Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.99 | Danny Liedka from Visit Syracuse

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Good News York Episode 99: Exploring Syracuse's Vibrant Tourism and Events Scene with Danny from Visit Syracuse In the 99th episode of Good News York, hosts Matt Masur and Mike welcome back Danny, a representative from Visit Syracuse, to discuss the exciting developments in Syracuse's tourism and events sector. Danny highlights the role of Visit Syracuse in promoting tourism and film production in Onondaga County, funded by local hotel occupancy taxes. The conversation delves into the economic impact of local sports, upcoming fall and winter events, and the growth of the film industry in the region. They also touch on the benefits of the new tax credits for film production and the development of local talent. Danny emphasizes the importance of community engagement and the efforts to position Syracuse as a key player in youth sports and economic development. As they celebrate their 99th episode, the hosts express excitement for future collaborations and continued promotion of the positive aspects of Syracuse. 00:00 Introduction and Episode Milestone 00:53 Guest Introduction: Danny from Visit Syracuse 01:26 Visit Syracuse: Mission and Activities 04:39 Local Tourism and Community Engagement 05:17 Upcoming Events and Seasonal Highlights 07:11 Impact of Local Sports on Tourism 08:51 Syracuse Mets Naming Contest 12:07 Film Industry Developments in Syracuse 17:47 The Rise of Syracuse as a Filming Hub 18:24 Building a Local Workforce 18:46 Developing Local Talent 20:21 Tourism and Economic Growth 21:17 Youth Sports Investments 22:24 Tourism Trends and Strategies 24:54 Promoting Syracuse to International Visitors 26:04 Defining Upstate New York 28:02 Wrapping Up and Final Thoughts

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and Unirold's 50th anniversary summer specials. Hey folks, welcome to Good News York. I'm Matt Measier from Growth Mode content. And this is our 99th episode. We are so close. We are so close, in fact, that we were actually thinking today was the 100th. And then Danny's like, hey, guys, actually. I told our guest yesterday, I said,

I'm so sorry, you were one-off, but 99's still cool. It's, you know, it's Wayne Gretzky's number. I was off. This is definitely 99. Hiding the spiky hair this morning. I am hiding it. But he's rocking a Syracuse hat, at least, for once. He finally figured out how to do the local virtue signaling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trying to teach him for months. Well, I'm getting there. This is not Ithaca. And I can color coordinated too for you. I love it, buddy. I love it. Mike, go ahead and introduce our guest again.

A returning champion. here. Listen, we are excited to bring back a very special guest from Visit Syracuse. That's it. Our man, Danny, is back in studio again. Dan, you are not only back, but you're looking, you're looking good. You're looking like things are going well. Welcome back to the show. We love having repeat guests. Yeah. You know, it feels good. Yeah, when I got the invite, man, I was pumped off. It's great to be back. Thanks for having. We love that, man. We love you. Danny, if you wouldn't mind, let's just give folks a real quick recap of kind of what Visit Syracuse is. And we don't have to go too in depth, but give them the spiel.

Visit Syracuse. We're the official tourism agency, marketing agency for Onondaga County, and also in the film realm as well. So we're the official film, movie development, and television, commercials, those sort of things for Onondaga County. We're funded through the tax that's on hotel rooms, the occupancy tax, and a marketing group, but we're also a sales group, too. We try to bring large meetings, conventions, sporting events to the area. And we also have a seat at the table with some of the large economic development projects that our shovels are in the ground. We were part of those at the start.

So that's kind of a unique part of our role, but it's something that's come on with time and as we proved our value to the county. That's awesome. That's really great. You know, you're the guys, we talked about this before. I remember it was on the off the air, But I mentioned you have the best job in the world because you just get to promote all the fun stuff. And, you know, as many folks are in a government or pseudo-government role, there's a lot of nonsense.

You're over here telling people where the funds at and all those good times. So I can't say that I'm not a little jealous of you. It's a great gig. But, you know, the people that work on my team make it a whole lot more fun because we're all competitive, but we're winning a lot of these battles. and it's thanks to my team. I've got a world-class team I'd put them up against just about anybody. Yeah, I would agree

because every time I see the visit Syracuse account on social media, I have FOMO. Like, I feel like I'm missing out. Yeah. Which is what you want, you know? That means you're doing your job. I mean, it's just,

you really capture what's going on in Syracuse and why you should visit it. I just, I love it. Yeah. I mean, you so many great. A good friend Robin is just out there every day. It seems like, hitting the pavement and showing off the area and cool things and I just love it.

Yeah, I think, you know, if I start of about a year and a half ago, I always assess where we're at and maybe what our weaknesses are and maybe not a weakness, but maybe an area that we needed to really go out and make a bang with was community relations and kind of tooting our horn. We've been very humble for too long, but getting somebody out in the community, and I thought about for a long time. I'm like, man, this is a tough gig for somebody. I'm not sure that it's going to take me a long time to find this person. And she landed on my doorstep. And I think

I knew within 40 seconds I had to have her. And she didn't come in for that reason. It's just that personality. Sure. Absolutely. Really connected. It represents the brand extremely well. Yeah. We couldn't have a better ambassador, honestly. No, she's wonderful. She was a guest on

one of our clients' podcasts not long ago. Yes. Outing all kinds of great things happening around here. And And just like I said, just a great, super impressive team. And we love to see it because in all honesty, we have very similar missions, at least with this podcast in your organization in that we're here to promote the good stuff, you know, and let people know the good stories. And this month we've had close to a million views on videos featuring a couple local businesses. The thing that's like, the thing that's blown my mind is kind of the most common comment on both two different places. was I live right near here

and I'd never heard of this place. I'm going to check it out. That's the best. And that just, you know, that's the whole point. That is the whole like, yeah. So many of us are just, you know, determine we've got to go to vacation. We've got to go another state.

We've got to go to the other side of the country. We've got to do these things like, you can drive a half hour and see some of the most incredible things that, you know, you're going to wait in line and pay three times the price to our in another state. But anyway, Danny, tell us about some of the things that, folks can look forward to. What's what's coming up maybe this fall, this winter that they might want to check out in our area? It's obviously a great time of year fall in central New York. It's a peak,

it's peak season for us, you know, our peak, October, September. Once that chills in the air, those leaves start changing it. We kind of change gears and it's just promoting all the great things, especially on the agriculture side, getting people to stop at some of these farms and these orchards to maximize their time there. the local agriculture industry. That's really one of our biggest strengths here is what we have from that side of things. Plenty of conventions coming through town, Syracuse football. We help Coach Brown any way we can because what he's done with that team,

somebody asked me, why do you get so involved with athletics? Look at it this way. And Coach Brown mentioned this at my annual meeting, and I kind of gave him the notes. but the year before he came in, football was roughly around numbers, $20, $22 million economic impact on the local economy. So think about not just when they're on the road, people are in bars and restaurants. When they're home, you can think, obviously, it's a massive effect. His first year, that number jumped up almost $35, $40 million. Wow.

So that's major tourism. So whatever we can do to help him win, we're going to jump in. Same with basketball. So it's a great time of year. just I'm a baseball guy. It's the perfect time of year, right? The Syracuse Mets had a great year. Now we're on to Syracuse Athletics,

LeMoyne Athletics, Conventions, fall season. It's just, there's just so much going on. I can't point in one direction. It's just a great time of year. It's our favorite. And my team was out doing some great content yesterday, which you'll see on social over the coming days,

just to welcome in that fall season and really showcase what we have to do here. I mean, people don't realize, like people that don't watch sports sometimes don't realize that, When a local sports team is doing well on the field and there's excitement around the team, I mean, it's a butterfly effect across the board,

and it's better for everybody. It's not just about the games. It's about the excitement in the air. People got a little bit of an extra pep in their step. And Syracuse football, it's felt that way for the last couple of years, thanks to Fram Brown. He's different. He is different.

And I think that's part of the excitement you knew when he came along, that you just went, this feels this feels a little bit different than before like this this and and that generates excitement and then if they start playing well then you know the snowball yeah community prized through the roof um i would say that clemson game's probably his signature win what's the first thing he says to the when he was being interviewed he thanked the syracuse community thanks the community right and he's say no more that blew my mind and i'll tell you what and it's like that with the bills that's why it's exciting for the bills right now you know other teams and other you know

journalists come to these games, and they go, man, you know, Buffalo and, you know, Syracuse, it's got such like a tight, you know, the community is very intertwined with the team. And that's when you know you're doing it right. The team and the city feel intertwined, and that's exactly what's going on. I'm just lucky we don't have a Syracuse mafia yet. Well? I could just a man, just hordes of people dressed like auto trying to run out of street. What would we jump through, though?

We can't do tables. That's what I'm saying. We'll jump through like, uh... That orange suit is hard to navigate. Recycling bins. I got to ask our intern. I think he's secretly auto. He might be.

We shouldn't say that on the show. Syracuse football. Sorry, I get going. Danny, I got to ask you because you mentioned the Syracuse Mets, and as you know, they have a naming contest. Do you have an entry or what you think the new name of the Mets should be? I mean, I don't know that my offer carries any weight. Yes, it does. Thousands and thousands of thousands.

Well, ours didn't. We came up with really great names, and they didn't even listen. Jason Smorrell, right? I had the Smoriels. Hello. That's actually really good. Thank you. Thank you, Dan.

It's kind of neat. They didn't. So now we're soliciting any names that anybody wants to come up with. What do you got? The visit Syracuse? Visitors? I have a German Shepherd. How come there aren't any teams that have a cool shepherd mascot? Wait a minute, man.

Just the look of that. Okay. So it's maybe not the most, but like the canines or the shepherds or something. I have always said that. I love that. The breed of dogs. that always blows my mind is the German shepherd. Because, I mean, that's

what the police use for, because they're just, they're the smartest, they're loyal, they're protective. I mean, these people will sniff this cup and then be able to go find me in Ithaca. You know, it's crazy. They're a little goofy too. You know, my dog works at golf courses. She's

got the best life in the world, you know, ride around the golf cart, swim in the pond, chase a few things. Come home. Damn. And then my kids, like, for some reason, they like, like squirrels, We were talking about the flying squirrels. It's an inside family joke. But I think it was a great move on their part.

Yeah. We're one of the few, I think, maybe two or three that have the parent name, where others have something that's kind of born in the community. I think that's important. It's going to help them from a merchandising standpoint. I can tell you as a Yankee fan, it's really hard for me to buy something Mets. Sure. Me too.

But if it was neutral, if it was the squirrels or whatever, you know, the Smoriel. That makes a lot of sense. Like, I don't like the Smariel. It's good. Thank you. You're absolutely right because we did a shoot at the Binghamton. I wasn't even thinking about that.

The Syracuse Mets game. And I saw all this great merchandise, but I'm a Yankees fan. I can't rock that, you know? So, you know, if we had the Syracuse Shepherds or. But again, this goes back to what you said earlier about, we were talking about community and the team being intertwined. Yeah. Right.

I mean, look what Jason Smarro and the Syracuse Mets are doing. Including the community. And that's, yeah, it's a great move. We're happy to be part of it. We're the big sponsor for that. And just the traffic we're seeing from that is great. But it's, again, it's community pride. People are getting involved.

They've got a stake in this now. So I think it's a really a brilliant idea. It was awesome. It was an awesome idea. I'm excited to see it. I'm not necessarily a baseball guy, but we went to opening day. It's awesome. It's just the facility.

It's just absolutely incredible. And everything that, you know, Jason talked about everything that they do with a different events. It's crazy. Like it's like Super Sunday Madic Monday They really figured it out You know

I'm a huge You guys know I coach baseball I love my baseball But whenever I go to a game there I end up seeing very little of it Because it's just like a social event And that's great And it's so

It appeals to anyone You don't have to be a baseball fan Go there and enjoy And they always have some wacky contests Going on it It's cool It's really a cool scene No it was a good time

It was a good time Danny let's Let's talk a little bit about film There's been some different headlines about different things happening. Give us kind of an update on just the status of the kind of film program that's happening in our area. Yeah, I think it's really unleashed now.

Once the governor, once her budget came out, that announced the tax credits being good through. I think it's 2034, 36, something like that. We had a lot of folks that got to the start gate and just sat there until that was re-upped. So now we're starting to see three or four productions at a time. Wow. We've seen massive private development here with an animation studio and a post-audio production studio downtown. Also down where case supply is, those buildings have been repurposed into sound stages just to ramp up for what we see as amazing growth. And then with the new aquarium, the county executive mentioned dovetailing some of the aquarium into the film industry, which makes good sense.

So I think we're going places there. We've hired a consultant that's in the industry. You know, we market to those folks, but we're kind of outsiders. So we have somebody on the inside pushing from that, from the opposite direction. So he's been with us for about six months, and we're starting to make really good traction. And we're doing great before, but I think over the course of the next few years, I think it's going to grow exponentially, especially with the county, putting some more money in to go on top of the state incentive. That's awesome.

What you talked about kind of repurposing these things, the sound stages and stuff. And I know I think we talked about this a little bit previously, but what kind of goes into doing, that say you've got a uh an existing place and you want to make it ready to shoot in what do you got to do yeah it's not it's not really a tedious process at all i mean obviously you want clear span very few pillars high ceilings i mean adding soundproofing is pretty inexpensive so it's a process where we come in we fill out the application takes you know take some snapshots and look at it but if you have a big a big open building those are ideal i mean the fairgrounds in a perfect world if we had a lot more access to that would be amazing.

Obviously, we have tons of events going there, but you think of like the Center of Progress building. That is a nice spot. So case supply, that was warehouse space. Gotcha. So it's transformed into that. So it's not a difficult process at all. And what do folks do if they want to get into that?

Is that something they can reach out to your office? Yeah, reach out. Eric Vinyl on my staff is our VP of Film, and he knows the process. intimately. He's helped us, you know, during COVID, we had to go around and add a few, such as the Red House, the On Center, Civic Center. So we've went into some of those facilities to have alternatives. But we're always looking for unique venues. So I would encourage people if they think they have something, by all means, reach out to us. Awesome. That's great to hear.

Ten years ago when I had my first podcast studio, I interviewed, I wonder if he remembers it, but I interviewed Eric over a decade ago. Was he shaking? Incredibly interesting guy. He really is. I think sometimes he's a little hard on himself, but I take him to meetings, and I just let him go,

and the stuff that comes out of his mouth, it's fascinating, really. People are really into it, but he knows the industry. There's really not anyone better than him, and we're lucky he fell into our lap, yeah. No, that's awesome. Let's see.

You had one person fall on your doorstep, But now they fell on your lap. Well, I went and acquired him. Let me back up. We actually went to the county. It's a gentle cruising. You start to see the village, almost like a painting. Join me, travel expert Darley Newman and Univorl Boutique River Cruises L'ouique Bali to learn about river cruising in France.

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name is a cup of coffee. You can buy Liquid Death Sparkling Energy at a fine retailer near you like 7-11 or to learn more at LiquidDeath.com. Back in 18, Joni Mahoney was the county executive at the time. And he was, I call him the guy in the broom closet. He worked for county economic development. It was him in a broom closet. That's it. He didn't have any resources. And I went to the county executive and I said, you know, you're doing five or six million dollars worth of productions here locally, we can do a whole lot better. Here's my plan. I need him.

And, you know, she was a wonderful leader, and I go to her budget presentation, and I tell this all the time, I'm sitting there picking my nose, and she goes on, Danny Leekis here, and he's going to be taking over film and his visit Syracuse. I'm like, wow, careful what you wish for. So we had Eric and some of the resources to market that, starting in 19, and the rest of his history. So we went out and got him. He's a talent. That's awesome.

That sounds like a movie. The guy in the broom closet. There's your next film. I don't think he's kidding. I'm pretty sure that we interviewed him potentially in his office. Really? And I remember he just in the middle of the county office, everything else happened. There's one little tucked away.

That's awesome. That was the whole department in the county. It's that one. It makes him even cooler. Yeah. I love it. No, but it's great to hear. And, you know, there's so many things going on.

We interviewed Joe Cunningham, who just finished, local guy here who just made a movie. Can't wait to see that. And just, you know. Sentinel, shout out. Talk about building a community. You know, we're able to do that now for that whole industry, which only, I'm assuming, can make your job easier. Yeah, no doubt about it. And it's just so cool to see and hear.

And then we keep hearing about these things. Oh, here's this movie. It's now on Netflix that, by the way, that's my house. Yeah. Like in the background. I love hearing those stories. about that too is, you know, it's easy to say that with streaming and the way things have kind of rapidly changed that the film industry is moving out of the whole, everything's in

L.A. or New York, you know, and people are going to different states for tax credits. But, you know, the filming in Syracuse was going on before that started. And American High has a lot to do with that. But, you know, this area was a little bit on the map. And now, and now it's gorgeous. It is. It's always been a beautiful backdrop for anything. Yeah. Well, Hollywood became Hollywood because of the weather. You know, they couldn't shoot here year-round. It was originally supposed to be in this area. And I think, and Danny can probably speak to this a little bit,

but it was a little bit of a perfect storm where the costs in California and all that got so high. Right. And New York saw that and said, hey, there's an opportunity to draw that business in. And then the county doubled downed on it. Yeah. And now we're, you know. I feel like a big turning point. Now we're booming.

I don't know. Is that an accurate description? Yeah. And I think the part of that doesn't get a lot of attention, I mean, you referenced American High, obviously they're doing wonderful things there. Yeah. But initially when we started, a lot of the people that worked on these movies had to come from Buffalo or downstate. But Eric and the county, they've done a great job creating the local workforce.

So now a lot of that money stays home, local jobs, which is important. We're part of the STEAM school in that realm. So that part of it takes time to build out, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And now we've got, you know, I have high school kids that reach out to me all the time. Hey, I'm interested in film and going to school for that. can you kind of take me around and we hand them off to Eric. So we're starting to develop our own talent. You saw Mr. Emmy there with his movie that he'll be rolling out shortly.

It's great. It's local talent. You know, another element of that is you've got to think about the Newhouse School, right? You know, there's TV and film embedded in there. And a lot of times, same with the Park School at Ithaca College. You know, a lot of these people graduate and then they go to L.A. or New York. And I think we're going to see over the next decade, a lot might stay here as this. build. Yeah, I think you're onto something.

That's something we've tried to, we've tried to reach out to some alum and get them interested in Syracuse. Why not Syracuse? Yeah. We're going to see Bobcat Gold's Wait do some things here. It's awesome. Yes. So we're excited about it. We are happy to promote that any time you want.

Yes. Especially if you could get Bobcat in here. Even tame Bobcat. He would imagine I could. That would be incredible. He's a big champion for the area. I don't think that's a huge far-fetch request. Oh, man. Such a Police Academy fanboy. I would have to really take a few breaths before that interview.

Yeah, we might have to sedate you. I might have to not come in at all. It might be for the best. My smotching from home this episode. Bobcat was just like, man. He was like unlike him and Kinnison in the 80s. It was just like unlike anything you'd ever seen. And then Farley came along, just that high energy madness.

I love it. But, no, there's so many great things. And that's the thing that I'm very excited about is, you know, between the Micron Project and all these. other things that are happening. You know, it's these problems that you've mentioned we've had for years. We've got these awesome universities that train the best and the brightest. And then they go.

Dispatch them away. Yeah. You know. And now we've got a reason for them to stay. Absolutely. We're building, I tell you, we're building a really good ecosystem for, especially the tourism industry here. You mentioned Mike Kron. They're going to do gangbusters filling up hotel rooms during the week.

And there's going to be a lot of new hotel rooms coming on with that. But then the weekends, we've got to fill up the. weekend so a few miles from here carrier park will be done in March you know that's a $20 million project that'll have two super fields tons of baseball fields you'll be able to play soccer lacrosse certainly for special needs folks that's one of the only certified facilities in the country oh wow and then Hopkins Road the county's doing the same thing so my goal and I kind of started all of this with the company called Salt City Sports really pushing on the county exec and the led

legislators to invest in youth sports because it is a recession proof. And we're going to see $20 million at Hopkins Road. We will become the youth sports capital of the Northeast with these facilities in a few years from now. Hopkins Road will be done in a matter of a year from now. So we're already marketing that in other areas. So you're going to see a big lift with those competitive sports here. And it'll benefit the community during the week.

So we're very, very excited what's being built here. It's world class. When you think about the increasing population, more and more families, more kids, you know, we need to invest in these things like this. We're not going to have anything for them to do. You know, there's going to be the school league that can take 20 kids and that's the end of the story. Exactly. What do we do with the rest of them, you know? So this is great.

That's a great economic lift. When you look at tourism, we look at 24 numbers and what tourism generated saved the average taxpayer about $900 a year. Wow. So if we continue to grow that, that's great for everyone. Yeah. Yeah, let me ask you on that. You know, there's been grumblings that tourism is down in the United States. I don't know about here, but as someone who works in this industry, when you hear that or maybe you experience it, what's like, what's the move in the tourism industry to kind of combat that?

I'm just, I don't mean it as a hard hitting. I just, I'm curious as to how you combat when tourism is down. I think it's one of those things where you can make the numbers say whatever you want. Sure. Is tourism down nationwide? It is. It's probably one or two percent. but most of it's international driven based on the status of the visas and those things.

Is it down? It is. But when we look at Syracuse, we used to be what I call a flatline market. I've been in this industry, in this market for 35 years. When the market was struggling, Syracuse never took that low dip. Nice. But when the markets were flourishing, Syracuse never got that high. Those days are different now.

We're actually one-tenth of one percent over last year. Wow. So we would have liked to have seen a little bit more growth, but it's not killing us. The hotel occupancies are super strong. The rates are up. We haven't seen that dip yet, knock on wood. Now, I think we would see a dip in the future just based on what's going on with 81, with downtown being a little wacky at times.

So I think we're going to see a little dip, but on the other side of that, we're going to come out of it very, very strong. So what do we do? We know that Canada right now, the reception, there isn't great. So we just take the money that we would spend there in a marketing campaign, and we go into markets that are really, really doing a great job for us, like New York City, Philadelphia, Boston. So we just double down there. That's great. And we try to get more of those folks here. So I say if we can just hang on and stay relatively flat and weather the storm will be just fine, and we've done that so far. What a great answer. That's great. I've always wondered that.

Yeah, how do you combat when tourism is down? You know, what's interesting is it reminds me of last week, we randomly discovered this content creator, this woman and her fiancé from Boston. Well, they're from the UK. Well, they're from the UK originally, and that's, of course, they got the accent, so that picks you up. But they live in Boston primarily now in the United States, and what they do is travel to different parts of the country. They recently came to the Adirondacks and had nothing but great things to say about upstate New York. And it was just, you know, it speaks to that folks. It was a day trip for them to come here and had the time of their life.

that they never expected. Yeah, I mean, you teed me up for something there kind of indirectly, but our challenge right now is we're focused. The World Cup's coming next year. Oh. We know, you know, international travelers are going to spend probably 20 days here. Wow. We know they're going to be in New York City, New Jersey, Toronto area.

What do we got to do to get them to stop over in Syracuse, even if it's for a night? So that's our focus right now. Wow. That's awesome. Because that's a, you talk about a massive and bucks of visitors. Yeah. And we know they're going to go to Niagara Falls. Sure.

What do we got to do to get them stop in Syracuse? So that's what my team we're focused on right now for next year. Not to knock Niagara Falls, but I feel like we could offer them something way more interesting. I know that seems to be the natural draw, but then you get there and you're like, okay, now what? No, I know what you mean. Like, yes, you should go see it. It's one of the Seven Wonders of the World, whatever. But also, there's a lot of other cool things going on.

Yeah. And something that I hope you can combat too is people, we talk about this all the time on the show. People in New York City or in the tri-state area, they think, upstate is like an hour north, which I guess technically it is, but we need more people like the woman from Boston that came, you know, came down and was just like, whoa, okay, you know,

there's so much more than just trees and, you know, let's go back to this upstate thing, because you want to talk about my top pet peeve. Let's do it. Let's go on Syracuse.com and it'll say, upstate man charged with X. And it's in Westchester County? Or, well, whatever serves

their purpose. One day it's Utica. Yeah, sure. The next say it's Poughkeepsie. Right. All right. We're central New York. We're not upstate. We're central.

There you go. New York State, we're in two different, in the tourism region, we're in the finger lakes. Yes. In what they call the regional economic development council region, we're in central New York. So the state can't even get it. All right, sermon's over. Fair enough. We did a thing on the show once where we put the map up and I asked him to draw a line where you thought upstate started.

do you have in your mind where an hour north of New York I would say so too an hour and above I'm with you on our video about the wild in Chittanango I opened up with saying

we're in upstate New York and this guy no you're not you're in Western New York half the comments are people arguing but the one guy who claimed we were in Western New York which we're not appropriately been crucified I feel like but yeah no that whole argument ensued

It's just wild. Yeah. It's funny what's considered upstate. We need to, we need to. I feel like you, though, of all people, have the gravitas for lack of a better term. You have, you're able to, your word holds more water than ours. I feel like if you say an hour. I feel like if somebody played it the right way, they could win a state level election with the right position on that particular.

Just on that platform. Listen, I'm going to pass a bill that sets the line. We're going to put up signs. It's going to be a whole thing. We're going to draw a line. Google Maps is going to say welcome to upstate as soon as you drive over the line. You know, like it says welcome California or whatever. Poughkeepsie upstate, you get a $50 fine.

You know, you go farther. Anyway. You're on something there. Danny from Visit Syracuse, buddy, we will let you get back to all of your duties of promoting our beautiful area. But before we go, where can people find more websites, socials? What's all that fun stuff? It all starts at visit surrequise.com. Be sure to check it out.

You can certainly subscribe to our newsletters, our week. our weekly updates on what's going on in town. Our calendar is our top-searched item on there. And if you're a local business and you have an event, you can put it on our calendar. Just email me. Oh, that's great. That's great to know.

Show you how to put your event in there. We do have some editorial privileges. Sure. You'd be amazed how many, let's say, adult events think they put them on there. But if they have events and we can help promote them, our calendar is a great place to be. We get several million views of that each year. So visit Syracuse.

dot com. My information is right on the website. That's awesome. Danny, you're doing amazing things. Danny, thank you so much for joining us. Mike, any final questions for our man before we let him out of here? I mean, I feel a baseball playoff question here. Well, I mean, we could get into that.

That just seems dangerous. Well, I'll ask, no, I could, no, because I'll go another hour. That's a whole other show. Yeah, I'm going to shoot a sports. We are, by the way, launching a Good News York sports show. GNY Sports. Posted by my buddy here. So down the road, Danny might be a great guest.

You know what? I was thinking that. When you and I started talking about Syracuse football, I'd love to have you on for that. You guys may not know this, but I spent 34 years in sports television. No, that's right. You talked about that.

Actually, now I actually mentor some kids from community college on Spectrum. One, we do a Friday night game of the week, and I'm on there as the broadcaster. So if you talk sports, bring me in. I'd be happy to do it. I think it would be, let's rephrase that. I think I would be a great guest.

Yeah, right. Oh, no. We should just let him do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we talking about here? You host and I'll just, I'll just say, as much as I'm not a sports guy, the sports content is some of our most popular stuff on all the channel. So I'm happy to embrace that.

It also brings the most trolls. People, if you say one thing wrong about the, you know, the team that they root, oh, my God. Yeah. Then they go straight for the insults to, like the personal insults. But I can take it. That's a part of the game. All right, guys. I'm Matt. That's Mike. He's Danny. The other Danny behind the board looking extra fly. You don't have a camera on it.

You, Danny is the big Dan Bouski today. He looks phenomenal from head to toe. He's ready to. Tomorrow's our 100th episode, brother. Oh. So tomorrow's the big day. Yeah, good news. You're sponsored by ads on the go. Get ads on the go.com. The big 100 tomorrow. Big thank you to our boy, Zach. It adds on the go for sponsor. He's been with us for at least what, 50 episodes or something at this point? I would say so. Yeah. At least half the ride so far. So, love him. Literally the ride. Yeah, literally. He rides around.

He does listen to us in the truck as he's advertising local businesses. So at least he says he does. I don't know. Well, you know what? He might never have shown. We should tell a bad joke about it and just see if he, hey, man, why did you just get to? Zach, your truck smells bad. All right.

Let's see if he tells us. Yeah, then we'll know if he's really left. We just. Smelly truck. We just lost our only. We just lost our only sponsor. What did I just do? Anyway.

We better go. Yeah. Peace out. It's a gentle cruising. You start to see the village, almost like a painting. Join me, travel expert Darley Newman and Uniworld Boutique River Cruises L'Ik Bally to learn about river cruising in France. As we have been selling there for decades, we have been able to create deep connection with the local communities. Local connections make exploring France easy. Tune into the Travels with Darley podcast on IHeart and wherever you listen to podcasts to hear about river cruising and Univor. world's 50th anniversary summer specials. You're listening to a podcast right now.

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