 Hi there, my friend and friends. I'm really excited to share with you that I've started a second channel and it's for my new podcast, General Musings. I started the podcast a few months ago actually, taking the introductions to my weekly Sunday newsletter and making them into podcast form because I realized that not everyone wants another email in their inbox and it felt like the format of them would fit really well in audio form. While it's lived in podcast land only up until now, I've had enough people asking me to also bring it here to YouTube and by doing so it also makes it available as a podcast on YouTube music, which is just a nice little bonus there. Now, unlike the content here on my main channel, the content on the podcast is not tutorials and actually it's often not even directly related to CSS, which is definitely a little bit of a departure for me if you're used to just consuming my content here. And that's actually one of the reasons why I didn't bring the podcast to this channel and instead did it as a second channel just because I felt like there was enough of a separation between the types of content because instead of doing tutorial type stuff, I talk about whatever's front of mind, hence the name General Musings and it's just whatever was front of mind for me in any given week. So for some examples, I have an episode where I talk about how I use Notion to help me stay on task and stay organized. There's also another one where I talk about a trick I use to stay focused when I'm working from home though of course sometimes they do fall into the CSS realm just because front of mind for me often is something at least somewhat CSS related. So you know, one episode I talk about it's just called the CSS mindset and I talk about why CSS is different from other languages. I have another one where I talk about intrinsic layouts and intrinsic web design. And so they're always at least tangentially related to development in some way or things that I feel like my audience would benefit from in one way or another, sometimes very tightly related to CSS and sometimes much more general. Now when I started the podcast, it was really just a big experiment for me. I wasn't even sure if people would be interested in having a podcast to listening to me talk about stuff. But so far the results have been a resounding yes people have been really enjoying it so I'm planning to keep doing it hence why I'm also bringing it over here to YouTube. And if you go and look at the back catalog of them you'll notice that the early episodes were only about four minutes long and since then they've actually expanded up into the like 10 to 15 minute range instead. And one of the reasons for that is I originally was only doing the very introduction part of my newsletter where I talk about random stuff, like I was saying, whereas now I also include the rest of the content from my newsletter as well, where I talk a little bit about what I've been up to in the given week as well as another part where I talk about other awesome stuff from around the web where I talk about other sites and resources that have come across and where I share other awesome stuff that other content creators are creating as well. And speaking of the back catalog if you're the type of person who likes to listen through the back catalog of a podcast to not have missed any episodes, if you do go through those earlier ones you'll notice that not only are they shorter but there's two other really big differences as well. The first one being that the first six episodes don't actually have any video because I wasn't originally planning to bring it to YouTube in this format but the newer episodes just like this it's me talking to the camera just like we see here. The other difference though which is probably a much bigger one is in the very early episodes I was actually using an AI text-to-voice tool called 11 Labs to read the script for me because as I said when I started the podcast it really was an experiment and my idea was I would have my newsletter written I could copy that paste it into 11 Labs and generate the content for me because after playing around with it for a little while it was really impressed with the results and I thought maybe that could be good enough and the results of it actually were kind of mind-blowing. Here's an example of an introduction to one of the episodes. This is an experimental podcast where I'm using 11 Labs AI voice cloning to turn the general musings of my weekly newsletter into podcast form. If you're listening to this I'm going to assume you know who I am but just in case you don't my name is Kevin and I like to help people fall in love with CSS so it's pretty good right and by being able to use that my idea was I can just copy and paste that into 11 Labs download the file like I was saying and then it was a very low effort endeavor no editing would be required and I could just get episodes up nice and easily but after a few episodes of playing around with it I realized it was taking me longer than I was hoping it would and it wasn't saving me as much time just because when I'd have to upload there's a few settings within 11 Labs so some levers you can pull to sort of play around with stuff and I'd always end up having to do that and then I'd have to make a few changes to the script as well just to try and improve how it was reading certain things and then I'd also end up regenerating it a few times until I'd get a result that I really liked and the last thing I wanted to do is actually have to like generate multiple takes and then edit them together so I wasn't about to start doing that and I was reaching the point where I'm like you know what it's easy enough for me to just read my newsletter to the camera like I'm doing right now and the editing for these is very simple so it wasn't really going to be more work and definitely comes across as a little bit more authentic especially because while 11 Labs honestly mind-blowingly impressive and kind of scary but also every now and then it would just fall a little flat with its delivery so here's an example of that and of course until next week don't forget to make your corner of the internet a little bit more awesome so yeah the podcast has definitely evolved a little bit though I think it's starting to reach its final form in one way or another at this point although I'm sure it's going to continue to evolve at least a little bit as I refine sort of my approach to how I'm delivering everything and organizing the content from it just to make it work as well as possible in audio form but the main thing is it is a weekly podcast most episodes will probably be in the 10 to 15 minute range and it will be out every Sunday as an alternative to my weekly email newsletter if you are interested in it as you might have guessed the link to the second channel is right below this video in the description so you can go and check it out and if you listen to an episode or two and you enjoy it please do consider subscribing to it as well or if you'd rather I've put links to apple podcasts and Spotify down below as well as the rss feed so you can manually add it to your podcatcher that way as well it's yeah exciting times for me second channel more or more stuff to manage but yeah for me it's something that I've always enjoyed my newsletter is one of my highlights of my week every time I'm working on that and so doing it in more format so I can reach more people is I think a fun thing to do and if email isn't for you definitely at least give one episode a lesson even if it's one of the ai ones just out of curiosity just to see if it's the type of thing that you might enjoy and once you've listened to an episode or two once you're all done with that you've subscribed to it in your podcatcher and all those good things don't forget of course to continue making your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome