EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

Interview

Sep 16

Written By Jens Heitland

In this riveting episode of the Human Innovation Podcast, host Jens Heitland sits down with Jeff Dolan, the mastermind behind Wave, a revolutionary platform reshaping audio content marketing on social media. As a multi-faceted creative - a podcaster, musician, and award-winning filmmaker - Jeff shares a wealth of insights on the confluence of AI, podcasting, and filmmaking. Entrepreneurs and leaders, take note: Jeff delves deep into how podcasting can be an instrumental tool in branding and business growth. Plus, we explore the dynamic realm of content creation and the nuances of effective digital marketing. A must-listen for innovators, creators, and everyone in between! Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation with one of the industry's finest.

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Are we creating content just for AI?

In this blog post we dive into the challenges faced by content creators in the era of AI-driven content. How do artists maintain authenticity in a world dominated by algorithms? Is it possible to protect and license one's likeness and content? Join us as we explore the implications of AI on artistic content and discuss the emerging importance of licensing in the digital age.

Introducing: Proof of Authenticity in the Business Landscape

In the digital business era, trust is crucial. Inspired by cryptocurrency terminologies like 'proof of work' and 'proof of stake,' the concept of 'Proof of Authenticity' underlines a business's need to genuinely engage with its audience. By consistently sharing content and showcasing the brand's essence, businesses can foster trust. Essentially, genuine brand engagement is the future for discerning consumers seeking transparency.

EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

In this riveting episode of the Human Innovation Podcast, host Jens Heitland sits down with Jeff Dolan, the mastermind behind Wave, a revolutionary platform reshaping audio content marketing on social media. As a multi-faceted creative - a podcaster, musician, and award-winning filmmaker - Jeff shares a wealth of insights on the confluence of AI, podcasting, and filmmaking. Entrepreneurs and leaders, take note: Jeff delves deep into how podcasting can be an instrumental tool in branding and business growth. Plus, we explore the dynamic realm of content creation and the nuances of effective digital marketing. A must-listen for innovators, creators, and everyone in between! Don't miss out on this enlightening conversation with one of the industry's finest.

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

Hello and welcome to the human innovation podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I'm your host Jens Heitland. And today my guest is Jeff Dolan. Jeff is the CEO of Wave, a cloud based platform that helps podcasters and other audio creators marketing on social media simple. He's a podcaster, a musician and award winning filmmaker who loves to encourage creators of all stripes.

Jeff and I have a fascinating conversation, starting with AI, talking about podcasting, talking about filmmaking. And we as well look into how startups and leaders can use podcasts creating their brands and as well, supporting their businesses to grow. We talk as well, a lot about content creation and of course, how you market yourself and your business, fascinating conversation, and highly recommend to listen to the end because they're awesome topics in it.

Please welcome to the show Jeff Dolan.

Hey, Jeff. It's awesome to have you and we need to talk about surfing later, but let's keep our conversation from before we started recording Flowing, we talked about AI and the development in that direction. I'm testing this chat bot where we just try to use a couple of AI topics as well. Are you applying anything of that?

Yeah, I'm still exploring like a lot of people, I think there's like we were joking, there's like the overnight gurus that are all out there trying to teach you exactly how to do everything because they figured it out, which I think is some of it is very valid because they're one step ahead.

They spent many more hours, doing it, researching it, reading it than a lot of people. But yeah, the possibilities are endless. The, we were talking earlier about training and AI with all of your content. To where, they have these, pick your brain services where you call gurus on the phone and ask them a bunch of questions that were around a niche subject.

Now you can just train your AI and your AI can talk to them however long they want. Yeah, it's going to be crazy. I think the point that content creation has gotten to now is very interesting because the rate of. Change in the world and what is working versus not working is changing so rapidly that you almost have to be careful how far ahead you schedule content, because the world could be totally different by the time that content comes out.

It might not be relevant enough. And the interesting thing about open AI is that it starts, I think, 2021 and previous, right? So it doesn't have the recency of some tools now that are letting it like search the web for news and things like that, but there's still that latency there where it's pulling from knowledge bases that you're not sure is totally relevant right now.

we're in this strange learning phase where how much are you trusting AI? I think almost a perfect balance is aI gets it started for you. And then you as an expert, finish it. And then if you really want to get on the cutting edge of it, you're telling people about skills that are working right now and are very relevant to what's going on at the moment.

Yeah. And like we discussed before the recording as well. Fascinating with Sam Altman talking to Lex on the podcast where he was, oh, they discussed this notion of, hey, it's still a tool. It's not a person. So we need to still be aware. Like I think even Steve Jobs was saying that way back IT and all these things is still tools and we should not keep them as humans.

And it's, I think it's the lines are blurring a little bit when you see that there are people who are using it for chat possibilities, where you you're lonely and you need a friend to talk to, and this, it works that you get answers. So I'm right now, like I said I'm testing this audio version of a leadership guide.

And I'm calling it the name of my daughter. So I'm teaching it in a way that I'm, Hey, you're a female from a name perspective, at least, and you are supporting startup founders in this way. So I'm discussing with it. I'm trying to keep it conversational as well to see how do I use questions and answers from a leadership perspective that I bring my content as part of that as well.

It's so fascinating.

Yeah, and we personify things all the time. Pet rocks, dog, pets, things that can't really have a real conversation with you, but we impose a bunch of personality and characteristics of humans onto. And so I think. It's totally possible to do that. What's that movie, Her, where he falls in love with the AI.

I think that's totally possible. And it is blurring. You look at what just came out with Elon Musk with the robots walking around, it's going to be very difficult if you've got, an animatronic robot that looks like a human that's having a real conversation with you and the latency is not there and it's real time and it's going to get super hard.

What's the movie, the new 2000 or what's the Harrison Ford came back to do it blade Runner. So the newest Blade Runner, he has a relationship with the AI.

It's a total clone copy. Everyone has the same copy of it, but he's training his AI that knows him. And he, he has a connection to it, right? Because that AI is educated on him. And so I could definitely see a future where you train an AI. It knows all your sayings, your mannerisms, your stories, right?

And your family can continue to come back and talk to it. Almost remember the old Superman movies where. He's got the crystals and to go talk to his dad. He like puts in different crystals and has this conversation. That was very futuristic. But that's possible now. It was not possible back then, but now it's okay, that is totally possible.

When I left the corporate world, I first time ever discovered Gary Vee in 2020, which is hilarious. A lot of people laughed about Vee, but I still figure out that people even don't know him yet. So he's one of the marketeers out there with who is really out there. And one of the things he was saying at that time was Audio will be the future and he was saying, I'm recording everything and transcribe it so that when I have all of this, you can ask Alexa and all this assistance in the future, anything about me.

And I think that's already possible if we take the AI component as part of this, you have all your content and his content is massive. All stored somewhere and the AI can use it as a learning, but you can basically copy paste him into the internet with a chatbot, whatever in the future. And I guess if you then go then in film like with Joe Rogan, I don't know if you've seen the videos or the podcast episode where he was talking to, I'm always Steve Jobs, I think

Yeah.

this, and it's fairly good already.

And it's early,

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah. And I think that's the interesting part too, where we're, as content creators, we are trying to wrestle with the idea that we are just creating content now for the AIs. And so the question is, are you going to be one of the artists styles that people choose? I want to create content as Jens,

that would be

are you going to be a personality that they're going to mention or want to consult?

Cause you're going to be feeding the algorithm. And so the question is, Do you put guardrails on that and guard that, and do you license your likeness? Because the other side of this is on the artist side, you're basically giving all these AI's all your content and your likeness. That guy that created the AI Joe Rogan podcast.

He just straight up used Joe Rogan's content, created his own content, created his own conversation. It's all based off the assets and the fame and notoriety that Joe Rogan has created across his career. So it's if you monetize that in any way, does the original artist get to take a part in that?

And that's why the NFT boom was so big was because it was the first time artists realized, hold on. We can create a situation, much like the music industry with licensing. That we can create a little commission override that says, okay, you can use it, but pay some back to me as the artist. And so I think we're, all these things are converging and at some point the law and the government is going to have to catch up to it because it's just moving so fast.

And traditional governments and legal systems just can't comprehend all the new technology that's coming out. And at some point, the technology will get easy enough for the mass majority of people to use. And, it'll come to a head where everyone will say, okay, hopefully everyone will agree that, okay, this is a good model to help people.

Use your likeness, licensure likeness, and not feel as an artist that you're just feeding this machine and not getting anything back from it.

Yeah. It's fascinating where this will go. I'm really curious. I'm just trying to be in that wave, just, one part because I'm an innovator and I want to find out how this works and I'm more from a perspective. Yeah. Right now I can't do anything against it. So let's figure it out. I will try to do my best to at least get a little bit piece of the pie in the future.

But yeah, it's very hard.

And as a software company, I think it's scary too. Cause the old saying used to be that software would eat the world. And now AI is going to eat all software and they simplify the interface to that chat interface, which is universally understood. People understand what a chat interface is.

They don't have to learn buttons or where things are or hidden menus or drop down anything. It's just have a conversation, right? Just like you interface with another person. And so they made the software interface. The exact same as talking to another person, which is brilliant, which is why it caught on faster than all software in the history of software.

Yeah.

And so once you have that interface. All the AI companies are like, great, we're going to just make it a part of our software, but there's one catch to that. And that's, then you commoditize everything. And the joke amongst the VC world is so you're basically just using chat, GPTs, API. Great.

That's for me, it's always a difficult one because you built a dependency as well. What if ChattGPT is saying no or double the price or whatever, then your business might struggle in the future. So if you just rely on this only, that's why I'm eager to test as well. The Google Bart version, which unfortunately in.

At least as of the day of the recording is not possible to reach in Europe because it's isolated.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah it's not available in any European country. I guess it's because of the data protection rules and so on.

Yeah. GDPR.

Yeah. I would love to test it and see what's going on. And I think then a couple of others are working on it as well.

There was I've seen a post today from Meta as well, where they're looking at it and are now a little bit more verbal. And then I guess the Amazons they're working on it behind the scenes as well. So there are a lot of different models in the future, which we can use in different ways.

It's good to have more versions than just one.

right. Technically, if you're a developer or software minded person, you could take one step back a little bit and actually go to the models the big, what are they called the language LLMs

Yeah, language learning

the learning models that these things are based off. And you can go back and.

Go to the GitHub repositories and kind of start from where the researcher stopped and just build on top of it. So you can go a layer back and then start training it yourself to fork it, if you will, into a different version that you have. And I think that's what we were talking about before, where the value is going to be in the specialist that is taking it.

And making it a tool for a specific niche or specific use Hey, we've trained this thing to do this specifically. And that's our spin on it. But yeah, to your point, you would have to build from the base model and then train it up. It's just so much easier to take an API that somebody's already actively developing like Sam and open AI, where it's we're rapidly going so fast that you can't even keep up with it.

If you started from scratch on your own model. So yeah, there is a risk to that. And I also think the risk comes in too, from a I guess to use a made up word, a truthiness of it, how truthful do you want it to be and to which people?

Yeah

And so once the neutrality. goes out the window with a certain creator of it, who's training it, then it's hold on, I didn't want to go in that direction.

I wanted to go in this direction. So that's why you see all these different versions of it where they're naming it instead of, chat, GPT, it's like Truth-GPT, or like whatever other one that, people are cooking up. Or the funniest one I saw was I forget the name of it, but it was like a cynical GPT where it like sasses you.

It like talks back to you. Have you seen this?

no, I haven't.

So it's like rude to you.

Yeah,

It's

that's, yeah it's interesting where will be the guardrails. As part of the legislation in the future as well, like what is allowed to do free speech, all this discussions. Yeah, the difficult thing in if we talk about governments and politics, just a little bit on, on that one thing, it's difficult.

And we have been laughing about that yesterday, Sam Altman was interviewed by some politicians and they're far away from getting it. And we have seen it with Meta and the other ones as well. I think they have a little catch up to play everywhere in the whole world.

For sure. For sure. Think about it. They're a generation older than all these guys, right? They're a generation older than us. They. It's very hard to learn all these new tricks and even keep up. Just think about just to do your job right in any government and then to keep up with all the young kids that are just innovating like crazy on stuff.

It's super hard, but yeah, we were joking. Cause Sam Altman was like, yeah, I don't get paid. I do this for fun. And then the Congressman was just like, what?

Yeah, let's go a little bit more in Into your world. So I have a couple of topics, which I would love to explore Let me see where we let's start with who is Carter.

is Carter?

Yes

Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah. My buddy I met him in college at UNC Chapel Hill. Good friend of mine and we have always been buddies growing up and bouncing ideas off each other. We've always liked content creation and filming. We've filmed all over the world together and.

He is a funny guy. I just, he just, he's just funny. And I've always encouraged him. Like you, you are a natural for creating content. Like you need to have a channel or something. And he's got so many different interests. Like a lot of us as artists, we are multi hyphenated. We do a million different things.

We want to be everything for everybody. We've got talent, multi talented, we can do this. We can do that, but nobody really cares. It's just be real, be yourself, be available, share your content, share your personality and be yourself. And that's hard to do in the content creation game. It's very hard to do.

Cause once you put on the lights, once you put on the camera, once you put the mic on, it's Oh,

a different

going to say something wrong? So I was talking to him and. I invited him to help us out at the wave conference to exhibit and be there not the wave conference. What am I saying?

The craft and commerce conference in Idaho with convert kit. So I invited him to come out to that and help us at the wave booth. And we were talking and I was like, what's stopping you? Let's just. Let me help you help me help you. And yeah, I just, we created this show that was like, Hey, let's get on every week as accountability, public accountability, let's jump on and let's talk about growing our channel together.

And so that's what we did. And yeah, then we knew that the looming thing that was going to derail everything was that he was about that become a dad. And so I'd already gone through that journey. And I was like, man, you have no idea what's about to happen. You think you're busy now? Wait, just wait.

And so we we sure enough came to the point where he had his son and it was like all hands on deck and then a lot of stuff happened in his life and in his wife's life and just all these things happened in his family. And so he literally was like. You were right. And plus, and so we got to just hit pause on this.

And so we did, and I actually, it's funny enough, we're recording this week. So Monday I'm going to do the final wrap up episode and see where he is and catch up on the story. So stay tuned for that. But yeah, it's been a fun little journey with him.

Tell us a little bit more about the six months to 6000 parts. So what are you exploring? And how do you explain it? I watched like a couple of the videos just as a prep for the podcast. And I think it's super fascinating for a lot of people that Want to start a YouTube channel or want to start any channel.

I think it works as well. When you start with your small startup, when you start with the small business to, Hey, let's do a social media channel. How do we get started? Give us a little bit more details about how you do that and what's the content.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is like you said, it's a common struggle where almost like the zero to one concept. Like I think Peter Thiel had a book on it, but basically how do you go from, I just started a channel on whatever platform and we chose YouTube. But like, how do you choose a channel?

And then how do you get any followers whatsoever? It's like super daunting. So we chose 6, 000 just because that was like a snappy, and meaningful. And six months seemed like a reasonable time for most people. I think when you get online and you see all these gurus talking about, we can get you to a million overnight.

And you're just

get that every day.

you're lying. Like just, whatever you did that one time somehow. And you're not going to tell me until I pay you a million dollars. So we wanted to just grow. Organically, authentically in public, starting from zero. And it was just like, I think we both had our initial story where we had a little bit of success doing something right.

Like I think he was he was following one of the treasure hunts. That this guy buried treasure and had this story about how you could go find it. And there was all these mysteries and you had to read into this book and there was all these treasure hunters all over the world trying to find this treasure.

It was really cool. So he was part of that and he got some followers off that cause he was talking about it all the time and how he's trying to find the treasure. And then I was a filmmaker and I am a filmmaker and my first film. I just posted the film after all the film festivals. And so after it won and everything was done and all the rights were, I was like, okay, just put it on YouTube.

And it did pretty well. For what it is, it's a short sci fi short film. And it was it was pretty prophetic. When it came out, because a lot of people were like, Hey, how did you know that? We were going to be talking about this in five years after, after your film, cause it's about a lot of like bio biotech type of concepts.

But that gave me the initial little couple hundred followers. And then it was like, okay, how do I go from there? And I said I'm going to. Start creating content about how do you grow a channel? It's the default way to grow on any new platform, right? Not that YouTube is new, but a lot of people are like, Hey, there's a new platform, how do I grow on it?

So it was super humbling to just go from. A couple of hundred followers and be like, yay, I got one more follower this week. And it was my aunt who I told to follow me. And it's so true though. Cause I follow a lot of people that they have no followers, right? Like you go to their channel. Like I just saw this one the other day, my buddy sent me this link.

I don't know how he found it. I'm I guarantee you probably YouTube just suggested it, but I think he literally had 600 followers. And this guy was, had amazing content wow, like top quality. I was like, man, this guy probably has a hundred thousand, followers on, and I went up to his channel and said 600 and I had to like double take on it and I'm like, what, but this is what's happening.

This is reality. Now you can start easily, but it's super hard to grow.

takes time. Yeah.

Cause there's so much good content. Now there's so much content. And then the AI is just helping people do it better, faster, quicker, smarter. And then everybody has access to all these tools. And and they learned during COVID how to do things like what we're doing here, like recording.

And you mean I can just get a, have a conversation and create content and I can put that out like amazing. So yeah, it's getting harder and it's getting very hard to grow. And so what are the tactics? What are the skills? You really have to roll up your sleeves and learn. You have to learn the tactics on how to not only create content, which I think is a generic term really, because it assumes that all content is a commodity.

Like I'm just making rice, I'm just making rice and all rice is the same and it just tastes all, all the kernel and all the little the little grains of rice are all the same. And I'm just going to create a bunch of rice and put it out and everybody's going to love it. And it's all going to taste the same.

That's not how content is. Every little thing you put out is a different flavor. It reaches different people. It has different topics. It speaks to people differently. It hits emotionally different. It lands in a time in a timeline to a specific set of people that are going to react to it in a specific way, and then it's going to go bye bye.

And then maybe it'll resurface if the algorithm determines that someone else would benefit from that based off the data of the original post. So you have to learn all these things about how these platforms treat your content. How do you describe that content? And then as you get smarter, that's why I always encourage people start on one platform because you have to learn that platform.

And grow your audience. And then you can tell your audience, Hey, follow me to all the other platforms. So it's so funny to me how you can hear these. Gurus or whoever out there that says it's so easy to grow. Even Mr. Beast, right? Had a commercial. I think it was Shopify or something where he's it's so easy to start your store.

You just start it and look overnight, I'm getting all these orders. It's so easy. It's bro,

You have 130, I think 130 or around 130 million followers.

Yeah,

YouTube. No problem.

no, so easy. And it's the same thing if you build a following. So if you have a following either on your email list, you did it on YouTube or Twitter or any of the platforms, right? You built Instagram, you built up a big following and then you're like, you know what, I'm going to start a telegram or I'm going to start a, Snapchat or whatever platform you're going to move to.

You just tell everybody, Hey, I'm going over there now. And then they follow you because you have a real following. If you don't have a following, if you do that and nobody shows up over there on the new platform, then you know who your real people that are paying attention are. And that's humbling because you might have a situation. And I, I didn't get here with Carter in the journey. But in the next phase of the journey, after you get the initial little bit of followers you have to start moving into creating some sort of service or some sort of product to help people do something right.

Whether it's paid or you're doing it on a 1 on 1 basis, however, you're doing it consulting wise or services wise or product wise, you have to move to a point where you're. You're helping people and they're being drawn into your community. And then you start creating a community and you start talking about your products, whether, it's a, maybe you can even do an affiliate, right?

If you don't want to create products, but you're like, Hey, I want to promote these good products that are in line with what I'm talking about. And so you start creating this community, you're helping people, you're at that next level. And then that kind of flywheel effect starts happening where there's something to be attracted to.

And you start building out the network and growing. And if you don't do that, yes, you can, and there's different ways to look at it. Some people say, create your content first and then monetize it. And that's fine. I think that's smart. That's right on. But what happens when you can't figure out how to grow your audience first? That tells you that you're probably not on the in my rice analogy, it's just too plain, man,

That's

the rice ain't good enough. Like you got to change it up.

agree. Because what is let's just jump quickly to Mr. Beast. He was just I think he just had birthday and he was posting his statistics of his life on YouTube. He started with 7, 000 views per year, which is nothing compared to today, but it's 12 years journey as well. So that's what a lot of people don't see as well, because you're not good when you just get started.

when you have your own channel. I just started a new channel for my starter. I have 25 followers as a day of this recording. It's growing a little bit faster than maybe my first channel, but it's still nothing. And one of the things I'm playing right now, just to geek out a little bit is YouTube shorts.

That's massively I've had on my podcast channel. I've had a couple of thousand views. With one and that's built over to all the old content. That's always the interesting, like the tail end strategy where, yes, you have one, one peak somewhere and still everything goes up, which is quite interesting to see,

Yeah. And that concept is actually really important. There's a concept that you just want to put volume out, right? You just want to just throw everything at the wall, see what sticks. But there's another philosophy that says, put out your best stuff, because here's the concept that is interesting to me as an artist, if I hear a song on Spotify or somewhere, and, or I hear it on the radio and I find out who is this artist. What's the first thing I do?

check

listen to more of what I just heard. So I go and I look at the back discography or the catalog of this artist and I go listen to his other songs. What happens when I find a really good video on YouTube?

I click through the video and I see all the other videos and I see if I like any of the other topics and I Listen to another one. I want to hear that I subscribe right? so I think the backlog concept is a very important one to realize that when As you get more popular More and more people are going to go back to your back catalog and listen to it and watch it.

So your views will go up on all your past content as you get more popular. So it's a building thing that happens, not linearly. Like we think where it's just Nope, the new video that goes viral, then every video after that will go up and all these videos will still be nothing. You'll start to see a lift effect on all your content.

If it's good. Now, if you went to the concept of I just know I'm bad. I'm just going to put out all my bad content and get it all out of my system. Now you need to employ the concept of pruning, right? Or as you get more popular, some of your less good content gets deleted and magically disappears.

And you only, promote your good

I still keep all that shit in.

Yeah.

So with my first channel, which is the podcast channel, now it's 99. 9 percent the podcast only, which was not really favored in, in the old times of YouTube, but now it is, but with the new setup and YouTube going into podcasting as well, which so it's growing.

The views are growing. It's the retention and so on is different than it was before. Just having a normal podcast episode, like us right now, talking to each other, it's not everyone listens to podcasts or watches podcasts. Most of the time, it's still like we discussed before as well, while driving a car or while commuting to somewhere, and then it's just audio.

You don't watch it. So it's, I still have all the old stuff in, which is just funny. I just I'm more, but it's for me, it's not, I don't do this for gaining followers. I'm just doing it for myself because one of the reason, at least for me is I've seen it with my dad. He did radio a bit and it's just fascinating.

He died a couple of years back. I can still listen to it. I listened to him, him talking, and then I just want to have a huge library for my daughter when she's maybe 16. I hope I'm still there, but when she's 40, which is in 36 years, then I hope there is something which he can listen to and say, Oh, my dad was.

Not funny, but he has that interesting conversation. They talked about chat GTP and so on. So that's just for me is one thing to explore as well. Like how do I react to things? And now the other one is my other channel is a little bit more strategic because it's the channel of the startup, but yeah.

It works a little different.

Yep. Yeah. We have all, we all have our different reasons for doing the content. And I think we all have to find our why in that, because if we're only looking at our follower count as the reason to continue it's going to be really hard.

And that's even what in the podcast interview with Mr, Mr. Beast, he was even saying that it doesn't matter. It's easy to say if you have 130 million,

Yeah. But I've talked to, I've talked to guys like Sam Parr of my first million podcast, and he even admits that the hardest channel to grow is podcasting

It is. And it takes time. Joe Rogan was saying it. I think he has had almost thousand episodes already out before it took off. Thousand episodes. I'm at 200 something published, 222 I think.

which is huge. Congrats.

It's already big for a podcast, but just comparing this to Joe Rogan is far away. Not just from the listeners and the quality and so on.

And it's, if you also look at it. Even if you're looking at it, like you're doing it for yourself, but maybe also looking at it like a learning experience, you're basically learning out loud,

exactly.

in public and you're saying, Hey I'm doing this to get better. And. You just know that you're using all the latest techniques.

You're mixing it up with the latest and greatest, thoughts and leaders in the industry, you're going to get better. You're going to make contacts. You're going to get a community going at some point, just keep going, I think a lot of people have this mindset of if I don't make it by next month and have a million followers, like I'm not meant to do this, I'm going to quit, it's okay I guess we won't see you.

especially with podcasts. If you take the first 10 podcasts, except you have already huge following which you drag in. It's Yeah, it's your family and friends. Listen, and if you're lucky, it's your family and friends. In my case, they don't speak English properly. So they don't listen. Nobody of my buddies and my family's listened to it. Which is always funny.

That's an interesting yeah, it's true. When I was I won this award with Red Bull and I went to Portugal and I met people all over the world and I met this one girl who had to apologize to me cause she's yeah, I'm coming out with my YouTube channel, but it's not in English. So you won't be able to understand anything I say.

And I tried so hard to like still listen to it and try to translate it. And I just, at some point I was like, it's too hard. I can't keep up.

Tell us a little bit about phase six. So how did you which is the film where you We're in the, what was the top 10 of the Red Bull

Yeah. Yeah. It was very interesting competition. So they had a worldwide competition to find the best sci fi filmmakers. Because they were partnered with a European think tank called future IO and future IO is a really great group of futurists and leaders and innovators that inspire businesses to think differently about the future and desirable futures.

And so they realized that the future, a lot of times mimic sci fi films, right? Whatever comes out, we were just talking about Superman, right? Where he has his crystals and he puts them in and he's talking to his father. That was basically an AI of his father that was trained in all his father's wisdom that he could just tap at any moment.

What kind of desirable sci fi filmmaker ideas and concepts can we bring? And so what they did is they created this huge kind of. Meeting of the minds in Europe in Portugal, where they brought all these big thinkers and innovators and futurists from all over. And then brought in our, us as filmmakers to share what is our desirable vision of the future.

And so we had to do like this Ted talk. We had our films, we had our premiere, they rolled out the red carpet. It was super amazing. And we got to learn from, the guys that chose films at South by Southwest and Cannes film festival and all these different films and really give us storytelling and networking.

And it was just an amazing time to. Really just hear all these great ideas and what the future could look like. And I didn't even know what a futurist was, like when I went there and they were like, you definitely are like,

but how did you get into this? So did you hear about it? Did someone nudge you to say, Hey, you should go there. You should apply for it. How did that,

Yeah. So I was working at tech mountain in the, on the coast here in North Carolina. So I was working at a startup and we I was making, I had premiered my film and they were like, you should really think about entering this Red Bull competition. Cause you're forward thinking you're innovative you're right in line with this and you need to apply.

And so I applied thinking it's just like another film, premiere thing that I, And when you go on the festival circuit with your short film, it's really tough to go anywhere beyond a short film because a short film and in the film world is like a business card. It's just here's my style.

Here's what I can do the work, but it's not a film full length. So you can't sell it or do anything with it. And so it's very hard to do anything. So the festival circuit for a short film filmmaker is basically just Hey guys, here's what I did. It's fun. It may be open some doors, make some connections, but it's not really Hey, I'm going to go make a living at this.

Yeah, so I got in, I applied and I won and it was cool. And I, and then they had, so once you got picked they picked like 20 people to go to Portugal, then they had a second competition to win. So after you do your Ted talk and you're not Ted itself, but like the style of talk you kinda, you have a certain amount of minutes to present your ideas.

Then they had this second competition there at the conference, at the event where the winner of that got the red bull film team to film their idea, which is super cool. And I didn't win that, but the guy that did his concept was in the future, you would be able to transfer energy. To other people.

And yeah, so they did a film on that, which is really cool. So yeah. And the Red Bull film team is amazing. They were, we got to meet them when we went over there and wow. They're great.

I was just watching your short film, which is called phase six. I will put the link into the show notes for everyone to have a look at it. It's amazing. I will not spoil the story, but the story with Jade and Chas and I was completely dragged into and it's, what is it, 12 minutes?

Yeah.

It's super good.

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah.

Really good.

it's funny looking back now because. I went too ambitious on my first film. Like I was like, Oh my gosh. Like then I was always joking. Like the next film I do is going to be a two person romantic comedy in one location. Cause it's just, when you do an indie film, you realize that you don't have a big budget, so you can't get it done in a compressed amount of time, which is why, big budget films.

You can basically get. Everybody together at one point, just knock it all out and shoot it all. And everybody's isolated and that's all they're doing. They're not like flying away, like doing other things. And but when you're doing an indie film, you're like, Oh, three people can't make it today.

I guess we can't shoot, and so I had 30 people on set. Like everyone had to be there doing their job and there's so many crazy stories. Like one, one time the sound guy showed up drunk and he couldn't, he wasn't hitting the record button. Just crazy stories.

One time we had, we rented out this restaurant, we're doing the scene in the restaurant. One of the extras, little boys were in the bathroom painting the walls, white. With paint, they found underneath the counter.

It's Oh my goodness. There's so many stories, but yeah. And then after that film came out, I started having kids and I was just talking to a stunt coordinator yesterday actually. And. Yeah, we were like comparing notes about how hard it is when your life changes and you don't have the time anymore to just go do films.

Yeah.

And so I think eventually I will be gathering people and resources for my next film. And I can't wait. It's gonna be fun. There's some, I'm talking to some people about maybe doing like a. Like a sci fi fantasy kind of deal. But again, I'm like still going back to the romantic, just two people and some drama, just keep it easy, man.

I just want to, I just want to put something out. I don't want to have to spend five years of my life making it,

but like you said, the business card is there and it's on your YouTube channel. I think it's definitely worth checking out for some film people

Thank you. Thank

It's really good. So let's lead us. Let's use that a little bit to, how did you get to being a CEO? Like you're a filmmaker, you're doing this things, you're working in marketing, you work even in medical stuff, which we haven't talked about and.

You're surfing, obviously. So let's start with how do surfing and being a CEO of a startup link together and what did you learn from surfing, which you can apply as a startup CEO?

Interesting. Yeah. I've always grown up around the beach. My dad was in the military. He was a Marine pilot and he, we moved all over all the time. It was always moving. Holding down friends was really hard because you get to meet great friends. And then you'd say, bye, I got to move somewhere.

And so it was really tough growing up to just not have. Any solid foundation or friends. And so by the time we got to high school, my dad sacrificed for the family and said, Hey, I want to keep us here on the coast of North Carolina. And that really helped us to have some stability, especially through high school.

I think that's a crucial time to not say bye to all your friends and start over at the bottom somewhere. But Yeah. I always love the water. I always love like the mountains, like snowboarding and stuff too. California probably would have been a better place to surf and snowboard in the same day, but I'm an East coast boy, so that's what we did.

And then I always wanted to be a CEO. I always knew that one day I would probably try to start my own company or lead a company. And I was just just being very patient, right? Very patient in corporate America, just doing my job, learning as much as I could. I knew that. One of the scariest, hardest things to do in business is sales.

And so when I was graduating college at the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I was even talking to my friends that were graduating ahead of me a couple of years and they were getting into sales and I was like, what are you guys thinking? Like how boring, how like why would you do that?

And this was during the time where. It was right after the. com boom, right? Like the. com boom was full effect. Everybody was, I had friends that were like, yeah, I put. com on it and they're giving me a million dollars. I'm going to fly out to San Francisco. It's amazing. I'm like, Oh my God, I was just a little too young, like a little too naive.

I got, I didn't quite understand what was going on, but yeah, friends were, just crushing it, going out, doing, making all this money and then I graduated and had already crashed. So I was like, great, this is amazing. Like friends that were graduating with me were like going into the Peace Corps and like going back to get their master's degree.

Like they're doing anything but trying to get a job. And that just wasn't my style. And I was like, okay, what are the things you need as a CEO to know how to do? And sales was one of the skills where you absolutely knew needed to know how to sell yourself and your products. You need to know how to sell, you need to needed that skillset.

And if you're running a company and you have salespeople on the team, you need to have their trust and you need to have street cred. It's like trying to be a general and you've never shot a gun in your life. It's and I always, growing up, had seen these CEOs and I'm like, I don't know if I could respect a CEO that couldn't sell anything like, how do they even, you can't become a CEO and not know how to sell. So I was like, all right, I'm going to bite the bullet and do the hardest thing first, and I'm just going to go into sales and sure enough, what do companies need in a recession?

Sales. Definitely. Yeah.

So if you are young and hungry and want to make money and you think we're going into a depression or a recession, brush up on your skills, sales skills so that's what I did. And so that whole concept I'd been in sales or business development, selling software, medical software, my whole career, and just being very patient.

And my friends had been watching me. And going on a different path where they were starting their own companies. Eventually some of them created their own private equity firm. And they saw me join one of these companies and triple it in revenue and they were like, Hey, we want you to come run one of our companies and do that,

yeah.

And it was. One of the things where as a personal value of mine, like I want to make sure that I'm enjoying what I'm doing and enjoying life. Cause I, I think there's a balance between doing something you hate to just make money to then one day, do something you like no, just, four hour work week it right.

Figure out what you enjoy now and make that happen. And then, expand from there. And so they said, Hey. We know you like podcasting. We know you're creative. We know you like software. What if we buy, and we know you like marketing and sales, like why? What if we bought this company?

Would you run it for us? And of course I was like, that sounds amazing. Like first time CEO. Let's see what I got. Let's put me to the test here. Let's plug that junk in. Let's go. Yeah, so that's, I got that opportunity and it was a really cool thing. And so that's where I'm at right now, just learning and growing and figuring out the content game, just like everybody else is with the AI and everything.

So yeah, it's been fun. It's been awesome. And I don't think I answered your question though, on, on the surfing, how it relates. It relates because in surfing, you have to paddle to where the wave is crashing. A lot of people are passive. They're just like, I'm going to just sit here and just if you do that in surfing, if you literally just sit there and want the waves to come to you, you're going to be sitting there all day long and you're going to watch everyone else catch their wave and crush it and do all the tricks and right.

You have to actually paddle and what's called dig. You got to dig. You got to get to the wave. You got to get into it. You got to be in the right spot on the wave. You got to know what you're doing. You got to go down the line and then. You have to flow with the wave. You have to feel the wave. You have to move with the wave as it's moving.

It's an organic dance that you make, right? And that's just like in business, you have to go where the opportunity is. You have to figure out who needs what I can make for them. Find those people, go to where they are, serve them, and then adjust and listen to what they want, just as you're writing a wave.

Love that. Yeah. And it's obviously, and we haven't geeked out about podcasting. Maybe we can dive a little bit into that because before we do that, explain a little bit what you do, what Wave is doing, the company Wave.

yeah, so wave is a tool for podcasters and audio creators. To help them grow their influence on social media through turning their podcasts or audio into video. So it's like a, you take your audio podcast and you put visuals with it. And then now we create videos for you to share on social media.

So what we're really doing is taking the editing process and. Difficulty out of it. So if you don't want to sit there and take video and try to chop it up, you just take your audio, find highlight, and we create the visuals with it. And then we add. Waveform animations that match the audio, right? So the video is like creating animations that match your audio to create an eye catching movement.

So when people are scrolling, they see that there's something active happening there and it's interesting. And they're like, Oh, let me listen to that. And then they're going to see the captions there. They're going to see the title. They're going to see, okay, this is a topic I'm interested in and something's happening here and I want to listen.

And then they can go into kind of passive listening mode and listen to whatever the clip is. And if they like that clip, they might not do it in the first one. They might not do it in the seventh one, but eventually they're going to say, I got to go check out the whole thing of this. This conversation is interesting.

I got to go listen more. And they're going to find you. They're going to subscribe to your podcast. They're going to get your full episodes. And now you might have earned a new listener. So we're really trying to help you grow your audience at wave. And we're recently just released transcription.

So full transcription of your podcast to be able to repurpose, if you need to use create a blog, a newsletter descriptions for social posts. Putting the full transcription on your website, under your podcast player, right for SEO, all sorts of things like that, just to help podcasters the most to leverage what they're doing.

Yeah. What I love as well, what I've seen when I looked at your website and as well, the YouTube channel, you educate a lot, which for me, this is it for me, it's basic marketing, but it's so good. When you start educating with the topics you do, and you're not an education company it's just helping the audience, the people who are interested in podcasting.

Hey, how do I do this? How do I do that? So they link to what you do as a company and then say, Hey, they helped me with this. Maybe they can support me. So it's not hard sales. It's just, Hey, there's cool content, which might help you to do things better without. you paying for it. You just need to do it yourself.

And I think that's, that goes into the no and trust. Paradigm where if, look, there's a lot of options out there right now, like you don't have to use wave. You don't have to use Adobe premiere. You don't have to use any of these products that are out there. You choose to use them and you choose to work with people and brands that you trust and that you like, right?

And we look at it as an honor. If somebody chooses to use wave, because we know they can go wherever they want at any moment, there's no long term contract, right? Yeah, it's, I definitely think that's the way to look at it as a company is who are you trying to serve? And are you serving them with education, with encouragement?

Are you inspiring them to get to where they want to be as a creator? Because there's so many options out there. And, if we can help somebody along the way then they're going to, they're going to roll with our community and what I hope to do this year is create a community, right? In the app, like just have it where we show up and teach people live.

Here's what we're doing. What are you doing? What's working for you? Let's, what do you need right now? What can we build you?

Yeah.

And so to really create that community, I think is the next step beyond just teaching. Like we're doing now.

Yeah. Very cool. Let's talk about podcasting. So you have, if I have seen right here, you're running three podcasts yourself or co running three podcasts or did at least in the past.

Yeah. Yeah. There's my personal podcast. I did run at my last company. I helped start their podcast which is tax pronation. And then yeah, then the current wave podcast.

Yeah, I did. They all came naturally need to let's start with your personal podcast. Did you start this to explore? What was the purpose you did? You started that?

Yeah. The original one was just to document my journey as a filmmaker and just start podcasting. It's funny cause back in the day when I was in Nashville. I got the Canon 5d Mark two and I thought it was the best thing ever in the world. Cause it was like the first, DSLR that did film.

And I was like, Oh my goodness. 10 ADP. It's like amazing. And at the time that was like 2006 to 2008 was the first. Boom of podcasting, like the Fert, like V1, it was like, this is it. Podcasting is amazing, but I was like still on the filmmaking kick where I was like, Oh no, I got to learn how to do all this DSLR, like crazy stuff. And so I started blogging back when a lot of people were starting to podcast. And so I feel like I was following it and listening to it, but I wasn't, I felt like I was part of the podcasting community, but I wasn't really doing it. I was blogging and so years and years later, I was like, I need to just.

So I need to just do this as a podcast. And so I started doing the podcast and then just experimenting, it's just one of those things where, some of it is just me monologuing. Some of it is interview. I'm still working that out. I think that's my play pen, if you will, of what, what's interesting to me right now when I went to the craft and commerce conference last year, and then to the One of the major podcasts, what's it called?

One of the big podcast conferences. The talk was the YouTube, the transfer to YouTube. And so all the podcasters were like, what are we now? Are we YouTubers now? Are we, are YouTubers now podcasters? Are, is everyone a podcaster? It's yeah, pretty much. If you're creating audio, it's just a distribution point now.

And it's very, it's I created some of the content that was for video first. That also could be a podcast as well. And I realized quickly that as a podcaster who has video tied to it, it's actually a different editing process. I don't know if you've realized that too. Like in audio only world, you can actually move entire sections of the conversation

Yes.

that happened at different times to make the actual podcast sound like more cohesive and make more sense.

Especially if you like come back to a conversation that you started originally to finish it, you can take that, put it with that first part and make it sound like coherent. Whereas on video. I might've shifted in my chair. I might've took, taken my hat to the side. I might have, done something different.

My mic is in a different spot. And then where you cut it on video, it's like really disjointed. Wait, why is he sitting like that now? I don't understand how this happened or right. And so the video component really constricts you as far as your freedom of editing. So I've been really understanding the difference of how you can.

Use both. And you really, I think the audio only podcasters, it's a, it's an art in and of itself, just to focus on that. And whereas I think if you're trying to double it as a video, YouTube kind of podcast it's another art.

Yeah. For me, one of the reasons I did video from episode number one on was The distribution opportunities and creating video clips on top of the audio clips, just because I've seen the movements. I started in 2020 of what's going on with videos in Instagram, for example, at that time. And there's okay, I will just try it still was very bad, but that's how it is when you get started.

Let's use that to talk about podcasting. So I have quite a few listeners who are building businesses, who are entrepreneurs and startup founders, for example. Why should a company like you do as well with wave have a company podcast, something where they focus on different things than you do as a person, as the CEO of the company.

Yeah, this, I think this is important because it gets into the niching. I think a lot of people have problems when they're doing a. Kind of a personal podcast that they can't niche down. It's really hard to use your name or even a concept that you call it. Where you can niche down enough to where a listener is okay, I'm going to listen to this.

And at the end of this, I'm going to take something away. In other words. You're in a utility mode versus a, I just want to be entertained for an hour. I'm just going to laugh. Like the purpose of this is I'm just going to laugh for an hour or I'm going to just like, enjoy this time that I'm hanging out with these people.

So a lot, it's very hard to get into that entertainment mode. So most podcasts are going to fall into the utility mode. And if you're in the utility mode, you better be super niche. You better be teaching something that people care about, and they're trying to learn something. And at the end of it, you better give them something that they can say, okay, I'm, that was worth my time.

And so most businesses are going to find it extremely hard to jump into that entertainment category, right? And so if that's, Red Bull, they've figured it out, right? They can create entertainment and they're a company that sells drinks. Like great. Okay. They, that's super hard though, to do so to think you're going to just come out of the gates and you're going to have some amazing, emotionally, powerful, entertaining thing.

Is this hard? Okay. So if you're going to start somewhere, you're going to start in the utility branch, which means. If you're getting away from your personal, which you can't even figure out what your niche is there, a business podcast. That's going to be strictly serving the people that you're already serving your business.

So whatever those customer avatars are, whoever, whatever the demographics, psychographics, whoever those people are, their likes, values, goals, create content that's going to serve them. And then when they're attracted to that content, they find out, Oh, you also make can openers. Cool. I collect cans. Like I need a can opener.

Like I'm going to, let me buy a can opener from you. That's really cool. So you're building on that. know, like trust concept where it's like, Hey, I'm learning from you. I like you. I want to support what you're doing. So I'm going to buy the thing. That's a commodity that you sell. Or I'm going to trust you as a coach or a consultant to help me do what you're talking about.

You're, you just trained me on the how do I do this thing? I want you to implement it for me. So that's a really good way as starting a business. Like you're telling people how to do it. You're giving them 99 percent of the stuff they're hiring you for the 1 percent or the 2 percent of to actually implement what you're saying.

And so I think that's why it's important as a business to have a podcast or a YouTube channel or putting out content in general because it gets you out of the trap or the difficult climb of trying to figure out as a personal brand. Also, when you have a personal brand, you can talk about way more things, right?

So you, you're not just. Work mode all the time. You have other interests, other things that you do, and that's your platform to talk about that. And then there's a middle ground where you might have a lifestyle business where you are the business. And then it gets really muddy.

Now it's okay, you're I'm trying to think of a an example, but you're, you are the business. You're the name, right? And you have your name on it and you are in a niche. And so you can probably get away with just having one podcast and talking about everything. I've seen some gurus. I follow, I followed them.

For 10 years and they've changed their business. They've changed everything like several times, right? They start off in one thing. They got this business. Oh, they sold that business. Okay. Who cares? Now we're doing this other thing. Okay. Now we're talking about something else. Oh, web three. Oh, Hey, NFTs. Oh, Hey, now we're doing this.

So we're doing something else. And so you just fall in love with them as people. And you're just like, Hey, I'm going to support you. You just wrote a book about something. Okay, cool. Oh, you have this product. Oh, you have this, you have a software company, whatever. And that's cool because in that way, you don't look at it.

Like your podcast is forever, right? Just like you said, like you started a podcast, you did this other thing. It's starting out with 25 followers. That's cool. You're going to start and stop things. But what you're really trying to do is create an ecosystem that people want to be a part of and lean in and be like, what is he going to do?

What's next? It's almost like you're creating the grand drama of your life. And you're living it on a stage and you're inviting other people along for the ride. And they're like, Whoa, like you got all this stuff going on. Like how can I, and then that's also why you see some of these platforms.

They're creating this content as the cultural talking point or water cooler to just come to, to have these conversations. And then what's really cool is when you take it to the next level. I'm trying to remember this guy's name. He's in the real estate niche and he basically, the way he grows is he has his community built around his content and then they source deals for him.

That's cool.

So they're giving him real estate deals to grow his business. And then they both win, but they're incentivized to be like learning from him. And then they're giving him deals. And it's just, it's a really cool dynamic that can happen, but he is the brand. And he leverages the personal brand to sell all the businesses.

And he has 10 different businesses now. So the other way to look at it is if your personal brand grows bigger than your business brand. In other words, your business podcast, it's okay to just. Close the business podcast and just be the face of it. I think the danger though, when a lot of people think about it, that way is okay, cool.

You're a brand, you're a lifestyle, you're a personality. You are now jeopardizing your business a little bit, because now if you sold that business off, it doesn't have any media tied to it. There's no media publishing part of it. So that, that, that's a tough thing. And it's also the argument that a lot of people talk about where Elon Musk is Tesla, right?

And if he left. It would struggle and Oh, I don't know. Like he's personality. Okay.

And no. Hard to

maybe not.

Yeah. Maybe it would be better. You never know. But I agree from a perspective of having this niche, which is in your case, it's about podcasting and the WAVE podcast is about. Podcasting it, it makes, it, it relates people. What I like about that. It's like you said, community building, that's one piece of it.

The other part is you get a little bit of feeling of who is behind that company, because, today everyone can be everything, but if you have a little bit more consistency and you, they 2050, whatever growing episodes, and they're still coming. That means there is something, there are people involved.

It's not just a scam, which I think, especially in today's time where you can do a lot of things with AI, like we chatted in the beginning, this helps relate to people and then it's okay. They do something interesting. Maybe that's something for me as well, because they're producing valuable content.

That's such a good idea. You just prompted something in my mind. I just got to share this. Okay. So in crypto, there's something called proof of work. You also have concepts called proof of identity. Proof of stake, meaning you own a part of you own coins in the network. So you have proof of that.

But what you just said is I think a huge concept we can debut here on the show, if no one else is going to coin this in the future, but it's proof of authenticity. So if you're a business and you're not creating content. We don't know the personality behind this business. How do we know to trust it? Is it going to be here tomorrow?

What are you thinking? Are you going to rug us in the crypto world to use crypto terminology? Are you going to rug us? Are you, are we going to trust you? And then you're just going to leave what's. So I think that is a huge reason to be creating content as well to your point. I think that's a great idea.

Like proof of authenticity is you as a business showing up. And sharing what's going on in your world so that your customers trust you.

Yeah. And you can use that for as a news channel, explaining a little bit what you do from a news perspective, but you can then as well do the educational piece, like we discussed with YouTube channel. So I think it works in both ways, or you, I don't know just brainstorming here the employee of the month or whatever it is, if you have a bigger company where you interview someone who is only behind the scenes, but it's a fun person to talk to.

And what would be awesome. So it's also, if we think bigger, it's not just customer, it's also the people who want to work in that business, because it's going to be hard to get awesome talents in the future.

That's a great point. Yeah.

even for talents, I listened to a couple of podcasts with Jeff and it was like, yeah, he's nice guy.

I would love to be in that company.

That's a great point too. Yeah. You can find people that are going to work for your company. You can find, you can interview customers. We interviewed, we had a whole season of story on tax pronation podcast, where we, all we did was interview our customers. And I bet out of the, I don't know how many episodes that was, maybe 12 episodes.

I bet out of all those episodes, we had half of them where we reached a point in the podcast where we were crying. It's hard to do.

Yeah.

That's hard to do, but they're telling their stories and they're raw. And it's look, I'm a small business owner. I was trying to start my business. My wife died. I had to figure out how to keep going or just curl up into a ball and cry myself to sleep every night.

There's, the stories are just insane. Like what these people go through, or like I was starting a company. I put all my life savings into starting this company. And then they partner just scam me, walked away and I lost the business and I had to, Jerry McGuire, all the clients and call them and try to get them to stay with me and just crazy stories.

But every small business owner has those kinds of stories.

Yeah.

Imagine like all those stories, like you sharing them. And so I guess it's on you as a small business owner, learn this stuff, get a mic, get on YouTube, figure out how to do the technology. It's not an excuse anymore to not know how to do stuff.

You got, you're a YouTube away from knowing everything. You're an AI question away, a

And to the earlier discussion, it don't need to be perfect. You don't, it's not comparable to your short film, which is awesome, but it doesn't matter because the proof of authenticity, like you said, it's still there. Even if the, if you don't have the best camera and if you don't have the best background, but you have an interesting conversation, it's fine.

hundred percent, a

And you don't need to be in

that, that really is what moves you from utility to story, right? That entertainment gap, that's where. The forgiveness of the technicalities comes in. So the higher, the value of story that you have, the higher, the authenticity and what you're saying and communicating on an emotional level, the more forgiving your audience is to the technicalities of, did you pull off the right?

Lighting or the right sound or the right, mix or the right. If you look at Joe Rogan's first podcast, he's sitting there like fumbling around, trying to figure out how to work his camp. It's just funny. He's am I doing this right?

Yeah. And I think that's an important one. And even in, I think in your case, you do the podcast now, the wave podcast, but you don't need to do it as the owner of the business. You can have a, like you have on the wave YouTube channels. Like you, one of your colleagues is doing almost all the videos and a couple of others as well.

It's not you as the CEO who is in every video.

So you can as well get creative people in your organization. Maybe you have already a marketer who would be awesome on the YouTube channel.

Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And there was many years where I worked in corporate America, where they forbade the employees from making content, they were like, no, you can't make content, only the CEO can make content.

That's BS.

But I think now you can look into your audience and you can, I'm sorry, your your staff, your employees and see who's talented on camera.

Give them a shot. There's some really talented people that are wanting to make content. That if you buy a camera for them and tell them the rules and set them loose, they'll make all sorts of great content for you.

Yeah. I have cool example. I can't say the company, they have a couple of stores and two of their salespeople took over their YouTube channel and they had one hit after the other because they just had fun doing it. But then it was a slightly bigger corporation that said, no, we can't do this anymore.

You're not allowed to do

of course

it was so hilarious what they did with the products and the videos, just really short stuff and just having fun.

Yep.

If I would be the owner of this bigger company, I would say, Hey guys, you do this 100 percent of your time because you're awesome doing it.

And they could literally, and this is why I moved. I started shifting in my career from sales only to marketing, digital marketing, because I realized that the conversation is happening online. And then they're deciding before they even talk to a salesperson. So a lot of the times the salesperson is just what a waste.

What are you doing? You're not going to cold call somebody and convince them to buy. What are you even talking about? That's not how it works anymore. So it's very it's very interesting that a huge opportunity right now, if you're an entrepreneur, especially if you're younger and you understand how to do the social video and social media, there's so many people right now that are older, that are retiring and selling their businesses.

Do you know how you can buy these businesses and just put that publishing media arm on it and just crush it? There's so much opportunity right now to do that. If you're

I should have done

you're hungry.

I should have done that. I tell you, because my first business, I've built everything and lost so much money. in all the learnings, but I agree. Even if you take very normal business, I was just talking yesterday with a friend, like a hair salon, which is a one, one, like one store or salon only, you could do so many things with social media. And they're doing zero, like zero, zero, zero.

Yeah,

so many things you could do with just being a little bit creative with involving all the different customers, even if it's the grandma from next door or whatever,

Yup.

have her interviewing her life while you do the cutting is like, there's so many fun stuff you could do.

That's I'm almost saying let's buy a business like that. It would just make fun to market it.

Absolutely. If you make, even if you make it a destination, like if you have a physical store, how hard is it? I'm trying to remember if, is it in California? There's like this wall where all these Instagrammers have to go in California to take a picture of themselves on this wall because it's pink and it's got this certain kind of style or whatever.

And they're just like, everyone has to go there. How hard is it if you're a brick and mortar business? To paint a wall outside your business so that people come as the destination. Oh, and by the way, we sell whatever,

True. A hundred percent. I worked in one of the companies, which is a destination my whole life or not my whole life, but plus 10 years.

Or the, what's the documentary about the sushi chef where he's, you can only have, five people that come in and he does the sushi, and it's like the best sushi in the world. But the mystique around that guy, it's like, everyone wants to go there now.

Yeah. It's

So if you're the hairstylist and you're just this one hairstylist in the middle of nowhere, but man, you use like you chop hair with a big chopping blade and you put it on the block and you pop and you, then everybody's Holy junk, what just happened?

And you put that all on YouTube. People are going to be flocking to you. What is going on in this little town in the middle of nowhere? Like I'm going to go, I gotta go find this lady and figure out how she chops my hair. Just right. It's amazing.

Yeah, I think marketing wise, there's so many opportunities and looping us back to podcasting, I think at least in my experience, I do this now a couple of years and I'm saying I should have started 10 years ago. So because it's a learning curve, I've never done a video. I've never done any audio cutting.

I've done zero before. So especially if you, for you it's slightly different. You come at least from the cutting, you have done a bit of that before you, you start blank and then you, it takes a while to get into a direction and then you go and learn and get better and learn as well how to ask question.

How do you communicate in a different way? And even worse, like I do and Not my native language where you have a double hurdle sometimes because you talk different,

and that's amazing by the way, I think there's also a huge opportunity for those that are listening and from a business standpoint to create all different language of the same content.

agree. I have not never tried this because I suck talking in German. So I'm German originally. I can't do the same fun stuff in German anymore. It doesn't work. I can say the same things, but it doesn't work. It's not funny. So it's super, I like, like I said, before we started recording, I do this leadership question of the day in the moment.

I couldn't do that in German, but I should,

Yeah,

the market is so small that I could get quite a lot of attention there because Germans in general are not the most funny people.

Yeah. For real, you, I think there's a huge opportunity for multiple language speakers to create content in those different languages native, because. With the advent of transcription, and then translation, you're seeing a lot of content creators like Mr. Beast who have different language channels and they're subtitling it. But I think AI is going to get to the point. And it already is at this point, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

And it's not mass, production ready where they actually 3d map your face and your lips and they, you do the translation and then your lips actually speak in German, even though you were speaking in an English, let's say, which is totally mind blowing. That technology is going to be available where literally you were saying it all in one language and then you're all of a sudden saying it in another language and you didn't do any extra recording or work.

That's crazy, right? But I think you're going to start seeing this technology come out, but I think from a authenticity standpoint, if you in your workflow can speak two languages or more, and you can say the same thing. Just one right after another in the same especially if you are doing the snippets, like you're saying, you're doing the short little clips.

It's a little bit easier to do that than maybe this conversation. But I heard a strategy the other day. That was really interesting. She was saying that she recorded the podcast, like we're doing now with video. She puts out an audio only podcast, and then she only shares the video. So she doesn't have to edit all this crazy, like the whole thing is

The video.

And then when they go to listen, it's just the podcast, but you, we all find our ways to navigate the editing game. I'll also share this, which I'm, this is what I'm working on right now. I'm about to get off this call and do this. So they just came out with this AI editing tool. I don't know if you've heard about this or seen this.

I'm using one.

Are you where it edits your video for you automatically?

Not automatically, I still need to do it myself. But it's, you can do a lot already. So it's, I can select, Hey, take these words. I'll take these words. I'll take this words out. Make the gaps between the words shorter. If there's a thinking, if you do too much or you, for example, I've had a couple of guests who say, oh, that's an amazing question.

If they say too often, then it sounds weird. So you can just type in these words and then it takes it out.

Yeah. That's audio editing. I'm talking about

including

it like this interview right here and it'll go through and edit the conversation where it's cutting to different things. Like I'm eager to try it and see how good it is.

Awesome. Let's get us into the last part. We are already way over the time which is good because I think we could do a couple of hours more.

We're going for three hours, baby. No,

exactly. I'm not sure that my daughter is waiting for me already because we agreed that we will do how it's called. Like an indoor camping at our roof part.

So last part of the podcast is the part where I'm asking two questions, which I'm asking to every guest. If you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you choose to work with? And why would you choose to work with that project?

Wow. I would work with something that helps people build businesses. I think there's only two real things that you can chart your own path in the world. And define your purpose, why you're here and to create something of value for others, which the vehicle for that is usually some sort of business.

So those are like the two skills I'd want to help people with is like, why are you here? Where did you come from? Why are you here? And what are you here to do? What are you here to help people do? And yeah, it would be something along those lines for sure.

What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started?

Ah, solve trillion. Trillion dollar trillion people problems, right? Solve problems at the largest level and think as big as you can. Because I think what I've learned, especially watching the big innovators in the world, like Elon, if you reverse engineer what they're doing they start at the top, like what are the biggest needs in our world, and then they go backward from there instead of what a lot of people do, which is like, how do I make. Like how do I, do this one little thing and then I'll figure out from there and then I'll give, and then I'll do this stuff. No. Like, how can you help the most people figure out the what first, not the how. I think that's what I would say.

Cool. I will put obviously all your social links and the video clip or not clip the link to your short film as well into the show notes. Is there any social media platform where you prefer people reaching out to you? If someone is in the listeners to say, I would love to talk to Jeff.

Yeah. Right now I'm active on YouTube, LinkedIn really all of them. I'm even on some of the newer ones but. I think I'm very responsive. So if you want to reach out to me I'll I'm listening on all channels right now. So feel free to your social media of choice. I will probably respond now.

Will that happen in the future? If I get too much, probably not. But right now my time is efficient and I can do that kind of thing.

Awesome. Super. Jeff, thank you very much for the great conversation. Was really pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you. It was amazing. Thank you so much.

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Jens Heitland

EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

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EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

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JENS HEITLAND

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EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

Spotify Podasts

Youtube Podcasts

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EP 227: Proof of authenticity- How content creation can change businesses & People with Jeff Dolan

Guest Links:

Equipment that I use for my Videos and Podcasts!

Here are the ways to work with me:

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Subscribe and Listen to The Jens Heitland Show Podcast HERE:

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Transcript:

EP 228: Innovation Breakfast Club Revival

EP 226: Redefining Spaces and Minds: The Creative Synergy of Visual Storytelling with Natalia and George

JENS HEITLAND

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