Jordan Heath-Rawlings: The Big Story 6 Years In

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
It was back in 2019 when we had Jordan Heath Rawlings from the big story podcast on to talk about the first year of one of Canada's newest Daily News podcasts, and here we are five years later, when the show has evolved and grown and it has become my go to for Canadian news content in podcast form. I think I'm stating the obvious when I say that daily news podcasts are popular and there's a lot more choice now, but this is one that I keep coming back to over and over again, and by keep coming back to that's something I'll bring up during our conversation today. And now we welcome Jordan Heath Rawlings back to the show. He joins me from Toronto, which we will refer to as the center of the universe, more than once today. Did they have to get you a new computer for all the new video you need to shoot to make a great podcast.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  1:04  
That wasn't the specific idea behind it, but it definitely does help. And we are experimenting with it because it's it's certainly nice to have something that that

Matt Cundill  1:14  
looks really good. Yeah. Noted actually, when I appeared on your show back in its first year, I couldn't see you. We weren't looking at each other. The interview was being conducted at that time, just over audio. But have you changed the way you do interviews?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  1:31  
I mean, I don't know how many guests you ask that to, but I bet everybody says yes, because of the pandemic and never mind to pivot to video, when we started before the pandemic, it's so funny to think about it now, because we used to get people to come to our office and sit down with me in studio for half an hour and then leave. We'd be like, just drop whatever you're doing today, take an hour to get down here, chat with me for a bit and then go back to wherever you came from. Thank you very much. And people would do it like now people are just like, yeah, no, what system do you use to record? Because I'm not coming in. So yeah, that's that's the big thing that changed. I mean, obviously we couldn't for a couple of years, but even now that we can, we sometimes invite people in. I mean, selfishly, I'll say that they're people who are friends of mine from the industry that I haven't seen in a while, and it would be great to catch up or whatever, sure, but most of the time, people just assume that these invitations are virtual now, which is like, just not something they did pre pandemic. The

Matt Cundill  2:36  
first time I met you was just before your show launched in 2018

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  2:41  
at Podcast Movement, right? Yeah, yes, I remember that

Matt Cundill  2:45  
exactly. Julie said, Go find Jordan and hang out together for a little bit. And it was in Philadelphia. Yeah,

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  2:51  
I actually thought about that last night. We're recording this the day after the presidential debate as they showed a capitol Hall, or whatever it's called, which I wandered around while I was down there, meeting you and everybody else.

Matt Cundill  3:04  
And there you were. You were tasked, really, with coming up with what was going to be the groundwork for, or you'd already really started. Either you'd already started it, or you were just

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  3:12  
started. I think when I went to that, it was like the show was like a month old. Yeah.

Matt Cundill  3:17  
So first episode was June 15 of 2018, you went down to Podcast Movement. And I'm gonna really ask you to because this is kind of a big question. But how have daily new shows evolved, you know, sort of through the pandemic and right up to this point? So like, how did you do it then, versus, like, what you know now, with all the data and all the interaction that you've had with audience over six years?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  3:41  
That's a great question, because I think they've changed a ton. First of all, and this is true of probably any genre of podcast, is just there's so much more competition now, right? Like we were the first daily news podcast in Canada, the only other daily news shows that you could get as a podcast in Canada then were either like chat shows, or they were cut downs of CBC or, you know, global radio news. And, I mean, we obviously used the basic format of the daily. But even then, there weren't that many, uh, today explained was out by then, Washington Post had experimented with one. But there was actually like, as we were creating the show, there weren't a ton of them out there. Now, there are, like, off the top of my head, at least four major media companies in Canada have them. There are a ton of self produced daily podcasts that that do fairly well. Like, there's a real talk with Jesperson out in Alberta. And there are a lot of shows in that model that do pretty well, so it's just become way harder to stand out. And as the audience has evolved a more discerning taste, I guess, based on all these options, we used to just put out our episode for the day, and if you were subscribed to the big story. Probably like you probably listened to it right, or you weren't listening to podcasts that day. And now, if you're a regular podcast listeners, and who you are, and probably most people listening to this are you do what I do, which is you subscribe to 2030, 4050, podcasts that you know range from you know, news to sports to whatever your little niche hobby is, and you end up with 1520, episodes every morning, and you have time to listen to two so you know you're scrolling through. And the challenge of standing out from the crowd and really nailing your topic selection, really nailing your show's title and show description even has become so much more important, because it's just, it's impossible to be the default. I know everybody who began their career and radio talks about like being, what is it? P1 p2 and on people's cars like that doesn't exist in podcasting anymore. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  5:55  
you know, it's really wild to hear too, because also in that time, YouTube sort of popped up, and then it's, I know you probably had to have a meeting with a number of people and say, okay, YouTube's here, and most people are discovering their podcasts on YouTube. And how are we going to be a part of it? So how did you become a part of YouTube?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  6:12  
Two ways. So we don't do pure video podcasts like this. Now, we've experimented with them for a couple of bigger guests, we've done some some clipped highlights of some podcasts and works, we're experimenting with putting those on YouTube. But the big story is actually released twice a day on YouTube. It's released once through our frequency podcast network channel and YouTube podcasts. And it is, you know, it's an audiogram with no video of it, and the same audiogram is published through the city news feed, right, which is our partner, Rogers, parent company news channel. And so within the City News YouTube channel, we have our own little mini channel. Obviously, City News has a much, much bigger and older legacy account, so it reaches far more people that way than it does on our little account. But again, it's just making making it accessible right now while we wait and see what we want to really commit to in the video space. And to be fair, we do listener surveys too, and we've asked our audience a couple of times, and nobody's really made that like a huge priority to us, probably because nobody really needs to see me. And I also think it's a bit of a challenge for guests. And our commitment is to, like, make sure we book the best guest we can. Make sure we book a diverse range of guests, a diverse range of viewpoints, and you don't want that to be limited by who wants to go on camera, especially when we're not actually recruiting them because of how they look or sound on camera. We're doing it for their knowledge and their reporting and that kind of stuff. And I've seen studies, and this is thing I think about a lot when we talk about doing this, is that women will say, no more than men. Men are just like, Yeah, I'll go on. I don't care, right? Can I swear on this show? Absolutely Okay. Well, yeah, they'll say, eff it. I don't care. I'll go on like, sure sign me up. And a woman who, when this goes on YouTube is like, let's face it, probably gonna get far more critiques based on her appearance is gonna be more hesitant. And all of a sudden, I'm not asking you to roll out of bed and join me on the thing in 10 minutes with your camera off. And it doesn't matter, you know, I'm asking you to set up your camera somewhere with a presentable background and, you know, make sure your hair is not messy, and it's just, it's a different commitment. So that's why I'm a little hesitant about, like, throwing myself wholeheartedly into the video thing.

Matt Cundill  8:34  
And one thing I'm kind of envious of, and that was, I did notice this on the City News YouTube feed, is you get feedback? Yes. I mean, I think it's one of the greatest things you can have. So I just want to talk about two pieces of feedback. Let's start. Oh, no, you read the comments exactly, but you're getting comments. We are. Some

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  8:53  
of them are out there, but YouTube comments can be Yeah. And what

Matt Cundill  8:57  
about Spotify comments? Have you tried some of those yet? We have, yeah, and

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  9:01  
it's definitely not as big as YouTube, but we've gotten some helpful comments. And we value feedback. We do feedback episodes, and I think that's honestly one of the cool things about getting to do this podcast that I never got to do when I was like a print journalist, is actually like, answer the letters to the editor or whatever.

Matt Cundill  9:17  
Have you surveyed the audience about topics. And what's surprising about the feedback that you would get from them about the topics you do

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  9:26  
this is, I don't know if this is surprising, but they lie.

Matt Cundill  9:29  
Oh no, absolutely they do. They lie about what they

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  9:32  
want to listen to. I know. I see what you listen to, and then I ask you what you want to listen to, and you want us to cover climate change and indigenous issues and social justice and all this stuff. And we do it because it's important. And you listen to the who's gonna win, liberals or conservatives or the other topics that are far more salacious, and it's just like I used to see this when I worked in magazines too. People would share those long read stories. You know, the. 5000 word Sunday digital features, they would share them all over the place. What an astounding piece of work, and they read it, they got 40% of the way down. So people like to live. I don't know if that's surprising. I think anybody who's done actual audience surveys compared with like actual audience reporting, knows that now

Matt Cundill  10:17  
you sent me right back to commercial radio. We would ask listeners, hey, what do you want to hear in a new radio station? And they wanted to listen to something that would wind up being some sort of like jazz fusion. Nice. Listen to type radio station with no commercials, no DJs and no interruptions for at least three weeks. And in truth, this radio station would suck. No one would listen to it. And I think the reason why is because the product that you're offering is free, and you're asking people to think about a free product, and they would think about it completely differently if they were paying for it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  10:50  
Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all at the same time, like, I don't want to dismiss that kind of feedback, because it tells you that people know what's good for them on their news diet, even if they don't necessarily always eat it, which is no different than, like, you know, you should eat your vegetables and guess what? Sometimes you just have pizza and go to bed, right? So, like, it's natural human behavior. I mean, one of the reasons we launched in this economy was because our personal finance episodes performed well and when we surveyed the audience, they really rated them highly and requested more stuff. Digging into the economy, we did learn a lot from these surveys.

Matt Cundill  11:29  
I didn't even know that was a separate podcast up until recently. And I love the episodes when you would drop them into the big story feed, but I was like, I didn't know it was a separate podcast altogether. You

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  11:40  
can get it a few days early if you follow it, it's in your own feed. That's the value proposition. I think that's the one of the best ways to release a podcast right now, like having an umbrella brand that you can use to introduce your listeners to this show, while also putting that show right there, and especially now, like I talked about this on the last feedback episode that we did, especially now that your podcast players, most of them, no longer automatically download all those episodes and store them on your phone. They just retrieve them when you want them. There's no longer that cost. Like we're shoving this onto your phone anymore, right? It's like you see the title you don't want it, don't listen. That's what I say to people. Like it's, no, I'm not. I don't expect you to listen to six episodes of the big story every single week. If doesn't interest you, feel free to skip it. But we're going to put it here for your convenience, basically, and and we have the separate feed so that we can promote it separately and so that the episodes can be in a place where everyone can find them if they want to binge that particular show, because the big story moves so fast, those in this economy feed drops disappear, right for all intents and purposes, within a week or two, nobody will see them again. So

Matt Cundill  12:55  
I just want to touch also on the other side of feedback, you talked a little bit about like feedback that came from surveying your audience, but you have feedback shows that you do on holiday weekends, and so how do you gather that feedback and reproduce it in order to do a show? And I'm asking this sort of thinking about independent creators who are like, I just don't know how to get people to call into my show or to get that the audio in order to put it on. So how do you put it together? Truth is is we don't

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  13:22  
use a lot of audience audio, mostly because we have a policy of, if you want us to use your audio on the show, you got to say that when you call and leave your message like, yeah, and by the way, you can play this if you want, and most people don't, whether they don't want us to, or they just forget, I'm not sure. So most of the feedback is read out by Joe fish, our lead producer from an email. Although we do play we have played audio clips, and I don't have a really good answer to how you would do that as an independent podcaster without, like, sort of paying for one of those internet voice mailboxes or whatever. We live in a network of like, radio stations, right? So they have all this. They have all these things set up. We could have a text hotline, if we wanted to, and all that kind of stuff, but we don't also get a lot of voicemails. I find most of our audience prefers to write emails, and we have a dedicated email box, which I guess, if you're an indie producer, you could just set up with a free Gmail account, right? And I know a lot of podcasts that do that, tell

Matt Cundill  14:16  
me a little bit about planning the episode, because I know in the feed, and I think a lot of people will behave like I do. I can't find anything to listen to right now, but let me check the big story feed, and I'm going to scroll through and see if I can find two episodes maybe to listen to over the next hour of the day. That's how I behave. Maybe other people have, you know, do it differently and consume it in a different manner, but I feel that there's a conscious effort on your team's part to make sure that the last 10 episodes really look like the show. We're going to do this issue some politics. We're going to talk about Doug Ford, and then we're going to talk a little bit about other subject matter that might do well, how far do you plan ahead and how do you. Spread out subject matter, so the feed looks clean and interesting.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  15:04  
We do do kind of exactly what you're describing. I'd say there's a few things that go into it. The first is geography, which is, we're a national show, even though we're based in Toronto. So we don't want to talk about Doug Ford too much. Doug Ford's always good for for a good story. And I mean, Toronto is the biggest city in the country, and as we all know, the center of the universe where everything important happens. But if we do two or three Toronto episodes within the span of two weeks, we'll definitely hear about that from people in Alberta and BC and et cetera, et cetera. So geography is a part of it. Subject Matter is a huge part of it. You don't want to do two things that are so connected. And I mean, one of the things that we've struggled with, thankfully, not as much anymore, but like covid and public health was a really big thing because it was the biggest story in the world for so long, and there's always a news angle on it. How often do you go back to that well before you really start? You know people tuning you out. So sort of, how often have you repeated the same general area of topic? There should also, in a good couple of weeks, be one like at least one really interesting, fun narrative story like this happened to this person, or maybe it's a crime reporter talking about a case, or just something that has like a flow, like a beginning, a middle and an end type thing. We do try to make sure that our guests are diverse, so that plays a role in it. And you know, going back to what I said about listener feedback versus what they actually listen to is you kind of got to walk that line between given the people what they want and giving them their vegetables, right? You want to feed everybody kind of a balanced diet, so making sure that there's some fun stuff that if you're just, if you're in the mood, to just kick back and listen to a big story episode, here's an interesting one. But also, if, like, I don't know, you're in a news mood and you want the latest on federal politics or whatever. There's something in there.

Matt Cundill  17:03  
One of the things that you do very, very well is you recognize that Toronto is the center of the universe. You know how Canadians feel about it when it comes to their sports, let's say like TSN, or it could even be news stories, but I don't feel excluded when I listen to you tell a story about something that matters to Ontario. And I don't know how you got me to camp. First of all, anything Toronto, I'm out. However, I believe it was your podcast that did an episode about no home runs, which was a local sign that was up at the baseball. Yeah. I mean, a great Toronto local story that I'm like, Yeah, that's interesting. We have crazy stuff like that here in Manitoba. No dogs. Parking in the dog park allowed. That's right. And I think you present it in such a way that the rest of the country can care about it. And I don't know how I began to care about this stuff, but I've become transfixed by a couple of things in Ontario, and one of them is Ontario transportation. And why you can't get transportation right? And maybe it's because we like to see you lose

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  18:10  
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing, from sports to transportation to everything. That's the that's the key to getting the rest of the country to care about Ontario. Yeah. I

Matt Cundill  18:18  
mean, you can't get the highways right. You can't get the subways right. You can't get

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  18:21  
stuff right, and it win a damn playoff series. Yeah? But it feels like an evergreen issue. It is, oh, the transportation issue particularly, yeah, the really fun one that I love talking about in Ontario is the Ottawa LRT, which is just, like, it just doesn't work, like they built this entire thing, it took years, and like, it's in audible and it doesn't work in the winter, like it's just the ultimate example of, like, I don't know hubris, I guess, like, just like, Oh yeah, it's gonna be fine. But I think, honestly, the key is just people know that Toronto and Ontario is important, but they also really appreciate us losing or laughing at us. I mean, I'll give sometime next week, we'll do an episode where Matt gurney and I will break down the fact that Toronto finally has beer in convenience stores and people are losing their minds. It's the most Toronto story ever. Yeah, and

Matt Cundill  19:14  
I know you're laughing at it, because for somebody who grew up, I believe in Stansted, Quebec, you had it just at the local day Penner, right,

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  19:21  
right? Well, the reason I'm spoiling my own show now, the reason I find it so hilarious is just because, like, the concerns that are being raised over it are about public health, right? And alcoholism is incredibly dangerous. And you know, Doug Ford is closing safe supply or safe consumption sites at the same time as he's opening a safe consumption site in every like grocery store, but we are, like, the only place in the western world that doesn't already do this. So it's not like it's some radical new thing. And also, a lot of the same people who really dislike Doug Ford and are really criticizing him over this are being fairly. Disingenuous, because I know those people, and those are the same people that were criticizing the Toronto City Council for not allowing alcohol drinking in parks during the pandemic. So do we want booze everywhere or not? Or does it just matter, like which politician is delivering it for us?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  20:17  
Transcription of the sound off podcast is powered by the podcast Super Friends, five podcast producers who get together to discuss podcasting. Sharpen your podcast and creation skills by following the show on the sound off podcast, YouTube or Facebook page.

Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  20:35  
This podcast supports podcasting 2.0 so feel free to send us a boost if you are listening on a new podcast app, find your new app now at podcasting two point org slash apps. That's podcasting two point org slash apps.

Matt Cundill  20:50  
You know your presentation and whether it's music or the way that you write and frame the show before it starts. A lot of people just come off and say, This is a very serious Toronto or Ontario issue, and we got to get to the bottom of it. You kind of shed this light to whatever issue that makes it a little quirky, but just sort of piques a little bit of interest that says, I think I need to listen to this episode.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  21:13  
Oh, that's really kind of you to say. Thank you,

Matt Cundill  21:16  
by the way. And it has spurned a couple of like a podcast gravy train. Yes,

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  21:21  
I really love doing that. That was a lot of fun. I feel that that was

Matt Cundill  21:25  
sort of the collection and a summation of all the ridiculousness of Doug Ford. It was almost was like, Okay, we're just gonna do a separate podcast, because that way we don't have to talk about Doug Ford every day on the big story. It's

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  21:37  
one of those stories that like, I don't know. I think anybody who works in journalism long enough has like that story that kind of defined a period of their career that was just everywhere, and everybody they know was covering it or talking about it, right? You have one of those. You must have one of those. That's just like, stuck with you. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  21:54  
that was actually the time I was on your show and we talked about Portage in Maine. Oh, right, yeah, yeah. And just the silliness of having to do a plebiscite to open up so people could cross the street, which, by the way, in 2024, they're actually now considering to do it. Oh, wow. So, you know, we have our we have our

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  22:13  
own wheels of progress turn slowly,

Matt Cundill  22:17  
you know, which I mean, at some point, then it's like, okay, well, we'll have to update this story. So do you ever find yourself in a situation that maybe you put an episode out a few weeks ago, and yeah, we might need to update the story. Would you do that with dynamic audio, or would you put it in the blog? How would you update a story of a previous episode that maybe just a few weeks old? That's a tough editorial decision, by the way. Yeah, we

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  22:40  
probably would not at the time, unless it like, changed the entire story, right? Like, this morning's episode is about the Air Canada strike. If, after we finished that last night and we woke up this morning and there was a labor deal, like, obviously, we would have either pulled the episode or updated it, or something like that. But once it's gone, it's kind of gone for a while, but what we've actually started doing now, which I'm I really enjoy, and I think people like it, is like, we've grown a lot over the past three to three years or so. So we've brought back episodes that we recorded, and I will just do, like, a minute off the top being like, here's what actually happened to this person. Here's how the story ended, or whatever. And you know, if you've never heard this before, now's a good time to listen. Kind of thing you got to interview the prime minister? Yes, I did, face to face. Yeah, it was an intimate little setting and like a break room. Tell me about podcasts

Matt Cundill  23:34  
and the Prime Minister, because I think it's part of their strategy for the Prime Minister to reach out to Canadians is through long form chat and not just like, sort of like the short sound bites. It's weird. I

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  23:47  
think he might have stopped that strategy now. I think he went on this big Blitz. Obviously, he did our show. He did a number of us podcasts that are pretty big. He even did some, like, much smaller Canadian shows, like out in the prairies and stuff like that. And you're right, like that was the strategy is that, like, he explains himself much better in these longer form sit down settings. And to be honest, he did a great job on our show explaining his point of view. And, I mean, we had a little back and forth, but he was, you know, really engaged. And like, good guest. You know, you didn't have to pull anything out of them, but I think what happened? And it wasn't the podcast that did it, but shortly after they did that huge Blitz, they got smoked in that by election in St Paul's in Toronto, which turned out to kind of be a referendum on like, Can the Liberals hold on to this really safe seat, or do people just hate this guy so much that they're going to vote against him. And they lost. And then I think they made the call to just like, Okay, pull them off for the summer. Like, put them, put them in mothballs for the summer. Let's see what happens. And then, like, let's bring them back out in the fall, there'll be a US election, etc, etc. I mean, Trump winning again might be good for just. Justin Trudeau, I'm not sure, but, you know, I think that that's so. I think that strategy had a short shelf life. I'm really interested to see if, once the inevitable election is called, that that will be a part of his actual campaign, like sitting down. I mean, we already said to his press secretary afterwards, just like, whenever the next election comes up, you guys have an open seat, like, we'll invite all the leaders. We did actually reach out to pauliev after we had Trudeau on being like, you know, we're happy to give you equal time. But haven't heard back.

Matt Cundill  25:35  
That's interesting, because I was wondering if it's not going well for one and you're gonna pull out well, if it's going well for another, wouldn't you want to go on tour and do this? I just think that the conservative strategy probably doesn't lend itself to long form chit chat instead of 240 words on x. Yeah,

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  25:56  
I think it's just if you're kicking ass right now without having to answer tough questions. Why would you volunteer for it? Like there's no there's not really a lot of upside to sitting down with a journalist for 30 minutes to Pierre poilievre Right now, all he can kind of do is hurt himself based on where he is now,

Matt Cundill  26:12  
you had Peter Mansbridge on the show too, and you talked a little bit about what we're talking about now, and that's, you know, social media interview styles, traditional media. What was it like to speak for them? It

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  26:24  
was cool to meet Peter Mansbridge.

Matt Cundill  26:26  
So cool. Like,

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  26:27  
a childhood idol of mine. I don't know if he was childhood idol, but, like, certainly somebody that when I realized I wanted to be in the news business, he, like, you, really looked up to him. He's the guy, like the face, as we talked about on the show. Like, what's it like to be the face of Canadian news, which is like him and Lloyd Robertson basically for 30 years, right? He showed up. I don't know if tell this story, but I will, because it's so cool. He showed up wearing Nike Air Force ones and an ovo hoodie. And he was just like after seeing him in a suit for her behind a desk for my entire life growing up. And he's just, he hasn't, you know, he hasn't shaved in a while. He's rocking the hoodies, got these nice kicks on. You're like, wow, retirement is good for Peter Mansbridge. But no, he's a super He's a gentleman, like, he hung around and we chatted a lot afterwards, like, just a great guy.

Matt Cundill  27:14  
He seemed happy, though, to be out of the news business.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  27:18  
Yeah. So am I? I'm happy I'm not a newspaper reporter or, you know, having to deal with it, like I obviously do, but like, if you're really in the grind of it, like the burnout rate is high, and, I mean, he's the highest level of that, with all the pressure on you every night, and, like I said, in a suit and tie, and having to be perfect. Must be exhausting after a while, he deserves a nice retirement, like he went hard for a number of years, and now he's got a great Rolodex, so he can just call people up and get him to come on his podcast, because they're not going to say no to Peter Mansbridge and like

Matt Cundill  27:54  
easy way to do it. You head up the frequency Podcast Network.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  27:58  
I'm in charge of the content. I'm not in charge of the business anymore.

Matt Cundill  28:01  
So my favorite podcast is the history of Roz and mocha. Oh, talk about that all day, they were nice enough to actually reach out and say, Could we use a clip from your podcast in our show? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Just go, go ahead and do it. But you know, in terms of original content, you know, a lot of people think, Oh, this must be some sort, some form of catch up radio. It is not it is a documentary.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  28:23  
Yeah, it's amazing. Huge credit to Roz, who, like, drove that whole bus. This was his passion. He, you know, obviously the whole team at Roz and mocha helped finding all the clips and recording the interviews and sitting down and doing all that and like, we helped them with some sound design and production and that kind of stuff. But like, this is, this is Roz Weston's baby, and it turned out fantastic. And I mean, just the Roz and mocha show. History of Roz and mocha included for my mind. I think it's one of, if not the most innovative radio morning shows in the podcast space like they put such care and intention into what they do with their feed. And I'm not saying that no other radio show does that kind of stuff. I know that some of them do, but I also know that, like the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of traditional morning radio shows that are in the podcast space, our cut down shows, or our catch up shows, or maybe compilation shows once a week, or whatever they treat this as a second show right. There's if you listen to the regular rosin mocha show every morning over the air, you will still always find stuff every single week in the podcast feed that is new for you, and then to go and do something like the history of Roz and Mocha, which is just such a gigantic undertaking, and it came off so well, and I joined frequency launched frequency right in like 2018 and Roz and mocha had started their podcast a little bit before that, but of course, they'd already been the Roz and mocha. Show for like, five or six years, and because this doc covers the first five years or so of the show, this was all new to me, right? So I got a huge kick out of it. And they're such great guys to work with

Matt Cundill  30:13  
some proprietary information, if you could share, sort of in the evolution of the big story. Probably when you started, there was a lot of Apple listening and then some Spotify. Spotify had just barely started their trip into podcasting, but what is that balance now between Apple and Spotify on the show, we are

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  30:30  
still majority Apple, for sure. We've also had great partners at Apple Canada over the years who have given us a lot of promotion to keep building an audience on that platform. And I also think that like our audience, without getting too deep into the demographics, is very much like an apple type audience, right? But definitely Spotify has grown exponentially over the years to the point where it's now like, conceivably close in a way that it never was before, but still well

Matt Cundill  31:03  
behind. I would say, Yeah, and I don't ask that question to too many people about their podcasts, because I just thought it was interesting that your show launched at around the same time that Spotify entered into the podcast space. But you know, to your point, I do think that if you're going to listen to the big story, you're a traditional podcast listener who listens to a lot of podcasts and has probably been using the purple app since, you know, it came out years and years ago.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  31:29  
I also don't mind sharing with you, and you will not be surprised at all. Roz and mocha do incredibly well on Spotify, right? That's yeah, of course. Music, loving music, consuming people. It's just a matter of meeting. That's what the whole thing about YouTube, right? It's a matter of meeting the people that are gonna love your show, where they are

Matt Cundill  31:47  
for Roz and mocha. It's a very short trip from Katy Perry over to Roz and mocha.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  31:52  
That's exactly what they would love to hear you say, Katy Perry to Roz and mocha. I think I heard I was walking through the halls. I'm at the Rogers studio now, right? And they have kiss on in the mornings with razamoka When I come in sometimes. And I think I heard them playing Zach Bryan this morning, and I was like, Wow, I love Zach Brian. He's hugely popular right now.

Matt Cundill  32:13  
He's very country. I mean, that's kind of where it's at, the Gen z's. Don't care about that stuff like we did. I

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  32:20  
think it's great, man, you're talking to a huge Jason ISPO fan, so I want to hear him on Kiss next. But no, I think it's, I don't know. I just I like, I like rosin mocha a lot. They are the one radio show I still listen to the radio for.

Matt Cundill  32:34  
How are the lions gonna do this year?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  32:37  
It makes me nervous trying to answer that question, because I am not used at all to the weight of any expectations whatsoever. You know, it used to be like, just a pleasant surprise if they turned out to be okay and won a few games and everything. And now we're starting as, like, super old baby, okay? And then they almost lost the first game. It's like, all right, they're a good team, a complete team, for the first time in forever, like they'd had decent teams before, but that team was like, Okay, well, first Barry Sanders dragged them to the playoffs, and then Calvin Johnson dragged them to the playoffs. But now, like, with the exception of maybe the quarterback or like penne Sewell, there's no one person that could go down and you're like, oh, they can't overcome that. They're toast. So anyway, who are you? A Vikings fan, bills, ooh. Josh Allen is a lot of fun to watch. Well,

Matt Cundill  33:30  
both teams are a fun watch, but you've got this, like, look in your eye that I had in 2018 where it's like, you know, 2019 where it's like, oh, we can start to believe again in this team, and you get reignited.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  33:41  
Everything worked out for you, right? Don't tell me how that ended when,

Matt Cundill  33:45  
no, of course not. It never does.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  33:50  
That's the problem with expectations. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  33:52  
I know. And you were very careful, by the way, you didn't make a prediction. I'll make a

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  33:56  
prediction. They're gonna win the NFC North. That's as far as I will go. Okay, anything after that? It's okay, man, I've, I've wondered the wilderness for so long that just knowing I can show up and watch them and they have a good chance of beating somebody, it's great. That's that's a win. So there you go. Thanks

Matt Cundill  34:12  
so much for doing this. Five years after the last time you did this, you're most welcome. How

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  34:17  
long have you been doing this show? For eight years. Eight years. Yeah, what have you learned? I had to turn it around and ask you a couple questions before

Matt Cundill  34:26  
I go. You wake up every morning to the future. Something could change at any time, and you got to be ready for it. And I am not a comfortable person on video, but I've learned in the last year how to do it, and you just got to be ready to learn and see what comes next? I think podcast, you know, it's a podcast, yes, but I think these are all shows. Now, that's a great way to put it that can be found anywhere. And so you've got to make it available on YouTube, and you've got to make it available where the audience is at. As much as we want to push back and gripe and talk about, oh, the delivery method isn't. RSS feed, and it's not about the tech, as much as I know and love the tech. It's not about the tech, it's about the content in the show. Do you find

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  35:07  
people are following you to YouTube? Are people engaging with the video? No doing it anyway? Yeah. I mean, you got to be there before they get there, I

Matt Cundill  35:20  
guess, yeah. So if you're watching this on YouTube right now, this is going to be unedited. It's going to be our conversation, and somebody's going to watch it, enjoy it like it, maybe go and finish shit over on Apple or Spotify. Maybe not. It will clock in somewhere around 40 minutes on Apple and Spotify. It's going to be edited narrated. It's going to be a different show. It is made for the ears and this one's made for the eyes.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  35:48  
That's a perfect way to put it. Also, the reason that we haven't done video yet, because can't edit it, I think

Matt Cundill  35:54  
YouTube is, it's really a marketing thing. So a lot of people saying, Oh, you're doing a lot more video these days. And I said, Absolutely. So when I hear that, I think people are just sort of seeing me like a billboard as they're traveling down the highway. They say, Oh, you're doing video. They're not stopping. Watch this. I'm just getting front of this. There.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  36:10  
There he is. I know that guy like that. Well, it was a pleasure to do this. I have a lot of fun, and I'm don't make me wait five years next time,

Matt Cundill  36:17  
I won't. We'll do it again sooner.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings  36:18  
All right, take care of yourself. Thanks a lot. Matt.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  36:21  
The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan Surminski, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden Glassey, another great creation from the Sound Off Media Company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.