371: Lucas Dickey: How Deepcast is Revolutionizing Podcast Discovery

I almost went to law school, by the way. That was what I thought I was going to do and then did not. Podcast junkie-ism is like Amicus, which is Dahlia Lithwick's about the Supreme Court and current activities with the Justice Department, etc. She's a former Slate. I think it's Slate. I don't actually remember who puts out the podcast, but it's called Amicus. And I love... those sorts of things too and trial like data exploitation

artificial intelligence, machine learning, application of data to unique fields. I was like, love this. Check all the boxes. Generally, if there's something that's complex like that and technology can play a part, I'm a fan of thinking it through.

Podcast Junkies episode 371. Welcome back. I'm your host, Harry Duran. If you are new to the show, it's the one where we search out interesting voices in podcasting. We get them to kick back their heels, talk about their show and whatever else is on their mind or going on in their life or with their businesses, as is the case with this week's guest. In case you missed last week's episode, we had a fantastic conversation with Eric Melkor. He's a marketing expert and podcaster.

who shared his journey from Texas to Bucharest, Romania. And his story is a testament to how life can take unexpected turns, lead to new opportunities and personal growth. In this conversation with Eric, we discussed the transition from corporate marketing to the startup world and how he eventually found his way into podcasting with his show Innovators Can Laugh.

Eric's insights into the podcasting space are both practical and inspiring, and he talks about the innovative ways he's grown his audience, including several things that I want you to listen out for when you go back and listen. Create core episodes for each episode, host cocktail parties to build connections.

We also delve into his thoughts on AI and podcasting and how he's leveraging tools like ChatTPT to enhance productivity. Chock full of great information. Please check that out if you haven't done so already. This week, I'm thrilled to welcome Lucas Dickey. He's the CEO of DeepCast. and it's a relatively new entry into the podcasting space. We talk about Lucas's journey from music aficionado to tech innovator.

And he shares how his experiences in digital music, e-commerce, and ad tech converged to inspire DeepCast, a platform aiming to revolutionize podcast discovery and monetization. We dive into the challenges of finding a niche content in a sea of podcasts and how Deepcast is leveraging AI and advanced search capabilities to connect listeners with relevant shows and episodes. This conversation explores the potential for new revenue streams for indie podcasters, which I love.

We talk about passive affiliate income, targeted advertising, and we dive into Lucas's passion for supporting creators. What I love about this conversation is as we dove deeper into the world of podcasting, I was struck by Lucas's systems level thinking.

and how his drive to expand the possibilities for both listeners and creators in this evolved medium drives his thinking process. Here's five takeaways I want you to listen out for in this episode. Number one, leverage AI and transcripts to enable deeper podcast discovery.

Two, consider creating a second screen experience for podcasts similar to IEMDB for movies. This could include episode summaries, key takeaways, and links to reference people and products. Three, indie podcasters should be exploring new monetization opportunities such as affiliate links.

for products mentioned passively in episodes, or pooling inventory across smaller shows for ad buys. Four, use AI-powered chat interfaces to gain insights into what listeners are most interested in. This data can inform future episode planning and guest bookings.

And five, think holistically about the podcast ecosystem and look for opportunities to create value for both listeners and creators. If you are enjoying this episode or any of the past episodes, I would truly love it if you leave a rating and a review at podcastjunkies.com forward slash love.

Nothing would please me more than to read yours out next. Tons of great takeaways in this episode as always, but I want you to focus all your energy on the conversation. Rest assured, you can always visit podcastjunkies.com to read the full show notes, which includes all guest links as well. Okay.

Before we get into this uninterrupted conversation with Lucas, a few words from the amazing folks that support this show. Hey, Harry here. I've just updated my ultimate podcast launch game plan where I'll teach you the six phases of a successful podcast launch. This free one-page PDF walks you through the six phases of a successful launch and provides links to services and tools that you can begin using to launch your show today. When you sign up,

I'll send you the PDF, which includes six phases of a successful podcast launch to quickly focus on each step properly, a Notion template to set up your own ratings and reviews guide for listeners, a full list of gear recommendations to save you hours of research time,

and actual applications I use every day to produce shows for our clients and our students. This game plan will give you the confidence to take that next step. Your audience is waiting to hear from you. Let's make it happen. Head on over to podcastjunkies.com forward slash game plan to pick up your free copy.

So Lucas Dickey, CEO of DeepCast, thank you so much for joining me on Podcast Junkies. Thank you, Harry. I'm happy to be on Podcast Junkies. If only people knew what happens behind the scenes when an episode gets recorded. second third takes all the restarts all the refreshes that's very true it's also the uh hey i forgot to hit the record button and we just did an entire 60 minute i actually talked to somebody else who said they record all of their own sessions in parallel

Yeah. So that if necessary, they can send them after the fact. And they were like, it's saved three or four interviews because they do the sort of redundancy on their end, which makes total sense. It's probably a smart thing to do, but 11 years in, I probably can't. I think I've only lost one interview since then, or maybe because of tech related issues. So knock on wood. So we were connected through Allie because she's working on your show.

And I was, she was kind enough to connect us and I was on and we had a great conversation and I can't wait till that gets released and maybe we'll sync it up so we can release yours and mine at the same time. So people get the full experience.

How long have you known Ali? Yeah, it's been in at this point, three or four months, but it became a fairly like tight uh relationship i mean because she's produced so many shows and then she has her own show yeah she knows how to get into the groove really quickly she also knew so sound strategy being the name of the podcast and then i

keyword stuffed it after talking to adam scheibel so it's now the sound strategy with lucas dickey the most meta podcast about podcasting ever so i get podcasts about podcasting in there my name in there and the name of the show sound strategy itself is like

a good keyword for differentiation yes but it misses out on the things like podcasters looking for things about podcasting because they didn't have it in the title so it's now in there obviously it's in the show notes as well but like hitting hitting both is good for redundancy purposes and

i don't usually do the whole show name when i talk about it but then when i write it it's always in written form right yeah yeah so she came on what i wanted to do with sound strategy was somewhat similar to your sort of job or focus or whatever you think about it with this show. Sure. But it's also a marketing vehicle for deep cast and deep cast creator, although I'm taking the sort of show don't tell.

approach and i don't heavily sell so when i come on you know hello lucas dickey founder of deepcast ali kicks in as like co-producer and occasional co-host yeah um and she was in our episode for example and um She has been a major value add for me and she was also trying to figure out how to manage within my budget. With us, and I think this is anyone who has a show, where do you choose to allocate dollars?

And so, yes, we're a commercial entity, which in some ways makes us like a studio or network or agency produced show. On the other hand, it's a marketing vehicle and I'm thinking about it relative to other customer acquisition costs, et cetera, right? We also happen to have with Deepcast Creator, which I imagine we'll get into later, like this sort of asset generation and setting things up for me that the marketing side, I just said, we'll take that over. Oh, you're doing.

Show prep, guest bookings, the research that sets me up so that I don't look like an idiot when I talk to guests. What are the things that are important to them? What are the alignments with things that I'm interested in so that we can drive the conversation? And she's done a great job on that. I would say shout out to Allie, by the way. I've just pushed three prospective customers to her in the last week. So guest booking for one, show production for another one for a coach slash former.

being very senior like operator at Amazon and a bunch of other companies. Yep. Oh, Ali's doing a great job. And obviously she has her show as well. So I think knowing that she was a consummate professional, I liked her sort of film. tv industry background so production on that side of things she's got a good holistic view and even though she's not doing marketing for us she's still providing me feedback on like hey this has worked this hasn't worked and you can choose to do this other thing

For example, like our show, we're recording on StreamYard, right? And I don't have a budget right now to do video editing. She's doing audio editing, but I don't want her to do performance right now. So I was talking about whether Should I just take it as a director's unedited cut? Drop it into YouTube only for that. Separate it from all the other channels. If there's discovery there. And that also gives me something too.

clips start in endpoints and share off to places. So again, like a marketing collateral on that front versus the rest of the show in the audio format being like legitimate good content that we all want to engage in depending on where you sit within the podcasting ecosystem or even as a listener I mean because we're talking about things that to your point about inside the actor studio I don't act

But I still loved watching and saying like, what was the inspiration of director, actor, whatever it happened to be? And how do they work through those things? So if you like, I always like inside baseball in almost every industry. So I tend to be like.

diving deep into the nitty gritty and try to increase yourself so yeah let's talk offline about some video ideas i think a couple ideas came to mind as you were talking about that and i think there's something i can help with for sure perfect yeah

So I love that we have that in common that you were also a DJ. I actually got into podcasting because of DJing because if you could pan the camera to my left, my turntables are still set up with my vinyl, my Technics 1200s.

so i grew up like since i was 16 like house music dj like i still love it it's a super passion of mine i thought i was going to go to a podcast conference to learn how to interview djs and i realized how hard that would be because they're all globetrotting djs yeah so i switched to podcasters and that's hence

Podcast junkies was born in 2014, but I saw that's a little bit, and you also, you know, have a music background. Is that an early passion for you? Yeah. Um, it's actually an interesting, I grew up in a family that. You know, both of my parents played instruments in high school and college, and yet they didn't encourage any of us to play or push it upon us. So we didn't naturally, me or my brothers, end up playing any music, which is a bit unfortunate.

Then I hit college. So I went to high school in Germany and I returned back to the United States at the Napster, Kaza, etc. Actually, I was doing all of that in Europe before then landing back in the US.

and i landed in college and i had a t1 line in the dorm room and it was just how much could i torrent or download as quickly as possible terabytes of music yeah and then i was sitting and i was skipping class to watch bet because I didn't have music videos where my family had no television those four years I lived in Germany so I only got it when I was like over at friends houses so I was just binging on music in a major way yeah and

Most people will tell you this, including ChatGPT, when I asked it this question, what are things I don't know about myself that maybe I should know? And this I already do know now, but I like lots of things. And when I do those things, I don't do them superficially very well. I'm doing this experiment right now with AI generating a fashion brand. It's a nerd streetwear brand. This right here is me. It's a 5950.

All the hip hop folks like this, rear folks like this fitted, you know, etc. But this is an embroidered, this was AI designed.

okay and then i'm assuming for those who hear this on audio they won't be yeah you're gonna have to watch the video now because i was gonna tell them they can go to a-ok.shop and they can check it out but like i've generated 40 different t-shirt hoodie and hat ideas my copy is generated and i'm playing with the whole thing as ai driven as it can be right but this is me saying hey i want to play with a couple like a t-shirt

All of a sudden it becomes I'm launching an AI streetwear brand, right? So music was kind of the same for me in that era where I was like, Oh, I'm falling in love with all these independent hip hop artists and like i can see all of them because they all swing by seattle because it was a big like underground hip-hop town like a fan of it and so i was like i should probably like get into this thing so i bought my 1200s i bought a battle mixer

i bought an mpc and then i was using um it was an ableton at the time what was i using with the long-standing sound no no um yeah been around forever Pro tools. Yeah. So I was using, you know, pro tools on my laptop doing what I could. And, and then that sort of morphed into college radio through an internet-only station we had, and then I started reading ad copy on an actual non-profit station called KXP in Seattle.

and then they called me college boy because i could read the underwriting without messing up the underwriting which mattered to the underwriters that's funny and steadily i just took over more and more of the show to the point where like every second show i was deejaying three hours straight and then i was like oh can i produce my own remixes to these so i would use like the original plus acapellas yep switch from one to back

and then i was like i love this and so like more and more so i have both bought and sold gear three times i sold uh gave away a collection of 16 000 records wow so anyways very much loved music and i go deep when i and like again inside baseball like publishers labels ascap bmi csac once in europe like What is the radio industry? How do you like collect revenue on that versus and this was pre everything except for iTunes and Pandora at the time really like in a meaningful way. So anyways.

That's my entry point into it, which led me into my professional career in the digital music world. I saw that. shortly after that went to go work at amazon i did and even the company before amazon was a white label music provider so we did content licensing we wrapped in the digital rights management because this was the drm era

We did billing customer. We basically did everything but the UI presentation layer and editorial. And then our customers were like Microsoft Zune for that short lived period. Yahoo Music Unlimited, HMB, Virgin Digital, and Tesco in the UK. But I got to know metadata really well. I got really good at writing shell scripts to clean up things that were like malformed XMLs.

yeah so i've always had a bit of a technical bent though i'm not an engineer but like i wrote my own blog platform in 98 or so because i was tired of handwriting every one of my blogs before they were called blogs If only I'd have been domestically based in San Francisco, I would have collaborated with Ev Williams on blogger.com and made a hundred million selling it to Google. That was about the case. Tyrone didn't work on that one. Yeah.

That being said, that led me to many things that ultimately got me where I am here, but 10 years after I was out of the digital music space. But I was at Amazon when we launched digital music as a category. What was the biggest...

Kind of takeaway or lesson that you got from working and you're spending your time at Amazon. Getting to one lesson is very hard when you've worked at Amazon that long. So I was there for four plus years, but maybe give me three lessons. How about that? One. systems level thinking because I operated in a single business unit, digital music, right? However, at the time, Amazon had 55 business units of which AWS was just one business unit at the time, right?

um so this tells you how long ago i was there now it's hundreds of business units but i was advocating for as part of creating this cloud storage solution for consumers you could think of as like dropbox or google drive but specifically to store music in so that you could listen to your music anywhere that you purchased from Amazon or upload to your cloud storage locker in the sky. And this was at the sort of transition phase.

Spotify was live in Sweden and Finland, but had not made it domestically yet. I was VPNing into Spotify as soon as it launched so that I could experience the whole thing and said, this is where it's going to go. Senior leadership wasn't ready for that yet.

However, I did advocate for this other solution Amazon always opts for. It's a value selection and convenience. In this case, it was a convenience play. And so I actually advocated for buying Dropbox. At the time, I was advocating for $150 million acquisition. yeah they're a multi-billion dollar public company now right but it happened to be the number two customer of amazon at the time or aws so andy jassy who is the now ceo was the senior vice president of aws at the time and he said lucas

you know i don't want you buying my number two customer out from underneath us this is what facebook had been doing at the time by the way so they would launch an api they would encourage people develop on it the best app would like be the cream of the crop they would buy that app

Or they would reproduce it and then shut down the API. So he's like, this is not what we want to do if we're going to create AWS as the business that we have in mind. So again, I had not saw through his lens, which was much bigger than my lens. So now when I think about, and we talked about it a little bit offline, like I think a lot about incentives of players and things. So I have my purview, but what is my investor purview? What are my two customer purviews?

what are their purviews right like going through the stack of the entire system and then recognizing that in parallel there's a little bit of a chaos engine always at play too so that's probably one takeaways like thinking bigger than like my myopic focus point yeah I think another was, I really did like their process for working backwards from a customer. I'm a very like document driven person. So I don't like PowerPoints, Bezos.

famous for not liking powerpoints he's like that's what lazy people do or that's how lazy people communicate ideas it's just too easy to put three bullets in an image and gloss over the details yeah so he's not a fan of it and it leaned like i had a liberal arts

you know, poli-sci philosophy, comparative religion. So I was used to writing a lot and I've just always written a lot. I was also doing music journalism while I was DJing and working at Amazon. So a writing centric that sort of forces clarity of thought.

which arguably i'm still struggling at 20 years later or whatever it is because i'm always too verbose but then i go through this editorial process and work is back and i think working backwards from what the customer wants as opposed to it's very much solutions oriented instead of problem oriented okay

like, or rather it is problem and rather than creating a solution where a problem might not exist, what is the problem the customer's facing, which in the case of what I was building at the time, which was called Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.

was customers want to be able to access the content they buy from Amazon anywhere. And if I buy it on my computer laptop or my laptop at work or home, I have to figure out how to get the content between the two. And for folks who are not old enough to remember, like smartphones were basically brand new then.

and google didn't even have google drive then or the list goes on and on so like working backwards was the right way to approach it and it lent itself to be a nice stepping stone to what amazon music ended up being thereafter and the integration so anyways i would say like systems thinking and very much like the customer obsession i pay attention to competition but only in as much as it might inspire features that are like what i think my customers want

but i'm not sitting there just like feature for feature watching them and sort of parody play because that's like death by a thousand cuts sometimes you don't get to focus so i'd say those are two takeaways maybe the third is i can survive in a highly volatile, aggressive environment where some people couldn't do it. I thrived in it. That means the pseudo-combative style was just fine for me. I thought it, I kind of thought it was all as like academic. I'm curious.

Because we're going to get into some of where you went after there and how it eventually led to DeepCast. But what I'm noticing, you know, coming out of college, I'm trying to think even before then, I get the sense that you have this strong, call it a work ethic. or this attention to detail or this kind of mission-driven focus. Were you always like this as a child? It's funny that you put it that way. Like as a child, self-motivated.

like early reader for fun right like john grisham in the fourth grade or something like that i think i read time to kill then because my grandpa thought i would like it despite my age and he was right sort of like the autodidact you know a lot of self-teaching Fun fact, you'll oftentimes hear autodidacts pronounce words wrong because they've read it so much in literature, but they haven't heard it used verbally because common layman term or layman speakers don't use those terms.

i was also a bit of a lazy but successful student so it meant that i could apply my time elsewhere for fun um but i was you know student council president vice president something like that class president one year okay model united nations president captain of the tennis team i played soccer so like very motivated but self like my parents i was the middle child with two very black sheep

older and younger brother so i just like did my thing and whether i got validation from them or not i did it anyways although later in life maybe i'm still seeking validation And then hitting college, that got a lot harder in terms of studying and whatnot because I just didn't study. But yeah, I have always been that. And it gets to infinite curiosity.

to really scratch itches sometimes i feel like you have to do things so i'm just a fan of trying right and doing the thing and maybe minimal fear of failure and you know knowing that i'll get a lot of credit for trying even if it fails

So it can gift and a curse, by the way, because I spread myself thin and I'm fine with it. But others can't necessarily write like, I can parallel process a bunch of these ideas. But how do I keep people like at my pace on all of these things yeah yeah which can happen within a company too where i'm like i can balance a bunch of competing priorities and pursue thought exercises

Sometimes those thought exercises get other people anxious and concerned because they're like, wait, are we going to do this thing? No, no, that's not what I was asking. We just need to think this thing through. Where does it lead? What's the eventuality? How do we scenario plan this?

That can be exhausting for people, especially if you're thinking about tons of things in parallel, right? Is that different than multitasking? Because I find myself sometimes... especially from microdosing my mind starts like working a bunch of different actions and i have the two screens on and i can like make like nudges towards things that i have an idea and okay let me just get put that in motion and then i'll just set it to the side and then another thing comes up

And I guess if anyone was watching me, they'd think that I'm like, you're very scattered. But I think in my mind, I can sort of like organize the thoughts and processes, keep it all going in a way. I'm not like trying to like complete like 10 tasks at one time, but I think.

I nudge them along and then I'm like, okay, I've nudged that one and I can just close it and put it aside. I'm just trying to find different ways to work for me because I'm a slightly neurodivergent and I always have ideas percolating. I got to find a way to figure out, you know, signal from the noise and all that sort of stuff. And what's 80, 20, all this. Yeah. Yeah. Did you happen to read Walter Isaacson bio of Elon Musk?

No, I've heard that was pretty interesting. It is interesting. One of my takeaways was, and this is probably me trying to project myself to someone I am not necessarily on par with in many ways, but is he a multitasker?

because he's managing whatever number of businesses at any given time and so walter's eyes is like no he's like a serial single threaded hyper-focused individual so he will time box four hours on a thing nothing else exists during those four hours i time box the crap out of my days

And I will close other applications. There's always like one sitting open just in case I need to drop a note to myself, which for the most part is just Slack and I'm slacking myself. Set reminders to myself off of Slack, et cetera.

But otherwise, I mean, this is how I like I can go from podcasts with you deeply focused on this, not paying attention to anything. I'm going to get off of this. I'm going to switch to another very focused task for an hour, right? I may do an hour on a personal project. mid-workday knowing that I really want to knock out this hour and then I'll flip back to the other mode and just keep going.

It's kind of how I've operated. So it works for me. So I don't think of it as multitasking. I think it was like this, you know, serial single tasking and it's just all daisy chained one after another. Makes sense. Being able to quickly context switch helps, which it sounds like you can probably do too.

yeah and i'm i've always been really good at that and like inference of conversations so like stepping into something that i know nothing and trying to quickly ramp up based on what's going around i don't know if that's a superpower or not but i've always somewhat been decent at that

yeah it's something that i think people need to be self-aware of their like learning styles and you know and i think i'm trying to become more aware of what works for me and especially with someone who's got like a lot of ideas percolating it's trying to figure out like

what I can get rid of and so I don't have a lot of open loops because then the open loops float around for a couple of years and then just then becomes a lot to start to manage but the time helps a lot it's time boxing than the other one by the way I was like a not a productivity hack person but i was a fan of sort of like the getting things done book yeah same yeah or sort of zero inbox thinking or if you've ever tiago forte's building a second brain

that one or if you've ever read high output management which is andy grove okay that's the top business book i ever recommend And Andy was sort of like the originator of the zero inbox and a lot of these sort of activities years ago. And then, you know, when he was at Intel and then wrote it all when he was at GSB Professor Sanford. But there's some other things that folks do like.

if you can answer the email in under two minutes just do it like don't keep it in your cognitive overhead and a great example of this the consumer ceo of amazon jeff wilkie no longer but what at the time invested in my previous business he was my senior vice president when i was there and when we like did a follow-up to arrange a call with him he responded in under 10 minutes and it wasn't his ea and i emailed back and i was like jeff

how the heck do you do this? And he's like, delegate as much as possible, pull myself out of decisions I don't need to be in. If it's a one-way door versus a two-way door decision, if it's one way, include me. If it's two-way, figure it out yourselves, right? so how do you push those things away and if you don't keep the cognitive overload then you're not stressing about that stuff so like my inbox is partially zero because i use what was formerly the boomerang function now called snooze

And I will snooze to particular times to manage it so that I am not going into my email saying, wow, when am I going to get to that? I'm like, I know when the responsible moment to get to it is. It's tomorrow afternoon. So I snooze it tomorrow afternoon. If it requires more than two minutes, if it's under two. just bang it out so yeah that's how he managed to do it same way i've heard it described as deferred

delegate or delete or delete defer and delegate i don't know there's some word no that's the one yeah i think they use it for email in particular but he kind of expanded that beyond email to just like everything right yeah there's a new service i'm using called quora that basically does that for your inbox

And it just delivers you a summary, an AI summary at 8 a.m. and at 3 p.m. So it's been helpful for me because I, you know, I like to think I have the discipline to do that. But if I see stuff floating around in an inbox, you know, I'll be like, maybe I should answer that.

that it's been running for the past couple of weeks and it's been kind of like calm interesting down my inbox you should reach some inbox sanity you should reach out to kevin ruse at new york times and the hard fork because recently he's been talking about like an obsession with getting his inbox managed

oh yeah to the point that he was trying to vibe code his own version of it and he's like just kept him running into a bunch of google related issues but which is always the issue he doesn't want to send his data to a third party either which is part of the challenge. I was like, well, Udita's already with a certain part. They're the ones monetizing anything more than anybody else on that front. So what's your concern? Yeah. So I'm curious as we get closer to the concept for DeepCast.

After Amazon, you spent some time at a couple of different companies, Dell Twist, Telenav, Adam Tickets, Rival. Did any of those experiences help kind of shape, you know, this path that you were on? For sure. so like double twist was my first foray into sort of startup world and jumped from Amazon to San Francisco to pursue that one. At the time, they were nicknamed the iTunes for Android because Android hadn't yet had the Google Play ecosystem. Those guys were great.

if there was a gray zone they played with it and i kind of learned where i was comfortable or not but like wwdc first day apple's got all its people coming to town if you know san francisco all that well there's a Apple store on market, which is where they always do big announcements. There happens to be a BART entrance that runs up the side of that. No one ever advertised along the escalator all the way up. so they bought the ad space for under 10k and on w it launched wwdc day one and it said

set your music free and had like a big X through iTunes because they just hated DRM. The founder was DVD John who you know um reverse engineered the dvd encryption as a 16 year old in 1998 because he wanted to be able to rip dvds to play on his linux machine so he was all about sort of like your media should be free and he hated drm

But they love to do things like that. And by the way, the media company who owned the outdoor space, Apple came and said, you have to take it down immediately. And they said, we sold the space. It was sitting empty. And you're like, we spent so much with you guys.

offer them something to take it down. So they gave us, I think it was another half million in order to make it go away. And it got Wired Magazine covered it. Everybody did. So interesting lessons around leverage and what do you call it? um asymmetric fashion it's almost like warfare between you know street fighters and big planes right so we were the street fighters the guerrilla fighters girl marketing yeah exactly i also built with them

12 different media players, same player, but across 12 different platforms, which most people wouldn't know them. It was like WebOS. Intel has one that's called Tizen, which is now used for smart TVs, but it was heavily used in India and China for some phone manufacturers at the time.

okay some an integration with sonos just a bunch of stuff so again media management players within that context i wanted us to have other things to generate revenue for the company so i was just constantly looking for things and one of them was like Should we have our own subscription radio station to compete with Pandora? So we built one. And for those who are familiar with some of Spotify's acquisitions, they had a company they acquired called the Echo Nest.

Circa 2017. The Echo Nest is what basically created their recommendation algorithm for music because they were doing a music genome. Oh, yeah. And it was like two MIT PhDs that one was like digital signal processing and music theory.

And the other, I don't remember what it was, but anyways, the Echo Nest, I took the Echo Nest and I took this white label music service provider called Seven Digital out of the UK, combined the two, built business logic, launched a radio station within the context of what we were doing.

So it was like continuing that media move. And then when I switched over to TeleNav, it was technically a company called Thinknear, where they were acquired by TeleNav in my month between accepting the job and starting the job. But I stuck around kind of as a key man clause because they were anticipating me playing a major role in the business had it not been sold. And I just switched titles in different contexts. But that was an ad tech company.

So we were buying media on behalf of advertisers and agencies based upon geolocation.

and historical geolocation so where you are now versus where you had been and then attempting to infer things location based against that if you're half a mile away from mcdonald's it's a great thing to advertise mcdonald's to you if you've gone near the mcdonald's 18 times in the last week great right this was also before a bunch of the privacy stuff came into play uh the world west days of early mobile advertising but i learned a lot about

monetization in the context of advertising so how does real-time bidding work from both sides buy side and sell side how do you create those opportunities with information that makes it interesting whether psychographic demographic historical behavior patterns whatever it is we use location obviously is one of them um sort of working with agencies versus brands what is like selling a sponsorship that is not an insertion order

that is not fulfilled in an RTB fashion or a real-time bidding fashion, which is applicable in the world of, you know, dynamic ad insertions versus sponsorships, right? So very relevant in this world. So media to ad tech. And then Adam Tickets was a movie ticketing to compete with Fandango, or at least that would go full. And they were heavily funded by all the studios. And I launched their ads business there.

And that one, the ads part of it was a little less interesting to me because it was kind of rote for me at that point. But I was also standing up as sort of a data as a service that we were going to try to sell back into the studio ecosystem.

because we had first party data around who was buying tickets for what movies right meaning we had their email address we had their phone number we had either the aid or idfa at the time the unique identifiers for their device so it went to a star wars franchise movie

i would say disney you guys should be retargeting these people for merch visiting the park another use case was uh let's say the movie there was like high correlations with traditionally hispanic like central america and south american names you can assume that they speak spanish

Should you consider that a bunch of people going to this film that when you sell the digital or the distribution rights for this film, which may not have been sold yet internationally when you're showing the film domestically, should you consider those markets or those streaming services that are unique to that market?

how could i find and exploit interesting data to help them so you take all of those like music tech ad tech it's like data exploitation play moving across multiple medias right i did radio I did digital music, actually sold physical music retail at one point, like multiple times in college. There's a journalistic perspective, then film and television, right? So a lot of perspective that would make this arguably like a good sort of founder.

market or founder product fit, maybe more founder product than founder market, because I didn't know as much about podcasting at the time. Yeah. You know, as a consumer, less someone living it, I also then Furnish was on there, which was the company I co-founded in 2017. And that one was just what it meant to be.

a co-founder of a business and grow from the two of us to 250 employees having nine physical locations because it was a furniture rental and sales company so we had warehouse nine major metro areas serving surrounding areas physical movement of goods, recirculation because it's rental. So we also had to take what's called reverse supply chains and take possession of it, refurbish it in our warehouses. So we had to train refurb techs, go learn how to do all that stuff.

Again, completely new vertical I knew nothing about. But because co-founder and I'm a consummate sort of like king of hacks, generalist, whatever you want to call a range oriented person, I got to just tackle problem after problem after problem, which fits my sort of profiles of a person, right?

yeah which was great i learned how to raise money i learned what it's like to have a business that can struggle and go through like covid plus supply chain crunch plus the cost of delivery plus raw material increases plus the cost of capital increasing So again, systems thinking. So knowing these things, you have to, sometimes it's market timing more than anything else, right? And learning that lesson. So all of that, I would say kind of put me in the position to.

the deep cast and then the deep cast creator which came later so a lot of even got a little bit of experience with trellis law which helps i guess you're on the legal front now so trellis is interesting um the founder of trellis did Techstars LA with me, which is an accelerator program that I did in 2018.

And ended up just like loving the business. And so loosely listed there as an advisor and still the case. I almost went to law school, by the way. That was what I thought I was going to do and then did not. So some of my like. Podcast junkieism is like Amicus, which is Dahlia Lithwick's about the Supreme Court and current activities with the Justice Department, etc. She's a former Slate. I think it's Slate. I don't actually remember who puts out the podcast, but it's called Amicus.

and i love those sorts of things too and trial like data exploitation Artificial intelligence, machine learning, application of data to unique fields. I was like, love this. Checks all the boxes. Generally, if there's something that's complex like that and technology can play a part, I'm a fan of thinking it through.

that was very helpful and i know it's a meandering path for and i'm grateful to the listener and the viewer for sticking with us here because i think it really sets the stage for like where we are present day so you know it looks like you started

deepcaster on july 2023 so talk to me about the um the origin story like those early conversations were how did podcasting come into your world you know and what was you know, coming alive for you to decide that this is something you might want to start working on? So I was briefly chief product officer at a company that I was miserable at.

So part of it was like, I don't want to be miserable again. And partially because that one was a complex space, but I just wasn't interested in it. So I had sort of fell into it because when I was doing furniture rental, I learned a lot about. rental properties and multifamily housing and all that stuff. So it kind of put me in a position. But when I left trying to figure out who I wanted to be next again, which happens roughly every four years for me or less.

I was talking to a number of venture capitalists about potentially joining firms in some role. Chad was a longtime friend in that context. We were just shooting the breeze about problems that we were both experiencing somewhere in our lives that we were interested in tackling. And the both of us happen to be big podcast listeners. Him for health and wellness, me for tech, AI.

politics and then news news right so i don't listen to any true crime i don't listen to any fiction it's just like this information overload stuff that i love same and the two of us you know he basically said i don't understand like spotify you know introduced podcast support what was it over a decade ago and i was like yeah it's like why is it still so crappy and he's like and i don't just mean spotify it just happens to be what i use but

why is it the same on Apple and any one of these third parties like I don't get it why is discovery like why is it a top-down hierarchical navigation like Yahoo in 1998 why are we still doing that it's editorial and paid placement and he's like We've introduced so many things. Google changed everything here, right? He's like, I just don't get why there's not more sophistication here. And I said, I agree. Let me look into it, right? So I started thinking about...

I think the problem statement for users is like, why is it so hard for me to discover like net new content? It's easy to find the star power folks. How do I get to other things that are not using collaborative filtering to say, I listened to this and you listened to that, but it happens to be the thing that was like, call her daddy because I listened to Joe Rogan.

sure that they have similarities because they're both talk format shows, but there's not a lot of similarity otherwise in some ways. Or better example, Joe Rogan and then a recommends to me Up First or The Interview. there's no similarity between those two things it's simply saying these are like top 10 shows and so we're recommending it to you because other people have sent top 10 shows so he's like the both of us were thinking again

He built a search engine related business at one point that was an enterprise internal system. He'd also built and sold an ad tech company in the late 90s that went public. And so both of us were thinking like, Why are there so many, again, it just feels like technology and user interface and like the advent of better speech to text quality and the introduction of large language models with GPT and the chat GPT moment.

oh why is there also this secular trend of like adoption of podcast consumption happening at this rate the creation of new podcasts happening at this other rate but sort of like as the delta increased between you had to figure out articulate this so like the delta of discovery actually increased as there were more listeners it felt like so you had more compression of star power so your top 250 shows are listened by 80 of people top 25 190 which means the other

320,000 active podcasts in any given moment are only being listened to by sub 10% of listeners, right? Like, does it make sense in a world where we have the technology we have today? given there's so much niche in you know we all have these niche interests and yet there's not a thing that helps me do that other than top-down navigation between category and subcategory right um so we said how do we tackle that

and that was the start was with deepcast the consumer facing offering the creator side was in our uh roadmap but wasn't intended until two years from the inception i ended up pulling that sort of in early for a number of reasons but that was the incarnation of the problem going back to like the customer statement we both have sub problems like he wanted to be able to search for

um episodes by transcript snippets because he would remember he heard a thing but he couldn't remember if it was on a tia show or it was on hymen show or you know my sam harris whatever health wellness he was into and he wanted to be able to find it he couldn't do it and he wanted to be able to share with a friend couldn't do it right so he's like for him it wasn't new discovery more so like enabling him to revisit content for his own knowledge management purposes and dissemination to others

For me, it was like, I'm a junkie and I actually do want to find completely new podcasts that are related to the spaces I'm interested in. Why can I not do more of that? We contemplated things. The other thing we contemplated was

is this a player or is this a discovery platform and what does the discovery platform mean right you might think of it like i think in the podcast nomenclature it's like a listing service right i didn't really like that because i'm like we're not just doing listing of an rss feed We're doing a bunch more things beyond that. So sort of thought of it more as a discovery platform. I positioned it to some folks as a second screen experience, the sort of thing like you would use.

imdb in parallel to sitting on your couch looking for a thing to watch or who that actor is or who did the actor act with etc or genius.com or wikipedia you know the tried and true And how can we do more things along those lines ended up netting out like I love alliteration. So I think I came up with this later, but and backed into it, but it was around discovery, distillation, dissemination and digestion. So the first one being like, how do I find the thing second one being

i found it am i interested in this thing right like the distillation stuff that we do to decide a bit of try before you buy the dissemination like word of mouth is 87 of discovery or whatever it is independent whatever the status these days how do i make it easier to share with friends like any part of it can i maximize the shareability of the thing

in order to drive more word of mouth for any given podcast at the same time because i want to be able to brand equity coat ride and say well harry said this thing and the guy's a genius oh wait what did he actually say now i have to sit down and manually transcribe this garbage yeah right so and then sort of digestion came later when I was thinking a lot about some of this was just knowledge management. Like I listened to it, but I wanted to be able to go back and quote, exert, save, unite.

talk about our scatterbrains like i want to be able to drop it somewhere so that i can revisit it later but couldn't do i felt like i couldn't do those things and i also wanted to be able to discover in ways that made sense relative to an interest-based instead of just a volume-based. So Spotify introducing plays.

as of today and showing that to people i think that's just going to escalate star power and sort of like compress that power law curve is just going to be even more it's going to be like like youtube yeah exactly and it's like what i want is you discuss the topic

How do I navigate to other episodes that discuss topics, the same topic? You discussed a person. How do I go to an episode that discuss that person or product or company? What are all the other episodes that are discussing at the same time?

How much of what's out there are you ingesting? Because obviously it's dependent. I mean, are you ingesting all 300,000? No, I mean, that was a sort of a commercial decision in the short term that we had to do is like, we are.

And this is oscillated, right? So we were doing up to 6,500 podcasts at one time that I was sort of like picking based upon what I thought would be good sort of customer acquisition drivers initially, and then figure out how we could do more and more and more sort of mid and long tail over time, which is where.

what was called Deepcast Pro, which is now Deepcast Creator, came into play. I was like, look, if you guys can come to the platform and claim your podcast and then start augmenting it so the data that's on there is richer than what we would otherwise get. It's worth you being on my platform, even though I'm sort of paying for the operating expense or the cost of goods sold for transcriptions, AI, hosting, et cetera. When you say come to the platform, is it?

register my show and you'll ingest my rss feed or do you need to move over from your current host You do not need to move over a free current host. I think this is where it's like similar to a listing directory where some of them you're not added automatically. Others you have to manually like submit yours, do the verification thing, et cetera. We do that, right? So you don't have to host with us.

And that gave you also as a podcaster, an open web version of your podcast that is now highly Googleable. You will come before in many cases now. the random Spotify, iTunes, et cetera, listing that might not have anything to do with what they were kind of looking for precisely, especially if they're looking for an episode or topic or a person place product that you discussed. If you type podcasts that discussed blah, blah, blah.

sure we're oftentimes the number one return there and if it was someone who was kind of interested in hunting down this episode because we talked about amazon deepcast and whatever you'll be able to find it typically because of that so on the other hand we've had to manage costs so we are now very much leaning towards those who do choose to claim their podcast gets them in the creator ecosystem gets them doing more things for the fm so there's like a bit of a virtuous circle between the two

which by the way with an analogy there between imdb and imdb pro so amazon owns imdb and that business its revenue split is roughly 50 50 between the two businesses where imdb is ad sales right sponsorships full page takeovers i'm to be pro is you're registering to be part of a network you know and you're paying 17.50 a month and maybe they're a little bit more now but part of what you're paying for

big part of what most people pay for independent of the rolodex like agents being able to look up producer contacts etc is being able to augment your profile on imdb so if you're an aspiring actor producer writer and you know it's missing credits you pay to augment right if you're a big actor your agent does it because they want to rotate the images that are included in the image section you know carousel or they want to add to the

trivia about you because there's a thing they want to emphasize to make you look better to the media or whatever happens to be right so there's value bi-direction though because consumers love that stuff like the richer it gets on that side it's good for all parties so this is where At that point, we started thinking more and more and more about the podcasters as first-class citizens. And there's always been the aspiration that

We will ultimately push revenue back to podcasters for the consumer side of it, so deepcast.fm, under ideally a YouTube-esque split model or maybe slightly better. And there are things we haven't monetized yet, for example.

the entities that I was alluding to people place product companies on top of referencing them within our own catalogs what's known as like a graph network we also try to target the authoritative url for us you can look at it off platform which somewhat makes us like wikipedia in that respect right like we're okay driving traffic away from us which is very uncommon but you can imagine i'm on an episode that mentioned like four different supplements

and they were gnc supplements that we have links off to them all of a sudden you as podcaster who mentioned them passively are getting passive income through that relationship and we pass the revenues to you. You don't have to sign up for an affiliate program. We wrap it all and we distribute. Now we're not there yet, but like that's the intention with being able to use like it's an alternative way. This gets my thinking that I oftentimes have with.

like some dogmas and what i think is like myopia within the world of podcasting where people like nope nope this is the only way to make money yeah i'm like no no tam could be significant sorry target addressable market revenue could be significantly larger

If you looked at a bunch of other different business models and thought how they might be applicable here, the one I just made up, Spotify could do that, right? Of course. They're doing transcripts. They're doing entity extraction. They could be passing revenue back to you. But they're not thinking, they don't have the best interest of the...

I don't think they have the best interest of the podcaster, the indie podcaster in mind. And I think everything you're speaking to here speaks to kind of, this is like your ethos. How do we take care of, I mean, I've podcasted since 2014 and I see companies come and go and they're always trying.

And everyone that comes up with directories, it's always like the same shows being in discovery. Everyone keeps just talking ad nauseum about discovery, but it seems like you've really given it a lot of thought in terms of how you create something that's a win-win.

because i'm thinking about like as you know i was just kind of playing around with some of the links how they kind of take you deeper if you're talking about like i think one of the topics was like what's happening with like doge currently because it's yeah i don't know how much of it you're syncing up

What other conversations? Because you could look at like what's trending on Twitter, what's trending on LinkedIn, and you could kind of do an amalgamation and some sort of sourcing of like what's happening in the ecosystem of like what are people talking about? So that could give you a starting point.

and it takes you into these podcasts and then as a podcaster i'm like oh wait i want to know how many people landed on my deepcast page because you know deepcast sent them there because of something that was mentioned in my show so i don't know if you're at that point where we can see like traffic for

our profile or anyone visiting or kind of browsing on our page because that would be interesting not just yet but we're both for fm so the consumer product and then for pod sites which is like our competitive pod page and podcast page that's within deepcast creator

yes we want to be able to share metrics with you on that front because it is your authoritative website and you should be getting all those metrics but i also think like the thing we alluded to very early in the conversation around systems design and thinking about that way like

You're alluding to things that I experimented with. So at Amazon, we got pretty close to, and I think we're far enough away. I don't have to worry about NDAs at this point, but like striking a deal with Twitter so that you could use a special hashtag in your tweet. In order to reference a song on the Amazon catalog, it would be inline, playable, and then it would be purchasable. That was 2010 we had that conversation.

didn't end up doing it because they were contemplating something else and didn't end up pursuing it. Maybe it was a foreshadowing of their NFL deals that came years later, but that is the sort of thing. Can you prime the pump?

or like warm the cash if you want to use technical terms here a little bit like can i use trending topics on one and i did experiment with grok and do things like, hmm, can I draw correlations here? And their API does have access to Twitter, right? So can you draw those? And the answer is like, do we want to do those things? Of course. And I want to programmatically associate.

every podcaster on our platform and their guests with a social account as well so that when you share their tag then they're identified as well no one's really doing that it's like it's just these things to me i'm like why aren't more people doing it and to the point of your 2014 to today or you know talking to a rob greenley or dave jackson or whatever folks who've been around for 20 years

Many things I'm talking, you have seen folks come and go, but now feels like the era where technology is in a place to be able to do those things significantly cheaper and enable some sort of more expansive exploration there. Now, I take the attitude a little bit of rising tide floats all boats, and if some things that I advocate for manifest themselves in a different platform, that's okay. I think there's plenty of opportunity for us to collect.

like create value and sort of collect um so our part of that value um but i'm also happy you know if topic navigation became a thing within spotify that would be great Wondery is doing it within their Wondery app. Amazon Music's not doing it for podcast purposes, but at least within the Wondery app they are. And they introduced that sometime after we came out.

when you look at the experience on the discovery side how are you uh what are you measuring to know that it's succeeding and people are getting value from it very good question so typical sort of metrics around you know page views and on top of that is your time on site for those for me it's

we have other features there in right like you can bookmark or you can subscribe to what's called the deep digest which is a semi depending on how many podcasts you're subscribing to it could be every day or every other day where we're sending to your email inbox like one paragraph summary and two bullet key takeaways of any new episode for podcasts you're tracking so kpi for me or successful was like getting them to using that functionality getting them to use a bookmark on the consumer side

And ultimately, capturing enough of those signals that can we figure out with some subset of them how they would like to engage more deeply with those podcasts they are following or which discovery mechanism. Honestly, we're still in the product market learning phase and trying to get signals there. I can tell you that semantic search is hard.

and so like it works for us like 50 of the time in a good way and i think there's like best room for improvement and part of that is because we have not hooked for your technologist on the listening year the retrieval augmented generation where we're factoring in actual like llms interpreting it instead it's just the storage of the transcript and there are algorithms that predate

modern LLMs that can help with that, which is what we're leveraging. But on the other hand, when we have the, when someone finds something through Deepcast FM and gets to a, let's say a podcast page or an episode page and they play. Can we see those plays in our podcast hosts? Yeah.

yeah in every way we're fetching your audio enclosure value um and your accounts as a download playback um james cridland went and looked when we released our episode and he said here's the op3 tag breakdown of right so yeah everything every download on us is registered and then again it'll show if we go like if i go captivate my podcast host it'll show as a deep cast play

we have registered as a namespace in the uh open source library yeah that was james had also suggested that um that being said like i don't think playback on us is more i think it was a try before you buy a lot of it is discovery you don't watch the whole film on imdb right you're like kind of get a sense no no yeah i think it's just for a matter of like an interesting stat because

You know, it's almost like if I see activity happening on deep cast and I'll start to talk about it on my show and be like, Hey, if you're searching for any topics, you know, we saw that some folks found our show through that, you know, encourage people to kind of do that.

and do the same and i think it's like that especially within the in the world of like the podcasters you know yeah the nacho rogans like we all kind of like support each other's shows you know whenever we can so i think if this was like touted and it seems to be everything

that's like indie podcaster friendly like you know it's something that you know word of mouth gets out yeah people start doing more and more about it and you know even to the point of like um you know if you're going down the player route or discover more about us on deepcast or it could be even a way for

You know, for podcasters who've got a limited budget and don't have like a big website saying, Hey, if you want to search my back catalog of 300 episodes, go do it on Deepcast, you know, go do it on Deepcast and you could like learn about, you know, that could be something. Again, marketing brain is kicking in. Yeah.

if you had to sort of like plug in or something on the website for a podcaster and says you know ai powered by deepcast you know search through our own catalog and it kind of self-references back to the deepcast catalog that could be something interesting

we have very much thought about because we are an api first technology company when we created pod sites These are like your own. You can get a custom URL for it. I think it's easy for folks to think about as like pod page or podcast page, except for it's not just RSS regurgitation. We're generating a bunch of the content for you. Is it Podsitesites? It's Podsitesingular.fm.

okay a pod site is just a feature set within deep cast creator we just happen to have a landing page to do some explanatory stuff but if you go to soundstrategy.fm you can see it in action which shows off things like deep chat where you can chat with an episode chat with a podcast

which you're talking about interesting signals there. That one happens to be one where we've talked about, do we use deep chat, integrate that back into the consumer experience for one, two, create that as an embeddable. thing that you can put on your website you're hosting wherever it happens to be and then another cool feature we have there and a lot of this is sort of like we're resource constrained like every startup so where do we focus but when you as a user when you

chat with the deep chat. Great experience, everything you would assume on that front. We do citations, so if there's a quote and it's on an episode page, it deep links to the transcript. If you're on the podcast object... it will the citation will be to the episode so you might ask it a question and so again we're like really big into sort of citations for concerns around hallucination but also because it's basically journalistic and we do want to share those things

the flip side of you as a podcaster represents a whole new way to sort of like what are my fans actually interested in what are the listeners like there's a different modality when you google versus you chat with something or when you fill out a contact form so like hey contact me go to my website fill out the contact form very different like even though like the barrier to entry to do that are they interested versus going to chat did harry ever talk with so and so

In Harry's episode with Lucas, what was Lucas's big takeaway on X, right? And you can start getting a sense for, my hope is, are people asking about specific guests? Might that help you think about your show planning in terms of guest bookings? They're asking more questions of your weekend summary episodes versus your individual episodes. It's almost like you could take a recap of the questions that are being asked. Create a grab-back episode.

and but also you could because i think about how much i use chat to bt for just like my third my second brain or whatever yeah i'm just like i have a thought like it's not a cook like properly like polished thought

So it's just like a jumble of ideas, but I just dump it in there anyway. A lot of times it's like helps me iterate. Did you mean this or ask me like, I'm like, push me if you're not clear, ask me. And so it's kind of along those lines for the show. If people are searching for specific topics, you could have that kind of saying.

Hey, here's a recap of everything that's been happening around your show. We've positioned and we've created like a summary of what a next episode could look like. Here's the format. Here's the outline. Here's what you could talk about. And it's based on some of the things that people are engaging with.

Also, as an aside, people are in general talking, asking a lot about these questions. I noticed your podcast covers this topic. They weren't specifically asking it in relation to your show, but they were getting fed episodes from your like.

competitive call them competitive yeah competing shows so it seems like this is something that's bubbling up in the world of alternative health let's say there's like 10 mushroom podcasts and like nine people are asking a bunch of questions If you're like at the bottom of the pile, but you see that this conversation is happening because of the deep cast, like learnings, you could be like, well, I want to kind of like leverage that momentum and I'll do a podcast about.

what everyone else is talking about in the space and i could see how that could kind of like lend itself towards like helping indie especially i always think about indie creators they're just like trying to figure out what to talk about next or who to have next or even if like this these topics are being discussed

Who would be, you should probably reach out to this thought leader in the mushroom space because he talks about this topic. Maybe get a leg up. He's only been on two other shows. You know, can you kind of see how like you can kind of put this Intel together? You could probably, he hasn't. from what we've been able to see, you know, based on pod chaser, all this other data, I, you know, that, which is the IMDB of podcasting, like he's kind of like an up and coming riser in the mushroom space.

you should probably have them on your show so there's a lot of like interesting ways you know to kind of help from a creator perspective like have that you know like ai really put ai to good use test yeah i think you're totally right and you are quickly going off on like the right tangents i think with like what's possible and so you know i never really thought i when i talked about this

I think the DeepCast creator page says, and I'm horrible at remembering copy that I write, but something to the effect of, you create the show, let us help you with what comes after. Sure. That's now a misnomer, right? Because I never thought we would be getting to show planning or the creative part of creation of the shows, except for with this data signal.

you're getting that, right? Like your point, there are themes that are emerging. So initially, if we just give you raw, raw transcripts back and you know what they're asking, that's interesting. The other is where you start surfacing themes that are emerging on top of that. We do have a tool that is not public, but we have access to it internally. I was part of a content intelligence thing we were working on, which because we've done this topical analysis, we can look at either.

the next step was to identify like shows 20 shows like yours yeah and then do a topical comparison like in the trailing 7 30 60 90 days what topics are they discussing and what topics are you discussing and where are the deltas and you could identify more or less popular shows or those you think are more or less akin to yours is kind of like what you're getting at so if four shows of topic talk this about this topic you're like i don't even know what the heck this thing is

but like these guys are talking about it there's sufficient interest maybe i should go look into it so it's kind of melding you what you're describing is like where is the interest from a topical basis plus what we can infer from the interactions, like consumer interactions or fan interactions with this LLM model-based chat interface. There's also getting back to the passive income idea I was telling you about.

Just pause there for a second. How are you on time? Because I want to make sure. I'm good. Okay, cool.

I'm loving this, so I just want to make sure we keep going. We can keep riffing for 15 minutes. Where I was headed with the sort of deep chat, and earlier I was alluding to entities and the fact that we can do external URLs. Imagine someone going to your page and saying, what you know harry talked about being neurodivergent in a given episode and he talked about books that he used to help him learn how to manage or medications or whatever all of a sudden you've got like 18

monetizable things that can be surfaced the description coming back to you is normal but like anything that's a purchasable object is all of a sudden a link targeting a new tab for you to go buy that thing can I give you as the creator some large portion of that revenue because it was happening on your page? Yes, of course. Can I charge you some basic platform fee to coverage my costs? Yes. So that gets to...

There's like commerce involved in a way that you hadn't necessarily, like these don't have to be your sponsors. Like this is just anything you discussed in passing in your show that could be an actionable event. I talk about books all the time. sure and like you want to find that my Ezra Klein ends every one of his episodes with tell me three books you would recommend I buy one out of three of every one of those

I have to go hunt it down. Imagine it was just like right there and I click it and I purchase and some revenue gets passed back. Indies would love that. They don't have to do much work.

they're not yeah it's been the challenge for indies of setting up all these like plugins and the amazon affiliate and all this other stuff yeah i don't want you to have to do that and even with that yeah there's a company that's called the skim that basically they identify all the affiliate programs associated with a given purchasable product yeah you sign up with them and then

They will farm out the, you know, find the appropriate affiliate programs and boil it all up. And then I will wrap every these, and then I distribute revenues back to you because I've identified from an accounting perspective. Where did the finish that thought? Sorry.

No, I was gonna say this is a non built thing here. But this is like, having done attribution logic for other businesses having worked in ecom across a bunch of my career as well like digital music was really me and ecommerce but for music you know furnish was ecommerce figuring out how to properly attribute the revenue back to the original like creator that ends up being easy too because we can create like

utm parameters that we pass along with it and then they attach it to the affiliate and then gets passed to me for accounting purposes but yeah there's just a lot of things if you start rethinking the paradigm of i have this really good well-structured transcript upon which I can do a lot of things. And if you just throw it up on Apple in a non-searchable way with no diarization, with no speaker identification.

it's failing. If you do it as a read-along on Spotify, it's failing. And the problem is, all the indie creators on the indie podcast apps area basically said, what's Apple doing? That's good enough for me.

so they're all replicating the same thing which isn't helping this sort of like expansive thinking that there should be more of this happening unfortunately you know to your point like does spotify care or not well they only care if it's honestly if like their stakeholders care so yes indies are okay with maybe they would appreciate the passive income but you know what like youtube like caller daddy gets a

crap ton of money, not just offer for sponsorships, but off YouTube serving ads against it. Yeah. So if they can passively get a bunch of income because listen to any health and wellness, you will be recommended 15 different things. Of course. Whether they're a sponsor or not, right? Yeah, yeah. The guest that comes on. So how do you monetize what is effectively a passive income source? That people are highly...

in market for the thing, right? You're a marketer, right person, right time, right place. Are they in the moment to buy? Sure, sure. This could be a great way to do that. Yeah, if you think about analyzing the transcription to see what are all the shows and feeding that data, you could have marketing companies or companies with marketing departments.

not knowing that there's like these 10 shows or there's two or three shows that talk a lot about this product. And you could take that data and say, hey, marketing person, you may not even heard this show.

It's got a very tiny audience, so you probably wouldn't have come up on your radar because you wouldn't have done an ad buy on it. But they're crazy passionate about it. And then we've cross-referenced it against their social campaigns. So we see they've got a decent social following or large or rabid fan base.

So it could be something to try out, you know, as a low level buy. It's anything that in the podcast you can get from revenue perspective is a nice win if they're getting 50 bucks, 100 bucks an episode. So it could be this nice way. And if you could facilitate the mechanism.

through which they could do those buys you know maybe that would be helpful yeah that's definitely given the experience you've had before with ad buying it might be interesting that would come back into play we thought a lot about like i'm debating how much to share here but

Like what it would mean to be a vertically integrated platform if you were hosting with us. We're not a host today for Deepcast Creator, but if you were and you did not have to go back and forth between our platform and your host. and as we're building more of our all-in-one stuff i currently do not have host that ends up presenting us with an opportunity on the back end to our own ad network or sell our inventory through the trade desk or something similar

And if you can decorate the ad opportunities with this metadata is potentially a target. Well, like you can keyword target on display. Can I keyword target my brand on podcasts? Why not? Right. And. We thought about this, you know, I don't think anyone's going to do it. So I don't mind sharing it because it's just the pace at which development happens. But imagine you like we've chapterized the thing we know when a rough breakpoint is between switching between topic A and topic B.

Within the first chapter, you discussed Starlink favorably as a way to get remote internet access because you happen to have a show around the quote-unquote flyover states and non-access to these higher bandwidths, whatever. Oh my God, that's like positive sentiment about Starlink. Yeah. That break point, Starlink should be investing in their saying that, right? Or their competitor.

positive sentiment or negative was using starlink but it failed for this reason and now like the french equivalent satellite company that's out there says no don't use them use us instead right all these mechanisms that exist within digital advertising everywhere else except for podcasting. This is why I think that like TAM is much larger if you start throwing like the technologists of ad tech who've been doing this like for a long time.

There's fewer of those in this industry. A lot of the ad-oriented folks in this industry tend to come from radio and radio survey-based, and it's not directly attributable. It's more like brand lift studies. One more idea and then we'll take some of this offline because we could talk about a lot of this stuff and I want to wrap this up. But the other idea that popped into my head is because you're gathering sentiment about what people are talking about, what's interesting.

You could literally go, I don't know which would come first, but go to Quora and ask questions in Quora that could be answered by DeepCast conversations or something like that. or some there's something along the lines that that just kind of popped in just like where are people asking questions and where are questions getting answered it could be interesting something to think about there there's something i've also thought about which is funny so i was listening speaking of

conversations with Tyler, one of my favorite podcasts. Sorry, I mentioned a different episode, but it's something I listen to a lot. He interviews the co-founder of Anthropic today. It's usually Dario Amadei, who's the CEO, is the one who gets interviewed, but in this case, it was Jack Clark.

Jack's background is in journalism. He was a Bloomberg reporter. Then he got into tech and the role he had at OpenAI and then Anthropoc when he moved was in public policy. Okay. Liberal arts background, right? He, where was he headed with this? The, um, your idea, sorry. Oh, the core question. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Leverage.

where can we take this data and make it accessible in a way that is non exploitative? Yes, it's always the way I'm trying to think of like, I had so many friends who were indie musicians when I was DJing and going to the clubs and spinning there and opening, etc. How do I put food on their tables? You know, the idea of it may be like handing it all over to open AI or anthropic or perplexity is like, it's cool. It would make it accessible to a lot of people.

but is that even more tried like do they never try before you buy they just try and never buy in that context and i have thought about you know that a lot so again like if we're doing it how do we do it in a way that's like responsible and provides revenues back to the creators because the thing doesn't exist if the creator's not there but also how do you take this pool of stuff like the other reason why you might want to vertically integrate like we were talking about is

I can create like run of network advice. So I can say these 10 things shows mentioned your brand.

I can pool these together to a collective impression count of N where you usually wouldn't spend it unless you can spend at least Y dollars. Why can't I do that? And the answer is... you cannot today like i've talked to ad buyers i said i want to buy for deep cast i want to target shows based upon this segmentation nope can't do that i'm like you mean you can't do that like can't do it yet i can identify them for you right and

some cases folks who run their own network are also augmenting it with real-time bidding in order to hit the total insertion order value and we could hypothetically do the same thing through rtb buys but the rtb buys have to leverage certain like our tech on them in order to buy on our pool of inventory. And yes, it'd probably be at a lower ECPM versus a direct buy.

But it's revenue you never would have captured before. So how do I do that? And that's a TAM growth-centric thinking. How do I actually take 100 hairy podcast junkie-like shows of... i don't know how many podcast junkie shows there's a lot right but like and all of them fascinating but how do i potentially turn that into you know buying and selling something into that audience right so yeah i this is where again system syncing across all the parts of my brain

like yours i connect all these dots i'm like why aren't we doing these things biggest challenge is how do you do it all cost efficiently and maintain sufficient focus right which is always a problem for me

Something we'll be tracking very, very closely. This has been a really fascinating conversation, Lucas. I'm glad we had the part one on your show. I kind of had an idea as we were chatting that we would have a really good conversation on this show.

it's been so interesting to see kind of like how all the pieces came together for you with all of your past experiences how you got started it just from a love of music and how that kind of like you know yellow brick road its way to all the things that you've kind of been fascinated and had the experience with and it just it's very obvious now when you look back how all the pieces came to play to kind of put this together to what is now deepcast

And why, you know, it's in your DNA to kind of, you have this indie mindset and you want to support podcasters and you're always thinking you have the systems thinking way of approaching things. So it's been really fascinating to see how it's all coming together.

From seeing so many companies that come in and out of the space, I can really say that this is truly something that I feel you're passionate about. You really have the creator, the indie creator in mind with everything you do. So I'm really excited to see where this goes for you. Me too. We have just a couple of questions that I usually wrap up with. One is, what is something you've changed your mind about recently? That's always a hard one for me because I change my mind constantly.

I am a big sort of like strong opinions loosely held. And that can make it hard to interact with me sometimes ask my wife. So I changed my mind constantly, I guess is the long story short, it's hard to hit a big one. Let me think about it. I'll circle back to it while the others and see if anything fun popped up. What is the most misunderstood thing about you? I do think it's the idea of being like scattershot with approach versus like what actually motivates me.

I stepped away from the last company I co-founded four years into it for two reasons. One is I was no longer able to scratch all those itches and keep myself intellectually satisfied. and so we tried to pursue strategies like where do we find me because i'm a 10xer when i'm excited when i'm not i'm 0.5 um you better off not having me right so i was like

We have the e-commerce platform set up. We've done all these things, sort of like my traditional e-com background and sort of novel things we were doing in the warehouse were more and more rote for me.

and so trying to like that was thing one i recognized is like i do have to be constantly stimulated but the flip side to that is like look if you can set me loose on a problem then you don't have to worry about this distraction stuff because i will it's that like singular mind singular minded but in batches of singular mindedness so just let me do it right so like i had a friend as i was pursuing a job you know an idea three years ago

and his advice was like dude i think you should just go into find a company to let you consult on the side or run a vc micro cap fund on the side because you're going to be able to be you're going to switch between and he goes you definitely gain energy, bounce back and forth. And in sort of a VC world, if I get to talk about 1000 other people's businesses, I learn a lot. So I guess the misunderstanding is like, I'm a

distractions, not the appropriate word for it. I'm just seeing really focused multiple times on multiple things. Let me do my thing. I love it. Well, thank you for this. Just fascinating conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. And the best place to send folks on that, especially since this is podcast centric, we'll have all the links in the show notes, but deepcast.fm for discovery.

Yeah, deepcast.fm and definitely look into Deepcast Pro for all of the sort of creator automation related things post production and the pod site. You can go to podsite.fm if you want to see that independent of Deepcast Creator. And then the last one I would say is soundstrategy.fm, which is obviously our podcast that you were featured on and will release your episode soon enough. Or it'll already be heard by the time this one plays.

Thanks again for your time, Lucas. I really appreciate it. I appreciate as well, sir.