Episode 133: Steve Taylor

ANNC: This is The Producers Podcast. Featuring the most respected international talent in the world of audio production and voiceover. TV, radio, film, and more. In-depth interviews and industry insights, putting you on the inside. Learn more at ryandreen.com. The Producers Podcast. With Ryan Dreen.

RYAN: Hello, podcast time. Thank you so much for checking it out. I very much appreciate your time. I am back. Took a small break. It was kind of an unintended break, but I just couldn't I just didn't, simply didn't have the time and I didn't wanna rush a crappy episode. Especially didn't wanna rush an episode with someone the likes of Steve Taylor, my guest today. But happy to be back. I'm back on schedule. Let's see here. Couple of quick pieces of business. If you would rate and/or review this show wherever you get your podcasts, that would be very exciting for me. It would make my heart warm and stuff. Okay. That's enough of that. If you are, I don't know where you're finding this podcast, but again, if you go to Ryan Dreen, then you can— let's see, well, it might not be on the front page as I'm saying this, to be totally honest. There's a new sound design product out as I'm speaking, and I have a post at the top of the little post section as I'm speaking, or just search Retrograde and that'll bring it up. Anyway, Adam Benton has released a new package from Little Monster Media in the UK. He's got a special introductory price going now, but I said, damn it, Adam, that's not good enough, give me more discount. And he said, okay, And he gave me a special code to give you. So if you want an extra 10% off any of his packages, not just Retrograde, then go to the website ryandreen.com and hit that link, or just search Retrograde. That should bring you there. It's great, but in all seriousness, I have every single sound Adam has ever made. Sometimes I even get kind of preview packs as well. I use this stuff all the time. It's very niche. Well, not very niche, but some of his stuff is niche. The Retro package, for example, he's Put some focus on AC sound design, which you don't see a lot of, in the buyout world, I should say. At any rate, that's enough about that. Adam's awesome. Go get his stuff, or at least preview it. The guest today, Steve Taylor, hell of a guy. And yeah, you'll probably notice by the time on the episode, it's definitely one of my longer ones, and I didn't care. I thought we had a great chat. in my opinion, or at least from what my perspective was, he's really blown up in just the last few years, and there's a few reasons for that. Yeah. But he's actually been working at this radio thing and then voiceover thing for a very long time. He's got a great story. He's a great storyteller. We get into the how he got into the business to what else he's doing. And not just the fact that he has still a day job, so to speak, in radio, but he's also done other non-radio things that we talk about. Really interesting cat. Go check him out at stevetvo.com. And I already made fun of him in the show, but you're not gonna find much there, demos, he is going to get a new website going at some point. Or you can go on the social medias, Instagram and Twitter. He's @SteveTVO, of course. And on Facebook, he is Digi Weatherman, or just search Steve Taylor. Let's get a quick sample to remind you of the greatness that is Steve Taylor, the monster voice that'll be coming out of your speakers or earphones in moments. And then we'll bring on the one and the only Steve Taylor.

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RYAN: And there he is. You, you can't mistake that guy's sound. And, a side note right out of the gate, I was able to utilize the talents of Steve Taylor on a project I just worked on. And as I'm speaking, it's not released to the world, but I can't wait for people to hear that. Anyway, I'm not going to promote the thing I'm doing. I'm promoting my guest. Steve Taylor. Hey, man, thank you so much.

STEVE: Ryan Dreen, I— you've been a hero of mine for about 4 or 5 years. And, the reason you are is because you share what you do with everybody freely. You're a great instructor, and you get to work with some of the best voices in the country too, and the world.

RYAN: I know.

STEVE: And that's— I hate to go on and on about it, but for Christ's sakes, you work for TM. There's nothing bad about that.

RYAN: Hey, you know what? You will not find me In fact, I was talking to, oh, somebody, but you know, in this business you just can't really complain because there's a lot of worse things we could be doing.

STEVE: Yeah, exactly.

RYAN: Man, in fact, I'm gonna go back in time and hear some of your life story, and it's possible that both of us have had jobs where we were doing a lot worse than what we're doing now. Well, we'll find out, we'll find out. So obviously voice actor, you're still a production director though at US stations in Or United Stations, I'm sorry.

STEVE: Where the hell are you?

RYAN: Hot Springs, I know that.

STEVE: It's US Stations in Hot Springs, which is owned by a group of fellas that— this is, I think, the 4th time I've worked for them, which is kind of sick, really. But they're good to me. They allow me the freedom to do my freelance, which is kind of— it's funny. I'm not alone in that my freelance has caused some issues at stations I've been at previously, and I'll talk about that later. But these guys are nothing but supportive. supportive of it. They are huge and tremendous fans of radio. These are the types of people that when you walk down the halls, they're telling radio stories. So it's very difficult to not enjoy being here.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And having free nostalgia flowing around you at all times. Not that I care for that very much, because I try to live in the moment, but these guys really are the historians of radio because they remember it so well and when it was good. I think we all are the same way that way. But it's been great working with them again. They, as you said, I'm the production director here, which that's not a very complex position. I ended up in Hot Springs for a couple of different reasons, which I'll get to in a little bit. But I ended up doing production here. And that involves me managing all the agency dubs like a production guy would.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And I handle all those personally myself instead of assigning them out. That way there's one guy you go to if there's an agency problem. And so there's And we maybe have, I don't know, 100 agency dubs a week between 5, 6 stations here. And so it can be busy for that. But local production, we do enough of that to keep every talent in the building busy at least 2 days a week with direct material. And I produce a lot of that. I did at one time produce the majority of our local production just to kind of up the quality of it a little bit. But when you work with a great group of people, they kind of— latch onto what it is you're trying to accomplish, and they try themselves to do that. And that's been the case here.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And so, lately, I've been lucky to be able to assign a greater number of things out, and I can entrust them to be handled, which, as a production director, that's kind of what you hope for. I'm not one of these micromanagers. I don't have to have my fingers on everything. I like to know where it's all at, just so I can be accountable for it. But that's how I feel about the production director's job. Since I can't spend all my day writing, we don't have a whole host of that, the way our hierarchy is set up, set up here. Our sales department handles the majority of their writing and I tweak it as necessary, but it's a great symbiotic relationship and it works out great for me.

RYAN: Hey, tell me, in fact, for anybody who's sort of curious, that market there, I've actually known a lot of people that have gone through that market over the years. Maybe not a lot, but a number more than you. Well, yeah, you're right. So tell me about that market or that group there. What size of a radio market is it? And like, for example, what percentage of the commercial production there, or I'm sorry, the commercial spot load is local direct? versus agency?

STEVE: Well, that's an interesting question right there because we have a very fair balance of local direct and agency buys here. And that certainly can be true across all of our stations. We don't have a throwaway frequency. All of our stations are active with live programming, as live as it can get, voice tracked. We have a live morning AM show like so many people do, but rather than being a political show, that one at least is— Hot Springs is a resort city. You don't think of Hot Springs as a resort city, but that's precisely what it is. Our entire economy around here is driven by tourism for so many reasons. And Arkansas hawks its tourism all over the world, and Hot Springs is no different than that. And plus, we have kind of a nostalgic history here with tie-in to the mob and gangsters and so on used to spend time in the '20s and '30s and '40s here hiding out because Hot Springs was not a place where, you know.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: They were starstruck enough if— you know, the officials here were starstruck enough. Hey, that's this guy. He's here. Let's treat him good. He'll treat us good. And that's how they were about it.

RYAN: And he's got money.

STEVE: And he's got a lot of money. And he's got beer, and he's got drugs, and he's got all the other stuff he can bring with him. So, whatever it is that gangsters do, that's what it was with Hot Springs for so long. So, this is a storied community. There is an actual group of hot springs here that I say erupt. It's not erupting. The water flows freely out of them from a magma deposit that's underground here. And so, it's a unique place.

RYAN: It's also small.

STEVE: We are not a— we are an arbitron market. We are a— I guess for us, that's gonna slip into a 4-book-a-year market, I think, in the next couple of years. But as a local group, and we don't have any in-market competition from any of the big conglomerates, no Clear Channel here, no Cumulus, or excuse me, no iHeartMedia, no Cumulus. Sure. Yeah. And no other big players. There's, I think, an ESPN Radio here, which when you really dive down to it, with, I think, 13 frequencies licensed to the market. There are 9 on the air, and we have 5 of them. We don't have any problem competing. It's essentially a maybe 40,000-person city, which is not all that big, but we still have a sales staff of 4.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: We have a sales manager that is incredibly active. He's also the host of the morning show on the AM station here. We have, on one of our stations, the country, which is KQUS, US 96, It's a legend in Arkansas, kind of like the name Bob Robbins is a legend in Arkansas for country radio. Bob was on in Little Rock on KISSN forever and ever. He still is, I think, but is due to retire. And so here we have our own group of Arkansas radio legends, that is.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And one of them is Tom Duke, who's been on the air here for 30-something years and who's a big fisherman. And we are surrounded by a number of lakes here, 6 or 7 that are called the Diamond Lakes. And we do events on each of them all the time. And so for the country station with a live morning show, live middays, live afternoons, they pound it and they're instantly recognizable and they do a fantastic job.

RYAN: Yeah, I love those still, the super local markets. There's just a different kind of radio.

STEVE: You know, and it is, you're right.

RYAN: It's still being done there. The bastion of local radio still being done. Yeah.

STEVE: And it is, it's good radio. I mean, when you listen to it as a radio person, you're not going, that's just small town crap. No, it's well done. well processed. That's something that these guys didn't skimp on. I mean, they, they could have, you know, spent $1,600, $1,700 maybe on the low end and gotten a couple of pieces of equipment to shoot into their exciter and hope it sounds good. No, right? They bought the latest Orban OptiMods, they bought the latest other processors, take your pick, and the latest software updates. And they're all set by people that are audio engineers. I mean, they contract the right people, so they care about what they do. It's a craft to them. And thus, I think that's why I love being here, because they They put genuine care into their product, which is— you can't say that about a lot of local operators anymore, I don't think.

RYAN: Yeah, that's great, man. Well, hey, I could talk about local radio forever, but we got some other stuff to cover with you. You got some big stuff happening. But before— okay, so I do wanna go back in time and I wanna get some of your story. But hold on, before I do that, I think I've— let's see here. I met you in real life for the first time in Nashville.

STEVE: Right.

RYAN: But I don't remember this coming up. You have a degree in atmospheric physics. Atmospheric Sciences?

STEVE: Okay.

RYAN: From Mississippi State? Is that a fact?

STEVE: Yes, that's a fact. I'm a meteorologist. Yeah.

RYAN: I was gonna say, that means you're a meteorologist. I mean, not just like a weatherman. I mean, you're literally a meteorologist.

STEVE: Well, you could say I'm a card-carrying meteorologist even if you wanted to. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: At one time, I was— my forecasts were approved by the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, those little seals they put on there.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: You know, that was 12, 15 years ago when I was in the middle of it. my education completed through State, which was lucky for me. It was available as an online program over the course of 9 semesters or 3 years, summers included. And the sciences have never been an issue for me. In fact, when we talk about me and my past, I think one— and this will tie into my future prospects when we talk about that later— I always wanted to be an astronaut. I always had an interest in things scientific. The weather thing Ryan, comes from when I was 6. There was this tornado that went through our backyard, literally. It was not as close as, say, you know, 100 yards.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: It was about 300 yards away. But nonetheless, this is a freaking tornado going through your backyard. And at the time, I was 6 and had just gotten home that afternoon with my mother, who was a teacher's aide at the elementary school I went to. That's Hastings Elementary in Crossett, Arkansas. She was a resource teacher. And we let out of school an hour early that day because of a tornado watch that was in effect for us. And they knew that we were going to have a line of really significant storms come through, as happened. And then cut forward 45 minutes, we're at home, tornadoes going through Ashley County or about to, and this one goes right through my backyard. You could see it and the rotation of it and the debris cloud from it, which to me, never having seen anything like that, it was the hugest, most scariest thing I could imagine.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: But I was so curious about it, rather than crouching down behind my bed and my dresser in my bedroom, I stood up and walked to the window and watched the thing. And my mother freaked out, man. As you can imagine, she was like, Mom! You know, my real first name is Michael, and my mother was like, Michael, get out of here! Get in cover! There's a tornado! You're gonna die! It didn't happen that way. In fact, about 3 weeks later, I acquired my first real, true ship's eye. aneroid barometer. It's an old analog barometer you would hang on the wall of a ship. It'd give you the barometric pressure if you calibrated it right. And that way you could tell if it was falling, you had inclement weather possible. If it was rising, you had fair weather on the way. And that began a long, a lifelong love of analysis and forecasting that to this day I live. I just don't work doing that anymore. I'm just as interested in the weather. That's never gonna die because I look at the sky.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And if you look at my Instagram, if you look at my Facebook feed, it's littered with cloud photographs and sky photographs and things like that. Well, there's a reason that those things are there, not only because I believe them to be picturesque, but I believe them to show me something in the atmosphere going on that you just can't illustrate by saying it out loud. You gotta have something to demonstrate it.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: So when I look at the sky, I see all the layers that are going on up there, because there are layers. And it's like looking at the night sky and realizing that, well, that one right there, well, that's 4 million light-years away, and that one's 4 light-years away. You begin to learn the difference, and to me, that's the incredibly interesting part. And beyond Meteorology gave me the ability to have the schooling on advanced mathematics, like thermodynamics and other things like differential equations and calculus that you have to have to get to thermodynamics, and it's more advanced math.

RYAN: So just to real double— more than Algebra 1?

STEVE: Yeah, a little bit.

RYAN: Oh boy. All right. Well, you lost me there.

STEVE: It was a challenge, but it massaged and challenged the proper parts of my brain. I'm a scientific thinker every day of my life, every minute of my day even. And so for me, the meteorological education was great. It's actually in atmospheric sciences. And yeah, so if somebody needs a forecaster, I can do that, but a lot of money's gotta come with it.

RYAN: Before we jump off this real quick, were you ever— I actually don't know the answer to this. Were you ever actually paid as a quote unquote weatherman in your career? Yep.

STEVE: I was the chief forecaster and meteorologist at WDAM Television in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for I think 8 years.

RYAN: Really?

STEVE: I think I began working for them. Let me tell you how I got into that real quick. It's a good story. WDAM, at the time, their news director was Randy Swan, who had just— when I— this is like 1999. Okay? I moved back to Hattiesburg from Knoxville, and Randy Swan was the news director at WDAM, and he came on our morning show. It was the morning show on WXRR-FM in Hattiesburg, Rock 104. That's where where I really kind of started getting interested in doing the voiceover stuff long ago. But anyway, Randy comes in, hey, we're looking for a weekend weather guy. You know anybody? And I said, well, I'm really interested in it. And he said, well, you've been a broadcaster for years. Why don't you come down and just give it a shot? And I did, and I got it. And I started working on the weekends for him back in 1999. But late in 2000, the chief meteorologist left and went on a different shift altogether, and they gave me that position. And I stayed in it from the end of July of 2008 and covered Hurricane Katrina. We were the last television station left on the air in South Mississippi, which, if you'll remember, the eye of Katrina in the northeast quadrant, which is the worst part of that particular storm, or any hurricane for that matter in the Northern Hemisphere, it went right over and right up Interstate 59, which our television station was 2 miles from. So we got the eyewall just post-landfall about 2.5, 3 hours. And we had wind gusts of 117 miles an hour. All this in the middle of Eastaboochee, Mississippi, which is a little community in a swamp halfway between Laurel and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, underneath a 500-foot-tall tower. And we were just hoping we didn't die. But it was a rough time.

RYAN: So, you were actually on the air, I mean, live, on television, on the air, as that was happening.

STEVE: Yes.

RYAN: So, what kind of damage did that end up doing to you? Like, did you—

STEVE: what happened? Well, the television station itself didn't sustain sustain really any damage. Our property had somewhere on the order of 300 trees topped, and we didn't have any trees right around the building. In fact, out to the perimeter of the outside guy anchors, we didn't have any trees on the property. And so anything that fell wasn't going to fall on us.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: But on our overall property and all of South Mississippi, and still to this day, you can drive on, say, Highway 49 from Hattiesburg to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and look on either side of the highway, and you'll see out amongst all these great big blooming green pine trees, you'll see several that are cut off at about 20 feet above the ground. And those are the remnants of the woods that are left after Katrina, and they got sheared off at about 20 feet above the ground.

RYAN: Wow.

STEVE: And they happened from little spin-up vortices or little small tornadoes that occur during the hurricane. And I mean, it tore us up. destroyed our neighborhood, and it destroyed literally, I guess, 70% of the houses regardless of what they were in Forrest County and Lamar County, Mississippi. It was a ridiculous recovery. Wow.

RYAN: All right. Well, yeah, you know what? I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here. I'm finding this very interesting, but I do want to talk about Steve Taylor, the voice actor, and also, you know, other things in your career. All right. So let's go back to the beginning.

STEVE: Okay.

RYAN: And I do like to try to bullet point some of these early gigs, but obviously tell me anything interesting. But really, how'd you get started? You know, what was the first media job, or maybe even what was your first job?

STEVE: Okay, my first job was a radio job.

RYAN: Okay, I like that. It was always fun.

STEVE: It was at KMSL, which at the time was licensed to Stamps, Magnolia, Arkansas. Those call letters don't exist on that frequency anymore. They've been moved That station now goes by the call letters KZHE, and Dave Sion is the guy. I happen to know the guy that runs it. I haven't been home other than for my dad's stuff in a long time, but that station has a legacy, is still on the air, which is great. That was ran by a fellow by the name of Mark Keith, and Mark put me on the air on weekends. It was a great little education for me.

RYAN: How old were you?

STEVE: Yeah.

RYAN: Okay. I've said this many times now, but I've found there's plenty of people that got their start in their mid-teens or whatever.

STEVE: And it was the perfect time. I was ready to try something that challenged me. And there was this guy by the name of Eric that was working there who was close friends with me, and he got a job there. And I went up and visited him, and it was the Mark Keith that I mentioned that he saw me up there visiting him one weekend, rather than get onto me about it, he was like, look, why don't you sit, pay very close attention to what Eric's doing, and next couple of weeks, let's talk. And we did, and I ended up working that way. I immediately lost interest in being on the air because they had a production room. And brother, I think on the second day or the second weekend I worked there, the instant I got off my little 3-hour shift, I sat in that room for 9 hours.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: Because I wanted to learn about those tapes. tape machines and those cart machines and those— the way those turned. We had direct drive turntables, which were great because— no, these were high—

RYAN: these were high torque.

STEVE: God, what was the model? I can't think of it. These were the best turntables because you could hold it on and it would be—

RYAN: It was instant start. Like instant. Yeah, dude.

STEVE: When you let your finger off of it, boom, it was going. And I haven't never found a turntable like that again. And if I can find the engineer at the time who was there and he's still alive, I may ask him about that. But that was my start. And I worked for him on 2 occasions. The first time, I worked for them. I worked for them for about a year, I think, and ended up doing nights, which was incredibly cool. And then moved up to afternoons after a while. And when I got out late in summer and afternoons was gonna conflict with my senior year in high school, I think I parted ways with them for a year and then went back after I graduated, I think, is how that worked.

RYAN: Yeah. So, from there, I guess, you know, what was the next major jumps for you? What kind of happened with the career? What was your trajectory?

STEVE: So, I started in Magnolia, which is a small town in Southwest Arkansas. It's influenced greatly by Shreveport, which is about 75 miles to the south and southwest, but Texarkana to the west. My next radio gig was for the very people I work for now at this moment, the group that owns US stations for whom I work now.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: I worked for them just to fill in for their morning show for a week. I had gone back for my second tour of duty in Magnolia and had met these guys, and they were like, Well, you sound pretty good on the air. You could fill in for us for a week. It won't cost us as much as if we hired yada, yada. And I did. I went to their station, KCXY, in Camden, Arkansas, and worked for a week. And that was the first time I worked for them. About 4 or 5 months later, I ended up going back to work for them after my hometown gig kind of played out. And I worked for them for, I guess, about 2 or 3 months until I got a job out of radio in Texarkana because I was dating a girl there at that time.

RYAN: Oh.

STEVE: and ended up going to Texarkana. I worked briefly for KKYR-FM, which is Kicker 102.5, a station still on the air. I worked then, was my first real— I consider to be my first journey into radio. I went to work for KJLO in Monroe, Louisiana, K104, the legendary country station out of Monroe. A lot of people have been there. One of my favorite people, and he's no longer with us and hasn't been for a couple of years, rest his soul, is Mike Blakeney.

RYAN: Oh, yeah.

STEVE: Mike had the most awesome voice, in my opinion. And it was so big. And he was such a big guy, but he was a gentle giant. He could get mad like anybody and put that big old voice on you real quick, and it'd scare the bejesus out of you. But he was also gentle. He taught me how to deal with music companies. I became his music director after about 4 or 5 months working there and took a great interest in how music worked in country radio and got to talk to record reps. And he let me have the whole experience. I got to work closely at that time with the consultant Charlie Cook, and he was part of Mike McVey's team at the time. And after that, I worked in Monroe, I think, for about a year and a half, and then got an opportunity to come back to Camden, Arkansas, to work for the third time for the group of people I work for now. I went back because my I had married my wife, Terry, at the time. We're no longer married and haven't been in years. 20 years. That's how long it's been. This is how long ago all this is. I'm having trouble remembering.

RYAN: I think you're doing pretty good. I don't remember a few weeks ago, so I think you're doing very good, actually.

STEVE: So I went back to Camden, and they had a station that was licensed to El Dorado that they had been beaming programming to from another studio in Camden, and they had decided, because it would be to their benefit to be right under the tower instead of a 35-mile STL hop. They redid our studios, built me a production room to my specifications, and bought me a great microphone and put me in that building and let me go.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And I think that right there, that time I spent in El Dorado before I went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to work with the Blakeney Group there, that one really changed me because I started figuring out that you could make a lot of the people you liked in a smaller market, and people wouldn't give you crap about it. And it allowed me the opportunity at that time to be influenced by guys like Mitch Craig and some of the— like Bob Brown at Brown Spots in Little Rock. A lot of his commercials were running in Camden. So I heard these huge voice guys, and I said, wow, maybe I need to sit and mimic that 'cause I want this commercial to sound different. I'm sick of my own voice. So one night, I went in and started experimenting. And it's a singular night that I did this. I started trying to pull off the Mitch Craig voice. I never could. But if you listen to me now, you can tell how Mitch Craig influenced me. The same thing can be said for Bob Brown, 'cause Bob had this big old voice. He could throw on anybody at any time. Well, you want to mimic that because when you're young, shit like that impresses you.

RYAN: Yeah. That is something you do a little more when you're young.

STEVE: Yeah. Right? And I was still young at this point. I was in my early 20s, young enough in the business to still not know what the heck I was doing. doing. But I worked there and produced enough good things to get the attention of Larry Blakeney at WBBN in Laurel, Mississippi.

RYAN: Yep.

STEVE: They had purchased the old WHSY property in Hattiesburg and were going to put it back on the air as a classic rock format. They needed a PD. I applied. We hit it off. I went to work for him, and I stayed to work for him for about It's hard to say. I think I worked for him for that time, maybe about a year and a half. And then I met my current wife, and this was 1996, the beginning of 1996. We moved to Huntsville, Alabama. I got to work for Bill Dunavant, who— I have a lot of friends that work for Bill that have not great things to say about him. He's not an owner anymore. He sold out.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: But I enjoyed working for his stations. He really cared about what they sounded like. And so he inspired us production guys to kind of reach a little further.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: I wasn't a production director, but you know how it is. We had an incredible production director. His name was Errol Conner. And I swear to you, Ryan, I've got it somewhere or another. This guy was raised in front of the television. He was raised watching Hanna-Barbera. He was raised watching Merrie Melodies. So he could do literally every Mel Blanc voice as good as and as clean as Mel Blanc. He had practiced it for 30 years, and he was so good at it. And you take a man of that caliber that has the acuity to be able to take a voice that is nothing like his voice and make his mouth make that happen. I'm impressed by that guy. So there were 2 keys to my equation that happened over the course of about 2 or 3 years. I got influenced by big voice and character voice guys, and I got to be a production guy. So, some very formative things happened in a 2 or 3-year span before I went to work for the Blakeneys. When I worked for them, I went to Huntsville. We then went to Knoxville. I stayed about a year and a half working for New South Communications, I think is what their guise was. B97.5 and 103.5 WIMZ. Jeff Jarnigan was the PD up there. Jim Pemberton was the ops manager. Craig Jacobus was the GM.

RYAN: And.

STEVE: They spent money on me. That's the first job I had where, hey, man, I think some new studio monitors would be great. And wow, here's some new studio monitors.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: I'm tired of talking into dynamic mics. Can we consider a condenser? Which one do you have in mind? Well, I'm going to think about this Audio-Technica 4033 because it's not as expensive as the rest, but man, they sound good. And I set the GM down with one mic in front of him, the other one on the other side. I had him record one phrase. I just said, I want you to say WP. WPLJ, just like that. WPLJ. And he did. And the reason— and he said it on the dynamic mic, turned around, said it on the condenser mic, and Preston put them up there, and I said, here's your dynamic mic. You know, here's your other one. WPLJ. And he's like, how can I sound like that? I said, it's the microphone. Thus began— and I was already into electronics. I have a whole other thing I won't bore you with about that. Thus began the equipment guru side of what I do. And this has special bearing now because the older I become, the more incumbent it is upon me to acquire certain collectible items that are unacquirable. That could be microphones. There are a lot of Telefunken I hope to get over time because I'm just that way. You work in a huge studio too. It's a great thing having a huge mic locker when you need something.

RYAN: Do you have a mic that stands out in your collection? Like above all else, you're like, I'm This is my favorite. I love owning this one. This is my pride and joy.

STEVE: Yeah, I do, and it's the first Neumann I bought myself. I bought the first Neumann I bought. I couldn't afford to go up to a U87. The U87 is not my favorite mic though for my big old voice. I really don't like it. I like the U89 much better. It handles the transient response much better and there's actually a little bit more air to it, I think, for me. But I bought a Neumann TLM 49 and plugged it into my art voice channel, and dude, I sound like I'm supposed to sound on it. I can't use it. That's not the mic I'm using now. But I do so much promo and radio where the frequencies that thing uses just are not usable for a producer. But I'll say this, in my own experiments in recording things like I like, like guitar amps and things like that, it's an incredibly versatile mic. It's great for acoustic guitars, especially if you keep it about a foot out in front of you and put a pair of them out there, one— both of them pointing at the sound hole, but from different directions.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: And it's a very accurate mic. It's not as detailed as, say, this 416, but it's really close.

RYAN: I was gonna assume you're on your 416.

STEVE: Yeah, I can't not be. I'm pretty sure you use that. I can't not be because it's what everybody— it's not that they demand it, but they expect it.

RYAN: Yeah. Well, you know, and this came up at a couple different shows I've done, and it's not a difficult concept to think of, but there's so much— you know, we cut so much copy, and a lot of, you know, hey, I need an edit on this, and, well, I'm traveling today. You know, if I recorded that on my 808, 87 at home. I'm never gonna travel with my 87, so just do everything on the 416. You're always gonna travel with your 416. You're basically always gonna emulate the same sound.

STEVE: Yeah, so exactly. I'll tell you something too that I've found to be a useful tool, because I can't always— and I don't have a travel rig. It's— that's an investment that, because of dental work and things such as that, has kind of fallen down the pole. But I have a trip planned in March next year in which I'm going to need it.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And so the 416, the Apollo Twin, and a laptop, which that's inspired by a friend of ours, a mutual friend, Terry Phillips, who travels with that same rig which I used in Nashville.

RYAN: Terry travels with a truck full of equipment.

STEVE: He does.

RYAN: Can't find my words, but Terry travels with tonnage of equipment when he travels. He's insane.

STEVE: I needn't have asked. if I could use his equipment.

RYAN: You know?

STEVE: Yeah, you have to use my equipment. So, you know, I know. And he's— and man, what a guy. I could go on and on about him, but, yeah, we love Terry. I hooked up— I, since I brought his name up, I can say I hooked up with Terry Phillips, in El Dorado, Arkansas, for the second— the third time I worked for this group of people.

RYAN: And way back in the day, this is way back.

STEVE: We go, we go so far back, it's like we weren't there.

RYAN: Oh, yeah.

STEVE: To the '90s. Ugh, the '90s. All right.

RYAN: Now, I hate to fast-forward through, but I want to make sure I get a lot of the good content out here. Let me at least for a moment try to take you to when voiceover became paramount in your career. Yeah.

STEVE: When I worked for Larry Blakeney in Laurel Hattiesburg— I talked about going down there and becoming the PD at WXRR. Larry's also a big voice guy. His brother was Mike, who I worked for in Monroe. Yeah, I thought so.

RYAN: I know Larry.

STEVE: All right, well, so Larry— and saw him at CRS this year, which was fantastic. And, excuse me, I just jostled my mic there. I didn't mean to. But, Larry— and again, I worked in Camden, Arkansas, El Dorado, Arkansas, just before I went down to work for Larry. The guy I worked for and still work for now, for this group of people here in Hot Springs, hooked me up with Gene Wooten, who you know. All right, let me tell you That's what changed it for me completely. And here's how that happened. Craig Dale, my boss here now currently, was my boss when he introduced me to Gene. The reason I could do that is because he and Gene were college roommates and still had a lifelong friendship. They knew each other. I began a correspondence with Gene, which became a critique of my production. It helped me grow more in one month than at any point in my career before or since. Having that acute set of incredibly creative ears on what I did encouraged me to stretch myself beyond what I knew I could do and to stretch what the production could do beyond what I thought it could do. And it thus challenged me on multiple levels. Gene did this for me, though. He encouraged me to listen very carefully to his material. He sent me DAT after DAT after DAT. after DAT of produced material from right off of his desk at WPLJ. So I got to hear the best of everything Gene Wooten did for about 3 or 4 years. And that included some fantastic voices. Yeah, I heard Dick Ervasti's voice a couple of times. John Plesi. John is amazing. And has been amazing on that level for years. And he's still just tooting it, man. He's just going and going and going. And John is the reason that the end of my words are the way that they are. Because when John would say PLJ, and that's all he would say, PLJ, he would say it like that. He would give that J just a little sauce.

RYAN: Mm.

STEVE: And that little sauce turns into simply what you learn when you're a theater actor. In other words, every syllable has to be expelled. Right? Mm-hmm.

RYAN: That's—

STEVE: and so I took what I heard by John that Gene produced and took what I knew from theater actors and started doing some voice acting in addition to that. But because I was still listening to so much John Plesi, promo voice became the voice I started adopting for all of my local promos, no matter where I was at that point. I left from Camden doing stuff to Laurel-Hattiesburg, to Huntsville, to Knoxville, back to Laurel-Hattiesburg, so on and so forth. My career went to market number— we were market 6-9, I think, when I was in Knoxville. That's as high as I ever got on market levels.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: Yeah. But the challenge is just as much a challenge there to get production done on a great, high level, to do promos from scratch, which we did. We had some incredible voice people to work with as well. That was the second time that I got to work with Chris Corbin, You talk about somebody I miss, 'cause I got to cut him up so much. And then, because of the things I was— and materials I was sending up to Gene's way to critique, which had a lot of Corley stuff on it, he's like, man, Chris can really rip and read this stuff. That, I'm not saying was the impetus, but it was something correlating Corley's eventually ending up on WPLJ and staying there forever.

RYAN: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVE: So, I was on the edge of some of that good stuff. I got exposed to— Scott and Todd in the morning. And Gene was trying his best to get me familiar with these people. And unfortunately for me, I was married to someone that saw no benefit of moving to the Northeast from— we were in South Mississippi at the time. And so that relationship fell apart, and I took a hold on trying to go anywhere for a while. That was marriage number 1. And marriage number 2, I ain't had that problem. But we've not had to go anywhere. We've ended up here in Hot Springs for great reasons. Namely because it was close to home. to my dad as he was nearing the end of his life. Being his only son, I think it's kind of good that I was able to do what I do and still be close to home because there's not a lot of opportunities in radio to make great money in Arkansas. There's some great stations to work for, but they're not great— they're not high-paying jobs. They're never going to be. So I'm lucky. I had built enough clientele, and along with my income from here, I was able to do what I needed to do to to get here and to stay here and to help Dad with his stuff and make that passing much easier for him and for everybody in my family.

RYAN: And at what point, though, in the— we've kind of covered about 20-ish years there. Well, from earlier than that, but definitely from the late '90s. Yeah.

STEVE: Total opposite story. I'm sorry, I'm focusing on everything but the voiceover thing. I'm sorry.

RYAN: No, no, no, that's okay. So, at what point in the 2000s, I'm assuming, did you book enough of your own clients, your own work, where you felt like, all right, that is definitely something I'm going to keep doing? Yeah.

STEVE: It worked out just like that way. The first guy, I think it was probably about 3 months after I began to work in Laurel Hattiesburg the first time that I started sending out commercial demos to people to try to acquire some freelance commercial work. And out of the 2 dozen or so I sent out on that first foray, I got back one comment, and it was from Jeff Fishel at Fish Marketing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And I still to this day do work for him. That was 1996.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: '96, maybe. Something like that.

RYAN: You're okay.

STEVE: No, no, no, no, no. That wasn't '96. That would've been 2000 when that began. And I mean, this is 19 years later and we're still doing work together.

RYAN: Yeah. That's great.

STEVE: So it's great. So commercial work there. But shortly after I started doing that, there was a television station in Meridian— not Meridian, further up Mississippi. It may have been north of Columbus, south of Tupelo. They call that the Golden Triangle area. And one of the stations— Yeah.

RYAN: I'm aware of that.

STEVE: Yeah. One of the stations there, an ABC affiliate, I don't recall the call letters, adopted me as their promo voice. And it wasn't a lot of work, but it was a little bit. It was probably— I had them retained for $150 a month, and I'd do whatever they needed, which was 3 promos a week. Not a big deal.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: And so that actually would be my first foray into that. Not long after that, though, Larry Blakeney started getting some station work from this, that, or the other station. And I said, well, I'm gonna have to start sending this stuff out. out the stations. So for about a year or two, I did that. No response. All right. The first time I went to work for the Blakeney's, I told you I left, went to Huntsville and Knoxville. While I was in Knoxville, got to hook up with a great voice guy, Mike Carta, who is the voice of the Motor Racing Network, or was for the longest time. And I think to be one of the coolest guys I ever met. He let me have his studio for, you know, he let me come watch what he was doing. Let me watch his sessions to learn how they work. And from Mike Carta, I learned how a session works, how you're— how a directed session rather works.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And how those communications protocols are set up and how to properly set up and balance a room for voiceover if it's not a small one. Because he did have a pretty big space that was incredibly dead but didn't have a lot of treatment on it. He said, it's all about the angles, boy. So you stick with what you know. And he was great at it. And I learned a lot from Mike on that. But what I— here's the thing. This is where it really honestly kicked off for me to where I am right now. So I had— took me a minute to get here, and I'm sorry, but here's where we are. In Mike Carter's studio, We hatched the great idea to audition to see if we could get on at Don Buchwald and Associates. And Don was the guy that everybody knew represented Howard Stern. And of course, Stern's book had been out a couple of years at that point, or had just come out. I don't think the movie had come out quite yet. But we're gonna audition for Don Buchwald and Associates. How do you go about doing that? Well, you have to call an agent. So I called somebody I knew, and they said, well, you need to talk talk to Haas over at DBA. And Haas was there just prior, I guess a year before he left to go to Atlas, when they had just formed that. That was hard because here's what I did. I finally got the guy on the phone. I finally convinced him to let me do an audition. And he sent me copy for something or another. The copy was something for some person, something for another station, and something for a TV network. And so, Mike and I both looked at this thing for a couple of days, maybe, and then we sent what we felt to be our audition back. Mike didn't get a response off of it, I don't think. I got one that said, I don't hear anything that leads me to believe that you'll be able to do this.

RYAN: Okay. Yeah.

STEVE: I don't know if that were his exact words, but very close.

RYAN: But that was the gist.

STEVE: I don't hear anything here is probably actually more close to what he said. But nonetheless, all right, fast forward.

RYAN: I like that though. I've heard these critiques before where somebody makes the blanket statement that not only are you not ready for this now, we're declaring you won't do it ever. I like those statements that happen in music or in voiceover. or acting, et cetera. Anyway, continue.

STEVE: No, man. And so that was my first introduction to Hoss, which, you know, I knew— I didn't expect anything bad there. And believe me, out of all the people on this planet I could harbor bad feelings toward, it could be somebody like Hoss. But here's the real golden thing. 17 years later, I'm sitting in Biloxi, Mississippi, and have in the last couple of months at that time, done a voiceover for Kelly Doherty at KISS FM, who I had never met before. And this is when I worked for iHeartMedia on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I'll get to all that story later if you care for it. But the point is this. After I did a VO for iHeart, which at the time it was for their Christmas thing. Forget what it was. The Jingle Ball.

RYAN: The Jingle Ball?

STEVE: Yes, it's the iHeartMedia or the, you know, KISS FM's Jingle Ball, which I now have said every year for the last 6 or 7. So thank you. I'm glad to be stuck on that one. But that's what it was for. And I had just gotten in contact with Miles, who had not made it to KISS yet in LA. He was still in Cleveland. And I was like, dude, I'm pestering this guy up at Atlas. I said, do you have any templates or something you could throw me some copy in? Let's put together a quick little demo. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I laid down some VO for him. A couple hours later, I get this demo. I listened to it 600 times probably.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: 'Cause I've never heard myself sound like that. Nobody like Miles has ever produced anything by me that I knew of. And I was like, yeah, this is blowing my mind. And so I sent it to Haas by email the next morning. And within a couple hours, I had an offer to move forward with, let's talk about representing you. And I have never once until today reminded him that 17 years before, he said I didn't have the talent to do this. It's not because I'm not the kind of guy that's going to do that. respect Haas. A lot of people don't. I do. And here's why. He hired me to that agency. He left that agency, and he's managed to be successful apart from that agency. You kind of got to give the guy a hand.

RYAN: Sure. Yeah. I don't know Haas.

STEVE: So, you know, a lot of people do. And I got to shake his hand and hug his neck at Worldwide Radio Summit last year or this year. And yeah, I'm looking forward to going back next year. I already got an invite to go to that next year. It's like, man, we have just—

RYAN: I just I know. Yeah, these conventions, they do that. Yeah, I should be there. I think they've created a direct flight for me here in Dallas. So I like— I think I saw you writing on the internet about figuring out if you're gonna fly a 5-flight connection or if you're gonna drive or take a train, and I'm just pissed that I might have had to connect one time. So, you know, I'll go if there's a direct flight, and I'm pretty sure there is.

STEVE: Well, listen, Ed, All right, you've got standards, and that's okay. I don't. I'll fly 5 return flights coming on. I don't give a damn. It took 2 days to get me home from LA the last time I went out there.

RYAN: I know. I saw that. I love that you were even considering driving or taking a train. Do you know, I will drive 2 hours. That's it. I don't drive anymore. There's no driving. Yeah.

STEVE: Anyway. See, we have a mutual friend. Jen Sweeney is her name. And Jen takes trains 'cause she has a fear of flying.

RYAN: Yeah, that's right. I saw that.

STEVE: She's leaving California, in fact, the day that we're recording this. this heading back home. And so it's kind of mystifying in a way. A train track or a train trip out to Cali would be nice. But yeah, drive it. I got no problem with that. I got a great car. I got a Cadillac CTS from 2016. That sumbitch drives like I am on water. So I can drive that thing for, I don't know, a couple of days at a time if I had to. I'm good with that.

RYAN: Oh, okay.

STEVE: So yeah, driving to California is not out of the question, but there's a reason for that because there's a place up around the Death Valley area that I want to go to, and I would prefer to drive that instead of having to borrow somebody else's car.

RYAN: Absolutely. No, yeah, we're taking a departure here a little bit from the show, but—

STEVE: Sorry.

RYAN: I respect people that can enjoy a good road trip. Gosh, I have so much respect for that, 'cause it should be so peaceful.

STEVE: Right.

RYAN: I just can't get down with it. But this is probably a little— I don't want to make any claims, but I've been listening to your career, and I feel like you've been in jobs for about a year and then you move on. Like, you've had a lot of jobs. Is that a true statement? I feel like you've had a lot of jobs.

STEVE: I have.

RYAN: And you're not afraid to pick up and go to the next place.

STEVE: Well, no, I've got a wandering bone. I've always been that way. You do?

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: You know, but it's as much out of curiosity for what else there is as much as there is to go do a job. Because I'm just curious by nature. My wife would say I'm obsessive by nature when it comes to that.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: But I think—

RYAN: How long have you been in Hot Springs now? Like, is this the longest you've been somewhere, actually?

STEVE: No, no, no, no, no. If I go back and I'm realistic about it, I spent 2 and a half years in Knoxville. The first time I was in Hattiesburg-Laurel, I spent almost 2 years. When I got back from Knoxville, I think is when I settled down the second time we moved to Hattiesburg-Laurel, 'cause we stayed there for— or I stayed there for 9 years that time. Came back to Arkansas and worked in the metal industry for about 2 years. That's something else that I'm familiar with.

RYAN: Right.

STEVE: And ended up moving back to South Mississippi. I think when I worked for iHeart there, I worked for them for 4 and a half years before they canned me. And I don't mind talking about that either. They canned me because I was the youngest guy on the pole.

RYAN: Oh, well, no, I was gonna say, there's nothing wrong with talking about that. And especially because most people listening to this has experienced that.

STEVE: Yeah.

RYAN: That's the way the industry is.

STEVE: Yeah. And look, I gotta be open and disclosed about this. I'm contracted to iHeartMedia. They are my biggest employer. employer for the most part. They are great to me because I'm one of their big voice guys. I mean, there's not an iHeart thing you can hear pretty much anymore that I've not had my voice on at least the tag. And for a guy from rural Southwest Arkansas to today be sitting there saying that I'm heard on every iHeart station at least once a day, and worldwide on the entire network, plus all the listeners on the app, that's a little overwhelming, man. That's a crap ton of people hearing my voice. And that's—

RYAN: Yeah, but what do they say? You talk as if you're just talking to one person. So you're just talking to one person.

STEVE: It's not overwhelming. And I mean, I'm not a— look, I say it that way. The numbers are certainly overwhelming. I don't get nervous about anything. I don't even get nervous about going to the bathroom anymore.

RYAN: You used to though. You used to get nervous about that.

STEVE: That's a joke, man, because— It's like you never know what you're gonna walk into in that thing, you know? It could be scary at times.

RYAN: Let me jump somewhere. I don't know where this will be, but—

STEVE: Go anywhere.

RYAN: What point in your career did you look up and go— like, you just talked about, you know, this great success you're having right now. And you really— so from my perspective, you've really blown up recently, but I don't think it has been that recent. When did you look up and go, oh, hey, look at this, like, a lot of people have used me, I'm hired Was there a moment? Did it take a year? Did it take 5 years? When did you look up and realize what happened?

STEVE: I'll tell you when it was. And this is stupid but funny. Literally the week I signed with Atlas Talent, who is still my agent and will forever be my agent, by the way.

RYAN: Yeah, ditto.

STEVE: No.

RYAN: So when was that for you?

STEVE: I love this company. But go ahead.

RYAN: When did you sign with them? I was trying to put the timeframe there, but—

STEVE: I gotta scratch my brain a little bit to tell you when that happened, just so I can be accurate about it, 'cause I'm not exactly sure. I can't remember. I'm trying to remember. 2010, '11, '12, '13, '14. It was probably 2014.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: Yes.

RYAN: That makes sense.

STEVE: 2014 when I signed with them. So anyway, this is funny, and I'm gonna tell you more about me than you need to know.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: This is gross too, so.

RYAN: All right. Fair warning.

STEVE: So I get signed by these guys, get signed by Atlas, and I'm jubilant, of course. And I had been unemployed No, no, no, no, no, no. I was still employed by iHeart at the time. I was still doing my show in Biloxi. And I ended up getting a subcutaneous cyst about the size of a baseball.

RYAN: Oh, God.

STEVE: Right at that seam where your flesh is the little crack seam between your buttock and the top of your leg.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: I had this baseball-sized growth down in that area close to my crotch.

RYAN: Wow.

STEVE: All right, so we'll just be funny and call it a big fucking boil.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: So I'm telling you that to tell you this. I went and had that operated on and removed, and on— and that was one afternoon. The next morning I wake up and I'm recovering and I'm bloated with pain stuff. Obviously I'm still in the hospital. Stayed in the hospital 4 days. They want to make sure you don't get infection, yada, yada, yada.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: laying there, of course I got my phone, and I get an email. I get an email from, from Haas, and it's— dude, what is this? And I'm sedated and I can't yell, so it came out, Susan, Susan, come here. I want you to see this. I had been hired as one of the voices on KISS FM in Sydney and was laying in the hospital with a cavity the size of a baseball in my left butt cheek being stuffed by a nurse.

RYAN: And that's it. That's the moment.

STEVE: That was a moment. I knew when I get out of here, all of it's gonna be different. Yeah. And it was. I think I'd been on KISS for a couple of days, and all of a sudden here comes Steve Dubs from Y100 in I'm like, shit, yeah. And one by one, they started coming my way. And I think I hit on the contract with iHeartMedia about maybe a year or two later. And it's a good one, and it lasts a while, and I get to renew every year and work with people every year. That works out great. And so now, I'm not even starstruck by myself. Does that make sense? Does that make any sense?

RYAN: I think it does. And I think I'm not incorrect to say that it really is more of a recent deal for you.

STEVE: Yeah, it is. It's an explosion, really. I mean, if you're being honest about it, it's not braggadocio, it's honest. I mean, I popped onto the world basically within a 1-year, 2-year time period, and that doesn't happen to voice guys.

RYAN: 2015-ish, really. I mean, 2014 is when you said you had your butt baseball, but 2015-ish is really That's really when everyone's like, oh, wait, we like this guy. We're gonna use him everywhere now.

STEVE: And it turned out that way, and it's been tremendous. It's been tremendous. That's the only way I know how to say it.

RYAN: Yeah, I like that you're pretty cool about it all, though. You know, you're unassuming, which is nice.

STEVE: But I mean, I don't know how to be any other way about it because I don't feel like it's something that I necessarily am given license to brag about, but I'm not a bragging kind of guy. of person.

RYAN: No, but, you mean like I met you in Nashville? Yeah, I obviously— I told you like I had known of your name. We didn't know each other, but—

STEVE: No, we didn't.

RYAN: But I didn't really realize everywhere you were, you know? And I wouldn't have known that had I not been talking to other people about you, you know? Because you're not— you're not like, hey, maybe you've heard me on KISS FM, on everything.

STEVE: I'm not gonna be that guy though, you know?

RYAN: I wanted to— man, we've been going for so long and I'm I'm happy, but I wanted to get a little more of the business stuff here. A typical day, obviously you're doing a lot of radio imaging, a lot of announcer voice, a lot of promo voice. What are you doing besides radio imaging?

STEVE: Well, I tell you, the radio imaging thing is great. I have my daily radio job here at the group of stations I work for, which, you know, fortunately for me is not incredibly time-consuming. It's just steady.

RYAN: And besides that, the voice Voiceover-wise, yeah.

STEVE: Voiceover-wise, I monitor my radio station guys, and oh yeah, I auditioned at the beginning of this year, actually late last year, and got to be known as the voice of Court TV, which is a new thing for me.

RYAN: Now, I don't get that channel, but has that actually started? 'Cause that was— we were about 3 months away or something from that when I first talked to you about it.

STEVE: Yeah, they are gaining exposure in the large markets. Of course, they start from the top, work their way down. The larger systems have to get 'em, yada, yada, yada. so on and so forth. They also, though, if you notice, if you're on Facebook, and who's not, that if you're subscribed to them or like their page, the videos that they have on there are all live rolls, and they usually have something going on with their current day's bevy of activity. And see, you gotta remember, Court TV is all live, or it's tape replay of cases that have gone on during the day or that week or whatever, very recent. My voiceover for them is only used at a minimum. but I've given them the whole golden reel of, you know, tonight at 5, tonight at 6, tonight at 7. And you do that, but I'm on— you know, it's a handcuff. And when those guys call me and say, hey, look, Steve, we gotta have this this afternoon. I need it in the next 15 minutes. Guess what? You got it in 10, bubba. And that's how it has to be. If that producer hits me at 7:15 at night, it doesn't matter if I'm taking a shit, it doesn't matter if I'm feeding my dog, it doesn't matter if I'm outside walking the dog, watering my garden or kicking my neighbor's can across back into his yard, I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna go record that real quick because there's nothing to it. This is the easiest job I have. I have ever had.

RYAN: before I— I want to get more information on this gig here, but just to cover a couple bases, what, what other TV, I mean, you know, network affiliate TV work are you doing?

STEVE: it's just periodic.

RYAN: Periodic.

STEVE: I did a couple of promos for the Weather Channel Thanksgiving before last. They needed a, you know, a football announcer kind of guy for this thing they were doing, and I did that. I audition for everything. I don't get much. I think about 1 in 32 is my turnaround on most auditions like that. But they've all— what I've auditioned for has turned out to be great.

RYAN: Am I incorrect in saying that one of the reasons they liked you for the Court TV gig is you weren't very exposed in that medium?

STEVE: I would say that's probably accurate. John Wasser could probably explain that much better, and I think John actually may have inferred that to me. I think also my demo on Atlas' site for promos.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And it was done— I'm sorry to say, this is sick and sad, and I need to spend some money on it. It was done 3, 4 years ago.

RYAN: How dare you? How dare you?

STEVE: No. But it's got a little slice of, you know, tonight at 9 on Court TV. Not very excited, but just very direct. And Mr. Wasser told me that they heard that, and they auditioned you, and you got it. Yeah.

RYAN: That didn't hurt. That's great.

STEVE: No.

RYAN: Serendipitous, perhaps.

STEVE: Fortuitous, even.

RYAN: Yes, both. All the oohs. Yes, that's great. So anyway, back to specifically the Court TV work. they are— they, they're not ISDN, are they? You don't— you didn't have to install an ISDN down there in Hot Springs, did you?

STEVE: No. And I'm going to say this to anybody listening, I'll never install an ISDN, down here. It's never going to freaking happen.

RYAN: Well, I don't know if you could if you wanted to down there, or up there for No, I can't.

STEVE: I can't. There are no available ISDN services to any business in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And for that matter, there's a lot of Central Arkansas that can't get it. But I'm gonna ask you, why the hell would you do it?

RYAN: No, I— well, not anymore. But, but I mean, Source Connect, and then you can use the bridge, and there's other ways.

STEVE: Oh, I get this part. Yeah.

RYAN: So do you use— what do they like to connect with though? Just to give people a little insight on how that works.

STEVE: Man, they don't live direct me. They trust me to get it right. And I think the reason is—

RYAN: Oh, do they send you— they send you copy and you just cut it and then send it back? They don't even live-direct the session at all. Not even a phone patch.

STEVE: Well, you know why? Because I have a habit of how I do copy for most people that are working on promos. I don't give you one phrase, one sentence, and you're done. You get each phrase. You get each phrase 3, 4, 5, 8 times. You get the whole thing through 3 or 4 times. It gives you, as a producer, something to choose from. And I've been a producer long enough to know, especially what I want out of a talent, how to communicate it. to them. And that's the most important thing. I happen to be working with producers that know what to tell me. And you would not believe how important that is. Especially, especially if that direction can have an impact on what you're giving that ad. Here's the thing I hate about doing auditions. Because a lot of times, people are sending these auditions out with only the direction, sound normal. Sound like a normal-sounding guy. Non-announcery. Oh, boy, you get that one a lot.

RYAN: Well, I get that one a lot. I get that one all the time.

STEVE: You know what? There's a couple of them, and out of spite, and I'll freely admit to it, it's only happened 2 times, but I've sent back something deliberately announcery because that's the stupidest direction I think I've ever fucking heard.

RYAN: All right. Well, I wish you would tell— I wish you'd be honest about your opinions on these things. I wish you wouldn't sugarcoat.

STEVE: When I feel a way about something, I'll tell you. But if I don't, I'm pretty passive. I'm a nice guy. Yeah.

RYAN: So, Court TV sounds like the dream gig, but it is— you use the phrase golden handcuffs. That's come up, which basically means if they want it now, you do it now, and that can happen basically any day. Do you have a schedule with them, though? I mean, are they asking for you on Sundays too, for example?

STEVE: If they need me, I'm available to them. That's something that we've just— that's been upfront from the part. Other than sleeping hours, it's not that I have them specified in my contract or nothing, but maybe I should.

RYAN: Yeah, like, I will sleep, for these 6 hours. Right. Or 2 or however much it ends up being. Right, exactly. Give me 4. Give me a window.

STEVE: I have to skip dinner if I have to do that, though.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: These guys are not— they don't demand a lot. But as the network grows, I know that my amount of material is gonna grow. And having been intimately friends with people that do this on a daily basis, the first one that comes to mind is Mark Peoples. I don't think anybody on this planet works as much as Mark Peoples does every day between promo and especially affiliate work, 'cause he's got so many— affiliates that are doing, you know, right now and coming up next and this is tonight and blah blah blah. And you got to have somebody that's flexible enough to do that. I'm not that guy, but if they need me to be that guy, I can be that guy. I love just sitting down here and focusing on my work and getting it done.

RYAN: Over time I've learned, I think, that, the VOs that I've met from the South are some of my favorite, you know, Mark obviously included, you. it's just, it's usually a lot of fun talking to you guys. Although, you know, I grew up in LA, and then I was back East, so I'm familiar with everyone, but I'm a fan of my Southern VO buddies.

STEVE: I'm on in Toronto and in Chicago as well. And the Chicago thing, Eric Bradley and Josh Ross. And Eric, every time he sends me something, I'll send him a response back with y'all in there.

RYAN: There you go.

STEVE: And on purpose. And if I talk to those guys, I mean, you're hearing me not talk without an affected accent, and that's because I try to make sure that I don't cross over into any of my commercial or imaging things with my accent because—

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: Let me get into my real speaking voice. It's as Southern as it can be, and it's not one that is marketable. But this is a true, honest-to-goodness Arkansas accent, and it's derived from Acadiana to the south, which has a much different sort of sound, and Mississippi has a different sound. different one too. Mississippi's is a little bit slower. It doesn't have as much drawl in it. Oklahoma's one's got that drawl in it though.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And around here, when I'm out at Kroger, if I'm standing up in the line at the restaurant or whatever, I'm pretty much myself. And I try to be— I say I try to be. I'm just as naturally passive as anybody you'll ever meet. I'm not going to purposefully engage my voice in public and try to get somebody's attention. I don't desire that kind of attention. If I did, I'd be a musician on stage, which I am a musician, but I'm not on stage because I don't want to be on stage. I don't seek that kind of adoration. And when I get it, it's embarrassing to me.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: I think one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and it doesn't seem like it, and I smiled my way right through it, but that's what one does, is accepting the Benztown 50 Award at Worldwide Radio Summit this year. To walk on that stage amongst those people, and these are people that I have such tremendous admiration for, you know, and I'm paired with so many of them, Kelly Doherty and Rachel McGrath, and keep going, that list is long. To be there with them was just monumental to me.

RYAN: Is this the first year you were on the 50?

STEVE: Yeah, it's the first year I was on the 50.

RYAN: So that was another reason why—

STEVE: I didn't think it was gonna be.

RYAN: Yeah, okay. But see, that's another reason why, to me, you kind of are extremely recent explosion of success. I didn't realize it was the first year though. But man, big, big time on that. Congrats.

STEVE: Yeah, that blew my mind. And Chachi and Masa are so incredible at what they do at Benztown. And here's the other cool part about that. Benztown and Atlas, they work so freaking well together. Because if I got somebody that wants to grab me on barter, they go through Benztown, and it's never, not once, been an issue that has prevented it from happening. Not even that I've ever had to hear about. That's how smooth that business process works. So I'm proud to be associated with both those guys that way.

RYAN: Yeah, no, I've been— I've worked with Benztown forever, almost since their literal beginning. I think I was about a year late on it. Let's take care of some other business here before we wrap this thing up. You have Atlas as— I know they're your main— are they your only agent? Do you have other agents of any way, shape, or form?

STEVE: No, I've stayed with Atlas exclusively.

RYAN: Yeah, that's good.

STEVE: Namely because, and it's worth saying, the relationship— as I said earlier, I was signed on by Haas. About a month later, he decided to leave Atlas and go on about his business and do things. And I think it was 2 days later, Lisa Rich calls me, and out of the middle of her busy New York day, spends 25 minutes on the phone with me. And she is assuring me the entire time that she's gonna take care of me. And that— and I already signed at this point with some great radio stations. I felt like I was doing great.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: She felt like that Atlas had not done enough for me.

RYAN: You were being underserved up to that point.

STEVE: Brother, she could have done anything at that point, and it would have been okay with me.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: But what she has done is become my biggest supporter. Not just going out hawking my voice. She is genuinely concerned that I am okay. And I don't expect that out of anybody, but having it from her is incredible because it's incredibly reassuring. And Ricky Meyer— and I gotta say something about Ricky because without Ricky Meyer, I would be blind. He is my go-between on anything I need, and he is the coolest cat in the process. I love him greatly because he serves what I do. And I can't pay for somebody like that. I do 10%, but I'm just saying, that's not a bad deal when you got a guy like Ricky Meyer.

RYAN: No.

STEVE: Ricky and somebody like Lisa and somebody like John, who have that much contact and sway, that are working for your benefit and theirs. That's a great synergy. So yeah, they're my exclusive agent. I'm available for barter through Benztown, but it's managed through Atlas.

RYAN: Sure.

STEVE: And it's the easiest thing ever. Do I have another agent? No. There's some other voice work I do, and I'll just quickly throw in here, Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, which is a classic old-time radio storytelling group. And matter of fact, we did a version of War of the Worlds that to me rivals the original.

RYAN: Really?

STEVE: Yes, it's that good. No, it's that good. We did such a great job. And I got to do one of the longer-form announcers, one of the traditional Lowell Thomas kind of deliveries. Out here over in New Jersey, we've got stars in the sky.

RYAN: Right, right. What do you call it? Is it Mid-Atlantic? Is it like a Mid-Atlantic accent?

STEVE: Mid-Atlantic newscaster. And there's only one of them, you know? And for some reason or another, I identify with that, and I could pull that accent off. And I got to do that, and that was great fun. And I've done some other horror narrations for them. And doing horror is a lot of fun, and that's why I do it. But it's as much as anything else to be able to expose what I do to another group of people. And it doesn't seem like that, you know, because it's— to me, it's more than radio imaging and networking and our network and commercial. All voiceover is part of what I do. And furthermore, moving forward, and I'm gonna say this, and I'm actually— I'm gonna start demanding it so it'll happen. I want to be the voice of everything leaving this planet. I want to be the voice of SpaceX. I'm serious. If somebody can put me in contact with Elon Musk, I want to be his voice. Not for stuff in advertising.

RYAN: No.

STEVE: stuff they have to do interdepartmental for all their orbiters that are about to be going up. Yeah, I want to be that guy. Jeff Bezos, same thing. New Horizons spacecraft, I want to be the voice of that.

RYAN: I don't know if Bezos is actually hiring the voice talent, but he might be, or same with Musk. But isn't there a thing you just manifest it, right? You just start talking about doing something positively and then it'll happen?

STEVE: Well, and also, I've been an amateur rocket scientist my whole life. my whole life before I was ever interested in the weather. Space and astronomy have fascinated me. I've continuously had a telescope since I was 3. It's one of those things that when I look at the night sky, I don't look at it like everybody else. I do not believe that Earth is where we need to stay. I do believe we need to be moving forward. We started doing it in the '60s, and Buzz Aldrin said it right the other day at some event at NASA on the 50th anniversary Apollo. That was 40 years— that was 50 years ago, and we never went back. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. And you know what? You're goddamn right we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We were on the precipice of greatness. We were on the precipice of greatness, and we decided to sit down and start having feelings about everything. Well, I tell you what, for me, that's not good enough. I'm still one of these people looking forward, and I'm still one of the ones looking up. So that's what I want to do. Okay.

RYAN: There's a lot to A lot to unpack there. Let me take it a step backward though. I mean, you were talking about you want to be the voice of everything leaving the planet. What else— and I don't mean to sort of bring back to earth, quote unquote, your career a little bit— what else do you want to be doing that you're not doing?

STEVE: I like the idea of doing, if I'm capable of it, more network things. I like television promo. I don't necessarily like affiliate promo. There's a big difference. But I'm really challenged, I think, by TV promo, and here's why. This big-ass voice. This big-ass voice, everybody says, oh, you'd sound great on this, you'd sound great on that. You know what? This keeps me from doing a lot of work because this isn't the kind of voice that's in promos all over the place. No, a more mainstream, medium-timbre voice seems to be more available until you get to more specialized networks like, say, Syfy. Science Channel and Discovery. So you ask me what I want to do, I would love to be narrating programs for NOVA and for Science Channel and for Discovery and History because I love reading stories, and these are the stories that I like and am interested in. So I think moving forward, I think maybe longer narrations, kind of like—

RYAN: Have you— I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but it made me excited to ask this because it's something I've thought about, not really for me, but anyway, have you done so much promo, announcer voice work that you think you've in any way damaged your ability to bring that more natural narrative read into projects?

STEVE: Yeah.

RYAN: It doesn't take much. Serious question.

STEVE: No, it doesn't take much. And I'll give you an example. I say I'm not affectating an accent right now, and I'm not. This is pretty much my normal voice like that. And see, you can take something scientific and give a little bit of emphasis to things and not come off sounding like, an announcer.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: It's not hard to do. But the thing is, you have to identify what that voice is and be able to pull it up instantly. So when I— and it's the way I tell people, well, how do you know that read needs to sound that way? I just hear it in my head that way. What's the coolest way that I could hear somebody saying this? There it went. Okay, well, I'm gonna replicate that. It's not that I'm replicating some other talent doing it or the way they read it. It's a mental thing I'm kind of playing off of, a little game I have to play with myself because the idea with me and my voice, as big as it is, and everybody says, yada, yada, we love you, love you, love you. I get sick to death of it because it— to me, it's very easy to become monotone with a big voice and not be dynamic. And I would like to do more dynamic things that—

RYAN: Right.

STEVE: I'm not talking about going from yelling to soft. No, I'm talking about things that if—

RYAN: Emotive.

STEVE: Right.

RYAN: Acting. Yeah.

STEVE: Right.

RYAN: As opposed to announcing.

STEVE: Right. And that's incredibly important to me because, look, I got off air when they fired me 6 years ago, whenever, however long it was that I left off air 5 years ago, whenever it was. And I hate being on the air because it's a waste of my time. It truly is a waste of my time. My talents are better served in a production room or my fingers on a guitar. And— or on a golf course.

RYAN: Throw that in. There you go.

STEVE: Because, you know, you gotta have goals, and my goal is to do enough voice work where I can leave the radio thing, go home, and play golf at least once a day.

RYAN: Are you one of these guys who was never on the PGA, but you wanna join the senior tour?

STEVE: Nope. Nope.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: No, no, I'm so bad. Oh my God. I wanna organize a—

RYAN: And I'm not aging you now, by the way. I'm not saying right now, but eventually, by the way. I just wanna point that out.

STEVE: For clarity's sake, now that you brought it up, I'm 48. I'll be 49 next year.

RYAN: I was gonna say, I didn't mean to imply that you could be on the senior tour now.

STEVE: But, but, no, I have a— my 49th is in August, so I'm getting right up close to good old fame. But you're not far. That's right. But the only tour I'm gonna be playing is the tour of Steve back home. And that's a good one 'cause, man, look, I gotta tell you, at the end of the day, outta all I do, I love going home more than I love doing anything else.

RYAN: Yeah. Well, that's good. That is a positive thing in life. Absolutely. What else is there? I mean, I feel like I've known you a little while now, so we've covered a lot, but there's a lot more we could get into here.

STEVE: You know, I'm a computer geek, and I know you and Terry got into an extended conversation about those sorts of things. And as it happens, here in recent days, I've been I'm kind of— and I'm not going to go long on this. I've been recent days trying to kind of configure a desktop for myself. So, sure. And okay, just here's something else.

RYAN: Are you going down the Terry Phillips PC route or are you going to get yourself a good Mac?

STEVE: Is there such a thing as a good Mac? Really?

RYAN: Oh boy, here we go.

STEVE: Okay.

RYAN: Never mind. You started this. Come on, Dream, bring out your hooks, baby. Bring them out. No, that's fine. Okay, sure.

STEVE: Get yourself a PC. I just pissed off, you know, 70% of the audience. No, look, I don't care. It doesn't matter. If you really sit down and you look at the architecture of the processors and the way memory is laid out nowadays, Apple ain't no damn faster or performing better than any PC.

RYAN: Yeah, so exactly.

STEVE: Don't give me that argument anymore. That's old. All right, so now I'm gonna do a PC, and here's why I'm doing a PC, because we have a bunch of gamers in my house, namely me. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600, a long A long time ago.

RYAN: Man, you old. Yeah, I had one of those too.

STEVE: Yeah, yeah, I dated myself greatly then.

RYAN: But I had one of those too, and then I had the 7200, by the way.

STEVE: Oh my God.

RYAN: I don't even know what the difference was.

STEVE: You were an uber geek though. I mean, you know.

RYAN: Yeah, I was a bit of a nerd. Anyway, sorry.

STEVE: But see, I'm still that same way today. I've got 13 different games on my cell phone that I play each of them daily some way or another. So I'm a gamer.

RYAN: While you're waiting for that—

STEVE: Geek nerd geek kind of stuff.

RYAN: Waiting for that Cord TV copy to come in.

STEVE: You know, and I'm just, you know, I'll take it.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: I'm the guy for hire for that sort of stuff. But so I've been reeducating myself on a couple of things, especially getting kind of excited about what PCIe is all about and how fast it is. And I'm more impressed by NVMe drives lately. So the desktop I have outside this booth that I'm in, I managed to install a good NVMe drive in and have been just blown away by it. And this is my first one. So as far as that particular tech goes, it's a new exposure for me. But what it has done is made my pocketbook go, no, you don't need any more of those.

RYAN: I bet.

STEVE: So I can't have an 8-disc array of those. No, they won't let me. So, but per Terry Phillips, have you put Thunderbolt in your PC? yeah, I've got Thunderbolt in my PC.

RYAN: Yeah, I figured you would.

STEVE: Yeah, I got a USB-C card sitting right back there. So yeah, there's your Thunderbolt.

RYAN: And, have you, have you set you up a I haven't gotten a Stream Deck for the studio and the booth yet. That is next level. I need to do something on that. But working with a Stream Deck as a VO talent or even as an audio producer, mandatory.

STEVE: No, I'm not going to invest in it because in fact I'm downsizing the production side of what I do because I don't do— outside of the radio production I do, I don't do production. I just, I'm done with it. I don't give my energy to it anymore.

RYAN: Yeah, no, it makes sense. You've got a lot to do.

STEVE: Well, it used to make sense for me to keep those tools sharp, but I'll say this, with daily maintenance working in radio, they stay sharp enough. I'm more concerned about making certain that what I do as a voiceover person grows and is at least consistent, stable in quality. I'm also a big believer in customer service. I don't like orders sitting in my email box for a long period of time. So if I'm heading out to lunch or something, that's one It'll be a couple hours before you get it back. But if I'm sitting at my desk and boom, you email me, boom, I'm gonna walk in there and record it and send it right back to you.

RYAN: A typical one of your clients, and then I'll ask it differently, how long are they waiting to get copy back from you? Just a typical radio client.

STEVE: Typically you'll have it back from me within the hour every time.

RYAN: And what's the maximum turnaround you can, you'll, you know, that you'll guarantee, whatever?

STEVE: Oh my, every contract says 24 hours. 24 hours. Every contract says 24 hours, but I can't wait for that long. I hate having a stack of crap to do.

RYAN: Yeah, a stack of crap sitting there. And honestly, in this day and age, I really feel like a couple few hours is like— that should be expected, in my opinion.

STEVE: Yeah. And, you know, I— look, it is very, very unfair that I do as well as I do and have as much exposure as I do, because I know how many voiceover people all day with dozens of clients. And, you know, I don't have— I've got dozens of clients. They don't need something like that every day. You know, my stuff tends to be more explosive, and you could call it accent, but it's a different kind of accent.

RYAN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: You know? So, the workload is never tremendous, and it never bothers me. I never feel overwhelmed by it, and I probably never will because it is— every time I pull up a script, and it doesn't matter who it's from, I'm doing exactly what I've always wanted to do. it to do. So it's incredibly powerful to me to be able to do this. So I love it and I cherish it. It's great and it makes my heart happy, which really need more of that.

RYAN: I love it, man. Well, we're coming— I think this is a great way to wrap the interview up here, but I do want to give you a shot at the final question. If you have a key piece of advice for anyone starting out in this biz or someone looking to level up, what is your singular piece of advice?

STEVE: I'll give you the piece of of advice with a challenge issued to anybody that's still in broadcasting and radio right now. That challenge is this: find a youth, find somebody young that has any interest in this and help them. Do not ever run out of time for a young person trying to get into this business.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: Don't ever run out of time for them because right now, more than anything else, You don't have a— it's not like the '90s when there was a stream of talented people that cared about radio, loved it, because radio's changed. Now it's about podcasting, but radio still maintains a certain, I don't know, not even— I'll call it reliability that podcasting can't match.

RYAN: Certainly.

STEVE: And so if you're going to be in radio, you need to grow radio because you need to bring people into it. That's my challenge to you. is this, never think that you're as bad as you think you are.

RYAN: Yeah.

STEVE: And that's as much kind of a pat on my own back because of being told, you can't do that. Yeah, you can. And I'm doing great at it. In fact, I don't know how many people actually hear my voice today, but it's gotta be somewhere up in the 150 to 175 million person range. and range. Now think about that. That blows my mind.

RYAN: It's scary.

STEVE: It blows my mind, dude. And that— to be in a mind-blowing career and doing it, in essence, at my own direction, and being able to do it with the most creative people on the planet, is the most important thing to me every day. So if you're going to be interested in this business, you can make it to the top of any echelon of it you want. That— whether that be voiceover or production or on-air or sales management or general management or engineering, it doesn't matter. Find somebody in the business that will inspire you and somebody that will put a fire under your ass and make that person your best friend and then learn from them. That's what you do coming into this business. And there are enough of us like out, out there just like me that aren't afraid to tell you what we really think about it. And that kind of honest advice is something that I think we all owe people that are trying to come into this business. It's a reality. We ought to treat it that way.

RYAN: Excellent. Steve Taylor, you're the man, dude. You're the man. Your website is stevetvo.com, and now that I've put that out there to the world, you're gonna have to go put a new coat of paint on there. You said you wanted to do that. Okay, nice basic site. Okay, demos, and that's it.

STEVE: I'm apologizing in advance. This is a website done by a computer guy that's so old that he couldn't figure out how to do what I wanted to do on it, so I left it just like I left it. All right, so it's pure laziness that it's out there the way that it is, but I'm being real about it at least.

RYAN: It's fine. It has your demos and that's it. What more do you need?

STEVE: For real. Oh man, I don't even— I need a new website. So if anybody is actually a website builder that would like to trade services, I'll trade my VO for you.

RYAN: There you go. Trade your VO or trade some VO training. Hell, maybe I'll do a VO— I'll do a site for you, and then you can coach me and be the next Steve Taylor.

STEVE: Are you fucking kidding me? Oh my God.

RYAN: You're so good.

STEVE: You don't need any help.

RYAN: Aside from my voice, I think I can do it.

STEVE: Yeah. No, dude, you're a legend. I mean, you really are a legend, dude. And knowing you— and I'm just gonna be— I'm gonna blow sunshine on you real quick.

RYAN: Oh boy.

STEVE: I called you. I said, Ryan, you are an MF like Samuel Jackson. I told you that outside the hotel at CRS in Nashville, and I believe you. to be an honest-to-goodness motherfucker. And here's why you are. Because where you came from, dude, and what you have done with your career, you're at the top of this game. This is a game that we all play, and we know it is 'cause it's fun. And you're at the top of it. You're working for a group of people I have such admiration for. I've told you this. I'm not blowing sunshine when I talk about TM. I love what you guys do. And you've got another couple of my friends there. It's just so awesome to know you. And, and it just makes my day so happy. And then me being on here is just a great honor for me.

RYAN: All right, that's, that's enough of that. Enough about me. But we needed to get you up here to Dallas again, or down here, down and over here to Dallas, whichever freaking way it is. Southwest to Dallas. Get your ass to Dallas. Yeah, get your ass to Dallas. We'll get the whole tour. We'll, you know, we'll get a session going. We'll get you in there and play. We'll record you. You'll track some stuff for us. Anyway, all right, Steve, that's That's enough. People are tired of us. So stevetvo.com. You're on Twitter, Steve TVO. What's your Instagram? I forgot to look it up.

STEVE: Oh God, you're gonna make me find it real quick. Hang on, I'll tell you what it is.

RYAN: Okay.

STEVE: I haven't had to look at it in forever.

RYAN: And while you're looking it up, you're also on Facebook. Just type in Steve Taylor, you'll pop up. But I know you have like weatherman in your URL on Facebook. Yeah, it's something something weatherman.

STEVE: It's DigiWeatherman. D-I-G-I. Weatherman.

RYAN: I'll link it, I'll link it on the site too.

STEVE: Okay, and the Insta is Steve TVO. It's really easy, and you see me blowing an air kiss out to somebody.

RYAN: Yeah, there we go, there we go. All right, man. Hey Steve, I'm gonna wrap it up. Thank you so much, dude. You're the best. Thank you for being on the show.

STEVE: Much love, Ryan. It's nice being on with you. You're a legend, my friend.

ANNC: Visit ryandreen.com to subscribe, contact the show, and listen to every episode. Please rate and review The Producers Podcast on iTunes or on your favorite podcast app. The Producers Podcast with Ryan Dreen.