400 - Behind the Scenes at Multiamory
It's our 400th episode! Join us for a conversation where we talk about how Multiamory is produced, all the people, money, and costs involved, and how the show has grown and changed over the years. We also discuss some of the best parts about doing this podcast, some positive AND negative stories, and finally, we wrap up this monumental episode with some discussion about the future of Multiamory.
We want to thank all of our listeners and supporters so much for making this show possible and accessible. We could never have gotten this far without you all, and we look forward to many, many more years of Multiamory!
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode, the Multiamory Podcast, we are celebrating our 400th episode. Dedeker wrote that intro for me, and she wrote out the in the document.
Dedeker: You executed beautifully, that's what that was.
Jase: Thank you. What's funny is it gets highlighted by Google Docs as being spelled wrong, and when I highlight over it, it wants it to be bwah bwah bwah ahh, with spaces in between each of those.
Dedeker: Interesting, Google, that's your take on the air horn noise?
Emily: Oh, yes, fascinating, wow. That's beautiful.
Dedeker: A really good Google Easter egg would be, if you clicked on that, then it actually played an airhorn noise for you. That'd be good.
Emily: Yes, I love that idea.
Jase: Hey, so if you listening at home are a Google Docs developer, that's a fun Easter egg. If you could just stick that in there.
Dedeker: What are we doing for our 400th episode other than celebrating ourselves?
Jase: We decided that we would take this episode to sort of let you see what happens behind the curtain of the giant Wizard of Oz-style podcast talking head that we have out there. I feel this metaphor has really gotten away from me.
Emily: It sounds like we're like one unit, one entity--
Dedeker: Are we not?
Emily: One talking head together, I suppose. Maybe we're a three-sided singular head.
Emily: A three-sided die. A three-sided singular head.
Jase: Yes like that character in He-man.
Emily: What is it, Zoar?
Jase: The one where he's got like a helmet, and his head spins around, and he's got different faces underneath his helmet.
Emily: Ooh, cool.
Jase: That's some childhood memories right there.
Dedeker: Is that who we're going to be after the radioactive apocalypse where we'll just be fused into one being with a rotating head, spewing out different pieces of relationship advice?
Jase: Yes, right. That's gotta be it.
Dedeker: That'll be our 600th episode, listeners.
Jase: Gosh. Wow, but really though, we wanted to take an episode to ask some questions that are not-- We didn't specifically ask for questions for this episode, but more just things that come up that people wonder about, or things that people mistakenly think about us or about how the show is made.
Then also, just some fun behind the scenes. How does this show actually get made? What does that process look like a little bit? We just thought that would be fun to share with you in this super chill, informal chat about the real story Inside Multiamory, the hit documentary series.
Emily: Ooh, the Hollywood story.
Jase: Right.
Dedeker: Podcasting is a medium where I think it's more difficult to be in dialogue with your audience, and that can be both a good and a bad thing. A good thing in the sense that you listen to a podcast episode and you don't necessarily have a comment button like you do on YouTube, where halfway through, you can be like, "I hate this. You look silly, you're not attractive." Like the horrible dredge that is YouTube comments.
As a medium, a lot of podcasters I think are a little bit more shielded from that direct shooting-from-the-hip feedback and commentary that people in other mediums might get a little bit more readily. If someone wants to give us feedback, either positive or negative, they have to jump through some more hoops as it were in order to get that to us.
Emily: Find the email addres--
Dedeker: Yes, find email address, take the time to sit down and write either your glowing email or your scathing email, and so it is funny that a lot of the direct feedback that we get from people tends to be some of those opposite extremes. People who are very, very upset, or people who are very, very happy with us.
I guess on our social media, we get a little bit of a smattering in between, but in response to the podcast itself, I think it's just a harder medium to actually be in dialogue with your audience, and so that was part of my intention.
Also, bringing this idea for an episode for our 400th episode is, I guess wanting to have more of a conversation as it were, where we're talking about ourselves and about what goes on with this show. Because as a medium, I think podcasts are also very easy to-- Well, not just podcasts. I think any content creator is really easy to project shit onto when you don't have the full details of their lives.
Jase: Yes, and I do want to clarify that we do this too with the podcasts that we listen to, or the celebrities that we follow, or the shows we watch, or whatever it is. We all do it, so it's like-- Yes.
Like, I will tell you honestly, me and Carly Rae Jepsen, we're like best friends. We've never met, but I just feel like we'd get along really well, and I think she's great. I know that that's not actually true, and I know that's all in my head, but part of it is a little bit like, I do feel that affection for her.
If she writes a song and she talks about jealousy too much, I get a little bit disappointed by Carly. Like, "Come on, I didn't think that was so much a part of our relationship." It's like, that happens, so I get it on that side as well. We do get some of that reaction from people about us, which is a really, really interesting thing that I never thought would be something I would experience that other side of, but it is interesting.
Emily: Yes, I like the idea of peeling back the curtain today just to discuss what goes into making this show, because it is a lot, and it's something that I think when we all started, we didn't really realize what we were getting into as much as we do now--
Dedeker: Oh, 100% not.
Emily: No, and the idea of a podcast at the time was just so foreign I think to everybody. In 2014, people knew what radio was, but podcasts were a fairly new medium, I think-- I don't know. You're shaking your head.
Jase: Yes, it wasn't new at all, but it was sort of right before. Just a few years before they became so commonplace that everyone knew about podcasts. Because at first, it was that thing of like, "It's a what? A podcast?"
"Well, it's like radio."
"Oh, okay. It's a radio show."
"Yes , but it's on the internet."
"Okay, so you stream it on the internet?"
"Well, no. It's pre-recorded, so you can listen whenever."
"Okay."
I remember having those conversations.
Emily: Like, "Why would you do that?"
Jase: Yes. "People listen to that? Why would they do that?" Whereas now everyone's like, "Oh, yes, podcasts, sure I've listened to whatever--"
Emily: Slash like, "I'm going to make my own podcast."Or "I'm interested in making my own podcast." That's really fascinating too, like how many people come up to me wanting to make their own podcasts or just starting out doing that as well.
Dedeker: I was talking earlier about podcasts and other content creators being easy to project stuff onto that I think we've gotten that where people-- I don't know, some people think it's super easy to run a podcast, and I think because deceptively, it is. I think deceptively, the steps are like, get a microphone, put on some headphones, sit down, talk into the microphone, put it on the internet, done.
Deceptively, that feels very simple and feels like a very low barrier to entry, but we've had people who think that it's like free to produce a podcast, or like we have no expenses, or things like that, and that's on top of all the --
Jase: I used to think that about podcasts that I listened to.
Dedeker: Well, that's why we're here, it's because you thought that about podcasts--
Jase: I thought this would be easy and free.
Emily: You thought it would be easy and just a fun time, and while it is-- It is in a lot of ways very fun, it's also a lot of hard work.
Dedeker: That's also on top of all the assumptions that people make about us, our relationship to each other. There's still a lot of people who assume, I think based on just seeing, "Oh, I see a picture of a man and two women, or what appear to be a man and two women. They must be in a triad. In a classic, maybe unicorn-hunting triad."
I've had clients who have told me or who have assumed that the story of us was that Jase and I were together, and we unicorn-hunted Emily, and then broke up with her, and here we are.
We've had our own Patreons who are like, "What's the matter with all these freaking straight people talking about queer issues?" And we're like, "Excuse me, hello? None of us are straight."
We've had so many assumptions thrown at us, and like-- Whatever, that's hard, because even though we're talking about ourselves a bunch right now, on the show, we don't necessarily talk about our personal lives a ton. It's not like a confessional show about who we slept with last weekend, or the drama that's going on with my metamour right now. It's a weird basis for people to create a parasocial relationship because I think people are often filling in the gaps about us and how our relationship works and how the podcast works.
Jase: So you're saying it's our own fault for leaving the gaps that people need to fill in?
Dedeker: Yes. I'm saying we need to just like really get them all --
Jase: I feel like we talked about it--
Dedeker: Now, we need to go hard the other direction, just full graphic detail about everything in our lives.
Emily: Wow. For the record, the two of you are in a relationship. I am not in a relationship with either of you anymore, but I was at one point, and then that ended. Now, I'm in a monogamous relationship with my partner that I've been with for eight years for like the entirety of the time I've been in this show.
Dedeker: But our relationship didn't start as like a couple hunting a unicorn. It started from a failed quad, you must know.
Emily: Essentially, yes.
Jase: And it was Emily and I who were together first, and Dedeker had a different partner. That was the quad that came together that then failed catastrophically, but the three of us stayed close, and that relationship evolved over time.
Eventually, Emily ended up being monogamous with her partner, but our relationship and the closeness and friendship of that has stayed, and I would say gotten even closer and more developed over the years in part because we spend so much time every week doing this podcast together. It's really helped keep us all very close and sharing a lot of our values, and how we want to run a business and how we want to help people and put information out there in the world.
Dedeker: Snoozer, Jase. That's why all the reality TV show producers are like, "Oh, I'm so bored. I don't want to turn them into a show anymore."
Jase: Yes, they're turned off, I know.
Emily: That's why we still haven't gotten a reality TV show-
Dedeker: And I'm fine with that. I'm perfectly fine with that.
Emily: ---even though some people have approached us.
Dedeker: Yes, at least once or twice a year, we get some TV producer who is like, "Oh, my God. I want to get on a call with you. You're so interesting. Tell me about your relationship. Do you all live together or whatever?" Then I'm like, "Well, actually, this is what the history has been, and we find that it's really interesting really exploring how you could have a nontraditional relationship that's still very loving and caring," and they're just like gone.
Jase: You're like, "Hello? Are you still there? Oh."
Dedeker: Yes. Okay, let's get into the brass tacks of like, how is a Multiamory episode born?
Emily: I do want to say, when you were like, "Oh, we don't talk about our lives," I find that a lot of the episodes that I do, and that's a thing to throw out there immediately, is that one of us is responsible for an episode essentially.
Jase: Like a lead producer on that episode.
Emily: Correct. That person is responsible for researching or like being the one who begins the research or has the topic. Then we also have our research assistants who we've discussed and actually had on the show, Em Mais and Dr. Keyanah Nurse. Both of them will be the person taking the lead research from us when we have a topic.
I might have a topic on polyfidelity, for instance, and then I am interested in that, and so I go to Keyanah. I might write out a few questions, and then Keyanah will look more deeply into that subject, like what's out there, what the studies are, things like that. We have a huge Google Doc where that specific episode is written out and structured initially, and then that is what we actually look at while we're doing the episode.
Dedeker: Yes. Our research assistants aren't always involved in every single episode. There are also still a fair number of episodes that we just straight up write fully and research fully on our own. The research assistants we brought on when we got our book contract because we were like, "Oh, no, this is a lot of work. How do we do this and write a book all at the same time?" And so since bringing them on just for that little bit of extra help.
Also, really a little bit of extra perspective as well on which research is sound and what isn't sound, and what should we be critical of with this particular blog or research study or things like that. That's also been really helpful, because they definitely catch things that we don't always catch when reading through some of these things.
Emily: They're both academics and have very different perspectives than we do, and very different lived experiences, which is good.
Dedeker: Yes. Using a combination of just interests/what's going on in our personal lives, that is the funny thing is-- I did tell somebody this the other day, that if you want to track what's happened in our personal lives, you just go look at what the topics have been. It's not always a one-to-one necessarily, but often, there's probably a 50-50 chance that it's directly related to something that one of us personally is facing and decides like, "Oh, my God. I need tools and resources for this." You can get-- It's some little clues that you can look for.
Jase: Right. It's a mix of either something that we're wondering about personally, or sometimes it's also something we've seen several people talk about online either in the Patreon group or even just in larger polyamory groups. It's like, "I see this come up a lot recently, let me learn more about that and do an episode about that." Or it could be something a friend's going through. There's different ways it can come about.
Or sometimes, it's just, "I listened to another podcast that had an expert on and talked about this thing. I'd love to do a spin of that where we're including more types of relationships in that discussion." Or something like that. There's a few different ways I guess that the episodes come up. I guess I'm just saying that as a caveat, don't think you can guess too much about our personal lives from the episode topics.
Dedeker: Okay, so we give it to them, and then we take it back.
Jase: Yes. You gave it, I take it back.
Dedeker: Okay, great. Then, once we've got a little collection of episodes written, these days, what we've been doing for the past few years is we've been recording in batches. About once a month, we do a really long recording day that lasts anywhere from 8 to 10 hours where we record 4 episodes and record all of our ads, our sponsors as well.
Pros and cons of this particular type of production schedule, it's nice to get it out of the way and then have our calendars a little bit more free the rest of the month.
It is a very long recording day-- If some of our ads have seemed a little silly to you, it's probably because we always record them at the end of our eight hours of recording and we're just like so frazzled and toast at that point that sometimes it comes out hilarious. Sometimes, it comes out as really awkward and weird, so that's the explanation for that.
Emily: Then we also have our team that works with us-- We talked about our research assistants. We also have our wonderful editor who has been with us since our first tour, which is incredible. We met Mauricio on our tour and he was like, "Your podcast's great, but I want to help make it better. I'm going to do that. Why don't I edit for you?"
For a long time, he edited just for free, which was incredible. It was all volunteer-based until we were like, "No, we're going to pay you now."
Jase: Mauricio does the editing of the episodes and basically just-- He's told me before, he's like, "I really don't edit a lot," because it's not This American Life-type show where we've got all these different segments that are having to get cut together with background music and things like that.
Every now and then, we've experimented with doing a more produced interview-style segment show like that, but for the most part, it's more just cleaning it up. Sometimes, we'll stumble over our words and we'll go back. Those ads that Dedeker was talking about where we get really silly, for a one-minute ad, we probably recorded 15 minutes of audio screwing it up and being like, "Wait, what?"
Emily: Not that much, but a lot.
Jase: Okay, maybe not that bad, but sometimes. Mauricio helps clean that all up, make the audio sound nice, all of that. Then it gets passed off to our production assistants who are Carson and Rachel. For the writeups, that's mostly been Carson, who will then take that episode and do the little write up that goes in the show notes and on our website and gets everything scheduled and up.
Rachel does other admin stuff like helping out with our emails and keeping on top of things, and sometimes will take over if Carson needs to take time off. She does kind of that similar stuff for our other show, Drunk Bible Study, that maybe we'll talk about more at the end of this. She also helps out with the scheduling and episode write ups and some of the promotion and stuff for that.
Emily: Also, every single episode, basically the person who is in charge of the episode will create social media quotes that you all see on Instagram and Twitter and on Facebook, things like that. I'm in charge of getting those to our social media team, which are some people over at Brand Desk who we've worked with for a number of years. They create the beautiful graphics, and then also help us do the write ups for those --
Dedeker: Specific shoutout to our main lead designer on our social media, Brittany Walters, who --
Emily: Britney, yes, and Bethany Mackenzie.
Dedeker: Yes. Britney's been doing a great job with that for many years. Britney is also I think, designer with our press kit and some elements on our website as well. She's fantastic.
Emily: Yes, Britney is awesome. Also, shout out to my mom who's our bookkeeper, because we've gotten to the point where we need such things in our lives. She does bookkeeping every single month for us
Dedeker: She's also-- She is a professional bookkeeper. It's not just doing Emily's mom a favor. She actually has done this as a job.
Emily: Yes. She currently does this as a job for a much bigger company than ours, but she does it right now for us as well. She tells us how much money we can spend or not, which is nice. Good to have that outside perspective for sure.
Dedeker: Then we have-- This isn't necessarily directly related to the production cycle of the podcast, but we have this wonderful team of moderators in our Discord and in our private Facebook group for our Patreon supporters. They're all volunteers, they've willingly decided to give of their time to be able to create a really nice welcoming environment in our Patreon groups.
We're very fortunate in that, in the whole history of having these private groups, they haven't been groups that have needed super heavy moderation, so it's not like the mod team is not always in there having to break up fights or kick people out or really police the place, which is fantastic. I count ourselves incredibly lucky for that, but I do think having the moderators at all does help to support, and again, create that good environment and that good culture within those groups.
Also, we need to give a shoutout to the network that we're on, Pleasure Podcasts and our network manager, Cam, because he's the guy who helps get all the sponsorships.
We don't have a skill for negotiating those things, good Lord, but he's the one who's able to go to bat for us in negotiating when these ads are going to run, and how much we get paid, and making sure that we're able to get free samples and stuff so that we're not just like talking out of our butts about a particular product -- Yes, stuff like that.
Also, on top of that, Cam and Pleasure Podcasts have been just like a super amazing community and a fantastic network to be a part of.
Jase: Yes, definitely recommend checking out some of the other Pleasure Podcasts. One thing I was going to add about that with the advertising, and one of the things that's so great about Cam is that he'll approach all of us, all the podcasts on the network or some set of them with a potential sponsor who's expressed some interest, and we get to express some initial interest, and then even then, we'll have another chance of, "Hey, they're interested in working with you." They'll send you samples usually, and then we still have a chance to say, "Actually no, we don't want to work with them."
I would say-- Tell me what you two think, but I feel like we turn down at least 50% of different options that are given to us.
Dedeker: Probably, yes.
Jase: Because it's just like, "No, I don't think this is a good isn't a good fit," or "I don't think this is a good product," or "This is just something that doesn't support our values or just doesn't line up with what our show's about," or things like that.
I do really appreciate that Cam isn't like, "No, you have to take everything I give you, I worked so hard for this." He's really great about, "Okay, yes, no problem."
Dedeker: Cam's also been very vocal about the fact that, compared to other shows on our network, our audience is apparently like really good--
Jase: We're telling you about yourselves, I love it.
Dedeker: Yes. This is what we can tell about you, is that-- He's told us that compared to other shows on the network, our audience is some of the most responsive to our sponsors, as in-- Like we talk about on the ad break where it's like, "Hey, if you're interested, please listen to these ads, check out the sponsors, it does really help us," and a lot of you do.
I realize that it's tough to live under capitalism, and it's tough because the fact that a podcast isn't for you to produce necessarily, but the fact that people do listen and then do go ahead and use our promo codes for instance, it actually really helps us a lot, because it tells the sponsor that we have a good audience, and then the sponsor continues to sponsor us. Just want to say that this does have an impact, and when you do it, it does really help us a lot.
That's actually a pretty good segue to talking about things like money. I think we keep alluding to the fact that podcasts aren't free to produce. What's great about this medium is that it is still largely free to listen to the majority of podcasts. I think that the industry has been trying to shift and change, and I think there is a little bit of a power struggle to try to turn it into a subscription model, like how you get your Netflix and your Hulu and things like that. I don't know how effective that is going to be or how industry-changing that's going to be, but we're definitely at a time where people are really aggressively trying to put podcasts behind a paywall.
Jase: They're already doing it.
Dedeker: Yes.
Emily: I don't listen to any paywall podcasts though, do you?
Jase: No, I never have.
Dedeker: I don't.
Jase: I think there's two parts. There's the actual paywall, which is like the-- Spotify premium has some podcasts you can only listen to through that, Audible some podcasts that are only listenable if you're a subscriber. There's several others like that.
Then there's the other side, which is the platform-exclusive podcasts. Even if it's not behind a paywall, but you could only listen to it on Apple Podcasts, or you can only listen to it on Spotify or whatever, versus-- The idea of podcasts originally was that it uses RSS, and so literally, any program can decide to subscribe to it and get that content. Definitely, people are trying to figure out like, how do we as companies make money from this industry that was very independent for a long time?
Dedeker: We have to say that keeping the show free for people is a big value to us, because we've thought about different models. Like, there's a number of podcasts out there where the way that they make money is, "Yes, we'll release this show for free, but you only get every other episode if you're not paying us money."
Emily: Yes, or-- Sam Harris only does half of his episodes for free, and then the other half, you have to pay for.
Dedeker: Yes. And I'm not necessarily knocking that model. If it works for people, that's great, and I understand why people would do it. Oftentimes, we've considered that, but we've always just felt a little bit too weird about that. We have plenty of other options for being able to make money to support this podcast. That's definitely one of our values, is being able to always make this show free for people.
Emily: What do we spend our money on?
Dedeker: Well, one beer for Emily--
Jase: We didn't pay for that. She bought that herself.
Emily: No, my friends Jacqueline and Thaddeus brought this over and left it. All of the people that we discussed, with the exception of our mods, we pay. That's two production assistants, two research assistants, our editor Mauricio, and our bookkeeper --
Dedeker: Yes, because Emily's mom doesn't even give her bookkeeping for free. We got to pay for that.
Emily: No, we pay her. Yes, absolutely. Our Brand Desk social media team, we also pay, and then we have an editor for our other show as well, Drunk Bible Study, and we pay her as well.
Dedeker: We'll get more into the details of like how expensive this show is compared to how much money we bring in, but we have always tried to strive to at least pay people above minimum wage if we can, to the best of our ability.
We're still not paying people as much as they deserve. We don't have the income to pay people as much as they deserve, but we always are striving to pay people for their time and for their labor, and also to be the ones who initiate paying them more as well, in response to things like inflation or things like that.
Jase: Yes. Some other things that come up that are not people specifically, but one is the transcripts. We do make transcripts available for all of our episodes, and we do those --
Dedeker: That's another thing people are putting behind paywalls these days, the transcripts, even though it's an accessibility thing.
Jase: I know, yes. I've seen that suggested, like, "Here's how to help promote your Patreon or Supercast or whatever, is put your transcripts behind a paywall," and it's like-- That's that's yucky. Anyway, I'll put my wheelchair ramps behind a paywall as well. It's like, "No, that's not okay."
Anyway, transcripts, we do those, and-- There's lots of services out there that do AI transcription for pretty cheap, but they're all pretty bad, especially if you're trying to transcribe three people's voices or more. We actually do have a service that we've used now for several years who does actual human transcripts. I'm sure they use AI to help out their transcriptionists, but we do that.
That's something that we pay, and then Carson Carson has to then edit the transcripts that come back to then put them up on the site, so there's a lot of work and time that goes into each of those transcripts, which is also why sometimes they're not up right when an episode releases. Sometimes they might take a few weeks. It's just sometimes we can get behind on that, or the transcription service could get behind. Usually, it's our fault though, not theirs.
Then another thing about podcasts is that whenever you listen to a podcast on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or whatever, unlike the music that you're listening to on those services, they're not actually hosting our podcast. They don't hold those audio files anywhere, Apple doesn't pay anything for that bandwidth that's being used or any of those costs. That's on the podcast themselves to host it somewhere that can provide enough bandwidth for everyone to download it, that's fast enough that everyone can get it and can store the data for 400 episodes worth of audio and stuff like that, so that's another thing.
We've switched around to different hosting platforms over the years, but that's another place where-- I think a surprising place where podcasters' money goes, is into that hosting fee, because it's not-- Some company isn't owning this, and now they're taking on those costs. It's like, "No, we own this, and that's why we can put it on all the platforms, because we're the ones paying to host it somewhere."
Dedeker: Yes, that's-- A newbie podcaster, that's going to be the first thing that they run into, is paying for hosting fees. I mean, after you've already bought your equipment and stuff, which can also be quite expensive if you're wanting to buy even semi-decent equipment, it's still a chunk of change.
Specifically, if you have any friends who just started podcasting, or if you know of any newbie podcasters that aren't coming in with a ton of money, go support them because it does really help, because these hosting fees are not cheap.
On top of that, we have a whole host of other services that we have to pay for. Riverside, which is where we remotely record our episodes, and super crucial if we have a guest for instance, they need somewhere where they can go that's not just like Zoom.
But also, speaking of Zoom, we also pay for Zoom subscription because that's where we do a lot of our meetings. Then also, that's where we have our video discussion groups once a month for our Patreon supporters. We have to pay for email services, for Google Cloud services, the cost of website hosting, all of these little things that take up a little bit of a chunk.
I think this is also something, even with not very big podcasts, these are still things they're having to think about and to pay for. Thinking about your favorite indie podcaster, is that there's actually a lot that goes into this.
Emily: We also support other creators on Patreon, and we make charity donations from time to time. Also, Patreon takes a cut of everything that we make.
Jase: Right. Everyone involved takes some kind of cut it seems, for sure.
Dedeker: Yes, everybody's got to get something.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. Of course. We also pay for occasional events, like Jase and Dedeker had a Patreon meetup in New York City a few months ago. That was really cool, but there was a fairly large cost involved in even doing that, just even like securing the space.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. That's even separate from trying to feed ourselves or buy drinks for folks or things like that. And related, it's been a while since we've done a tour or done a ton of live events. We want to slowly transition back into doing that, but the tours are also really expensive, right? Because you got to pay between transportation costs and the cost of renting a venue.
Often, sometimes it's paying people extra to take tickets, or set the space up, or tear it down, and things like that, so that's of course another cost on top of it.
Then after all this, we also pay ourselves. Now, I never do the math on the number of hours that we put into the show in order to calculate my hourly rate because it's not great, and I'd rather not think about that, about how little I'm making per hour on this show.
Emily: Yes. We don't pay ourselves very much in relation to what we're making, because at the end of the day, the amount of money that we set aside to put back in the business is also fairly minimal, but we want to be able to pay ourselves a small enough amount so that we can put a fairly sizable chunk back into the --
Jase: For things like tours, or events, or things like that.
Emily: Yes. Book promotion, which is something we're about to do-- We didn't even get into that, but that was a whole to-do.
Dedeker: Yes. Just to give you a sense, like 70% of our revenue goes to paying for all of the above. With that remaining 30%, the rest goes to some savings for long term projects like Emily was talking about, but mostly, the rest of it goes to taxes, wheemp whomp, still got to pay those business taxes.
Emily: Capitalism.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: For all of the goods and services that the government puts in place to support podcasts and independent creators.
Jase: Oh boy. Anyway, yes. That's to give you a rough idea of where that's going. Then as far as how can we afford to do that, what is nice about podcasts is when you start out, the costs are quite low, especially if you're able to edit yourself, which I did for our first two years or so of the podcast. I did all the editing myself. We also crowded around one microphone at the very beginning until we eventually could --
Dedeker: Before we could even afford our own equipment.
Jase: Right.
Emily: Yes. In a hot bedroom underneath a sheet. It was nuts. It was quite something.
Jase: Yes. We built a little blanket for audio, and we would write out our outlines on a whiteboard right there, so we've come a long way. That is something nice about starting a podcast, is there are now-- There weren't at the time, but there are now podcast-hosting places that will even do free podcast-hosting, usually in exchange for some watermarking, maybe putting some ads on it or requiring you to do some promos. But the catch is, once you get to certain numbers of downloads, then they start charging money, so the costs do ramp up as you grow.
The advantage of that is it means that, as our listenership has grown and as we've created our Patreon, we've been able to afford those things. It's not like, "Oh my gosh, you're tens of thousands of dollars in the hole before you ever make any money at all," like if we were running a printing press or something where we've got to buy all the equipment upfront first before we made anything.
Dedeker: What a weird business idea for you to whip out of nowhere, a printing press? That's weird, Jase. What is this, 1875?
Emily: That was the first thing --
Jase: I don't know, I guess I was thinking about-- Well, I was thinking about newsies and how they had to go --
Dedeker: Okay, so it's like 1912.
Jase: Okay. Yes, sure.
Dedeker: Got you.
Jase: I'm the king New York. Right, yes. Speaking of that, and we were talking about before our audience being awesome and listening to the ads, around 31-ish percent of the money that we make comes from those ads, from what those advertisers pay us to be able to put them on there. Then the other 69%, nice-
Dedeker: Oh, so nice.
Jase: -comes from our Patreon supporters, which is awesome, and really, we do appreciate those of you who support us there. Because really, from the beginning, that was what led us start growing the podcast, getting to the point where we could actually pay the people who helped to make this show, being able to pay for better hosting so that we could keep growing. That started for us, at least for our podcast, with Patreon primarily, from just the contributions from you out there, and then viewers like you.
Dedeker: It is viewers like you.
Jase: Right, actually.
Emily: Yes, except for listeners like you, rather.
Jase: Yes. Then the advertising for us didn't really start picking up till quite a bit later in our journey. That's not the same for every podcast, but that was at least how it was for us.
Dedeker: We went on our first tour when literally, we were making like $300 a month. That was before expenses though. I didn't even do the math back then on what our actual profit was.
Emily: Even on our second tour, we had to put our own money into it. Do you remember that? When Jase and I were --
Dedeker: Okay, that's a depressing and stressful story. I was trying to talk about our scrappy little underdog first tour where it was like, okay, we're making less than $300 a month. How do we do a freaking tour, a multi-city tour on this amount of money? We just had to be real clever with, we're going to pile in the car and make it a road trip, and we're going to rope our friend Paul into being our roadie. We can't pay him, but we can pay for his food and lodging, and find cheap little venues, and just do everything we can.
Jase: Right. Just staying with relatives or friends.
Emily: And the book store--
Dedeker: Staying with relatives, yes. Real scrappy, but we did it.
Emily: Yes. At least the second time, we could fly places and go all around the country, but then we still had to put money into it ourselves, but that was fun.
Jase: Yes. That was a fun one where we overdrafted our account on that tour and had to pull out our own money to make it up.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Oh boy.
Dedeker: That was before we had Sherry. Sherry would've caught it. Sherry would've--
Emily: Yes. Mom would've been like, "No, don't you dare."
Dedeker: Like, "Don't do that."
Jase: "Don't do that. Get your head out of the sand."
Emily: Yes, exactly. We want to make it abundantly clear also that this is not our full-time job. All of us have other stuff that we're doing. I feel like I'm the one who's the gig worker out of the three of us still to this day in a lot of ways.
Dedeker: We represent a full spectrum. You're like still the gig worker. I'm self-employed, created my own job And Jase is the freaking corporate suit over there.
Emily: Yes. He is. Although you Jase, when we started were super gig working too.
Dedeker: That's true.
Jase: I was just doing-
Emily: Up until little--
Jase: -video editing gigs, little random Craigslist, independent film, VFX gigs, all that stuff, and editing our show and I guess photography. I was doing all sorts of things barely scraping by. That was on that tour was a lot of that kind of thing. I did want to mention that thing about having those day jobs, we're not saying that to mean like, "Oh man, podcasting sucks because we can't afford to quit our day jobs." That actually for us was a really intentional choice that we hit this point when we first started making money.
When we first started getting money, which was from our Adam and Eve sponsorship, that was our very first one ever that-
Emily: Shout out to Adam and Eve.
Jase: -they're still around today. The first ones that we're talking, we made $20 a month or something like that. It started very small.
Dedeker: We thought it was first $50 a month at first.
Jase: No, it started much lower that first. I remember because we didn't have any of our own Multiamory bank account or anything yet, so it all went into my bank account that then I had to divvy up to us. At the very beginning, it was that, "Here's $20, here's your $8, here's your $8, here's my $6," whatever it is. Then we did have this meeting probably at the point where it started getting to more like 50 or 100, of we should stop just taking this money that we're making, and instead, we should put this in an account and keep it separate so that we can save it for things.
That's part of how we were able to do that tour at all even when we weren't making a lot but we'd been saving it because we started not paying ourselves anything for the first several years of the show.
Emily: Several years, yes.
Jase: Then there was that next turning point of deciding do we Patreon and then making more money from that? That thing of, "Now we're starting to make a little more money, is our goal doing all this ourselves and quitting our day jobs or do we keep our day jobs and we hire people and we start paying people to help us make this show." For us, it was that decision of we want to bring on more people so that there's more voices involved in making the show, more perspectives involved in making it. As well as being able to bring in people who have more expertise in something else than we do to do different tasks rather than just trying to be the jack of all trades and doing it ourselves.
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is we're not complaining about the fact that we have day jobs. That was actually a very conscious decision that we made at one point. That we would rather be able to provide income and get input from a wider array of people than ourselves, than to just be able to quit our day jobs.
Emily: If it were just one of us doing everything, we could live off of what we have made at this point.
Dedeker: That one person could live off of.
Emily: The one person could, yes. I think that it would be pretty miserable quite honestly. We say so often how grateful we are for the support that we have of not just each other but everyone on our team as well. The fact that we made this choice to do a podcast with three people, it's been so phenomenal because at times when we feel really shitty and having a really hard time is this meaningful to anyone? Is anyone going to listen to this? Oh, I feel bad about that episode or whatever. We're able to lift each other back up.
It's just been so phenomenal over the years to be able to have the support of not just yourself having to do those things and lift yourself back up over and over again, but have other people who have your back as well. That's really wonderful.
Jase: In wrapping up this segment talking about money and finances which we ended up talking about a lot more than I expected to, but I do know it's something people are curious about. Hopefully, y'all found that interesting. Maybe especially if you want to start your own podcast, now you have some insights there. Speaking of that, we are going to take a quick ad break to talk about some of our sponsors for this week's episode and some ways you can support this show. Again, as we mentioned earlier, if they're interesting to you and you do check them out, that does directly reflect on us getting more of those ad deals in the future and it really helps us out.
Also, if you're not able to or none of them are interesting, we're dedicated to making sure this podcast remains available for free. Please take a moment to listen to these ads and we'll see you in a sec.
Emily: Hello and welcome back to our 400th episode blah, blah, blah, as Google Docs wants us to say.
Jase: good callback.
Dedeker: We spent a lot of time talking about money. I want to switch gears and talk about-- this has been such a funny thing. The size of our show, the size of the podcast. The reason why I feel the need--
Emily: Not that size matters.
Dedeker: Not that size necessarily matters, but this is yet another area where people make a lot of assumptions and a lot of guesses which is fair for reasons that I'll get into later. Basically, our show in comparison to a lot of the big players in podcasting like you are Joe Rogans, like your McElroys, we're so small. So small in comparison to most of the big players out there. Then there's a lot of folks and especially folks within our audience, people in the non monogamous community who think that we're freaking huge. Who sometimes treat us as though we are like the McElroys or assume that we have the same reach and influence and production capabilities as the McElroys or The Daily or things like that.
That has been a funny thing where really it's all pretty subjective. Then the internet also makes it hard to actually tell because podcasts are actually difficult to evaluate for their size and their influence. You can look at like iTunes charts and certain ratings like that that will give you maybe a little bit of a sense of how popular a show is. A lot of this is in this algorithmic black box and it's not like a YouTube video where you can click on a channel and see how many subscribers they have and how many downloads this video got. There's nowhere public to find that for podcasts.
Jase: Not only is there nowhere public to find that for podcasts, we don't even know how many people subscribe to our show. We don't know that.
Dedeker: We don't even know, you’re right.
Emily: That's a very strange picture though.
Jase: We know downloads, we know rough geographic locations of where more downloads happen than others. We get that information through our hosting site. As I mentioned before where we pay a company to host the podcast files itself and they publish that on this public RSS feed that any other service can subscribe to and essentially redistribute that podcast because that happens a second step away. Apple doesn't tell us how many people subscribe. Spotify doesn't tell us how many people because it's all separate to those services.
It is this weird thing of we don't even know how many subscribers we have. We can maybe make guesses and there're people in the industry to try to help you figure some of that stuff out but we don't know. It is a weird industry like that, there's not Nielsen ratings for podcasts where they're going out and surveying people about what they listen to. It is a very strange industry that way
Dedeker: That's starting to happen more frequently though.
Jase: With the big ones.
Dedeker: With the big ones and again as podcasts are becoming a little bit more of a mainstream medium where there's more money and bigger deals involved, that is starting to become more of a thing.
Emily: I will say I appreciate the fact that we are self-sustaining which wasn't always the case but we are a podcast that is able to function without us putting our own money into it anymore. Which is not a thing that always was the case. It took a lot of years to get there, but that's partially because of all of you out there supporting us. Dedeker and I recently went to Podcast Movement which was a really fun place where Dedeker did a panel on podcasts that I guess are about salacious topics.
Dedeker: Yes, you were there. It was a panel that I was on with some other people on the Pleasure Podcasts Network.
Emily: Yes. I was there for about 10 minutes and then I had to catch a flight. I was only there for like a hot second. We learned when we went to a different panel hosted by I think the CEO of Libsyn or something. That there are 2.4 million podcasts out there globally. However, only 466,000 of those are active, which that's 19%
Jase: Meaning have released an episode within the last month or something like that. That's what they counted as active?
Emily: Yes. That's a very small percentage of those 2.4 million podcasts. Then only 380,000 of those are active and also have more than 10 episodes. Many of them are just starting out essentially, and have not made it past that 10-episode threshold. By that alone, we're in the top 16% of all podcasts in existence so that's cool. I'm assuming actually we're in a far smaller percentage point because this is number 400 and we've been around since the dawn of time it feels like.
Jase: It is a weird thing because we were saying we don't really have numbers about what other people have. However, there are some places that have published approximate numbers, like these, or rough download numbers, things like that. It is that weird thing of like, we're probably close to this top 1% of podcasts just because most podcasts maybe run for a year or two and they fizzle out or something like that.
Emily: Those people on social media that say top 1% of podcasts, I'm like, "What the hell does that even mean? I don't know by what metric you were assessing this top 1%." We could put that on there I guess, but I wouldn't know if it's true or not.
Jase: Then I guess it's just that interesting thing of that that even if you're at that level, which part of it is just if you do a podcast consistently for eight years, you will probably be in that category just because not many people do that. Then there's still, as Dedeker was mentioning before, just that massive gap between us even being in that tier between us and even those moderately well-known podcasts out there who've maybe only done one season but still destroy us in listenership numbers just because they had a celebrity or they got a lot of coverage in the New York Times.
Dedeker: Or they are a celebrity.
Emily: Yes or Spotify curated it and created the podcast and threw it out to everyone
Jase: You got the company behind you promoting it or any number of things.
Dedeker: To close this out, I do think that there's often a lot of misconceptions that people make on the internet. What if these people on the internet have some misconceptions about other people on the internet? Because I don't know, I think in trying to suss out how popular any content creator is or how successful they are, you can look at a number of things. Their number of subscribers, their number of downloads, the numbers on their social media following, but those pretty much never tell you the whole picture.
We have known very large, very successful podcasts who happen to have very small social media followings or have a really unprofessional-looking website but the podcast is still just as popular as Gang Busters. We've also seen vice versa. We've also known folks with extremely large social media followings who are still struggling to pay their rent. I think that often what I've seen online is people assume, "Oh my God, your TikTok is that like a million followers, you must be making so much money." It's just that's not necessarily the case.
Now, I do think that in content creation in general, there can be just this absolute wild spread of how much money people can and do make so that's at the opposite end of the extreme. Just wanted to say that that's something that you can bear in mind as part of your own internet literacy I think is don't always assume that the numbers that you see attached to someone's podcasts or to their social media automatically mean something about the quality of their life because I've seen that happen a lot.
Emily: Let's talk a little bit about some of our favorite parts of doing the show and some of the parts that are difficult too. Gosh, I think for me, I've learned so much about relationships in myself just because we have immersed ourselves in this topic for the last eight years. The difference between who I was eight years ago and who I am now is so vast and immense. I think largely, it has to do with the fact that I'm actually taking the things that we've learned and implementing them into my daily life and it's made such a difference in my relationships and my relationship with myself as well. That's pretty cool and profound.
Still got a long way to go, my goodness. I think honestly, the most challenging thing besides the time and all of those things and sometimes feelings of inadequacy is worrying about the perception of the public and just feeling as though I have to be perfect in the way that I speak and in the things that I do because if I'm not, there will be a pile on in some respect. I think that's just being a public-facing person in any regard. We're certainly not celebrities, but I definitely at the restaurant I work get people know who I am from time to time.
I have a very distinct voice. You just have to hear it sometimes and you're like, "Shit, I know who that is." That happens. I think I would urge everyone out there just to know that we are people and we're learning along the same-- we're on a similar journey as all of you out there are and we will fuck up at times. I know that there are times that fucked up on the show and I felt awful about it for years and oh, I'm sure I'll do it again in the future. If there's any grace that you can give us, it's appreciated because it happens.
Jase: It's funny actually, I was just having a conversation about something a little bit different actually with my therapist last week. He was bringing up how it's more easy to latch onto negative feedback even if you get positive feedback as well. He was talking about--
Emily: We definitely get more positive for sure.
Jase: He was talking about that as a therapist. He's like, "I have so many people who've told me how I've changed their life, how I've really helped them. Who still to this day will write me a Christmas card to tell me updates on how their life is going and how I helped make that possible." He's like, "The one I think about is the one person who's like, "I don't think we're a good fit because of this about you."' Or it's those ones are the ones that stick with you.
I don't want to make it sound like everyone's piling on us all the time, but sometimes people do just write really nasty things because there's that expectation of perfection and that can be hard. Like I said, I understand it. I was--
Emily: Or even just mean shit.
Jase: Sometimes it's just mean.
.
Emily: Sometimes it's just mean, and that's even less
Jase: That's the thing. I find that the mean the stuff, at least for me, is a little easier to deal with. If it's someone who's just hateful and awful, it hurts and it's-- as much as I want to be like, "Oh yes, whatever, they don't know nothing." It still hurts. It's still weird and uncomfortable and hard for someone to feel so strongly about you when you've never met them and you haven't really interacted with them. It's more the ones that it's a really potentially nasty criticism, but even just a really harsh criticism from someone who is otherwise an ally, who's otherwise, part of the same community.
I think those are the ones that are really hard because there is that sense of like, "I do care what you think. We should be on the same team here and now it feels like we're not." I think those are the hardest. That is something I feel like we've especially in the past couple of years, really made a conscious effort for ourselves to not do that to other content creators or to other people to say that tearing down just doesn't really help any of us.
It's something that I want to give a shout-out to our moderators also and our community for really fostering as much as possible, that behavior in our Facebook group and our discord group of that people can make mistakes and people can learn and having compassion and things like that rather than just punishing each other. Anyway, I digress a little bit, but that's something that I never would've thought I would've had that much experience with that I guess nuance of how we interact with each other and hopefully an opportunity to have some positive impact on that in our larger community of people who support similar things.
Dedeker: You're so right. It's really changed my relationship to the people that I'm in parasocial relationships with. The content creators, the podcasts, YouTube channels that I consume about yes, if someone says something that I disagree with or if I think that their take on something is wrong, it's really made me reevaluate, first of all, if I need to give this feedback to them. Then also secondly, how. Because now knowing how it's on the other side of it. Because this is to say we've gotten some amazing critique over the years that has actually shaped and formed the show.
Jase: I did want to say that too. We have had some people who've done a great job of this, of being understanding of the job.
Dedeker: A lot of people who've done a great job. That's definitely been a really good lesson for me. I don't know, but also even though we talk about all the negative stuff, we've gotten so many people, like when people do take the time just to mention how helpful the show has been or talk about their favorite tool to talk about sharing it with a friend to talk about how it turned around communication in their relationship, it's just-- I'm going to get for clamps.
Jase: I am right here just listening to you talk about it and thinking about it.
Dedeker: Now it's bad radio. Now I'm just sitting here being emotional. Just saying when you reach out and say good things to us, it really does help to make all of this work and all of this sweat, blood, and tears just worth it.
Emily: We had a episode with Carrie Jenkins a couple of weeks ago where she was talking about projects and life projects and things that bring you and the world around you meaning, and also what you can give back to the world. I think this has been an undertaking that has been one of the more challenging things perhaps we've done in our lives. Yet it's so profoundly worth it because we clearly are, I think in so many ways because you all have told us that we are giving back to you in your lives. That I think makes it all so worth it. Even the challenges that we may have or just challenges within our own company and our own triad of being people who create content.
It's worth it because I hope that it's giving back to the community at large. Again, like I've said so many times before, we're learning right along with you every single week.
Dedeker: I'm going to keep crying if we keep talking about this. I think we need to move it along to talking about what's in the future-
Emily: Wrap it up
Dedeker: -of Multiamory.
Emily: Gosh.
Dedeker: What do you see in your crystal ball?
Emily: What indeed. The very immediate thing is our book coming out next year, March 14th, 2023. That has been a labor of love as well.
Dedeker: I'm not avoiding crying. I'm just going to keep on keeping on.
Emily: I know. I think it's really remarkable but I'm about to go to Hong Kong off on a contract for Disney and I'm thinking about the fact that I think the very first contract I did was when we were writing our initial book proposal, which was at the time going to be for radar or something.
Dedeker: That was the first version of the book was it was just going to be focused on radar.
Emily: A manual for radar. I remember being super jet lagged and waking up at 5:00 AM and just writing out a bunch of stuff and that now finally on this other side of the pandemic, four years later, it's actually going to come out, which is really remarkable. That's something that I'm super excited about and I hope that you all will read it. Will get a copy of it.
Dedeker: Go to multiamory.com/book if you want to specifically get on our mailing list for updates about that. Or honestly already, if you search for us on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Simon & Schuster, you can pre-order allegedly.
Emily: I don't know. We haven't tried it, but allegedly, you can--
Dedeker: Go check it out.
Jase: It's so cool because I don't know how much we've talked about this process, but the fact that the book started because a listener of our show agent Michael, who is our literary agent--
Emily: Shout out to agent Michael.
Jase: reached out because he's a listener of the show and had been to one of our live shows and heard me mention something about writing a book on an episode and just randomly reached out like, "Hey, do you want to get coffee and talk about making books? I'm an agent for authors, this is what I do, you want to chat about it?" We did that and that eventually led to all of us meeting and ending up taking this on.
When we say that none of this would be possible without the community, that's both on the macro scale of letting us keep the show growing and learning so much and knowing what is even worth putting in a book. Also, even on the micro level of so many of the people who we've met and who've helped at various things along the way have been from people who listen to the show.
Dedeker: I think that was also around the same time that we were polling our audience and specifically polling our Patreon subscribers about what are the things that you want to see next from us. Overwhelmingly people wanted a book, so thank you people who voted in that poll four years ago. You can finally get your book.
Emily: Took us long enough. Three years.
Jase: Seriously.
Emily: Also, we're really hoping to do more live events eventually now that the pandemic has entered a different phase are the words that I'll use. It seems as though things are opening back up much more and the possibility of us coming to a city near you is potentially going to happen in the near future. I've definitely wanted to get back out there and meet people in person again because both of our tours were just so much fun. It was so great to actually meet people in person and get to interact with all y'all and do a live show. I hope we'll have many more of those to come.
Dedeker: Again, especially what we were talking about at the top of the episode about being in this weird medium where you're just talking into a microphone-
Emily: Into the void.
Dedeker: -to what feels like nobody. Really, you're just talking into the void and then to be in a context where you're actually talking to people face to face and they can react in real-time and be in conversation with you and ask questions. Also, honestly, some of my best memories are just doing a show and then hanging out in the bar afterwards with listeners.
Emily: Yes, or karaoke.
Dedeker: Also, some of the memories that I don't remember anymore are from being in a bar after a show hanging out with listeners.
Emily: Karaoking maybe having some fun times with some pretty people. That too.
Dedeker: Also, by the way, again, as we're thinking about doing more live events, if y'all listening or yourselves or if you have any connections to people who are good at event management or tour management, we, for years, have been wanting someone who can help take on some of this labor of planning all these things. Because when it's just the three of us doing it, especially when it's multi-city tours, we all feel like we're going to die from stress and from how overwhelmed we are. We've done it but we would love to find a badass person who loves to do that stuff-
Emily: More help.
Dedeker: -that we could bring on for doing that. If that's you, find a way to reach out to us. What else do you see? What else is going to be in the future beyond just events and the book and doing 400 more episodes of the podcast?
Emily: Gosh.
Jase: I think that the future's an interesting place because so many things can happen. I think something that I'd be curious about is experimenting with different types of episodes or different other maybe audio projects in addition to written projects or maybe video projects, things like that. I don't even know what that is, I'm just speaking off the cuff here. We recently started doing our question-and-answer episodes and we tried that several years ago in the past with call-in questions and we tried different ways of doing that that just never quite took off.
I think partly because of maybe not having enough listenership or that it's a lot easier to write a question than it is to call in and record yourself asking the question. I'm not sure what it is but they've been a really cool way to connect to what people are talking about and get us to think about some situations that are a little more specific and a little less just general. It's kind of lets us focus more on, "Okay, let's see how these things can apply in people's real lives," or how does this remind me of, "Oh right. I went through a very similar thing years ago," or whatever it is. That's been really cool and that's a somewhat newish thing.
I wonder what other sorts of different formats or different interesting things there could be to do there. I think that's something that'd be fun to explore. Keep it fresh.
Dedeker: I think we'd also love to hear from y'all as well. Because y'all gave us the great idea of doing a book. all super exciting you would love to see, let us know.
Emily: Having more guests on, or even guests maybe do an episode like curate an episode of their own, that might be an interesting idea. I don't know.
Jase: All sorts of interesting things that could happen.
Emily: Yes, absolutely.
Dedeker: I'd be open to a TV show someday.
Emily: Definitely.
Dedeker: Just putting it out there. Doesn't have to be a weird smarmy reality TV show, but something more cool than that. Something where we have a little bit more control perhaps.
Emily: That would be fantastic.
Jase: That could be fun. I've talked about the idea of maybe trying out doing some occasional virtual live shows in addition to in-person ones.
Dedeker: The metaverse, Jase. The future of podcasting. Did you know that?
Emily: They said in Podcast Movement and we were like, "Yo, okay."
Dedeker: At Podcast Movement, literally anyone was like, "What's the future of podcasting, or the future of monetization, or the future of advertising, or whatever?" I think that that's just the acceptable answer for I don't know what's in the future. It's just like, "Oh, the metaverse. I might think the metaverse is going to be huge. I think no one can say exactly how or what that would look like. Metaverse, it's the future of podcasting.
Jase: I was just, the other day, I don't remember if I told this to you, Emily, but I was telling Dedeker because you two told me about this metaverse thing. I've also been researching metaverse stuff just on my own to try to understand more about what that actually really might be and how that could look since I'm a nerdy tech boy. I was semi-jokingly,-- I would actually do this if you were into it, but I don't think you will be. I was like, "What if we start doing our live shows in Roblox? We build a server in Roblox where we can--"
Dedeker: Emily doesn't even know what Roblox is.
Emily: Did you say roadblocks or Roblox?
Jase: Roblox, R-O-B-L-O-X
Emily: Ro. I was like Roe, little fishes.
Dedeker: It's what all the kids are into.
Jase: No. R-O-B-L-O-X. There's no E, not like roe for fishes. It actually started--
Dedeker: It's what the kids are into?
Jase: Here's the thing and I learned about this from my Metaverse book that I'm reading is it did start out as a game whose audience was primarily kids, but the idea is it's a platform where you can design your own levels. Basically, design your own games.
Emily: Mario Maker
Jase: Like Mario Maker, but with way more freedom and creativity that are options. You're not limited to just one particular type of game like you are with Mario Maker. The latest stats are that the vast majority of Roblox players are adults now. That it's really taken off as this figure platform. However, our show would get shut down immediately because you can't have any conversation about sex or anything. You can't even have description of sex anywhere, so we'd probably be close enough to that line that wouldn't actually happen. It's something like that. I was like, "Why not? We could run around with our little avatars and have special effects that go off. People could interact in real-time and dance.
Dedeker: If you're listening and we get overwhelming feedback that the listeners want it, we'll make it happen. Lastly, before we come to a close here, we do need to give a quick cheeky little promo for our other podcast, which we've teased sometimes over the course of this show. It's something that has nothing to do with the content of this show. Our other show is called Drunk Bible Study where it's what it says on the tin. Basically, Emily was a born and raised atheist, I have religious PTSD, Jase almost went to seminary and so we committed a few years ago to just meeting every week and drinking some beers and reading every single word of the Bible and then also live streaming it on Twitch.
Basically, if everything that you heard in this episode sounds super stressful, Drunk Bible Study is how we de-stress from all of that
Emily: By making another podcast,
Jase: I don't know if it was the smartest move.
Emily: I know.
Jase: We should have gotten into Fortnite or something instead, but here we are.
Emily: Fortnite, there it is. It's very fun. I'm learning way more about the Bible than I ever thought I would in my entire life, ever. I'm not being evangelized, I'm just going to put that out there. I am enjoying reading it because the Bible is pretty wacky. Pretty wacky. Just putting that out there.
Dedeker: Oh, we have a great time. We haven't done a ton of direct promotion some marketing for that show.
Jase: It's a different show, so I think that's part of why.
Dedeker: It really is just like, "This is where we have fun." We do have a fun little audience of regular people who show up to our live streams every single week. We have all these in-jokes and just joke around and have a fantastic time. If that appeals to you, and by the way, we get an audience that's very diverse as far as their-
Emily: Knowledge.
Dedeker: -experience with the Bible. Everything from people who are ex-evangelicals to people who actually are theologians, people who still identify as Christian. It's brought in a really funny ragtag bunch of an audience. If you're interested, you can go to drunkbiblestudy.com, you can find Drunk Bible Study in whatever podcast player you use, or you can go to twitch.tv/drunkbiblestudy and watch one of our live streams on a Thursday. With that, we bring our 400th episode to a close. I officially announce the start of Multiamory season four or maybe it's season five. I don't know how numbers work.