 Well, hello everyone. It is eight in the morning Pacific time, and it is time for our quarterly hangout where we take analyst questions from our Slack, discuss the future of Daily Tech News Show, and give you a chance to understand how it's doing. And we make this available live, and we tell folks about it in Patreon if they're at the $5 month level or above. So anybody who stumbles across it can watch it, and then we make it available on demand for everybody to be able to see. So you can always send questions in for this at any time they come into your head, and we will hold them available. But, you know, if you're back in this at the analyst level, you get to be able to do that. Big Jim already asking what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is in our Slack, and Roger rightly responding. Right. What is it? Atlantic? African or European? African or European. Damn it! Yeah. So as you could tell, Patrick Beja here, one of the reasons we scheduled it at the time we did, and we changed the times around for this reason is because we have people at different time zones around the world, and not everybody can join, depending on when we do it. So I wanted to make sure we could do it at a time Patrick could be on. So thank you, Patrick. Well, thank you for being so considerate. Of course. It does mean that to the size of the world and the shape idea. Yeah. Jenny Josephson said she might jump in here. So we might see her along. Justin Robert Young is actually driving to my house right now. So at some point, I'm going to jump up and open the door, let him in. I've got a mic over there. You may not be able to see him, but you'll be able to hear him when he shows up. And the one of the main things. Did you put that in, Roger? The estimating the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Nice. One of the main things I want to talk about today is the Patreon level. As I mentioned on previous ones of these, we have a very small percentage of support that comes from people just giving us PayPal donations. That has boosted a little bit, but it's still, you know, less than, I think, 5% of our funding comes from that. And we appreciate it very much, mind you. We don't discount that. But the majority of our funding comes from Patreon at patreon.com slash DTNS. And that has leveled out. It kind of drops down. It goes back up. And in fact, probably since May, it's dropped, I don't know, maybe $1,000 a month, which is one of the reasons we had to make a decision about day six. You may have seen that posting on Patreon. Peter Wells will continue to do it. He did it this weekend for the foreseeable future, but his plan is probably before the end of the year to transition it to his own project that he'll be able to fund directly. Now, I know that disappoints some of you who love the show, but the show's going to stick around. It's just that it wasn't getting the funding from Patreon that we had hoped. So it will become Peter's thing, which is great. And I love using DTNS as a platform. One of the reasons I was excited when Jenny Josephson got her job at Marketplace is she was able to take experience from working on DTNS and and do something that she wanted to do with it. And that's one of the things I like to do with this is give people experience to be able to launch their own things get into careers that they they want. And I hope I can continue to do that. Now, all that said, we have had a bit of a slowing Patreon. So one of the things that you kind of have to do when you're doing this Patreon game that we're all trying to figure out is make sure that the rewards match what people expect. So we're going to rejigger a few things for October. And I posted them up on Patreon got some good feedback from folks over there. But if you haven't seen that, the idea is to do a dollar a month reward up till now, it's been simply that you would get the satisfaction of supporting the show, which I hope is is is good. But also get your name on the website, which I try to update every month. At the $5 month level, I've sort of been ad hoc doing an update every month on Patreon of Hey, here's what we're planning with the show. So I'm going to make that formal. Once a month update goes out. And we're also because Patreon did this adding an RSS feed of the full pre and post show. So that's already in effect. If you are a patron at any level, you're getting access to that feed. Patrick, you have any thoughts on this as we go along? It's a it's a hard question. I mean, is the I remember a conversation we had with Veronica about constant growth. We were talking about Twitter, which is relevant. This right right. And my my guess, the point of contention between her and I was, does Twitter absolutely need to keep growing forever in order for it to have value when she was, it felt like she was almost not understanding the concept of not keeping growth forever. Well, because it is such a hammered in concept in business in the United States and Silicon Valley in particular. Right, right, which I completely understand as such. But I guess what I was trying to to argue was Twitter would could theoretically stay Twitter without the growth, the tool wouldn't go away, it would still be there as long as they sustained their their level of support. Right, right. So I mean, this is a little bit stretch of a comparison. But do do you want the funding to keep going up forever? I mean, staying stable is good. Because I guess I have kind of the same issue slash question for my own Patreon projects, which have also leveled out a little bit, they they're more or less stable, let's say. Yeah. And of course, I would love it if more people got involved. But at this stage, the project is functioning. So I would return the question to you. What do you do you want the the the Patreon for the Daily Tech News Show to keep growing beyond the fact that, you know, more money is always cool? Are you happy if it stays at that level and stable? Or do you want it to keep growing for, I don't know ever? Yeah, to me, it's more making sure it doesn't decline, right? That that's the thing I don't want to happen is, we have to start cutting things, we have to stop doing things. And day six is an unfortunate example of that, because we were halfway to the goal that would have gotten the day six show every week. And then we started to fall back away. So that was something where we said, Okay, well, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to back off of something. And I don't want to do that. If we can sustain the show where it is, I'm happy with that. I don't need continuous growth. On the other hand, there are more things that I would like to do with the show. And, you know, to do that, you need people and to make people's time worth it. You need a little bit of money. We have lots of people who do things, because they just want to support the show. And I'm cool with that in most instances, as long as they're clear that they really want to do that. And they don't feel taken advantage of. Sean, for instance, volunteers to make our video feed work. He's fantastic. And Sergeant Muffin from Diamond Club is providing bandwidth for that now. Instead of just hosting the video on archive.org, you can you can now get it from his CDN. And of course, we're supporting his Patreon, because of that. So it's it's a good it's a great question, because I don't need constant growth for growth's sake. I want to a make sure we don't have to stop doing things. And B, there I would, I would like it if we were able to do more things. There's there's other things we would like to do. Yeah, make sense. I had a very strong feeling of a presidential debate, just now me asking tough questions with interesting answers, because I just watched it probably. But yeah, I'm sort of being intentionally, you know, asking a question that has I guess, an understandable answer. But because for my patrons as well, I would love it if they kept going and if it allowed us to do more things. I'm sure in my case, I'm doing everything myself, and I would love to be able to hire people or to pay people to do other things. So I understand that. So yeah. Yeah. So anyway, dollar a month, we're adding a monthly update. And the and we've already added the RSS feed. And if you're wondering what that RSS feed is, it's one you get from within Patreon, and it gives you any audio posted to Patreon at your level. And right now, what we're doing is, we have an MP3 that includes pre show that isn't in the video, the entire main show, and then post show, which is in the video, and that that's all available if you enjoy that sort of thing, you can you can take advantage of that. At $5 a month, I'm going to add a weekly tech update posting slash newsletter. This will go through Patreon, which is one thing I really want to do is be able to have those audio postings not be emailed. So I'm trying to get Patreon to give me that functionality, so that you can you can easily be able to see these weekly postings. And I'll experiment with them, you know, at first, it may just be further thoughts on a discussion we had. It may be a collection of what I think are like the top five stories of the week stuff like that, we'll see what you guys like. But I want to add value, like take the work that we've done on the show every week and give you something a little more. And of course, that $5 a month, you still get access to the treasure chest, which includes those full MP3s in a Dropbox folder, but also is some special MP3s from contributors and things like that. $10 a month, we're going to add access to a monthly free form discussion audio show. Now, this will show up in that RSS feed only for people backing at $10 a month. And this will be just audio me on Skype with whoever's available, and just kind of open ended. I'm taking the things we have learned Roger at East Meets West, and applying them to technology. Got to keep, okay, don't want it don't want it to ramble on too long, you got to set definite time. Yeah, yeah, we'll set a time and we'll probably have a little bit of more topic guidance than we do at East Meets West. But that that is sort of a laying the groundwork for the for the eventual new milestone, which if you noticed that we took the day six milestone away, the milestone that is there now is a monthly video roundtable show. So so this this free form discussion audio show would be sort of a prototype or a pilot for that. And then at $20 a month, by the way, $10 a month still gets the co executive business cards co executive producer business cards and the co executive producer title. And then at $20 a month, you're an analyst in support of the show. And Scott Johnson is working on some art for some analyst business cards, we're going to add there. But I think they have one of the most popular perks, which is the Slack channel that we're looking at right now. In fact, Big Jim and they're talking about cash cows as sort of the concept of a mature company that just kind of milks that that market. Yeah, corporations value owning them due to their cash generating qualities. It's similar to rent seeking. So he's saying maybe replace cash for something else like visibility. That's interesting. Yeah. And so they, if you're if you're somebody who wants to get into the Slack channel, this is how it works just so you know, you make your pledge $20 a month. After the first of the month, the first time that you've changed your pledge to $20. So you've actually given that amount, you should get an invite through the Slack to whatever email address you signed up with on Patreon. And a couple of times people have not gotten them, or maybe they got caught in a spam folder. And if you think you should have gotten one, just send us a message through Patreon, and we'll make sure to figure it out with you. Or if you want to use a different email address, just let us know. We can do that too. Some other ideas that we are not ready to implement yet, but we're kicking around. And this one isn't actually a reward, but and something maybe I'll highlight in those monthly postings for the dollar and up level, special subscriber titles and rewards based on longevity or amount. So just acknowledging the people who have continued to support the show can from the beginning, there are people who have been with us from January of 2013, which is crazy to me. We're talking about maybe doing some monthly art, sticker, sticker delivery, maybe stuff from Len, it's gotta gotta work that out. And maybe even a monthly giveaway. So stuff we have around that we don't use. So they're like an old mixer that we're not going to use anymore, or gadgets that we have bought for evaluation. Maybe even, you know, sample mugs, things like that. And I don't know, let us know what what you think of that. What do you think of that, you guys? I think it's I like the sticker idea a lot. I think I instigated that one. But it's, we had a pretty elaborate idea. Hopefully we can make it work. No, I think it's good. I mean, I mean, it's definitely we're not I definitely do want to give the I don't I definitely want to emphasize we're not giving away just broken stuff. Like, hey, we got just stuff cluttering, cluttering our garbage bins, and we're going to hand it off. It's more like we've upgraded to two newer equipment that and we have all the stuff that still works. But we definitely can't use at the moment. We would like to give away to as a show of appreciation for everyone who's supported the show for for these many, many years or years, years, many years. I really like the idea of rewarding loyalty and long term commitment in, you know, all kinds of relationships. But especially in the in the one that unites us with our listeners. And because what what we're doing really is, you know, we're asking people all of the rewards are are awesome and great. And we love doing them. But really what we what we're asking from people is for them to give us money for something that they would get anyway. And it's always kind of a delicate matter to sort of single out some of those people because all of the support is, you know, in in our hearts, it's all support. And we appreciate all of it the same. But at the same time, when you have someone that has been believing in you when following you and supporting you for, you know, what is now years, it feels like from from a creator, creators point of view, you do want them to feel, you know, a little bit special in the same way that we have developed a relationship with them as well. I mean, in the case of DTN, as we have, I'm not going to mention them, but we have a few names that people will hear on a regular basis. And in the case of my shows as well, there are people I know now, just because they've been believing in me and supporting me for a long time. So, you know, it's not going to be all the time every year, every whatever, but every once in a while, maybe doing something to say a special thank you to those people that are that have been with us for so long, I think has a definite value. So I really like that approach. Oh, yeah, I like the anniversary approach to say like, Hey, today is the fifth year. Well, we haven't been around yet. The two year anniversary, one year anniversary, three year anniversary, etc. Hey, Jenny Josephson popped in. And then she muted. That's okay. It's good to know that she's she's there. Just pipe up whenever you you get get a chance, Jenny. It's good to see you. Okay, so that's the the reward tweaks and you know, still taking feedback, but plan to implement them for October. If there was something else we would need to talk about. So I want to talk about growing the audience, which that's another way to grow support is just give more people involved. And also the content offering that we have, because I'm not sure everybody actually knows all the things we're doing. So I want to go to content first before talking about con growing the audience. Troy in our slack asks, is there anything to upgrading the DTS website or expanding the brand to be more formal to be a kind of blog, maybe include opinion pieces about tech stuff might be a good way to get the brand out there. It's I'm thinking right along with you, Troy. We have Mike range posting a really funny weekly wrap up on Saturdays at daily tech news show com. And then usually on Tuesdays, Sakane Wright has a column called your private driver about ride sharing because he is a driver. And I am always interested in more things like that. Occasionally I've taken good emails from people and posted them up. Joe the pilot has put stuff up like that before. So yeah, I would like to with selectivity provide more of that sort of thing. That weekly newsletter at the $5 level is the idea is to provide more of that daily tech headlines as a separate show from daily tech news show is an effort to provide that. So looking at things that are natural to what we already do and don't add a significant amount of work beyond what we do but still provide a lot of value. I'm way into that. Hi, Jenny. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah, we can. Oh good. I didn't know if this had a microphone. That's exciting. It is and it works. Yay. Hi, Patrick. Hi, Roger. Yeah, I love it when we find genuine new contributors that we didn't like the people who consistently write us emails who are like this is longer than can fit on the show but they have something to say that's a unique perspective. Those are such great additions to daily tech news show. Yeah, and when we get somebody like Sakane who has direct experience and who wanted to try out a column, that's really fun because that expands it. So I'm all for doing that. Now, it's not just open season where we'll just start vomiting out everything because that wouldn't be any good either. The idea is to make daily tech news show like I was saying earlier, make it a platform and hopefully provide lots of different angles on things. That's the idea with the round table show as a milestone as well is like during the week, daily tech headlines gives you all of the stories that we think you need to know every day in less than 10 minutes. Boom, boom, boom. Here are the trend pieces, here are the top stories. That keeps you up to date. Daily tech news show, as it always has, gives you the context around things, the understanding. Let's look at the angles. Let's help you understand the big stories that are happening in technology news. And then that round table would be more of digging deeper and starting to really try to tease out the impacts and the more broad effects of this sort of thing. You know, it's an interesting problem conundrum to expand the offering of the show because when you go to audio products, then it's sort of a natural fit. But when you go to articles and written things, you were saying people don't actually, often people don't know that these things exist. And I'm wondering how to make it more well known. I guess you can mention it on the show, but it's almost like starting an entirely different kind of product or offering. So it becomes an interesting dichotomy of are you actually creating, like keeping in line. I mean, it's all in the core competency of the show and the audience because it's all about tech. But the format is so different. Yeah, I don't know how to make all of these fit together. If only in the minds of the listeners who maybe are going to, I don't want to say are going to be less interested, but they come to us for podcasts, are they then going to go read the columns, even if their quality is awesome, but you know. Well, and that's the other thing, is trying to make sure that people know you can support us if you just like the web stuff. You know, maybe you don't listen to the podcast. You can support us if you just listen to Daily Tech headlines and that's all you have time for. We need support for that too. You don't have to consume or read or listen to every single thing that's out there. The point is to provide a selection of options that work for different needs and different tastes. Sure. And then the next pit bit would be about getting more people to know about the show. And some of that, Jenny and I have talked, we were just talking this weekend, is about, you know, doing guest appearances, going out and appearing on another place is getting my name in front of other people. But there's a limit to how much of that I can do without impacting the show. So in addition to that, you know, we've got Big Jim in here talking about guerrilla marketing and things like that. I'm always open to ideas for getting people, making it easier for people to spread the word. I definitely agree. I mean, I think one of the greatest assets is actually our, is the show's listeners, the ones who currently support the show. And one of the ideas I had with the stickers initially was to make it something really cool looking, but at the same time still kind of have show branding. So if people have it on something, whether it's the back of their laptops or a piece of gear or, you know, they stick it something like on a wall at their workplace, people will be curious, like, oh, hey, what's that? What is this daily tech news show? You know, it sounds something, you know, it's something that could be a conversation starter and they could ask that person, like, hey, what's daily tech news show? It's like, oh, hey, it's a show hosted by Tom Merritt, with contributors that talks about, you know, tech news and tech issues, which I find is a great podcast to kind of catch up on a lot of the current events and related to tech without necessarily having to roll up my sleeves and kind of dive through all this, you know, news and blogs and and news websites myself and kind of get a nice concise and very cleanly understood version of things. You know, it's, oh, sorry, go ahead. Okay, I'm just clearing my throat. It's really, that is something I've been thinking about quite a bit. I think we're in a similar position for you in English and for me in French, although I do the show every couple of weeks, so it's more of a, we take a little bit more of a step back from the daily activities, but we have a few tens of thousands of listeners and the way I look at my shoulder on different tech and I think it applies to the Daily Tech News Show as well is part, you know, us getting together, having fun, talking about something we love and also to an extent almost, I want to be careful here, but almost providing a public service of some definition, especially in France, I think, because tech is incredibly important for everything and we know this, it's tried to say it to this audience, but you know, tech affects the economy, politics, communication, marketing, everything. And still in France, I think a lot of people don't understand the key issues that arise in this sector. So even though we have a decent listenership, I think it would be beneficial to everyone, I think everyone should listen to Daily Tech News Show or La Ronde du Tech, but you know, I say it in joking manner, but I really believe that. I think that a way for people to keep up to date with the different angles of those debates and having a clear idea of what is at stake, when we talk about, you know, one of the obvious ones would be the cryptography with the issue between Apple and the FBI, it was a heavily debated issue which people didn't really understand in the wider public. Maybe the same thing can be said about Uber and a number of things. So I guess what I'm trying to get at is it would be awesome if most people knew they had that option and understood that this is a fun way of keeping up to date with all of these, and Big Jim was talking about guerrilla marketing, and maybe there are ways of expanding the reach of these shows, but that is definitely something that I think would be valuable to us and to the listeners that don't yet know they would love to be listeners. Yeah, I mean it's a very, I mean it's kind of self-serving, but it's kind of a public service model where you're out there in order to inform people in order to make better, to allow them the tools to release the understanding of the issues to make better choices, especially when it comes around, especially here, election time, at least for me, next month. So when there are things that happen, either locally or maybe in their municipality, they understand, but they can also say, like, hey, wait a minute, I understand these issues, let's take a step back before we all just go with whatever the sloganeering is for that particular campaign, just wait a minute, sounds good, but really isn't. And it's one of those things I think we're having an engaged and active audience can really help, where it's like, hey, if someone comes up to you and says, hey, I'm not really sure about this stuff on, say, net neutrality, sounds interesting, I'm not really sure what it is, does it mean that they don't get to rate the content, or people vote on this, no, no, no. If you're listening to this episode of Daily Tech News Show, Tom Merritt clearly, cleanly and simply explains what the issues are. And in some ways, I can kind of do that with certain issues. It's like, hey, just listen to this, I'll send you a link, you listen to it, gives you a much better understanding than me trying to explain it to you in 20 seconds, using various stick figures and gesticulations to get my point across. Yeah, interestingly, Philip Shane in the Slack has been talking about the idea of having a snippet that you could put maybe on Twitter or Facebook to hook people in, and then as we were talking added like, yeah, maybe it's something like dark fiber, or why batteries blow up, you know, that you could pull out of the show and post up, and then it's something easy to circulate, that's a good marriage of those two ideas. I think the issue there is that you need someone to be doing this specifically, because the format of podcasts is really hard to sell quote-unquote via ads, you know, Twitter and Snapchat were mentioned, but what do you do in a 60 second format that is going to be compelling to, I guess it's possible, but it's an added level of work, which I guess means it's good to have additional funding to be able to do that. Yeah, it's its own job. By the way, Justin Robert Young. Hi, everybody. You're not going to be able to see it. Justin Robert Young, I'm here. So it's its own job, I think traditionally what you would look at stuff like that as is, you know, that that's a, you're making those very viral, auto play friendly text on screen, short videos, so you can build a Facebook community, right, or you are trying to do little clips that you are putting out on a Twitter to build your Twitter following, like every element where you would break up DTNS to put it somewhere else is by definition an advertisement for the place where you put it, right, and you building a following there. I think there's certainly maybe a worth to a, like, longer form, like a net neutrality, kind of like through the, I mean, I'll tell you what, actually really the key would be if Tom, if you could get access or permission between CNET and TWIT to do like, you know, net neutrality through the years, like and just pull like four or five different discussions from major topics. Like, I remember, I think they did that with PTI a while ago where they just did, like, a timeline episode about, like, Barry Bonds because the show had been on for as long as Barry Bonds was a relevant person and they just had, you know, all these, like, moments. Going back to AT&T's head saying net neutrality or Google is a, what's a free lunch that's kicked off the whole big furor. Yeah, I think that there's ways to do that, but anything that you do, I think it's easy to get caught into a two different traps when you talk about growing your audience. Number one, that you are just taking what works in podcasting and trying to put it somewhere else and then wondering why people don't respond to it, which is always a mistake. And then number two, thinking that building an audience somewhere else necessarily even means more podcast listeners because it will mean more people who follow you on this other place. Like, if you were to build, if we put a lot of effort into building a Facebook group that was, like, intensely vibrant and was, like, you know, gigantic and among the biggest, people would go there because they wanted to talk to other people on Facebook that were, like, minded and maybe the majority of them would listen to the show, but that's no guarantee. Right. Well, and the key for us, though, is would they listen to the show? Would they support the show? Yeah. Like, if they support the Patreon because they love the Facebook group, then it works. But how do you know whether the effort that would go into doing something like that pays off? And the question is, are we going to the moon so we can invent Tang, which is never the best strategy? You never want it for the side benefits. I think we're talking about different things, though. There is, you know, growing your audience and actually what we're saying here is creating community's outside of the core product, which is the podcast. I think there's, you know, and maybe that's a byproduct of quote-unquote advertising, but the goal, the ideal situation, is like literal actual advertising. You just put out your message somewhere and it brings back people to the podcast itself. And Justin, it seems what you're saying is this is the hardest thing to do. I guess it's the case and obviously not a lot of people who see the ad are going to come back to the core product, but is it possible to hook people back to listening to the show and having the other communities like, you know, Facebook, Snapchat, whatever become the byproduct? Yeah, and also I was intrigued by Justin's idea of the multi-year approach, where it's like you take, let's pick five topics like net neutrality, Twitter, I don't know, Samsung or Apple or whatever it is, and you do Tom like three clips through the years and then you do like, yeah, he's been at this for a while. Join Daily Tech News show to find out why people, you know, never want to, you know, always want to hear from Tom. Yeah, but the problem is, the problem is Tom Merritt, you don't like Tom Merritt-centered advertising. That's not true. No, I don't, I don't like, he's got a massive ego. He's got a huge attention to myself. But if it was, if there's two things, one is, I don't like calling attention to myself when it's unnecessary, but you're talking about something you can make in a good case for it. So maybe you could wear it. The other thing is, I don't want to fall into the trap of of Daily Tech News show only works if I'm there, right? And so you want to, we and bringing on contributors and doing that is sort of trying to, to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm, I am getting better at understanding that I'm good at what I do, Jenny, okay? You know, I need to drag that laundry. You are good enough, smart enough, and I think people should know about it. Well, I mean, you know, I have one more. Oh yeah, go ahead. Which is, I think you could do it both as like, that would be a great Snapchat ad, because you could do it in that short amount of time. It would be a great little Facebook video that you could make and put out there, but also frankly, like, I love the idea of either Len or Scott drawing like sort of Banksy style gorilla art of Tom and putting it like the guy you trust in tech. I don't know, like, I've been doing a lot of marketing lately for things, and I feel like we don't often talk enough about how great you and all of our contributors are and the things that they say are the best advertisement for that. And Phil saying a lot of good things in the slack here, and so is Dark Redeemer and Big Jim, just about like, this doesn't have to be making a huge group or something. It's more about putting some stuff out there that's shareable and compelling. Well, and that's interesting. You know, when you talk about getting more people, like right now, I think it would be uncontroversial to say that the majority of the people who support on Patreon, which is really the engine by which everything moves, are dedicated podcast listeners. So the idea is, if you want to increase your Patreon base, that you increase your podcast listeners, the one thing that I do think in terms of Alba Mart, and you know, if you want to extrapolate that to advertising, is that, you know, Daily Tech News Show is a great name, but it's kind of great because it's generic, right? Like it is, it's kind of, it's the USSR version of like, this is Daily Tech News Show, like, please take and have good health, but if you, like, Tom should be on the cover because Tom should be on the Alba Mart, because if people are just searching and you redo the Alba Mart and it looks cool and it's got your face on it and it says with Tom Merritt on it, then when they feature it on Apple, now all of a sudden, the people are like, oh, wow, oh, that's where he went. I used to listen to him. I used to love, you know, it's fun, it's funny. I've been thinking about a lot of the same things, again, for my friend's shows and I've been talking to a friend of mine who's a graphic designer and he's been doing, he's professionally and he does a lot of marketing and he's working on the revamp of the Alba Mart for all of my shows. And one thing he's been telling me is, well, I have another set of issues, which is I have, you know, branding wise, I have the names of the shows and my name and the name of the site slash company French Spin which makes three levels of things people have to remember and associate. And what he's been saying, I think rightfully so, but I don't know if I'm ready to make the jump, is that I'm the one at the center of it and whether we like it or not, in podcasting people listen to the shows, sure, but to the people and mainly to the main person. I think Leo with twit has discovered this to an extent when he was trying to diversify his offering, he found that most of the the shows that were really successful were the ones with his name on it. So as much as I would love for DTNS to become a collegial effort that, you know, everyone is as important and special snowflakes. Oh no, no one's as important as me, Patrick. Okay, all right, that's that's good then, but right, I guess maybe this is a wider, you know, reflection we have to have as a podcasting community as a whole and as we define what the media is, you know, I think personalities are sort of difficult to separate from the shows and maybe branding and maybe you should put your face on the on the art, I think. And that's why faces, I mean Candy Meyers taught me this at CNET, you always want to put faces on your website because people react to that and Philip Shane's back of that up in there as well. I mean it's a really good point. If you go look at the album art, like if you go look at the album art on iTunes, go look at the top 100 and tell me how many have like simple clean logos and how many have faces and I think you'll see like I think faces win and I've done some of this research lately and it is like you, you have, I think I would like to get a tattoo of what Patrick just said that says people may listen to shows but they stay for people, like I can't even tell you how true that is. So yeah, I think it's time like in year three here to really, and we don't have to do it for just Tom, we can do it for everybody, like let's, let's get it out there. We have the best people in podcasting and I really believe that. Well here's, here's what it is, is like when people are just looking at new and noteworthy or they're scanning the top 100 or they're looking in tech or something just to fill up their, you know, their podcasting schedule, you want the catchiest thing like out there and right now the best way to catch people, aside from a name like Daily Tech News Show, which clearly spells out what the show is, is the fact that Tom's got a reputation in this, in this field, you know, so like to me there are two ways to grow a podcast audience and none of them involve going to other communities to try and find more people who may or may not be podcast listeners. It is to leverage our relationships with Apple and and do follow the guidance that they give, which is bright, professionally looking designed logos with, you know, the right proportionality that they like and guesting on other podcasts, you know, this has consistently been one of the things that I've talked about with Brian about like Night Attack is that what we should put in, like it was our job, a month's worth of booking so we can do a round of a concentrated round of guesting on other podcasts because I've had it where, you know, I'm sure everybody else has where you're listening to your normal round of things and next thing you know you wind up seeing three interviews with the same person, right, because you naturally wind up clustering your interests in various fields and people are doing big press pushes now all of a sudden you're like okay I heard him once, I liked him, I heard him twice, I liked him, I heard him three times, let me listen to his podcast, you know, and and that's, I think that's where you grow like in-house audience, these people listen to podcasts, they want more and they like you. I do way more guest appearances that I have time for, like that's that's that's one of the issues is that, you know, trying to balance that time, but I like your idea of concentrating it so you're not doing them all the time. No, no, no, it's just saying and also targeting and leveraging them. I would like to talk to the audience unless to me, if we can, because no, the logo, logo absolutely is a good idea, it's not going to fix everything, concentrating appearances would would would help, but yeah I'm looking at two things, one is the outside audience, that's what we've been talking about and the other is making sure we keep people satisfied and don't want to stop listening to the show because that's the other thing is seeing people in the Patreon exit surveys saying I don't have time to listen to anymore, I don't listen anymore as the reason they're leaving, that bugs me too. Yeah, I mean I think they're all good ideas, but I also think what I kind of I agree with Tom, just my experience dealing with this at rev3, is that none of those are silver bullets and yeah I don't think they say they were, but you're right, yeah, but it's it I mean it's part of my fear is that it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy to suggest that the reason why you know the way that the reason why you know DTNS is currently at a plateau in terms of audience generation is because we're not putting enough fancy logos, which I agree, I mean putting you know things like simple things they do in face, but in Maestro's day they while they do have effect they aren't markedly bigger than what we had before and I think one of the things is that you know it's it's not an all or nothing it's just a combination of different things at different times like for example I still love the idea of getting high profile, I guess if they would respond to my emails, to do the show because it's all about reaching out and connecting with people you can do that with existing podcasts that we have relationships with but also kind of seeing if we can reach out and connect with people who might be covering the same content but not necessarily to the same audience if that makes sense. Yeah I mean those big ticket interviews I think are another gigantic way to do it I mean but but the the that in and of itself is kind of a long game right because yes definitely it's it's not I don't think you can see a spike in traffic like oh you had this guy boom right definitely you can but it's just a matter of getting it's like okay so let's say who is it Spiegel with snapchat yeah Evan Spiegel Evan Spiegel right so let's say you have the the the spectacles right like so they so he goes out and starts talking to people I don't know if he's if he's doing podcasts or if he's doing interviews right but he is obviously they're trying to drum up interest in this idea and their foray and physical stuff it would it be good if Tom got the seventh or eighth most read or listened to interview with Evan Spiegel which is probably where it would be charitably even looking at just reach right yeah it'd be good and yes you would always be scratching that lottery ticket that maybe Tom's going to ask the question that turns into a news that rarely happens yeah but that you can't you can't guarantee that right so what you really want to do is continue to interview every CEO on a regular basis so you can build relationships and a more consistently draw out newsworthy stuff but also create this expectation for the audience that this is where people go to talk now that would be an extension of the brand and I don't know if you I think we should you should always work toward it but like that that is a whole another element you know to to the show and if we're talking about keeping the audience happy now that that is something that you have to at least think about how does this affect the flow of a of the show that people know and love and find very personal because it's a daily experience for another really really simple thing we can do to that is absolutely free is whenever there's a great moment of two or three minutes on dts can we not clip that and upload it to facebook and then you know just attach our pod you know our website like if you want more of this go here it's like but you have to like be like wow this was the moment where we really clearly explained or someone had a really excellent point and you do one or two of those you know just start with one or two of them a week have a slate at the end you know and then let those travel because that's a thing I've really noticed about when so with with uh with with the other boss Kyra's doll we do these facebook videos and when we do videos that have a a Venn diagram and at the center of it is like really salient point within the area of expertise and really fairly strong feeling about it man those videos travel and then they do the work for you yeah and we I don't know maybe you got cut off earlier but we were sort of talking towards that with that idea of clips for twitter and things like that and I love that yeah but even then those those Kyra's doll videos that you guys do those are not part of marketplace the podcast right like that that's him doing a separate thing right I don't know if she can hear or if she's getting cut off yeah sometimes we hear sometimes they are on the radio it's like sometimes we back and forth them okay they live like if it's a it's one we've produced then we'll call it out and say hey you should go here or if it's something that's really notable like we've done about both ways before on different topics and it's just like again to the larger point it's one of those things we're like yeah you're right no one thing is a silver bullet right but this show is now at a point where it's mature enough to start doing the simplest and most free versions of the other stuff and you know the idea of clipping and sending them out into the world these little clips is a really simple easy thing and the idea of having art like like artwork that is up to itunes promotable specs is another thing um you know we're up to the specs you just talking about the design yeah the design like the current design ethos on itunes is something they also have very people with more money think a lot about well no and they've they've sent us i sent around the guides the last time i talked to the apple podcasting people but they've got specific like portion out proportionality guides where it's like yeah we have all those things need to be in a certain place compared to like ratio wise thankfully mustafa was very kindly able to like give me all of those so we have we have all of those available we have them for daily tech headlines too yeah i mean i'm looking at the the top podcast not just in technology but the top podcast and it's really it's really more just about logos to be honest and i'm not and i'm not saying that because i think we have you know you know that we that we can't do better but i'm you know you've got a face on heavy weight but npr politics just is the npr logo with the word politics well because npr logo has had 30 years of this america live had radio hour stuff you should know so i'm not i think it's more about impact of the of the thumbnail and faces is good i don't disagree with that and i think sometimes that's what you need well i think that what you've seen with all of those is that they're leading with their most valuable the best yeah number one their podcast so it's like ultimately things are going to rise and fall ultimately on things other than the album art so if we're talking about the album art we're just talking about how to put our best foot forward and it is my opinion that there are people right now i mean like put it this way right today yeah somebody is going to look at twit and say oh that's what leo leport's been doing since tech tv sure right yeah now i get that yeah there are people that are searching tech podcast that do not know where you've been since buzz out loud yeah you know and making that easier for them to find is is i think would be would be good for the show uh we got about seven minutes left and i want to talk about the actual content of the show because that's where i am most focused all the time as everybody knows uh and so i i look at it as uh how do we make sure that that show stays interesting and i want to go back to that point earlier about people saying at don't have don't have time to listen anymore yeah how do we stop that how do we how do we improve on what is a very good show otherwise it wouldn't have the the numbers and support that it that it does i would like if it's possible to reach out perhaps and maybe not maybe see so i've always wondered if maybe having like a so there's so many many discussions happen around the news headlines and i'm wondering if one of those can be uh a topic that or news story that we don't often cover for example a while back you were culling a lot of news from uh from media sources that weren't traditionally like uh the new york times or tech crunch or the bbc it was like you know biz africa or from other location be i think it'd be interesting to get a different perspective on not maybe uh a different um a look at how technology is impacting the stuff that we're so comfortable with stuff we're so familiar with but how does it affect people who perhaps have a different style of living or living standards or different needs or different environment where hey you know we don't necessarily have broadband here but we use our cell phones or mobile phones as our chief uh form of internet connectivity how do these changes for example zero rating on data uh mean mean for us does it mean that hey now i can finally get access to a lot of the internet that i've been needing but couldn't afford now it's affordable and i understand that you know doing this perhaps makes an unlevel playing field but for my for my particular situation it makes total sense kind of thing and the other thing is i'm would like to broaden out guest topics if possible i don't know if people were really i'm not sure what people's impressions were with of terry johnson who we had on with justin on the final friday that you were out in on vacation talking about services personal genomic companies like 23 and me but not necessarily like every week but definitely something to kind of put in there on a regular basis yeah i know i i i think uh thick cracking that topic code is important because you can you can do diverse topics but then if the people on the show don't have anything to say about it it falls flat so you got to make sure you balance like hey we're doing something interesting that you didn't know about i think a great example was the vtol aircraft that we talked about on yesterday's show which was not a main story of the day in most publications but it was interesting because vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and uber doing it is interesting and you could tell that veronica and i started to get more excited about talking it about it because i totally missed that episode i totally know so much about it uh the one thing that to to piggy back on on roger's point that i wish in hindsight i had done better and and this is something that you know marketplace for example does fantastic is when we're talking about a issue you have to sell the issue first the issue is the star and then you bring up as backup this person who knows everything right and so like what i in in hindsight if i had been better prepared i should have had a little monologue up front setting up everything right and then bring in to discuss more about this here's this person yeah that i lead with the most like common question that people would have i'd like to do more after that right so it's like because it it doesn't mean like if we're like dr steve who's or what's it like the audience initially is like okay well why do i care if that names first and then it's the topic it's well should i have known who that person is and so they're catching up but if it's just 23 and me could sell your genetic data like facebook sells your your your data your history your your interaction here's the history of it here's what they've done here's what they've said they've never going to do but will they keep their promise here's to talk about it with me is dr steve who's a what's it it's now everybody's narratively in the same lane by the way on the video there that's icu's creation out of the chat room by the way nice yeah that's amazing no i i like that i like bringing in more expert voices and figuring out an easier way to fold them in uh so that you know in the past it's always been if we have a guest they're there for the whole show and for some guests like brett ranceville coming on to talk about developer stuff he's also a podcaster so having him on the whole show makes sense because he has things to say yeah but having a more elegant way show shut up yeah oftentimes just as important but having an elegant way to like fold those experts in or or maybe even sometimes doing pre-recorded which doesn't work that great for video the way we have the setup but maybe we change the setup or maybe we just deal with that yeah i think you can bring them in live i think it is a live show um or recorded as live yeah show patrick what do you think um i like the show the way it is um and there's always room for improvement of course honestly i think the person that finds the answer to these questions to this question of how to do better content because we're still very much all of us basically doing a comment an analyzed slash commented uh press review specialized in tech and there there is a little bit of added discussion in there and there are the problem is if you if you dive into that let's have a wider discussion with an expert that's here i think one of the dangers is to fall into the trap of thinking that you have to do it all the time or you know maybe not all the time but if you haven't had one in in a week or two you feel i really should do that because people expect it but i think it's one of those things those things that improve the show if they're done when they're appropriate and when they're very relevant so the the the issue there would be certainly to find the ones that are that are relevant and to stay away from trying to get stick one in anytime you you have a chance so i don't know if that answers anyone's question yeah i like those thoughts though that's that goes along with a lot of the way i'm thinking about things too which is you want good shows and if that means a guest great if that means an unusual story great you know but you you you don't want to do it just to do it you want to do it because it it makes for a more interesting conversation and that that's my biggest push is make sure that our conversations continue to be fun and enjoyable for people while they're listening sometimes people are going to drop off because they're just tired of tech news and we're not going to stop and that's the blessing in the course of a five day a week show yeah yeah is that like the blessing is people it becomes something that if they don't have it they feel withdrawals right but then on the other hand if you see it's very easy for them to stack up and you'd be like i just don't have time for this anymore there's five episodes i haven't listened to which is one of the reasons i did daily tech headlines is to give those people another option like hey if that's that's where you're feeling i get stacking up too much here's something that's less than 10 minutes every day sure and maybe it's it's it's people will stop fall out of it for a million different reasons including like i just listened to other daily shows that post at different times that now that i go to work at 10 o'clock instead of one is uh yeah yeah totally all right well we're gonna wrap up here uh any last thoughts roger chang before we go uh we can't hear you suddenly i don't know why uh any last thoughts patrick beijo while pat roger figures that out uh thank you for having me i would like to thank my parents and my now um no i think this is the most interesting thing in all of it in all of our discussion all of it was interesting but i really think the uh branding conversation was the most uh relevant and important one and i think it might be ironic well not actually but it's the most difficult one to to crack so i don't know how we're because we're all in the same boat i don't know if we're going to be able to to crack it but it's definitely the one i think we should be spending the most time um trying to crack i would my final thoughts i'd like to add on top of what patrick was saying is um you know a lot of this stuff is sort of uh not cryptic but it but it is a little hard to see and i think having our continued feedback from our audience is great because that helps us form an idea of what does uh uh what does work what our audience enjoys what they get out of it because you know if there's no feedback we can't i mean we're just throwing stuff in the dark and we're hoping it goes somewhere uh with a purpose uh so you know definitely you know continue with your emails and your posts and stuff because it really is helpful to have to hear back from the listeners and uh help us shape the show in a way that benefits everyone jenny josephson do you have anything do i add here i miss this show horribly no we miss you too it's good seeing you this weekend yeah and um i i would love to develop a way to very easily you know get some some clips circulating around the internet so maybe that's like a little projie i can do nice um because i still listen on the way home uh and uh and i love this show and i love how it is strong and continues to grow and we continue to think about it and i think it's no i think it's really good to step back every once in a while and be like it's no small miracle that it's like getting on three years and the show is where it is and i think yeah absolutely there's a lot of little things we can do to to to jump that plateau but oh my god we should take a second and be really proud of the things we do thank you jenny justin robert young what do you think hey i love you guys i like the show i want more people to listen to it and i want the patreon to be the biggest uh ever again in the world in the world get over here let people see you for real they stop showing this collegiate thing ah hey look he's real he's actually here this beard is getting very prospectory yeah you should be panning i know yeah it's impressive all right uh huge thanks everybody in the slack i didn't mention every great idea that was mentioned in there there were too many of them so uh thanks to every single person in there uh throwing ideas i will go back and mine that for for some other awesome suggestions actually can i i'm super sorry but that's a brilliant idea there can i prolong the show by two minutes yeah what go ahead uh dr hunder vassar there uh mentioned that he was drawn in um to the fideos club for the the show we did together about the election um and i think that might be a way of marketing things doing specials about you know the apple versus fbi i did that on on a couple of the on the tech shows and then marketing those like when there's something important relevant yeah it isn't the news going out and putting like you don't understand what the hell is happening with apple and the fbi listen to this for half an hour or an hour and then you'll get it and that i think might be a way of drawing people so thanks everybody uh for supporting the show patreon.com slash dtns or paypal or the store or however you do it and we're gonna patrick and i are actually going to go start working on today's show so uh have a lovely week day afternoon evening morning whatever it is where you are and we will see you on the internet soon