Welcome to Podcasting Tech, a podcast that equips busy entrepreneurs engaged in podcasting with proven and cost effective solutions for achieving a professional sound and appearance. I'm Matthew Passy, your host and a 15 year veteran in the podcasting space. We'll help you cut through the noise and offer guidance on software and hardware that can elevate the quality of your show. Tune in weekly for insightful interviews with tech creators, behind the scenes studio tours, and strategies for
podcasting success. Head to podcastingtech.com to subscribe to this show on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform and join us on this exciting journey to unlock the full potential of your podcast. Alright. We've got a great one for you here today. We are chatting with Greg Wasserman. He is head of relationships at Cast Magic. And if you don't know what Cast Magic is, you don't know what
you are missing. A phenomenal platform that helps you to create all of the supporting materials around your podcast and, frankly, so much more. They can create amazing, amazing text based content for nearly anything that you put out there with the power of AI. So excited to talk about in some of the features that they've enrolled recently and and new ones to come. Greg, thanks so much for joining us. Hey. It's always great talking to you.
Thanks for having me on and and giving me the opportunity to talk to, to your people. Wow. It's it's great to have you. So you don't really come from a traditional podcast background. Right? So, like, what kinda led you to the road of working with Cast Magic? What gave it away, my terrible setup? Yeah. No. My background is in media sales. I was in the media world for about 15 years. Last company I worked with was a mobile apps company. So we acquired apps through the apps we acquired
podcasting space. So in the 1st day, your boss is like, go figure out Podcasting. It provides you a unique experience into the space. Before that, I actually sold podcast ads. So using my media background, I was at CBS, before now it's Audacy. So I sold podcast ads there. So that was ultimately my first introduction, running 3 Podcasting listening platforms. It gives you a unique perspective, right? So I'm not a podcaster, but your job is ultimately,
how do I help the podcaster? In this case, I have to go work with the hosting companies and go, Hey, if your show is hosted on X, Y, and Z, we need to make sure that show ends up on our platform so our millions of listeners have access to that show. So it provided you a unique, like, let me learn all the hosting companies. And then from there, you start working with all the platforms, whether they're a network, individual show like yourself or agency going like, look, I
have 2,000,000 followers, too many errors. How do I help you? And you start realizing the 3 questions every podcaster Passy is, how do I get more distribution? How do I get, grow my audience? And how do I monetize? Those are the 3 questions you also learned to hate from the perspective I had. But you really started learning what the podcast community is. And so if my background is also partnerships, partnerships and podcasting are very similar. They're all community-driven. It's like, how
do I help you? And can we work together? And my ethos is, hence my title, head of relationships. Life is about time and relationships. You have no clue where one conversation today is gonna take Tech. And that's literally what podcasting is about. How do I come in, have a great conversation, and now allow that conversation to be heard by other people instead of just you and I having that conversation? So end up at Cast Magic, long story there. Every Monday I
post 3 podcasts I think people should listen to on my LinkedIn. I did the founders of Passy Tech Magic Show, before they even created Cast Magic, and that ended up, connecting us. You know, it's so interesting when you talk about this aspect of community. I think so many people get into podcasting and the assumption is I'm behind the microphone. I'm talking to people, but you really find that the most successful podcasters out there
are ones who really have a relationship with the audience. It's not just a one-way street. They really listen to their audience. They communicate with their audience. They allow them to engage with them on the show and the content and everything else, and really good ones build up these huge communities of followers and passionate fans, and, frankly, they
become the advocates that help people grow their show. So that's so interesting that, you know, you bring up this idea of community and relationships as an important part of what has made you successful. I mean,
I'll go on to that. Yes. I think podcasting creates you from a community standpoint, but the core focus of what I try to think about, I mean, probably different for your audience, but, like, stop calling yourself a podcaster and start treating yourself as a brand is kind of what I consult people on because podcasting just becomes a download. It's going back to the 3 questions I hated, like,
how do I make money and how do I grow my audience? Well, everyone's thinking about how do I grow downloads or how do I make money with a CPM or sponsorship just on my show. But there's so many ways that your content, your conversations, you can build community beyond that. So whether it's your blog, your social Passy, a newsletter, your website, like, all those are different touch points that you can build a community and get feedback with.
Like, I may not always listen to your show, but I can also get your newsletter. And I'm still giving you 3 minutes of my time. And so you're building that community function there. So I'm really focused on how do we think about the content you're creating here and how do you engage with the community not just on downloads and listening to you because
maybe you're not going to. And so funny enough, you you mentioned the word newsletter, and that is a perfect transition to talk about the platform that we brought you to talk about was which is Passy Magic because there have been an explosion of platforms and solutions that take AI and tell podcasters that they can help them generate all sorts of supporting content for it. Cast Magic happens to be my favorite. One of the reasons for that is the entire,
the flexibility. Right? The ability to not just say, give me show notes and give me a transcript, but the ability to basically say, here are things that I want, creating new prompts, looking at what other people have done, kinda, you know, borrowing from other people's prompts, the the community prompts idea. And so, like like you said, you can use Cast Magic for your show notes, for your newsletters, for your social posts, for your transcriptions. You can use it for
keywords, SEO. I mean, the list just goes on and on, and and frankly, it's really only limited by your imagination. What are some of the best use cases that you've seen, with Cast Magic recently? Oh my god. I mean, look, our tagline is how do I turn any conversation into content like magic? I always look at content repurposing as twofold. All the examples you kinda gave, like turn in this podcast into a blog, a newsletter, social Passy, but then also how do I, to your question, turn that
into a course? Like I take I've taken my coaching calls running through Cast Magic and created a course out of it, then monetize that course. Or how do I go ahead and take an aggregate of shows and going like, alright, I've got 5 tools. Let's take your show. I've got 5 tools that I've, been brought on and talked about. Is there an article that we can go ahead and organize those 5 shows into something that would be like, here's a how to 25 step of creating your podcast based
on the 5 episodes that, have come on your show. Right? So you hit the nail on the head. You are only limited to your creativity. So Passy Magic, we give you, all these existing prompts. We actually just released a bunch more today inside the platform. Community is driven, so I will come back to community. I know it's an overused word on the show right now, but also in general, but it is truly community driven. The feedback you provide us, that helps us, but that's why we also inject. And
then if you wanna come up with any prompts, go for it. So the nice thing is is you and I could use the same prompt, but the input is gonna be your recording versus my recording.
So other ways I've seen it, I've gone to conferences and I've taken my, phone and I've got the Cast Magic app on the phone and I'm like, everyone's sitting there scribbling and writing notes and I'm like, no, I'm just gonna hit record, have the keynote speak, record and then I automatically have my LinkedIn content of like this is what I learned from whatever speech I went through or how do I combine 3 of the panelists that I went and saw and create a LinkedIn post around
that? Like, how do I write a book? There are so many ways that people are leveraging it, it really is once again creativity. What would you say is the one mistake people are making with Castmagic, what are they doing or not doing to tap into the full potential of the platform? I think it's an AI overall issue as opposed to just a Cast Magic, where you you you expect it to be perfect. You expect it to give you what you want. A great example is there was a person in our community yesterday
and they were struggling with a prompt. They're like, this isn't giving me what I want, my words or my tonality maybe, but that's how I read it. And then I looked at the prompt and I'm like, I don't even understand what you're asking. Right? So AI is only gonna be as good as the direction you're giving it. And so if the direction you're giving it makes sense to you, but someone else reading it doesn't understand it, then you're not going
to get the answer you want. And I think that's a big thing not just with Cast Magic, but just as a whole is people are like, why doesn't it know what I'm saying? AI should know how to read my mind and all these things, but like end of the day, like, no, it doesn't. So this, I
think, AI will actually make us better communicators. I know there's disagreements on the other side, but, like, I think AI will make us better communicators because you will now be forced to actually say in a way that makes sense to another person what you want without them having to read your mind. And I always have analogies I use on this, but I I'll I'll spare the, spare the, audience the analogies. Hopefully,
you get the idea. Yeah. I mean, what I always found amazing about this platform and and maybe others have caught up to it, but I love the idea of, yes, you gave us some standard prompts that are useful for podcasters, but then we can go in there afterwards and say, yes, but I want it to be more like this or I really want to include this feature in my show notes, and so to that point, the nice thing is is that anybody who's using
Cast Magic, maybe you don't get the results you want the first time, but you can very easily go in, edit the prompt, or add another one, kinda tweak and and, you know, manipulate a little bit until you zero in on exactly what it is you're looking for and for AI to deliver that. And then after that, all of your future content just comes out right exactly the way you want it, not the way the platform has dictated it for you. Yeah. And it's also editable. So the other thing is is,
like, it's not what I want. It's, like, great. You can go in there and edit what you want. So, as you said, edit the prompt, but I can also edit the text and go, great. It got me 80% of the way there. How do I edit it so that it sounds a little more but like you have full control. But as we know, like podcasters, and this is why our platform takes any conversation, podcasters like yourself do more than just podcasting. So how do we use your coaching calls?
How do we use your sales calls? How do we use events and repurpose that? So like all these components you're able to, repurpose because a lot of that content is just sitting on a shelf. So how do I help you? Think because most of your users, most people here are smarter than me in terms of understanding their business going like, I wish I could do this. And now you've got a platform that could actually help you do what you've always said you want to do. You just didn't have the time, the
resources, whatever the case may be. It's funny because, yes, you know, I've I've primarily used this for the podcast and for generating that kind of first round content and then taking a look at it and making a couple of massaging efforts. But then, you know, I'm doing other businesses, and I've been feeding in our social content, these little videos that we're making and saying, give
me some good captions. Give me some good titles. And, right, you know, the prompts are dramatically different from what we're using for the podcast, but we're getting some really great things and and almost copying and pasting exactly what Cast Magic spit out after creating the right direction for the AI to give us what we want from our content. Perfect use case. There you go. Love
it. So if you're allowed to say, what are some of the future features that are being worked on for Cast Magic that users of the platform today can look forward to or or those on the fence about whether they should sign up for it or could look forward to? Great question. So I literally so we have a Slack community. That's where our community lives,
1500 people or so. I just announced earlier this morning, so for you and I talking, but those that are listening, like, re new updates we had is we started adding more prompts in there. So the way it's set up is there's 8 different profiles, Podcasting, YouTube, coach, sales, webinars. Each of those profiles, we've already given you a packet if you wanna think about of content that out of the box you're gonna get. And then there's community prompts
because everyone asks like, what prompts should I be doing? This is great, but I would love to do more. So we've included prompts from the community going like, hey, you may think this is something of interest. Getting a lot of people asking like, I need more than one LinkedIn post. So we just threw in 15 different options for LinkedIn Passy. Once again, the joy is is you and I could use those same LinkedIn Passy, but the input, our content is going to be different. Therefore, the output
is going to be slightly different. So helping people understand, hey, You have full control over what prompts you come up with, but I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna give you some ideas and give you guidance there. We're working on getting a, Zoom recorder so you can actually then start having a companion there and
have that fed directly into your Cast Magic. You have the iPhones, the iOS app, which is a great one so you can now record your thoughts, your brain dumps, your meetings, whatever it is while you're on the go. Those are great things that you can look at. We'll just continue to evolve our studio function. So studio is our visual component to it. So, we're not trying to be Canva. We know there's a lot of people out there doing all these components. We like to give you control
and give you the options to do more visuals. So from a podcast standpoint, how do I start cutting those and making little clips, But also, how do I start creating, what is Tech, quote cards and audiograms and so forth? Very neat. Well, if you haven't yet, check out Passy Magic. It's castmagic.i0. And as usual, we will have a link to it here in the show notes. You can easily find it. You don't have to write that down or memorize it.
Greg, before we let you go, we have a few questions that we'd like to ask everybody who comes on the show. 1 and this is interesting because you have such a diverse background and have really come into the podcasting space from a a different side of it than most of the other folks who we've spoken to. But is there a place in podcasting where you would like to see dramatic improvement, like a industry wide scale? I guess I'm I guess I'm biased in the sense that, like, I come from the media
background. So I think the the what I saw in media was and I always I'm gonna have to actually look this up, but there was a big holding company that came out years ago and they're like, we aren't buying ads unless it is above the fold. We're not buying ads unless it's a 3 second viewability, and that changed the game. That made all the agencies,
that made all of the tech companies, that made everyone go like, woah. I'm not gonna get any budget from these guys, which is a lot of money when they're one of the big companies. I've got to change my game. And I don't think that's happening in the podcast space because right now, Spotify just left the IAB, so, like, forget this. Apple hasn't figured out and they saw a change in their downloads.
So I don't think there's anyone in the industry and I'm sure like sounds profitable and Triton and Brian Barletta and Noel's teams will are talking about it, which I followed their stuff. But like, I truly think until we can come together as an industry and there's a collective, let's change this, or as we saw on the other side, a big advertisers gonna go like, I will start spending 1,000,000 of dollars and 1,000,000,000 of dollars in podcasting if you do this.
No one's willing to do that. And so until then, it's just you're gonna be very fragmented. So I think people will just continue to go, like, I don't know what I'm buying. I don't know if it's working, and we will continue to try and figure those components out. But I truly believe Podcasting, They go back to those 3 questions. I hate, how
do we make money? And if we look at it just as a sponsorships and a CPM and buying that, like, if I'm only going with that as the way to make money, I think the industry will go far beyond the 2,000,000,000 that were expected to a lot more because at the end of the day, it's Influencers. Like, Influencer Marketing is supposed to be like a $20,000,000 or $20,000,000,000 industry. And Podcasting, you've got basically, you're an influencer.
You are using a product. You are great. You have an audience. You have community. So I think until the industry comes together, that will be a problem, which will allow me to continue to tell everyone, stop thinking about yourself as just a podcaster and focus on more than just downloads because the industry is still trying to figure all that out. I'd be so curious to get your reaction to this.
Like 7 years ago, I remember setting a podcast movement with the heads of Libsyn and Blueberry and a few other companies and wondering why didn't Google take over the audio space the way they did the video space? They they really you know, the acquisition of YouTube made them the central focus of all video content. It was the platform where everyone had to go to
upload their content, to monetize their content. They are so good at creating advertising opportunities and selling it and auctioning it and targeting it, and I never understood why they didn't do the same in the podcasting space. I I really thought they would make the YouTube of podcasting years ago, and and, obviously, they've had the exact opposite. They've done, you know, little to nothing, and everything they have done has
floundered considerably. Any thoughts on why Google isn't the, like, advertising platform or or why they haven't had a bigger focus in this space? No. I mean, it's a great one. Like, everyone you brought up Podcasting Movement. So those that are, that are where like every year now it's like video is the thing. And what is Podcasting? Podcast has to be renamed because it's just not audio and you've got the purest like, no, this is, it's an RSS feed and that's what a podcast
is. But like YouTube is 2nd largest search engine and everyone's now saying like, you gotta put your Podcasting from a video standpoint there for reach in the search and so forth. But Tech, yeah, I honestly don't understand, because the influencer space has been so large and everyone's so focused on influencers from a TikTok and Instagram standpoint, but like, let's go back to the core, like radio and radio was the first influencers. We go back before TV and then you got TV and you think
about how shows were sold then. Like I always think of I Love Lucy and it was integrated in like all that stuff back then. Why hasn't it been found where you've got these niche audiences that you can aggregate just like you do with influencers on Instagram. We have not figured that piece out in the Podcasting space, and I think that is a huge miss. And I don't understand why it's not happening. Like, I'm I'm
dumbfounded as as much as you are. That might make for a good debate or round table discussion, to have with a bunch of folks, including the Brian Barlettas of the world and the Tom Webster's and the Rob Waltches and and, you know, all those good folks. Outside of that, is there any
tech? Obviously, we are podcasting tech. Is there any kind of technology out there, whether it's hardware or software that you are just dying to get your hands on, whether it's something that exists that you wanna buy or something that you hope someone will create that will make your life easier in this space? I mean, I guess the answer to that one
is I just gotta first invest in a better setup. Right? Like, I watched your, your episode with someone and and I'm, like, I'm I'm using my my, camera, and I'm not looking. I'm looking down. Like, so I know I need to just invest in doing a better setup with the limited space I have here. So I think that's first thing. I think it already exists. I just need to go ahead and and buy it and invest and figure out how do I set that up.
But that also goes to what I try and what we what probably you tell podcasters is like, look, hit record, just start doing it. You can upgrade your tech stack. You can update your products later. Like, you don't need it now in order to start. Just start and then you'll upgrade. I think, like, you've done it. You're like, alright. I'll add 1 mic and then I've got another mic and you've upgraded from there. So I think for me, that's the first before I go and say, like, what isn't being built?
I think I think from a tech standpoint, go back from advertising. I'll go back to that. Like, why isn't there something there, that makes it a better experience? Overall I think it's exciting. I think podcasting, if you're in this space, it's exciting even if you're transgential like myself, like I'm not a podcaster, everyone keeps asking when will I start my
own show? Right now I'm having fun being a guest and experiencing what that experience is like which I think goes towards most hosts listen to a show and they're like I'm gonna start this and they've never actually been either a guest or understood what other shows are good quality. So yeah. Right now, I think that's where my focus is less on a tech or a software and they've never actually been either a guest
or understood what other shows are are good quality. So yeah. Right now, I think that's where my focus is less on a tech or a software. And you started to talk about other shows. So the last question is, what are some of your favorite podcasts you are listening to today? The ones that as soon as they hit your feed, you are going to listen to them. You're gonna stop what you're doing and and check those out. They will not get past you. None. Yeah. I know that's a terrible
answer. I listen to so many podcasts every Monday. I recommend 3 podcasts and that I post on my LinkedIn. And I try to focus on not the big ones, not on the ones that everyone knows, not on the ones that everyone's always listening to. I'm like, let me go find new ones. Like, let me go find it doesn't matter how many downloads. Like, let me just go learn something. Let me because the core, the indies are always struggling. I think someone
has said, like, they've brought up, like, one dream. It's like, well, at one point, those indies, they were indies before they they blew up or they got, investments. So like, I'm always looking for new shows. There's nothing that hits my feed, and even if something does hit my feed, because I know I wanna recommend other podcasts, I will probably skip the go to shows and go figure out like what other shows are out there. Like recommend me,
let me know, let me listen, let me learn something. Maybe it's just one episode. I'm like, I like the guest. I didn't like the host. Who knows? But, I'm always trying different things. Love it. Well, if you wanna see those recommendations, you can check out Greg's LinkedIn profile. We'll have a link to that in the show notes below, as well as,
again, a link to Cast Magic. It is a platform that just does an amazing job using AI to take your recordings, not just Podcasting, but you could use, you know, any video, any audio, open up the app that they have. It's a great app. Just record wherever you are in the world, and it will take that information for you and transform it into whatever it is you need for it to do. It's a great platform. I cannot recommend it enough. We use it here at Podcasting
Tech. So Greg Wasserman, head of relationships at Cast Magic, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. Everyone, thank you for your time listening. Thanks for joining us today on Podcasting tech. There are links to all the hardware and software that help power our guest content and podcasting tech available in the show notes and on our website at
podcastingtech.com. You can also subscribe to the show on your favorite platform, connect with us on social media, and even leave a rating and review while you're there. Thanks, and we'll see you next time on Podcasting Tech.