it's on robot mode. Okay, never. It's one of the keypads on the phone. Yeah. I thought you'd turn that off before I have to do anything for... Did you turn it on on purpose? No, she was just playing with it. No, I didn't touch it. Oh. I thought you were doing it on purpose. Never mind. Anyway. This is an airplane, clearly. So, you know, it's like, how do you, how do you, I had to find a picture. Now, you'll notice that's the same picture of me and Paul and Courtney. Yeah, okay, which, yeah, it is. That's right, same angle, but flipped. Right. So, okay. And actually it's the same picture of you. Am I? I flipped it the other way. That's right. Nicely done. That's Striker? Striker and Nicely Nielsen, yeah. Yeah, you're the captain. And Otto the autopilot. You're over. Yeah, yeah, Otto the autopilot, yeah. I thought that would work. Now, this was for the interface shootout we had. Oh yeah. So I'm like, okay, I gotta find... This is still a good piece of content for those that want to hear audio interfaces. Yeah, I mean, audio interfaces have changed a little bit. You'll notice we haven't done one since because it's a big pain in the neck. Yeah, really. I mean, I had to record all this stuff and then we had to chop it all together. That's the thing, we do the show live and it made things a lot easier because then we were just like, okay, cut off the end and then cut it into two shows. Yeah, doing the show live is a part of the secret sauce of how we could maintain doing this. You would think doing it live makes things harder. Well, it does make certain things harder. I mean, like I said, I was getting into the point of how we've changed the way we do the show and when Dan moved here, we had to rethink completely. Well, we have a studio to do. Yeah, we have a studio. We have multiple cameras. Look at this great set we have. Yeah, of course, if we have a studio, we need multiple cameras. Right, how are we gonna have multiple cameras? How are we gonna do that? We figured that out. Well, first we had a pretty good MacBook Pro that we thought was good enough. It's still sitting on the couch over there, dead battery and all. But was that before or after the Mac Pro? I think the Mac Pro was before the MacBook Pro. Yeah. So we had a cheese grater MacBook into the big tower Mac. We had one of those and it was a beast. It was a 12-core monster that we got on eBay. It still wasn't enough. No, because well, then we had the PC. Well, which I really referred to as the beast. We had to get the PC because it turned out that wire cast, which is what we were using. Doesn't work on a Mac. It was so unstable. It was terrible. That was the main reason this show became all of 13 was because of wire cast. We would have so many problems. Every other show we would have to do troubleshooting to get things work. It was a nightmare, right? So then we're like, let's scrap it. So I was at NAB, I saw, I think it was Kirk Harnack doing live appearances from NAB. And I'm like, what are you guys running this over? What are you guys using there? Like, oh, it's V-Mix. I'm like, oh, V-Mix. Let's get V-Mix. So I'm getting on the whole V-Mix thing, right? And they're like, it's Windows only. I'm like, okay. All right, well, let's get a custom built PC. So we had a custom built PC just to do V-Mix. And that thrusted us back into PC world and Sue had to learn the V-Mix interface with Windows. And it was quite a learning curve and a half. But it was stable. V-Mix was way more stable. And we did do the live show on V-Mix for a long time. And then you discovered StreamYard. Well, we discovered StreamYard because then we had the pandemic. Oh, right. And then we had to do the show remote. We had to do the show remote. So first it was remotely control. I was trying to get Sue to remote control the Studio V-Mix computer and then listen to the show via, I think it was Skype? Or was it Zoom? It was on Zoom. So Sue was list trying, that was the, that's how she was trying to hear what Dan and I were doing. That was the IFB. So Sue could hear us live, even if we weren't on the air. Right. It was so complicated and it did not work out well. It was just a train wreck and a half. So that's when we discovered StreamYard. Right. Which is what we're using now. And then it changed everything because super easy. Like if anybody, while I have my gripes about StreamYard, it does weird things like why Dan and I were jiggling up and down before and I don't know why. But anyway, it's super easy. You're still doing it, but. Is it doing it now? Yeah. It's a weird software. It's all based on the web, it's on Chrome. But in terms of you wanna get a live show out in the air with the least amount of absolute headache and frustration, it's probably StreamYard. And it's getting better all the time. It's got more features. But that's, yeah, now five years, four years running StreamYard. So now you're all probably, we're just shooting the poop here about this thing that's going on. Memory lane. It's the top of the hour here. All right. Yeah, it's like 11 o'clock in New York. Holy cow. In North Carolina. Oh, that's right. We've only been on for a half hour. That's right. Okay. I guess it's time for the big announcement. Should we do that? Because you guys are like, what are you guys gonna talk about? What is it? What is it? Well, when we decided to stop doing the show, we were thinking, well, how do we promote the stuff that we have? We've got so many hours of material. That's the thing. There is so much useful evergreen content. Any question you would ever have about voiceover was probably answered on this show by all the guests we've had on, all the coaches and producers. And if you look at nearly 13 years, all right, let's say an average of an hour per episode because they were split in half. Well, there was an hour and a half originally. For a really long time, it was a full hour and a half. Right. Well, mostly because the guests would continue to talk and I'm like, okay, how do we get them to stop? Yeah, I mean, well, the shows were literally each Monday, nearly two hours. Right. Do you remember? Yeah, I'll never forget it. So you add all that together. And then when we split the show into tech talk, I mean, it's gotta be like over 1,000 hours of content. Maybe a lot more. If you include E-webs, easy. Because we did over 300 shows as E-webs. And then we did like 250 shows with a guest and we did 114 tech talks. 114 tech talks. You do the math. I mean, it's an insane amount of useful content, right? So then it was like, how do we make this usable and consumable as going on as the show goes on? And then give me my Sunday mornings. Right, so if you go on like Google or if you go on YouTube and you search for things, you can get lucky and find like an episode where something was brought up or somebody was a guest. But beyond that, you don't get much more useful information and then you get a comb through the episode, find what you're looking for. Well, I remember Jack DeGolia used to, kept a transcript of what we were doing. In the good old days, we would actually have a live human doing show notes. I'll bet you Jack's watching too, but. We really did. And so we decided that there needs to be a better way to find stuff. I mean, even for my own personal use, I would be frustrated. I would see things on Facebook, people talking about a certain topic. I'm like, oh my gosh, we talked about this ad nauseam on our show. If I could only find what's the poignant thing that we said or the moment in the show where we said, anyway, we found a way. And you found a way because I don't understand any of this stuff. We found a way. You're kids and you're AI. And we found a way and it looks, and it looks something a little bit like this right here. This is our new AI. Now I'm already logged in, so it's not letting me show the screen blank the way I would normally show it. But you can see John's eye peering through. This is now how we, you can find everything we've ever talked about on the show. This is our AI, Dan and George. And so we've built a chatbot. This is now how you can access all these years of content. Everything that's ever been said on the show, every guest, every topic, and we've talked about everything, every question, like you guys have ever asked, everything that's been spoken on the show thanks to, let's face it, excuse me, modern technology, machine learning. AI. This is all findable now. And so we use the service that allows us to, well, it's not a circuit secret because it literally sits on the bottom of the website. What it is. Powered by customgpt.ai. We use, I found a thing called customgpt.ai while I was sick in bed with COVID the first week of the year. And we were able to use this tool set to scrape and get site maps and find as much useful information that Dan and I have spoken online as possible, ingest it into this thing and create this tool. And it is, all you have to do is ask it a question. It is awesome. And here's a few things. If you guys have done anything with AI type tools, you're probably quite accustomed to the fact that they hallucinate. Yes. This has been, it makes up stuff. This has been a rather controversial part of any chatbot, chatgpt type tool set, right? What's so cool about this chatbot system is it doesn't hallucinate. If what you're searching for is not definitively locatable. It's not gonna make it up. The language model, it doesn't make it up. So for example, I typed in the question a little bit earlier. Are there any episodes where Sumerlino was seen on camera? Well, that may have happened at some point. But however, because probably we never said her name Sumerlino or something like that, the database of everything we've ever said doesn't know where that is. So it says, sorry, we don't have an answer. We recommend getting help from Dan and George or go to the website or, you know, we'll help you somehow, you know? So it won't make up an answer, but it comes up with all kinds of good stuff. And the better your question, the better the answer. Like you can throw at it tons of details and it will formulate some pretty useful stuff. If you guys have some good questions in the chat, I will start throwing them in there and you guys can search it and see what it comes up with. And see, so give me some good questions while Dan thinks of something useful to say. Well, I mean, it's easy to find this because we've put it on all of our websites. It's on, of course, vobs.tv. Yes, it's a very top. If you look right above us, if you're watching on our website, it says, you can't say, yeah, it's a chat bot thing. Click on that, it'll take you to the chat bot. It literally says, the best shop talk in voiceover is now in chat bot form. And then right below in yellow, it says introducing AI, Dan and George chat bot. Click here to learn more. So, the way it works. If you click on that. If you click on that, it's going to take you to, yes, it's gonna take you to a paywall. So at the moment, it's priced at 20 bucks. We think maybe that's a little bit steep. An introductory price of $10. We're gonna drop it down to 10 bucks a month. And so what happens is once you log into this thing, you gotta put in your credit card info. But what it's gonna do is it's gonna give you 14 days. Two weeks. To hammer on this thing and play around with it and see if it's actually useful for you and what you're doing and what you're learning. And if it is, then it will start billing your card. You guys know how free trial subscription stuff works. It works like pretty much all the other stuff. Cancel it at any time, but why would you want to? Right, so. So we're gonna adjust the price. Maybe we'll take a break later and I'll fix the price. And you guys can start playing around with it, but we are really proud of this. It's the way to get information we never thought possible. Every question that you could possibly have about voiceover, I mean, performance. It's been covered. Improv, every tech question we've ever covered. By the way, we'd like to have your questions because George and I would still like to do what we do best, which is answer your questions. Yeah, well, Justin, we're actually kind of working on a question from Justin because Justin Ramos answer said, Dan, can you tell us that your daily VO routine compared to when you first started as compared to now? You know, like checking emails, auditioning, checking PDPs. And then a question for me from Eldorado GTT, what have you done about your routines? Holy cow, that's a whole show. One question. Well, I can. Do you want to get to that one right now? Sure, yeah, what's my routine like? Well, let's see, I get up at 7.20 every morning, then stay in bed till about 8.20. I'm retired. I'm collecting my social security. I don't have to answer to anybody except the Mrs. Yeah, yeah, and Mishka, and sometimes Jake. Mishka's the dog. And, but I will come out here after breakfast because this is a separate studio. This was the great thing about this place when we bought it. It was a recording studio. The first, you know, when we first bought the place. And so George and I worked it to reconvert it into a voiceover studio and a television studio, which is why we look so darn good on here. We got lights, we got everything as, you know, of course, there was all the cable that was in here, which is now sitting in a closet. It's enough to support, you know, a tank hanging from. But, you know, I'll go check my email. But when I first started, it was, yeah, it was a lot of going to the PDPs and looking for auditions and firing those out. And Was there a point where you just decided I don't need to deal with the PDPs anymore? Yeah, about four, five years ago. Well, when one of them really went south with how they were managing things. I remember actually going to their office and saying you can't do this, as were a lot of other people. And I came home and I immediately took myself off of that one. I was on the other one that had a numerical name to it. We're not saying the name is because we don't want to come up in AI search. Right, exactly. But anybody that's been watching our show or is dipped a toe in the voiceover business knows what we're talking about. And I built my business on those. The one was very good before they decided to change their management plan. And- They changed their priorities. They really did. That's what it was. Suddenly we were no longer their customers, we were their commodity. Yeah. And I didn't like that very much. But I built a good, solid clientele from that. And I had a couple of big contracts with a couple of companies that were constantly sending these stuff. And then I started doing stuff like I became president of a local board which I'll never recommend. Because, what do they say? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yeah. You know, and no good deed goes unpunished. Punished, yeah. There's a lot of that. And I became very philanthropic and started doing that. That started to take away from my time from doing voiceover. Then for some reason we started doing this about a couple of years later. And that took up time. But we were doing the show to promote the fact that we were consulting with people on home voiceover studios. And a lot of people were getting into the business and they needed assistance with that. I spent about 50% of my time doing voiceover, 50% of my time helping people with their own studios. And 50% of my time taking care of my dogs. 50% of your time being a dad. That's right. 50% of your dad being a time being a husband. Right, right. So now I get to do all that stuff actually. And today, you know, it's pretty easy because my clients send me stuff. They've been doing it for years. I count on you. Right. And you're a trusted voice. Right. And people keep sending me stuff through my specimen collection cup on my webpage. And it's, you know, it's a nice leisurely life out here in Southern California where the sun is shining except for this winter. And, you know, it's not bad. And because it's so relaxing, I don't need the stress of trying to put this together every week. Right. You know, getting a guest and that sort of thing. So not that I didn't like doing it. I just got tired of doing that when there are other things in my life I needed to be doing. Yeah. Like looking after my family and, you know, make up for all the time that, you know, perhaps I was maybe not paying as much attention to them as I needed. Sure. Because this is a place, great place to come out and hide. Yes, yes. More than anything. And you all know what I'm talking about. I never had that place to hide in my house with my daughter growing up. And my daughter, my daughter, when she was able to, when she was at the age of being able to run and walk was disruptive. I don't know if you- And she would always run and walk onto the show, as you recall. She would love to stick her head on the show. Do you ever remember hearing her banging on the door to my office? Oh, absolutely. Very loudly. Like, I mean, like a kick drum. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, like a monster. So my kid was very disruptive. So, I mean, things have not, in terms of my business and what I do, things really have not changed. I still don't do voiceover. As crazy and stupid as that sounds the more I say it to myself. I never dipped my toe in the voiceover business. I still run my business full time. There was a distracted moment where I decided to join another company. From 2013 to 2017, I joined another company because I was, you know, I was tired of running my own business because it's freaking exhausting sometimes. It is stressful. And so that was a little distraction, but since then, you know, that was before I joined that company, I was El Dorado Recording Services. I met my buddy, Graham Spicer, who helped me do a remake of my company, a rebrand. We moved, we changed to VO Studio Tech. Graham and I joined this company. We worked there together for four years. Then we both were asked to leave and we did and we went off to do new things. And that's when I started George the Tech. I had to come up with a new brand. I had to come up with everything literally in one night. And that's what I did. Sometimes there's inspiration hits. I was, you gotta go for it. I was kicked out the plane and I built another plane from spare parts that I had still strapped on to me as I plummeted to earth. Managed to not crash into the ground and then fixed the plane and the plane's gotten a little better now with our latest iteration of George the Tech. The new website, which launched a year ago now, is been quite a journey and quite a process but it's the first time we built something from scratch from the ground up and it's been a huge amount of work. Huge amount of work. It's probably, I spend not so much now but for at least six months to eight months it was probably a quarter of my time was like just keep getting the website where you see it now and improving it. And now it's coming up with services that meet more people's needs and then building a team. That's especially since the new site came out. Quite a list of people you got working with you know. It's been a huge part of our huge priority was to have more people that have more specialties. Not only am I just one person, I just didn't want to continue trying to pretend that I'm an expert at everything. I'm just not an expert at everything. I'm not an expert at Studio One. I'm not an expert at Logic. I'm not an expert at Pro Tools. I can get around in these things. I'm okay in Reaper. Which is why we tell people not to use those things. Makes it a lot easier. You know some people end up getting training from somebody who's an expert at one thing. You know like there's a guy for Studio One. There's schools that still teach Pro Tools to brand new voice actors. Don't understand that at all. But anyway. Even simple kids. I don't want to learn everything new and I don't want to convince people that they need to learn these crazy new things. So my job is to be the advocate for the voice actor. Always really has been finding the right tools. Things that are easy, reliable and efficient. That's really my thing. And that's what I still do at George the Tech. Just trying to stay relevant. And I guess the only thing that's really really new other than the chatbot experiment is I've just decided while I was at VO Atlanta it would be a good time to launch a new membership. So we actually have a membership program now. Now I've offered this for years but only to under the radar. Not like online. Just you know a client of mine that's really busy. I'm like you know you're hiring me a lot. Let's work something out. So I do have a number of VIP clients so I see on a regular basis or help them. Well now really it's open to everybody now. So if you're interested in getting like a more of a flat rate type support, you can do that on George the Tech. You'll see a menu item for memberships and see what you think. See if there's something there that's useful to you. We have bi-monthly meetings where we just talk tech. It's ask me anything. You can get access to sound checks which is your specimen collection cup and unlimited access to the chatbot which we're gonna demonstrate here in a little bit. Actually I have a question for the VOBS chatbot. I also forgot that I became president of World Voices. Oh you forgot that little thing. Yeah. That's also taking up a lot of time right now. My term is up in October but you know I decided to take the organization and it, the times have changed and what we originally came up with I don't think was really as relevant today as it was back in 2012 when we started it. And so we're really marketing our searchable directory of our professional members, voiceover.biz and we're promoting it to the people who hire us and they are hiring people from there. So if you join WoVo as a professional member if you qualify you can be on there and that's like, is it a pay to play? Well it's $99 a year to be a member of the organization but we got other stuff. We've got our demo player. It's a very minimal cost. Yeah, for a professional organization absolutely. I pay more than that for every other organization I'm a part of. Yeah and then we've got WoVoCon which is gonna be more like Fafcon this year in Chicago which is gonna be great. Now a bunch of you know what Fafcon is. In a nutshell explain the Fafcon. Fafcon is an unconference where it's not where you bring in lots of big speakers to attract people. It's members helping members essentially and people who everybody's got some sort of expertise in something and their voiceover. Some people are really good at accounting. Some people are really good at marketing. Some people happen to be fairly good at home studio stuff until they don't know and then they ask you and me about it and then or somebody else who's gonna give them some long complicated answer and but we've got videos on stuff. Distinguished speaker series. We've got webinars and that sort of thing. But the Fafcon model was people would get together on the first night and say what do you wanna talk about and everybody would write it down and everybody would look at the cards and go I wanna talk about that and you'd put a sticker on it. So the ones that had the most votes. Was it limited to 100 people? 100 people back then yeah. We're gonna probably keep this to 150. Yeah. So imagine 100 people in one conference room sitting there with post-it note type things writing down what their topic is. Right and then it's more of a discussion than it is presentation. Some people come with sort of. Yeah I mean there's definitely a lot of people that are coaches that kind of have a spiel. Right. Like I did. But it's non-commercial. It's not like we're pushing people buy this guy's book or buy this which is by the way something I have a big problem within our business right now. If you've only been doing it for a year you're not qualified to teach other people how to do it. You know I spent 12 years in broadcasting and have a degree in broadcasting. I know how all that stuff is. Everybody else is just guessing. Now they're getting online and going trying to create a TV show or a podcast. That's what I used to do is it was the public service programming on Saturday and Sunday morning you know. Intro body outro boom. Put it on big reel of tape. Put it on there on Sunday morning hit the button and watch Sunday morning TV while that thing's running for half an hour and then wait got to go to the next one. You know that sort of thing. That was my life for a few years. But where was I going with that? What were we talking about? It's not important. That's what happens when. It's not important but I do have a question for the chat box. Oh good. So here we go. I'm gonna. And the question is. Shoe show me the chat box. So this question came in from Justin. I think it was from Justin. Sorry, who was the one that said here's a question for the chat box. Chris did. Chris Walsh. Okay. So here's this question. All right, we're gonna paste this into the chat box together kids and watch what happens real time. So go to the chat box, paste. And the question is. For the chat box search on which episode did Mark Cashman explain what to say to clients if they want to know what they are paying for. What did he say? Look at that. Let's see what we get. So Mark Cashman discussed what to say to clients if they want to know what they are paying for in VOBS episode 236. He mentioned that when giving clients a quote it's important to itemize the three things they are buying before than just one. This approach helps clients understand the value of what they are purchasing and clarifies the breakdown of services provided. Boom. Gold. Come on guys. I mean, that's pretty useful. It is. And then right below that, it says where did this answer come from? And then so. There's the video. There's references to the actual episode when that was mentioned. Now it's interesting it shows four sources. So I don't know how it derives which. Mark was on the show a bunch of times. Yeah, it does show multiple times when he was on the show but it says that this was the best answer to that question. So guys, you have no idea how complex this is. I watched the highlight reel of the NVIDIA keynote. NVIDIA is the biggest company that you probably don't know about unless you're a gaming nerd. You don't know. I think the second or third biggest company in the world, like right up there with Microsoft and Apple and they are the ones that build the processors, the servers, the chips, all this stuff that make stuff like this work. It's unbelievably complex. It just seems like a search engine but what it's doing is it's searching through in our case of this particular chat bot, the library, it's called the language model is built of just shy of 10 million characters. And so it's searching through all that, figuring out what's the most relevant way to come back to you from your query with something useful that really makes sense and then formulating a very well-written response. But again, what sets this apart from just your generic chat GPT? By the way, I have a chat GPT account from OpenAI and it's pretty freaking cool. I make a lot of chat bots but this one is absolutely has guardrails. It will not hallucinate. If it can't find the answer that's relevant to your question and it's not within the database, it will simply say I don't have an answer for you. We find your search a little bit. Yeah, just come up with a different question because it's not gonna make stuff up, kids. And that's a really big deal about this. How do you like that? Yeah, there's one. Maybe we can throw some more in there later if anybody else comes up with it. Are there any questions for me and Dan? That's the question. Well, we asked for them. There should be some. There should be some in here. Bop, bop, bop, bop. While you're doing that, we, of course, we have to thank Jeff. Jeff Holman, who was- Mr. Jeff Holman. Yeah, who was probably out there watching, going, well, good, I participate. Because, you know, we're just, this is a shoot in the Breeze episode. Yeah, it's a very loose. Yeah, but he would monitor our chat room. Yes. Shout out, shout out to Jeff Holman. Hollywood, Jeff Holman. Yeah, yeah, Hollywood Holman, yeah. I can't remember his IMDB. It's probably still hidden on our- Oh, got a question on screen now? Yeah, thanks, Jeff. That was a real help. You loyally helped us almost from the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah, yeah, it was when we really needed it. Yeah, so thanks, Jeff. So we got another question here? Yeah, this one came from Lena Del Robel, which is actually a new name to me. Hey guys, you're the best, and I've really enjoyed your shows. Thank you. Congratulations and thanks for everything. What are your thoughts on the Earthworks icon mic? It does need, no, it says needs no interface. I found it on Sweetwater. Okay, so that must be the Earthworks icon USB mic. So they made two versions, the USB and the XLR. I don't have any personal experience with that model, but I do have its brother called the Ethos. Oh, I remember you talking about that. The Earthworks Ethos. And I have nothing but great things to say about the Ethos. It's been fantastic. I have not used the USB variation of the icon, so I don't know, I don't have anything specific to say about it. I'm sure there's some good YouTube on the USB, remember specifically the USB version, because they make, when you have a USB mic, it's gonna have different quirks and you have different behaviors than an XLR mic. It may not have quite the game that you'll have with an interface or stuff like that, but yeah, I mean, is the self-noise gonna be as clear? Is there gonna be more noise? A lot of times these USB mics, they kind of cut corners on certain components to physically put them in the mic and there's just, they're not always the most clear sounding. There are some good USB mics. I mean, we know the- Sennheiser makes one. Sennheiser makes a new one? The M-Pay for digital. Digital, yeah. And the Rode NT-1 Fifth Gen. Fifth Gen, which is an amazing mic at a fabulous price point. Two probably the best USB mics going. They have a common thread between them is that they have zero knobs, buttons, switches, or jacks. It's all software-driven. Just a USB cable, right? So everything happens in the computer. There's no headphone jack, but they are really good sounding USB mics. But yeah, if you're really looking at ethos, I mean, if you're really looking at earthworks, check out the ethos. Super impressive mic that can easily do voiceover work as well as podcasting and broadcast stuff. Yeah. Then again, the bottom line on all of this is if it picks up your voice and it's a fairly good microphone, it probably doesn't matter. Whatever mic you have is the mic you have. It's this space around you that matters. It's always, it's the acoustics. And a lot of you talk the more the acoustics come into play. I've been enjoying watching Dan tonight because Dan has been like backing way off and all this stuff and talking. And it still sounds like he's right in front of the microphone. Right. Isn't that amazing? This is the Harlan Hogan V01A, by the way. That's the classic right there. And the reason for that is this room's acoustics are very well done. Right. There's this whole wall behind us that's behind this green screen is one ginormous acoustic panel. We're actually, it's called the studio suit. Studio suit. Hey, let's show it here. This is a good time to talk about studio suit for a minute. A minute, because it's long gone. But there it is. This is what's behind the green screen, everybody. You've ever been one? I wonder what's back here. But it works. Dude, so what is studio suit while we're talking about? Studio suit was something I found in a warehouse in Buffalo. Somebody thought it was, they were tense and this guy had bought an entire truckload of these things from some government surplus thing. Wasn't it Quonset hut insulation? It was insulation for a Quonset hut. Like they would put these up in the, in the Arctic, in the field. Right, promoter pool. And then they would have these huge rolls of this stuff. And they would roll it out. And so this guy I knew who owned this, where this Army Navy store was like, oh, I'm going to use this. People can soundproof their studios with it. Cause that's the stuff you're talking about, like it's not soundproofing. It's sound dampening material. Yeah, it's dampening. And it's, we put it in people's closets. It was, you didn't need a bass trap. It just sucked sound into it. And, you know, and I can talk right into it and it doesn't bounce anywhere. It's incredibly absorptive. In fact, that one episode we were talking about where Dan is assembling a blue-brown PVC is actually using the studio suit. It would hang it from PVC pipe. And it worked exceptionally well. But it had a couple of little minor issues. Some of them had a little bit of a mildew problem. Right, it took two or three bottles of Febreze to really get it smelling. Because they were outside, they were out in this palette outside for 10 years. So they smelled like a Boy Scout tent. And that is a very divisive odor. I don't know why for me, mildew smell doesn't bother me. Cause it's like nostalgic. It reminds me of being in my parents' basement. Well, that's what I was gonna say. It's like weird Barbie. It smells of basement. Weird Barbie. Yes, exactly. Oh, yeah. No, that smell was very nostalgic. It didn't bother me. But for many, for other folks, yeah, maybe not the best choice in an enclosed room. But Dan, the other problem was it was in these massive things. Oh, there was a 40-foot roll and I had to cut them into eight-foot sections. Manageable feet, and that was not easy. Which is why I stopped doing it. But the people who have it. And it's all still in a warehouse in Buffalo? No, maybe, I don't know. Who knows where it is now? I don't know what Rob did with it, but, you know. That was studious. He came in these big, 10-foot long green cigars of green canvas bags. It's essentially loose yellow fiberglass in a canvas wrapper. Right. And it works really well. Works really well. And I still have a piece, I think I got a couple pieces sitting in my voice booth over here. Yeah, there might be some still around. Oh, there's somewhere on this door over here. Oh, no, that's not. That's one of the panels I made. That's something you made. All right, there was another question Sue had on the screen a minute ago. Let's see if we can grab to that one. She's scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Dang it, I had it on screen. And you guys, oh, how would you prepare your voice for audio book narration? And since you don't do that anymore, you can ask. No, no, no, I gave that up about 10 years ago. I mean, there's a lot of you guys out there doing audio books. While you come up with an answer, I'll search for it on our chat box. Yeah, you know, to me, audio books were always high effort, low reward. But how do you prepare? How do you prepare your voice for that? You warm up. I come out here in the morning and go, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, I do scales. I, you know, you go, ah, ah, ah. Oh, do the vocal exercises to really loosen up your voice. But doing a long session of audio book. I mean, when you read an entire chapter and, you know. Long form narration is physically exhausting. It can be, you know. I mean, it was, I mean, when I have to talk all day as not being a voice actor, I get physically tired and I can feel it in my throat. I feel how tired I am. Yeah, I was in really good shape back in those days. And I could, if you're in good physical condition, and I was working with a trainer back then and I was able to, the door swung open and a fake Newton entered as Groucho Marx once said. But, you know, I, you have to be in good physical condition. Really, to do voiceover, because there's so many people that try to read a sentence and take a breath every five seconds, you know. Right. You should be able to read an entire sentence without taking a breath. Look, think about how much editing time you save just by doing that. But what did the chatbot come up with? It came up with a bullet list of stuff. Which is, you know, chatbots are really good at making lists. And by the way, I have been using my own personal George the Tech bot, you know, my AI George for like a month and a half, answering you guys' questions on Facebook and Reddit. I don't know how much you, if you've seen answers for me that are remarkably well written and verbose. Possibly broken down into eight to 10 bullet points. Yeah, it's probably my chatbot. I've been using it a lot. But the answer is, it's eight points. Warm up your voice. And there's, you know, there's more details for each one of these, but warm up your voice just like Dan said. Stay hydrated. Thank you for the reminder. I forgot, because I don't stay hydrated. I don't drink at all. I mean, I gotta start using the water intake, but practice reading out loud if this is something new for you. Understand the material you're reading. Pretty important. It helps. It really does help. Work on your breathing, proper breathing technique. Very crucial. I'm just repeating what Dan said. See, look how relevant this is. It's all up here. Create a comfortable recording environment. Extremely important for audiobooks when you're gonna be there for hours and hours recording. Rest your voice. How long would you go between breaks? How long did you know before you're like, I gotta take a break? More than two hours? Yeah, I mean, I could do a chapter in an hour and I would stop. You would take a break. Have a drink and go back and go back at it. Although generally, back in the day, I would record and I would edit the chapter. You like to do it as you go. That would be my tendency. I would be so like, it would be so in my head when I just recorded. And I would just be thinking, I gotta edit it, I gotta edit it. I gotta edit it. I can't let it go. That would be me. I would edit as I go. I'm the same way. Are you coming for lunch? Yeah, I'll be there in a couple minutes. Yeah. And the very last one, which may be the most important bullet point of all is seek feedback and training. Listen to people, get advice from professionals. Don't think you know everything. And just because you have a chat pot, doesn't mean you have all the answers and get help. Or ask us. Get help, get help, get help. Great question. So, and Christ, we've been doing this all these years. The thing is, is the more you do it, all the years that you and I have spent building home voiceover studios, very specifically. I mean, did we know everything when we started? No, of course not. I mean, it was a little George Carlin joke. How do you start a path? You gotta hold the grass down yourself at first. Oh, that's a great line. I remember that one. Well, Carlin had a bunch of them. But we learned, you know, the more experience. Nobody has as much experience at home studios as you and I do. This has been an absolute obsession for a very long time. Yeah. And, you know, everybody else is like, oh, here's how you be an engineer. You don't have to be an engineer. Yeah. You gotta learn Pro Tools. That's the industry standard. There's no say. Which industry are you talking about? Yeah, let's talk about which industry we're talking about. Right. You know, you're not a recording engineer. You're a voice actor. Your job is to capture your voice in the proper acoustical environment with the right levels. And now levels, now AI is controlling that stuff. Well, AI and 32-bit float, which is a topic I've been, I have been teasing that I'm gonna do a webinar or a video on 32-bit float for a very long time. And it's time. So I'm gonna be doing that soon. Cause it's, the question keeps coming up more and more often. And I've got two perfect devices to test. I've got the Rode NT-1 5th Gen with the 32-bit float, USB, AD converter, magic sauce. And I have a Zoom UAC 232, I think it's called. Which is sort of like their Scarlett 2i2, right? It's an audio interface with no gain knobs. Oh. It has zero gain knobs. The EVO 4 is like that too. Well, it will set a level. It has a smart level. That's a whole other thing. So smart level setting. This is becoming more of a thing, especially now the new Scarlett 2i2 4th Generation came out. It has auto level and safe modes. I'm still dubious on the safe mode. I was watching all these YouTube videos trying to get a better explanation. Basically a limiter or? That's what I don't understand. I don't know if it's a limiter where when you get to clipping like zero, it brings the level down for just a moment and then back. Or if it drops it down and then leaves it down. If it was me, the way I would want that feature to be is if you do get to clipping that it would drop the level by, I don't know, let's say 60B, just like that. And then for the duration of the entire rest of the project, it would be six down. Because then if you're editing the audio, you know the precise moment where the gain changed and now you can just make your adjustment in post. Right. You just take the first half and drop it down by six. Boom, you're done. So I don't know, the jury's still out on that. Now, speaking of the Scarlet, you notice I didn't mention the Scarlet Solo. Do not get the Scarlet Solo fourth generation because. Because? Channel one is the guitar. Channel two is the mic. They flipped it on us. And now, so if you're trying to use this. Just to mess with you. Oh, it's so irritating. Now, I mean, a lot of like Zoom type programs just automatically hear both channels and it's a piece of cake. But your DAW isn't gonna work that way. So if you're just used to plugging in a mic to channel one, hitting record, you're gonna get zero on your track unless you go into the settings, switch the inputs. Now, I know that sounds easy, but trust me, it's a pain in the neck when it's not the default. Right. And so I really don't recommend the Solo. The 202i2, fine. The 4i4 has much more complicated software. If you geeking out on making mixed minuses and all this crap, go for it. It's fun to be a geek. I mean, if you want to play with stuff, but you don't need it for doing voiceover, catch it clean up front and, you know, we've only been saying that for 13 years. Sure. Let's grab some more questions. John O'Rourke, of all the home studios who each have worked on, what ones were your favorites and why? Can you remember anything that you've worked on that just stands out? Oh, let's see. What's the one that flashes to your brain immediately? Oh, some of the ones, you know, when you would go into these big expensive houses. You know, I'm suddenly in this mansion up in, you know, in Sino. You're in the gated part of the gated part? Right, exactly. Of the gated community. Yeah, you have to go in there and like, I'm here. You know. Okay, you go in there. And you're suddenly in this very, very nice closet. And you see the kind of clothes people wear and that sort of thing. And I've done that many times. And you realize they have a perfect booth already. Because they have this huge closet. There's clothing on maybe all four sides, it's a big one, right? And you put them like in there. I mean, I've done so many. It's the ones that look impossible and you just make a couple of little adjustments and it sounds good the way it is. Because as you always say, if it sounds good, it is good. Yeah, I mean, I won't mention any names, but you know, there are a lot of places where I've, you know, they're a challenge. I go into a place and I sniff. As I like to say. All right, what does it sound like over here? Okay. All right, if you place yourself here, this is the sweet spot, put the mic like this. And you know, I just, you know, rinse and repeat. And I always get it right. Because, you know, I don't want to overcomplicate it. I'll show people how to edit properly. But, you know, there's not one that was a favorite. I love doing all of them. You know, unless someone was a real pain in the ass, which was very rare. We're just a little loony tunes. It's pretty rare. Yeah, I mean. We're working with regular, we're working with people. Right. You know. Yeah, and, you know, and of course, there were a lot more people trying to get into it who had no experience at recording. Right. So, you know, that's the fun part for me was, you know, quickly setting up, but then explaining the business to them. Yep. Like, I mean, you, I, like, you know, I'm always making this joke. That's the, that's the extra special sauce of having one of us there physically with you or working with you. Right. There's so many other things that just flow out because we're just been in your, we've been in these environments so many times. And we find little things to improve or tweak. Exactly. Little tips, you know. Yeah. And, you know, trying to deal with background noise and, you know, I always say, well, you live where you choose to live. You know. If you're next to a construction site, you know, you're, you rest so well. That, that, that reminds me of that one time. Okay. Actually, let me show you, I'll show you my favorite studio before we go on. My favorite studio to this day is still, is still this one. That one. Yeah. I've been in that one. Speaking of the impossible studio, right? Yeah. Look at this thing. It's a freaking glass fish tank. Right. How can that possibly, how can that possibly work? The glass is all parallel. There's no slanty glass. Right. The room is basically a square. Right. You know, so it's glass, glass, glass, square, big, huge countertop. And there's a glass window on the opposite side, also perfectly parallel. Right. So every rule is broken in this space. Why is the glass slanted though, in most studios? Not for acoustical reasons. There's two, well, there's two reasons. One is no glare. So you can see, That's, that's the bigger one. Like, yeah. In radio studios, it was like, you know, okay, three, two, one. Try looking through the door of your studio bricks or really any door glass door that has double layers of glass. And all you see is yourself. Right. All you see is reflection. So that's one huge reason why the non-parallel glass is the norm. It can help in a small booth too, because the sound now reflects downward, you know, instead of right back at the mic, you know, but it's not necessary. And this is an example of that. Why does it work? Well, it works because mic placement is critical. We have the acoustics all focused on one location where the mic is. The entire ceiling of the booth is one gigantic bass trap, right? So there's no resonances or anything, the whole thing. And every square inch that isn't glass or wood has acoustical paneling on it. So it's, I put that drape in there thinking, well, we're gonna need a drape because it's gonna reflect. Right. No, he never closes the drape. So this one is a real favorite of mine. It's got stained glass at it because that window was already on the outside of the house. We're like, what are we gonna do with that glass window? Well, we should frame it out. So this one's a favorite, but there you go. You can see where the two mics are located. He's facing right into a huge- It was a beautiful studio. I know, you know. It really was. And that one's still, that's Howard Parker. It's still in use today. And so yeah, that one's that always comes straight to mind when that question comes up. It's always fun to see how people have already set up. You know, and then it's like, you know, one, you're talking into the side of the mic or you're talking on the wrong side of the mic. Yeah, let's demonstrate it every week. Yeah, let's demonstrate that. Everybody needs to hear the wrong side of the mic. Talk into the logo or if you got a road into the gold dot, not across it, the gold dot kids, the gold dot. You know, something just came to mind. Yeah. One of my favorite shows that we did. Well, actually I ended up doing it was the one I did from Hershey. The Russian talk show. You know, where I, you know, I'm like, is everybody here a floor director and a TV? So I do that. Totally cable access. Yeah. And, and we, we did it. It was all with analog cameras. And I had one of those switches. Just like Sony, old Sony Haney cams with your RCA cables plugged into a radio shack. Right. TV switcher like, I want to watch the, I want to watch it VHS click. Right. That was the switch. Right. You know, there was, the genlock was a little late, but you know, it was a little flunky, but it was fun. It was, you know, I'm like, hey, I'm here at Fafcon. Here, let's talk to this person. And, oh God, that was a lot of fun. You know, again, it was, there were no rules. It didn't matter. Yeah, we just went for it. I think, I think people need to start living their lives that way. It's like, yeah, there are rules. You know, you stop at a stop sign and, you know, things, you don't kill other people and things, but there are rules. It's just live streaming and doing a show. Just go with it. Very few. As we've been doing for the last hour and 15 minutes here. Exactly, exactly. But maybe, you know, do we have any more questions or? Yeah, I know there's more in there. All right. Well, let's answer a few more. I'm changing the price on the chatbot. Okay, good. This is the other thing. Well, we're doing this show. He's on the internet. Going, oh God, I gotta have something for tech talk. That's why the laptop is always right in front of me. It's like. Oh, wait a second. I hear somebody at the door. There, product price changed. Excellent. It's $10 a month. Come here. We've also had several dogs that have been in the studio. We had Ari all those years in Tink. Now we have Mishka. Mishka. Mishka likes to lick microphones. Lick the mic. And why not? Can I lick the mic? Can I lick the mic? Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Any questions? Okay. Sue has a question from somebody. From Greg Hernandez. What's your favorite part of VOBS? Is it the interviews or the tech talk? Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Tech talk. Yeah. No, I mean, it was fun meeting some really cool people. Absolutely. I mean, I mean, I've met Melamed in here. People who are, you know, fairly big stars. Debbie Dairyberry was always a pleasure to talk to. And some of the cool people that we've met. And it was interesting, you know, when they would come and they would be in my house and they'd come here and they'd sit here and I'd get to look up their nostrils and everything. It was kind of cool. But you and I just shootin' the poop here about all this stuff because it's so much fun. I mean, clearly, we've had some, the highlights are pretty obvious. And we've talked about them a lot, like June Ferre coming into the studio. He was passed on by now and just her live interaction with Dan and just, she was amazing. Yeah. Gosh. And then we had some great coaches on too. I mean, so many great coaches. You know, Dave Wall, she was always fun to have on and Mark Cashman and John Bailey. I mean, it's, we've had some friends of the shows over there, John Taylor. John Taylor? Where is John? He's out in Palm Springs. Oh, he's in Palm Springs? Yeah, he's lovin' his life in Palm Springs. Good for him. John, search for any episode with John Taylor. With John Taylor, yeah. You will laugh. But John Bailey became another friend of the show. Yeah. Just, if we were like, dang it, so-and-so we got booked. Yeah. Called John, Steve John Bailey, do it. And he would write back, who canceled? And we'd bring him in. John Bailey is a fantastic guest. Yeah. If you go to the chat bot, that's a picture of John in the middle of the, the guy in the middle is John. He doesn't look anything like that now. Yeah. Yeah. And Scott Parkin, we had some fun times with Scott Parkin, cause he would always bring a bottle of rum. Oh, yeah. Who were the guests we had that would bring booze? It was Scott. Yeah. And it was Compost Productions. Oh, oh. Yeah. Oh no. I'm gonna have to use the chat bot. I'm gonna have to use the chat bot. Bill Holmes. Bill Holmes, sorry, Bill. It came, it was in back in the back of my mind. Sorry, Bill. Bill Holmes, those two guys would show up to the studio. Usually it was shots. Yes. And so within the first hour, we were getting a little bit schnockered and getting pretty loose on the mic. Yeah. Yeah, those were fun shows. And, you know, it was just fun. If it wasn't fun, we wouldn't do it. Yeah. You know, and when it became more... It still was fun, but there was still more of the labor of it. Yeah. Of the grind of it. Well, and, but the... It's not shoveling snow. No, it's not. And it's not mining coal. No, it's not. Although there is a certain pleasure to shoveling snow. Like, I'm proud of this driveway as it starts snowing again. But... Well, we didn't have the snow. Well, we had the snow, but it was, for us it was the leaves. Should we wait till all the leaves fall out of the trees before we start cleaning up the leaves? Right. And then there were the tips, my tips of the week, which were well planned out productions. We gotta do packages. Oh yeah. Pre-recorded packages. Can't just be our talking for hours. Pre-recorded packages, yeah. And those are, those are still on the internet. Those are on, I think those are still on the VOBS website. And, you know, you can type in tip of the week and it'll give you all the different tips of the week that I made. Chris Anthony Lansdown, thank you for speaking up. The voice of Barbie. She said we had Barbie, of course we had Barbie. Thanks, Chris. Yes, we had the voice of Barbie. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, come on. I mean, where else can you, the funny thing was is people would recognize me places. I'm sure it happened to you too. I'm walking down the street in Pebble Beach or in Carmel by the Sea. People don't recognize me because I'm usually wearing a helmet and I'm on a bike going 15, 20 months now. I'm walking down the street. My son had just graduated from Middlebury College in Ventura and, no, not in Ventura, up in the Monterey Bay, upper Monterey. And so we went into Carmel by the Sea, which is a beautiful little town. Absolutely. And this guy's standing on the corner. I'm walking by there with my mom. He goes, why don't you Dan Leonard? I'm like, yes, I watch a show. My mother was very impressed. It happened in a subway a couple of times. People see the mustache and they were like, oh, you're the guy that has that show on voiceover. So clearly we were doing pretty well. And then people would send me mustache stuff. There was so much mustache stuff. What? I was trying to get her attention without getting distracting you, but it didn't work. No, well, you're going like this. I mean, what? No, I just want to make sure she had to go at some point. Oh, okay, yeah. At some point. Well, we'll finish up in five minutes here. Five or 10 minutes. Yeah. You want to run all the Best Wishes? Oh, yeah. Sure. We have Best Wishes from people? We do. I got to let Mishka out. All right, you let that. Hey, Bonnie, that's my cousin Bonnie in Pennsylvania. She's just a little older than me and she was one of my best pals growing up. Hey, Bonnie, thanks for saying that. Trey, Mr. Trey, Kendrick Mosley who has his own podcast. All right. Good to see you fellas, says Trey. Alicia Hurley says, where can we find new tech talk like all the new gadgets George talks about? Well, I guess moving forward, I guess my other show now, the Pro Audio Suite, it's probably the place to go cause that's where I'm releasing new content and, you know, so check that out. It's a very different vibe, definitely more geeky. But yeah, it's called the Pro Audio Suite and we release stuff every week. So that's one place to go. Paul Sager, thanks for everything you do. Thanks for saying that, Paul. Thanks, Paul. Yeah. Oh man. Justin Ramah says, yes, thank you, Jack. I watched all of you abs and thanks to him, I was able to take notes easier. So he's thanking Jack Tagalia for doing all the manually written show notes. Right. Which is things that just don't, I'm going to be happening anymore because of AI. Joan Covino says, thanks for sharing your expertise, humor and insight over the years. Thanks, Joan. Yeah. We recognize a lot of names, but that one I didn't remember. Humberto, Humberto Franco in Portugal, it's 3 a.m. and he's watching live from Portugal. You rock Humberto. You do. I mean, also I know that he works like Pacific Time Hours because that's where all the clients are. But thanks Humberto. He's an interesting guy because he's so great. Yeah, it's like, well, you speak Portuguese because he's in Portugal. He's Portuguese. He's Portuguese. And I once said, oh, so you could do stuff in Brazil. He goes, that don't speak Portuguese in Brazil. That's some other language. Well, that's like saying that you speak Spanish, but you're from Mexico versus from Spain. I mean, these are very different dialects, but yeah, you can understand it. Bill Hepburn says, thank you. I've immensely valued listening to the two of you over the past 18 months. And as I've started my, and as I've started my VO journey, so much learning, so much more to learn. Hashtag thankful. All right. Thank you. Eddie, Mr. All Caps. Eddie. Sure hate to see you two masters go. Thanks for everything. Thanks Eddie. Yeah. You are great support of the show. And Sue too. Thank you too, Sue. By the way, the desk that Sue's sitting at is thanks to Eddie. Yeah. Eddie found this desk at Costco. He's like, he had one. He's like, I got to get one for the show. He says, you guys want to get one of these? He's like, I want to get you this desk. We couldn't say no. We couldn't say no. He showed up and he brought this freaking super cool electric lift desk in the studio five, roughly five years ago. And it's been here ever since. Thanks Eddie. It's moved around a little bit, but you know. Thanks Eddie, you're awesome. Larry Hudson, our old buddy. Larry. I'm over here all by myself, blasting and laughing hysterically out loud. You guys have created an amazing legacy of greatness. Man, that means a lot, Larry. Larry lives up in the mountains. Up in right wood. Yeah, he's, you know, 10 foot of snow up there. I mean, they really get to see an hour from here and suddenly there's, you know, all that snow. Yeah, man. We love Larry. Larry, by the way, Larry, again, I was mentioning it. Larry was the one that told me, you got to move out to California. You're gonna love it here. Yeah, that was that Larry. That Larry. Diana Costello Merritt. Oh wow, we go back. Oh jeez. Good times, love y'all. Nice buffalo gal, yeah. I remember hanging out with her at Fafcans. Yeah, it's Violaire, Fafcon, that kind of thing. We miss you. We haven't talked in a long time. Did she have the temporary tattoos? I don't know. I feel like she had temporary tattoos and we were sticking away everybody and laughing. Oh, that might've been going on at one of those conferences, but speaking of stickers, not to get, you know, not to get, oh, but there's a sticker on the back of that mic. I'm gonna mute it for a second while you take it out of there, but there's a very special sticker on the back of Dan's mic that I know will be very hard to show on frame, but. We had this tradition at Movo. There's this guy, Pat Sweeney, who was a big fan of our show. One of those people, he was like my grandmother. He had a different relationship with everybody and everybody loved him because he was just a super-duper guy. And, you know, and he passed on, and so we have this thing, you know, he used to say, I'm gonna, you know, you're gonna give, you gave somebody a golden nugget and would give him a slap on the back and we came up with these stickers and say a pat on the back. And that's his testament. And boy, we miss you. God, he was such a. We miss you, Pat. Yeah, there's so many great people. I don't wanna get into a list of people we've lost because I can't hold it together. I'm not a professional. But there have been quite a few that we've lost over the years that have been our clients and friends of the show and all this stuff. And Pat, I'll never forget you. I'm glad you have that sticker on your mic because it'll always remember. It's always give out advice. And I know you're like looking at Pat, but Pat's on the back of the mic. Oh, I know. Kids, that's the back of the mic. That's at the back of the mic. I'm talking on the wrong side here, aren't I? Okay, there we go. Now I'm in the right side. There you go. Anyway, that's what the back of the mic sounds like. Well, it's nine o'clock here in California. Love you, Lee. Lee. By the way. And Lee Penny. Whatever we say for Lee Penny for being Lee Penny. Lee was a very early on supporter of our show as well. Coming into the studio. Helping us with some tech stuff early on. Big time supporter of our show. Thanks, Lee, for being there all these years. God, it's been a blast. It's been a blast. Yeah. So I guess that's gonna wrap it up. It's gonna wrap it up. If you wanna eternally, I know, I'm getting a little friclimbed. Talk amongst yourselves. We'll have some coffee and we'll talk. It's been a great time. And we're gonna be continuing to do things just in different formats and different ways. But if you wanna keep tapping into our knowledge, vObs.tv, and you'll access our chatbot. Our chatbot there for now $10. For $10 a month, 14 days free trial. Play with it, test it, and if it works well. And by the way, Dan, you're gonna be giving this chatbot to some supporters of our show. Yes. And to Wovo members. Wovo members. So if you are a Wovo member, world voices member in good standing, you're gonna get access to the chatbot for free. And everybody who are making repeat subscription support of our show. Who are sending us money, like on PBS, sending your dollars. People would send us money and it helped with the equipment and all those things. And people did it for years and years and we really appreciate it. We're gonna find a way to give you guys access to the chatbot too. So use it, enjoy it, share it, tell people about it. And we wanna keep helping people for years to come. This way. So I guess that'll put a wrap on it. They'll do it, man. And always a pleasure. Fortunately, we live in the same town. We can still have lunch. Of course. But we have to go to Chicago to WovoCon. Oh yes. Cause that's the only thing. That's how it works. The only time you see people from L.A. is when you go to a conference. Somewhere else. In another city. Yeah, you try to get together with people in L.A. It's almost impossible. I gotta cancel. I can't come. See, everybody knows that. It's very hard to make friends here. Everybody has to, it's a discipline. It is. Making friends and keeping friends and being friends and being friends means giving. And I think everybody needs to learn that and do that. Some people are better at it than others. But when you have friends, that makes the world a much nicer place. Absolutely, man. Thank you. And it's always been a pleasure working with you doing this show. You know, the thought that we'd be doing it for 13 years. I know. And Sue, thanks for hanging in with us. And Sue, yeah. So long. I mean, you've been our longest continuous technical director and, you know, gosh. Seven years. Seven years. Seven years. You've taken off so much stress off our shoulders in doing this. I've done it a lot though. I definitely teached someone how to set up their audio. Yeah, I know. Oh, hey. Sue is an incredibly versatile person. She has so many skills. Sue, what's your email address? Can I plug your email? It's my last name, but I'll put it up really quickly. Marlino Sue at gmail.com. If you need her for anything production, podcasting, live streaming, setting up your studio, setting up your lighting properly. Yeah, she knows that stuff. She's brilliant. Yes. But, you know, we're still in business. You've got George the Tech. I'm still the home studio master. And, you know, you can send your stuff into my specimen collection box. And VOBS fan 10-off coupon code. I think it still works on my website. Oh, good. If it doesn't, tell me. I'll fix it, but. Exactly. It should still work. And it's on off. Yeah. And, you know, it's what we love to do is teach people how to do it right. Because if somebody sounds bad, it makes everybody sound bad. But if it sounds good. It is good. By the way, I'm Dan Leonard. And I'm George Whittemann. And this has been VoiceOver. Body Shop. Or V-O-B-S. Thanks, everybody. You've been wonderful. Thanks, everybody. Big heart.