Episode 48
The Geese Have Moved On
This episode is a collection of my thoughts throughout the week, from the geese that are no longer across the road, trying to stay organized, my youngest son turning 30, and my hot take on the Patreon / Apple brouhaha.
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Transcript
This is episode 48 of Call Me Donovan, produced August 29th, 2024.
Speaker:The geese have moved on.
Speaker:Hello and welcome to another episode of Call Me Donovan.
Speaker:I am the Donovan in Call Me Donovan.
Speaker:This episode is made up of segments I recorded at various times throughout the week, so if
Speaker:the tone and energy is different from topic to topic, well now you know why.
Speaker:Let's get to it, shall we?
Speaker:So the geese seem to have moved on.
Speaker:You'll recall in some of my other episodes, I actually talked about the fact that I find
Speaker:it comforting or it's just something that I enjoy watching the geese mill around the
Speaker:property across the road.
Speaker:Where I live, it's kind of a misnomer, the ponds, like the name of my road is, well it's
Speaker:got Triple Lake in it, in the name of the road.
Speaker:And the funny thing is, I would not consider the three watering holes that the road is
Speaker:actually named after as being lakes.
Speaker:They're ponds, but I guess when trying to name a road, maybe they didn't want to go
Speaker:Triple Pond Road or something.
Speaker:I don't know, it sounds just as cool to me.
Speaker:But over the last, easily, two decades, almost two decades, because we've been here almost
Speaker:two decades, but over that time that we've lived here, across the road from us, there's
Speaker:a considerably larger pond.
Speaker:And over the years, it has been home to geese.
Speaker:And geese are migratory birds, and I haven't looked up to find out what their migration
Speaker:patterns are, as far as the time of year and that type of thing.
Speaker:Because with climate change, it's going to shift a little bit.
Speaker:I remember growing up, this time of the year, we started seeing actual cooler temperatures.
Speaker:And honestly, by the time we got into October, it was cold, but not anymore.
Speaker:This week, we've routinely had highs of 90 degrees or more.
Speaker:But one of the things that I've mentioned before is, I think there's somewhere around
Speaker:about 20 to 25 geese that had made this place their home.
Speaker:And there were a number of times where I'd catch it on my security cameras, or sometimes
Speaker:I just got to get up and stretch my legs, and I'd walk to my office door, and they'd
Speaker:actually be in our yard, scrounging for food.
Speaker:And I got this pair of binoculars.
Speaker:So whenever they were across the road, back into their kind of home territory, I would
Speaker:actually watch them.
Speaker:And I never considered myself a watcher of nature, if you will.
Speaker:I'm not one that I would want to go out and bird watch or anything like that.
Speaker:I never really cared to fish.
Speaker:I was never a naturalist, if you will, if that's even the correct term.
Speaker:But as I've gotten older, I guess our priorities shift, they change, our likes and dislikes.
Speaker:And it's interesting to find comfort in watching these creatures just mill around.
Speaker:And it's fantastic when just a big group of them just take off from the water, fly around
Speaker:the neighborhood, and then come landing back in.
Speaker:And I miss that now, because I've noticed over the past couple of weeks, it really,
Speaker:I guess it really didn't hit me until maybe last week, because I'm usually out in my office
Speaker:somewhere around about 630.
Speaker:And as we're approaching the latter half of the year, and we're now in the latter half
Speaker:of the year, we're getting into fall time, where it's actually dark at 630, where just
Speaker:a month, month and a half ago, it was light at 630, whenever I would come out here.
Speaker:And I could hear them, but like I said, I guess maybe last week, I was walking down
Speaker:the driveway, sipping my cup of coffee, and then it occurred to me, other than the local,
Speaker:I mean, we have crows that get rambunctious and other birds in the area, but I didn't
Speaker:hear the geese.
Speaker:And I started looking over there, and for the next couple of days, I started really
Speaker:paying attention, and they apparently have moved on.
Speaker:I'm going to presume that they've moved further south.
Speaker:I mean, we are technically about 90 minutes from the Georgia, Florida dividing line between
Speaker:Georgia and Florida.
Speaker:So I guess they could have been heading south.
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:Again, I did not look up the migratory patterns of geese, but it's just funny.
Speaker:It was something that actually affected me.
Speaker:It's like, where did my geese go?
Speaker:So here's a lesson about being better organized and maybe even labeling things.
Speaker:So I've been switching over to these small little mini PCs for a lot of my clients' new
Speaker:installs, or as we're rotating out very, very old computers into something new.
Speaker:And these little mini PCs, there's several companies out there that make them.
Speaker:I'm using a company called Beelink, B-E-E-L-I-N-K, and you can get Intel versions.
Speaker:You can get Ryzen versions, which I prefer, but I've got a particular client, due to some
Speaker:of the USB device requirements, it was warned that you might want to stick with the Intel
Speaker:chipset because of some weird incompatibilities, apparently, with the chipset that's on Ryzen
Speaker:motherboards.
Speaker:And I mean, honestly, these things are about the size of my hand, fully flexed out, and
Speaker:they're low power.
Speaker:I'm actually using one of those.
Speaker:It's actually an N100 made by Intel.
Speaker:Cost me about $150, $160 back during Prime Day.
Speaker:Inexpensive.
Speaker:It's running the radio station, radiotiff.com.
Speaker:The Ryzen and the Intels are a little bit more expensive because you can get these things
Speaker:with 16 gigs of RAM, 500 gig NVMEs on them, 32 gigs of RAM, 1 terabyte NVMEs, but still,
Speaker:no more than $300, $350.
Speaker:And again, like I said, they're low power.
Speaker:So I was getting one ready because the way I do this, especially for this client, is
Speaker:these come with Windows 11 Pro.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:Blech.
Speaker:But I need to make sure that they're digitally licensed because once the operating system
Speaker:is digitally licensed on these units, I can blow them away and put Windows 10, or in the
Speaker:case of what I'm doing, I'm literally making an image of the existing system that I'm replacing
Speaker:and, due to some weird incompatibility issues between the old BIOS mode versus using EFI,
Speaker:my son Tyler came up with a method, a couple of scripts to help his old man out so that
Speaker:I'm literally creating a WIM image.
Speaker:And so I'm doing an install.
Speaker:Usually I would do an image and then I would use his other utility to restore that image
Speaker:to these new systems.
Speaker:But I've run into some issues where they don't boot properly.
Speaker:And plus then you've got the whole sizing issue of, well, this is coming off of a 1
Speaker:terabyte, but these are 500, so you've got to shrink it down.
Speaker:And anyway, it takes a little bit longer, but the process that he's come up with is
Speaker:I can take that image and create an install image on an external hard drive.
Speaker:And so then I boot up this new system, like I'm going to do an install of Windows 10,
Speaker:but then I point it to the install and literally comes up and gives me all these images and
Speaker:then I can select it.
Speaker:And then it just happily goes in and does an install, doesn't care about partition sizes
Speaker:or any of that kind of stuff.
Speaker:I say all of that to say this, giving you a little background, a little history here.
Speaker:I was going through the process because I haven't made the image of the one that I'm
Speaker:going to be replacing at this particular client yet, but I wanted to go ahead and make sure
Speaker:that the machine was digitally licensed.
Speaker:And there's a way of doing that.
Speaker:All you got to do is get it up to where you're at that point in the OOBE where it's got network
Speaker:connectivity, but you're not so far that you're necessarily creating an account because you
Speaker:don't want to do any of that nonsense either.
Speaker:And there's a method of going in and running the setup and making sure that it's digitally
Speaker:licensed.
Speaker:So I did that, then I shut it down.
Speaker:Then I reached over and I pulled the power, not realizing because the power supplies are
Speaker:identical basically, that I didn't pull the power of the one I was working on.
Speaker:I pulled the power to my radio station PC.
Speaker:I was listening to the, uh, because I routinely will play what's playing, you know, locally
Speaker:and suddenly everything was dead.
Speaker:And I was like, oh shit.
Speaker:So there is now a label on the power adapter on the UPS that goes to my radio station PC
Speaker:that says Radio Tiffed.
Speaker:So hopefully I won't do that dumb ass maneuver in the future.
Speaker:Depending on when this episode actually gets published, it'll either be before or after
Speaker:Tyler's birthday.
Speaker:Tyler is turning that age.
Speaker:It's one of those milestone ages, I guess.
Speaker:I mean, is it really?
Speaker:I suppose it is.
Speaker:I guess it's your point of view if it is a milestone.
Speaker:I mean, we look at 20 as kind of one of those, but then the real milestone for better or
Speaker:for worse is 21 because, hey, you're old enough to drink now, which is not necessarily the
Speaker:best viewpoint that we should have, especially for those of us who have decided to, I mean,
Speaker:we look back and I mean, that it's not like I wasn't drinking before the age of 21, but
Speaker:it really opened up the floodgates, if you will, because I was old enough.
Speaker:I could go get it myself.
Speaker:I didn't have to worry about sneaking around trying to figure out how I was going to get
Speaker:the alcohol or getting a friend of mine who was a couple of years older than me to always
Speaker:be the payer and then I would just pay him back, that kind of thing.
Speaker:But Tyler's going to be 30.
Speaker:He's turning 30 a couple of days into September.
Speaker:And he's actually going to be here.
Speaker:We go and pick him up this Saturday, the 31st at the Valdosta Airport because he's currently
Speaker:enjoying some time with a couple of friends of his in Kentucky.
Speaker:This time around, he decided to fly from Seattle to Kentucky, and then he's going to be flying
Speaker:from Kentucky down the Valdosta for his basically two and a half week vacation that he's taken
Speaker:from his job.
Speaker:Something that he does, as I pointed out, about once every six months.
Speaker:But this is really the first time he's done this track of going from Seattle to Kentucky
Speaker:and then from Kentucky down here.
Speaker:But yeah, milestone age of 30.
Speaker:That really got me to thinking and really kind of hit home because I remember whenever
Speaker:I turned 30.
Speaker:My birthday year is easy to look at from the perspective of decades.
Speaker:I was born in 1970.
Speaker:So quick math tells you that I turned 30 in the year 2000.
Speaker:Y2K, baby.
Speaker:And I look at my age today, I'm 54.
Speaker:And then I look at what age my dad would have been whenever I turned 30.
Speaker:And in 2000, dad would be turning 58 by the end of that year, if I'm thinking correctly.
Speaker:Four years older than me right now, because he was born in 1942.
Speaker:So 2000 minus 42, 1942 is 58 years.
Speaker:And his birthday was December 30th.
Speaker:So that's the reason why I say that by the end of that year, I was born in January, he
Speaker:was born in December.
Speaker:So whenever I turned 30, it was in January of 2000.
Speaker:He would turn 58 later that year, end of that year.
Speaker:And it's weird that sometimes I try to put myself in the position, in the thought process,
Speaker:the environment, how things are viewed.
Speaker:Like what was my dad thinking and doing whenever I turned 30?
Speaker:He was already retired from General Motors because of health, because of an accident
Speaker:that actually happened at the plant that he worked at.
Speaker:Started out as Delco Remy in Fitzgerald, Georgia, then became Delphi, and now the building does
Speaker:not even exist.
Speaker:They literally razed it a few decades ago.
Speaker:And I know where I was in 2000, I had just started a brand new job just a handful of
Speaker:months prior, back in September, matter of fact, of 1999.
Speaker:I started work for the city of Tifton in their endeavor of cable broadband for the city of
Speaker:Tifton, a little bit of the county, called CityNet.
Speaker:We were still living in Fitzgerald, so I was making that trek every day, roughly 75 miles
Speaker:every day to Tifton and back.
Speaker:And we were living in a almost 2000 square foot mobile home on the backside of my parents'
Speaker:property.
Speaker:Financially, we were doing okay.
Speaker:There were going to be a couple of lean years going in there because it only been a few
Speaker:years prior to that that I had to file for bankruptcy because I got in over my head with
Speaker:credit card debt.
Speaker:And by the time I had to move over to Tifton because of being promoted into a director
Speaker:position for the city of Tifton, financially, we were doing great.
Speaker:It would have been, other than the drive, it would have been financially more sound
Speaker:to stay in Fitzgerald.
Speaker:But there were a lot more positives moving to Tifton, especially for the kids.
Speaker:I mean, we were homeschooling and just being in this environment over here in a bigger
Speaker:city and not to mention I was 10 minutes away from the office at that point.
Speaker:So it was definitely a better scenario.
Speaker:But it's weird at 30 because I remember January 1st, 2000, I remember sitting up in my office
Speaker:in Fitzgerald, Georgia in our double wide, because our master bedroom, we had this other
Speaker:room that came off of it.
Speaker:It had these double doors, which unfortunately, in our grand scheme of thinking, we knew what
Speaker:the hell needed to happen.
Speaker:We bastardized that room and just really totally fucked it up.
Speaker:We should have left it the way it was.
Speaker:But that's neither here nor there.
Speaker:But I was sitting there as the clock turned and the year turned and just monitoring systems.
Speaker:Were we going to have a Y2K problem?
Speaker:And for us, the biggest issue I had was there was, I believe, a JavaScript date and time
Speaker:widget or something on the friendlycity.net website.
Speaker:And I had to figure out how to fix that because it reverted back to 1900.
Speaker:It was January 1, 1900.
Speaker:That was it.
Speaker:That was the biggest issue we had.
Speaker:So yeah, it, and I don't know, I just, I felt different.
Speaker:I don't know if it's because in my mind I should feel different at 30, but I did.
Speaker:At lack of a better way of saying it, I felt more mature.
Speaker:Don't ask me why.
Speaker:It's ridiculous because I was the same person that I was January 3rd of 2000 versus January
Speaker:4th of 2000.
Speaker:I just happened to have completed one more circle around the big glowing nuclear fusion
Speaker:thing in space.
Speaker:But it was a mindset, I guess.
Speaker:Something clicked in my head and I was like, "Oh, things have changed.
Speaker:I'm now 30.
Speaker:I am now wiser, more mature."
Speaker:No, that's not true.
Speaker:But and I haven't had an opportunity to ask Tyler because of course he hasn't officially
Speaker:turned 30 yet.
Speaker:It's next week.
Speaker:And I'll probably ask him, "How do you feel?"
Speaker:The customary, "How do you feel after, it's your birthday or a couple of days later?"
Speaker:And it's like, "I feel like I was when I was 29," kind of thing.
Speaker:He's already done so many things from 20 to 30 that it took me almost a lifetime to accomplish.
Speaker:And he's got so many, so many more decades ahead of him.
Speaker:Interesting, I know, but just something I thought I wanted to mention.
Speaker:I also felt different at 40.
Speaker:50, oddly enough, I turned 50 in 2000, 2020 rather.
Speaker:Boy, I can't even do math.
Speaker:My brain was like, "Pandemic, what is time?"
Speaker:So yeah, I turned 50 in 2020 and of course then all hell breaks loose and the world tries
Speaker:to shut down.
Speaker:So that's an interesting marker for me right there because turning 50 in January of 2020
Speaker:and then we were in lockdown by what, March, April, May, somewhere in there, that year.
Speaker:Woo!
Speaker:But yeah, my middle kid will turn 30 and my oldest will be 32 in November and my youngest
Speaker:will turn 28 next year.
Speaker:So yeah, I think I'm feeling it.
Speaker:I think I'm old.
Speaker:I've been hearing a lot on various podcasts and then my good friend Sam's latest episode
Speaker:of his podcast talking about Patreon and what they're having to do to comply with, unfortunately,
Speaker:the Apple tax.
Speaker:It's the standard pricing structure that Apple has for an app to be in the App Store.
Speaker:A lot of people complain about the fact that they take 30% of all transactions.
Speaker:If your app is in the store and you do any type of transactions inside your app, then
Speaker:you have to go through their processing payment, their payment processing system, which by
Speaker:they take 30%.
Speaker:Now this is the reason why Apple has gotten in hot water over in the EU and they've had
Speaker:to allow alternative app stores on iPhones.
Speaker:Not here in the US.
Speaker:I don't suspect that we will ever see that in the US, but I could be wrong.
Speaker:Now one of the articles, I can't remember if this came from the Verge or one of the
Speaker:tech blogs, but basically it said, "Patreon faces Apple's 30% commission as the cost of
Speaker:staying in the App Store.
Speaker:Patreon will soon allow creators to automatically increase subscription prices on iOS to offset
Speaker:Apple's 30% commission on in-app purchases.
Speaker:Starting in November of 2024, all memberships sold through Patreon's iOS app will be subject
Speaker:to Apple's mandatory in-app payment system or Patreon risk being removed from the App
Speaker:Store.
Speaker:To comply, creators will need to adopt Patreon's subscription billing method within the iOS
Speaker:app, where Apple's 30% commission will apply to both new memberships and renewals.
Speaker:To manage the increased cost, Patreon will offer creators the option to raise their subscription
Speaker:prices in the app.
Speaker:This fee will only impact memberships purchased via Patreon's iOS app from November 4, 2024
Speaker:onwards.
Speaker:Existing subscriptions and those purchased through Patreon's website or Android app will
Speaker:not be affected.
Speaker:However, Apple's commission adds another layer of fees to Patreon's existing platform charges,
Speaker:making it more challenging for creators."
Speaker:Now, I'm going to stop right there because this is something that I do not understand
Speaker:and it's probably because I don't do it.
Speaker:But it's something that Jason and Brian at Grumpy Ol' Geeks have been pointing out, especially
Speaker:Jason.
Speaker:Don't make subscriptions in the Patreon app on iOS.
Speaker:Just don't do it.
Speaker:It does not make sense.
Speaker:Go to the Patreon website, click through, do your donations, do your subscriptions, whatever,
Speaker:on the website.
Speaker:The app on the phone will sync up with the website.
Speaker:So if you've got like, you know, if you do it like for me, if I do a subscription to
Speaker:Grumpy Ol' Geeks, which I do have one, and if I had the Patreon app on my phone, then
Speaker:I would see all of the posts that only a subscriber would see if I looked in the Patreon app.
Speaker:So the point is, don't use the damn app.
Speaker:Now, I know there are probably some people are like, "Well, that's not the point."
Speaker:No, I understand the point, but we can complain about it.
Speaker:Which to be fair, my friend Sam was not complaining about it.
Speaker:He was, he's really just looking at some alternatives and the extra workload that it does put on
Speaker:him to actually have to have a Patreon, which I completely understand.
Speaker:And I'm going to give an option or two at the end of this little rant.
Speaker:But just don't use the app.
Speaker:I've never used it.
Speaker:I don't even know what the hell the app looks like on iOS.
Speaker:It never occurred to me to use the app on iOS.
Speaker:And here's the reason why.
Speaker:I guess because you get a secure special RSS feed for podcasts and whatever else if you
Speaker:are a subscriber to a creator on Patreon.
Speaker:I plug that into Pocket Cast, Pocket Cast on my phone, the Pocket Cast web player, and
Speaker:it just syncs up.
Speaker:I get that.
Speaker:I get their notifications in my email, like one came today of their next episode.
Speaker:So I don't really understand the benefit of having the Patreon app on the phone.
Speaker:And okay, maybe this is the Gen X in me, but I don't live on my damn phone.
Speaker:I don't do everything on my phone.
Speaker:So maybe that's where the disconnect is for me.
Speaker:Now continuing on with this, it says, "Patreon noted that if creators don't absorb Apple's
Speaker:fee, transactions made through the iOS app will be more expensive than those made on
Speaker:the web.
Speaker:Some creators may delay switching to the new billing system until November of 2025, but
Speaker:after that, they won't be able to sell memberships through the iOS app unless they comply with
Speaker:Apple's requirements."
Speaker:Again, don't use the app.
Speaker:"Previously, Patreon avoided Apple's commission by using alternative payment processors.
Speaker:In a 2021 interview, Patreon CEO Jack Conte mentioned that they didn't have any special
Speaker:deal with Apple but had to navigate App Store policies like everyone else.
Speaker:Despite being allowed to use alternative payment systems until now, Patreon announced last
Speaker:year that it would transition to Apple's in-app payment system, with the 30% commission taking
Speaker:effect at the start of 2024.
Speaker:This fee will soon extend to all new memberships and subscriptions on iOS."
Speaker:So Patreon was already doing this.
Speaker:Patreon was already planning on doing this.
Speaker:So the reason why I want to make that point is some folks are saying this is not Patreon's
Speaker:fault and some folks are saying that it is.
Speaker:Here's my take on it, my hot take.
Speaker:It's both.
Speaker:It's Apple and Patreon's fault.
Speaker:It's Apple because they're taking the 30%.
Speaker:It's their store.
Speaker:They can do whatever the hell they want to.
Speaker:It is the largest, as far as I know, app store in existence.
Speaker:I think it's larger than the one on Android.
Speaker:It's definitely got better quality apps in it than any of the Android stores.
Speaker:Patreon doesn't have to be in the store.
Speaker:They don't have to have an app.
Speaker:They could always say, "Look, you gotta go to the website," because of all the other
Speaker:ancillary things that you can do that do not require the app.
Speaker:I guess that's the reason why I don't understand why people are getting a little heated on
Speaker:this kind of stuff.
Speaker:Now, for those that might not want to...
Speaker:Maybe you no longer want to do Patreon.
Speaker:Maybe you don't like the double duty of having to do Patreon.
Speaker:Now there is a couple of different things that you can do and still use Patreon and
Speaker:not necessarily have to do double duty.
Speaker:This may not work for everybody, but this will also lead me into another subscription,
Speaker:donation, whatever support system that you can use.
Speaker:Patreon has a plugin.
Speaker:So if you have a WordPress site, you can literally protect your content with that plugin.
Speaker:Now that means that you can...
Speaker:And as far as I can remember, I think you can expose only to people that using the plugin,
Speaker:if you put this on your website and you use the Patreon plugin, and let's say, for example,
Speaker:you create a blog post and you want that blog post to be protected so that only Patreon
Speaker:supporters can see it.
Speaker:You can do that.
Speaker:There'll be like a little button.
Speaker:I've done this before.
Speaker:Back a couple of years ago, I played around with it.
Speaker:You could click.
Speaker:And as far as I know, let me sidetrack here.
Speaker:As far as I know, the plugin is still available.
Speaker:I haven't used it in a couple of years.
Speaker:I would think it's even better now, but it'll show up a Patreon button.
Speaker:So they have to click and basically log in to Patreon, which that does a callback to
Speaker:the website and then you're logged in.
Speaker:I believe you can also present them with the secure RSS feed.
Speaker:And then that's about all I've got on that, because I do realize that there's an issue
Speaker:of where you're storing the podcast.
Speaker:And I get the fact that if you want someone, for example, GOG, they have it where you can
Speaker:get their podcast a couple of days early.
Speaker:It doesn't have ads if you're a Patreon subscriber.
Speaker:So I use that RSS feed.
Speaker:They also have a standard public feed.
Speaker:So one version of the podcast is literally hosted on Patreon and the other one is hosted,
Speaker:I forget where they host at, but it's a podcast hosting company.
Speaker:So there's a couple of different ways you could do it.
Speaker:But I get it.
Speaker:Unless you're really getting a lot of subscribers, that's probably not something that you really
Speaker:want to do.
Speaker:But there's alternative ways of, you can literally install the Stripe plugin on your website
Speaker:and create a tip jar.
Speaker:I've done that.
Speaker:It's real easy.
Speaker:And you know, create yourself a Stripe account, attach it to a banking account, and there's
Speaker:the plugin.
Speaker:You put in the API keys and you can create, I mean, you can literally sell products off
Speaker:your website using this.
Speaker:But if all you want is, say, a friendly donation, you can do subscriptions.
Speaker:If what you want to do is just get somebody to have a method of being able to support
Speaker:you.
Speaker:Now, if you want to put content behind a paywall, it's a little bit different.
Speaker:That's where the other two options come in.
Speaker:One is Memberful.
Speaker:Memberful is like Patreon on steroids, and it comes with a cost.
Speaker:It also has a WordPress plugin.
Speaker:It's the same system that Twit uses for their club Twit.
Speaker:It's $49 a month plus transaction fees.
Speaker:So it is expensive.
Speaker:So unless you're to the point of someone like a Twit that you really need to create a paywall
Speaker:and you've got a couple of hundred subscribers that this would make sense, then Memberful
Speaker:is probably not for you.
Speaker:The last thing I'll offer, and it's something that I've done, but I moved away from it for
Speaker:other reasons, but I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this, is Substack.
Speaker:Substack will allow you to create content that is freely available.
Speaker:You can also create content and podcasts and videos where it requires a paying subscription.
Speaker:I do this with the Chris Cuomo project.
Speaker:He puts his podcast out in audio form and video form.
Speaker:Videos on YouTube.
Speaker:Audio is standard RSS feed.
Speaker:They have commercials.
Speaker:But now if you want it ad-free, you can pay as little as $5 a month and subscribe to a
Speaker:Substack.
Speaker:And the cool thing about the way Substack works is you can give them a little taste.
Speaker:You can set it up like for a video.
Speaker:Let's say you're going to put a video behind a paywall on Substack.
Speaker:You can say, let them see the first two minutes and they can watch the first two minutes of
Speaker:the video and then it'll say, if you want to watch the rest of it, then you need to
Speaker:become a paying subscriber.
Speaker:Same thing with the audio.
Speaker:You can do the same thing with the audio podcast.
Speaker:The way they do audio podcasts, I think it's gotten better, but there was a reason why
Speaker:I moved away from it because I started looking at, you know, do I want to be able to do dynamic
Speaker:ad insertion and things like that?
Speaker:And Substack does not support that right now.
Speaker:With all the advancements that they've done in the last couple of years, it wouldn't surprise
Speaker:me that at some point they introduced dynamic ad insertion.
Speaker:So we'll see.
Speaker:But yeah, you can create it that way.
Speaker:You don't have to put your content on Substack behind a paywall.
Speaker:You can still enable subscriptions where people just pay you $5 a month.
Speaker:I think there's a minimum of $5 a month because of processing transaction fees and stuff like
Speaker:that because Substack does take 10%.
Speaker:Plus it also has to go through Stripe.
Speaker:So Stripe's going to get their 2.9% plus 10 cents, I think, per transaction.
Speaker:You can't get away from it.
Speaker:I'm sorry.
Speaker:You just, you got to pay the piper.
Speaker:But yeah, you don't have to put it up anything behind the paywall.
Speaker:You can just set up the subscription stuff and say, "Hey, if you want to support me,
Speaker:$5 a month, that'd be great."
Speaker:You know, the same thing like with Patreon, if you wanted to do it that way.
Speaker:It's best if you're doing it, in my opinion, I'm not saying you can't do it this way, a
Speaker:different way, but it's, in my opinion, if you're doing it just for a singular show,
Speaker:not a network of shows.
Speaker:I think it's possible to do it with a network of shows because you can create different
Speaker:publications and podcasts up under one login, one user account on Substack.
Speaker:But if all you want to do is have one singular podcast that you would like for people to
Speaker:be able to support you, throw a little coin your way, then I think it would work great.
Speaker:So I wasn't even planning on talking about this topic, but then I heard Sam's and I was
Speaker:like, "You know what?"
Speaker:And I know he probably already knows all this stuff.
Speaker:I know a lot of people probably already know this stuff, but I guess my biggest beef, and
Speaker:when I mean know all about this stuff, the other options, but my biggest beef that I
Speaker:just had to get off my chest is not directed at anyone, but stop bitching about the 30%,
Speaker:don't use the fucking app.
Speaker:It's that simple.
Speaker:Well that's going to wrap it up for this episode of Call Me Donovan.
Speaker:If you have any comments or questions about it, you can head over to callmedonovan.com/48
Speaker:and leave your comments there.
Speaker:You can find me on the socials at Insta and threads by the handle @DonEdkisson.
Speaker:Fuck Twitter.
Speaker:Until next time, take care.
Speaker:This has been a production of Tifton Media Works.
Speaker:Check out all our podcasts by visiting tiftonmediaworks.com.
