371: Lucas Dickey: How Deepcast is Revolutionizing Podcast Discovery

Lucas Dickey 00:00:00:

Jassy, who is the now CEO, was the senior vice president of AWS at the time. And he said, lucas, you know, I don't want you buying my number two customer out from underneath us. This is what Facebook had been doing at the time, by the way. So they would launch an API, they would encourage people develop on it. The best app would, like, be the cream of the crop. They would buy that app or they would reproduce it and then shut down the API.

Harry Duran 00:00:23:

Salucas Dicki, CEO of deepcast, thank you so much for joining me on Podcast Junkies.

Lucas Dickey 00:00:27:

Thank you, Harry. I'm happy to be on Podcast Junkies.

Harry Duran 00:00:30:

If only people knew what happens behind the scenes when an episode gets recorded. All the second, third takes, all the restarts, all the refreshes.

Lucas Dickey 00:00:38:

That's very true. It's also the hey, I forgot to hit the record button. And we just did an entire 60 minute. I actually talked to somebody else who said they record all of their own sessions in parallel.

Harry Duran 00:00:50:

Yes.

Lucas Dickey 00:00:51:

So that if necessary, they can send them after the fact. And they're like, it's saved three or four interviews because they do the sort of redundancy on their end, which makes total sense.

Harry Duran 00:01:01:

It's probably a smart thing to do. But 11 years in, I probably. I think I've only lost one interview since then or maybe because of tech related issues. So, yeah, knock on wood. So we were connected through Ally because she's working on your show and I was. She was kind enough to connect us and I was on and we had a great conversation. I can't wait till that gets released and maybe we'll sync it up so we can release yours and mine at the same time. Yeah. So people get the full experience. But yeah. How long have you known Ali?

Lucas Dickey 00:01:31:

Yeah, it's been in at this point, three or four months. But it became a fairly, like, tight relationship. I mean, because she's produced so many shows and then she has her own show. Yeah, she knows how to get into the groove really quickly. She also knew. So Sound Strategy being the name of the podcast. And then I keyword stuffed it after talking to Adam Schull. So it's now the Sound Strategy with Lucas Dickey. The most meta podcast about podcasting ever. So I get podcast about podcasting in there, my name in there and the name of the show. Sound Strategy itself is like a good keyword for differentiation.

Harry Duran 00:02:06:

Yes.

Lucas Dickey 00:02:06:

But it misses out on the things like podcasters looking for things about podcasting because they didn't have it in the title. So it's now in there. Obviously it's in the show notes as well. But like hitting. Hitting both is good for redundancy purposes. And I don't usually do the whole show name when I talk about it, but then when I write it, it's always in written form. Right?

Harry Duran 00:02:23:

Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:02:23:

So she came on. What I wanted to do with sound strategy was somewhat similar to your sort of job or focus or whatever you think about it with this show.

Harry Duran 00:02:33:

Sure.

Lucas Dickey 00:02:35:

But it's also a marketing vehicle for deepcast and deepcast creator. Although I'm taking the sort of show don't tell approach and I don't heavily sell. So when I come on know. Hello. Lucas Dickey, founder of deepcast. Ally kicks in as like co producer and occasional co host.

Harry Duran 00:02:53:

Yep.

Lucas Dickey 00:02:54:

And she was in our episode, for example, and she has, you know, been a major value add for me. And she was also trying to figure out how to like manage within my budget. Right. So with us, and I think this is anyone who produces a. Has a show, like, where do you choose to allocate dollars?

Harry Duran 00:03:10:

Yeah, makes sense.

Lucas Dickey 00:03:12:

And so, yes, we're a commercial entity which in some ways makes us like a studio or network or agency produced show. On the other hand, it's a marketing vehicle and I'm thinking about it relative to other customer acquisition costs, et cetera. Right. So we also happen to have with deepcast creator, which I imagine we'll get into later, like the sort of asset generation and setting things up for me that. The marketing side, I just said we'll take that over. So you're doing show prep, guest bookings, the research that sets me up so that I don't look like an idiot when I talk to guests. What are the sort of things that are important to them? What are the alignments with things that I'm interested in so we can sort of like drive the conversation. And she's done a great job on that. I would say shout out to Ali, by the way. I've just pushed three prospective customers to her in the last week. So guest booking for one show, production for another one for a coach, slash former very senior, like operator at Amazon and a bunch of other companies.

Harry Duran 00:04:08:

Yep.

Lucas Dickey 00:04:09:

So Ali's doing a great job and obviously she has her show as well. So I think knowing that she was a consummate professional, I liked her sort of film, TV industry background. So production on that side of things. She's got a good holistic view. And even though she's not doing marketing for us, she's still providing me feedback on like, hey, this has worked. This hasn't worked. And you can choose to do this other thing. Right. So, example, like our show, we're recording on Streamyard. Right. And I don't have a budget right now to do video editing. She's doing audio editing, but I don't want her to formats right now. So I was, you know, talking about whether should I just take it as a, like, director's unedited cut, drop it into YouTube only for that. Separate it from all the other channels if there's discovery there. And it also gives me something to like, clips start and end points and share off to places. So again, like a marketing collateral on that front versus the rest of the show and the audio format being like legitimate good content that we all want to engage in, depending on where you sit within the podcasting ecosystem or even as a listener. I mean, because we're talking about things that, to your point, about inside the actor studio, I don't act, but I still loved watching and saying, like, what was the inspiration of director, actor, whatever it happened to be, and how do they work through those things? So if you like, I always like inside baseball in almost every industry, so I tend to be like, diving deep into the nitty gritty and try to engage myself.

Harry Duran 00:05:32:

So, yeah, let's talk offline about some video ideas. I think a couple ideas came to mind as you were talking about that, and I think there's something I can help with for sure.

Lucas Dickey 00:05:40:

Perfect.

Harry Duran 00:05:40:

Yeah. So I love that we have that in common that you were also a DJ. I actually got into podcasting because of DJing, because if you could pan the camera to my left, my turntables are still set up with my vinyl, my Technics 1200s. So I grew up, like, since I was 16, like house music, DJ. Like, I. I still love it. It's a super passion of mine. I thought I was going to go to a podcast conference to learn how to interview DJs, and I realized how hard that would be because they're all globetrotting DJs.

Lucas Dickey 00:06:06:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:06:06:

So I switched to podcasters, and that's. Hence Podcast Junkies was born in 2014. But I saw that's a little bit. And you also, you know, have a music background. Is that an early passion for you?

Lucas Dickey 00:06:16:

Yeah, I mean, it's actually an interesting. I grew up in a family that, you know, both of my parents played instruments in high school and college.

Harry Duran 00:06:26:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:06:26:

And yet they didn't encourage any of us to play or push it upon us. So we didn't naturally, me or my Brothers end up playing any music, which is a bit unfortunate. Then I hit college. So I went to high school in Germany and then returned back to the United States at the Napster, Kaza, et cetera. Actually, I was, you know, doing all of that in Europe before then landing back in the U.S. okay. And I landed in college and I had a T1 line in the dorm room and it was just how much could I torrent or download as quickly as possible? Terabytes of music.

Harry Duran 00:07:00:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:01:

And then I was sitting and I was skipping class to watch BET because I didn't have music videos where my family had no television. Those four years I lived in Germany, so I only got it when I was like over at friends houses. So I was just binging on music in a major way.

Harry Duran 00:07:14:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:15:

And most people will tell you this, including ChatGPT, when I asked it this question, what are things I don't know about myself that maybe I should know? And this I already do know now, but like, I like lots of things.

Harry Duran 00:07:26:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:27:

And when I do those things, I don't do them superficially very well. So I will drive. Like, I'm doing this experiment right now with AI generating a fashion brand. It's a nerdwear, like a nerd streetwear brand. So this right here.

Harry Duran 00:07:41: Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:42:

Is me. Like it's a 5,000, 950, you know, all the hip hop folks like this streetwear folks like this fitted, you know, et cetera. But this is an embroidered. This was AI designed.

Harry Duran 00:07:51:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:52:

And then I'm assuming for those who you hear this on audio, they won't be able to.

Harry Duran 00:07:56:

You're gonna have to watch the video.

Lucas Dickey 00:07:57:

Now because I was gonna tell them they can go to a. Okay shop and they can check it out. But like, I have generated 40 different T shirt, hoodie and hat ideas. My copy is generated and I'm playing with the whole thing as AI driven as it can be. Right. But this is me saying, hey, I want to play with a couple, like a T shirt. All of a sudden it becomes I'm launching a, you know, AI streetwear brand. Right. So music was kind of the same for me in that era where I was like, oh, I'm falling in love with all these independent hip hop artists. And like, I can see all of them because they all swing by Seattle because it was a big, like, underground hip hop town. Like, they were a fan of it.

Harry Duran 00:08:33:

Yep.

Lucas Dickey 00:08:34:

And so I was like, hmm, I should probably like, get into this thing. So I bought my 1200s, I bought a battle mixer, I bought an MPC. And then I was using. It wasn't Ableton at the time. What was I using? What's the long standing sound?

Harry Duran 00:08:51:

No, no.

Lucas Dickey 00:08:53:

Been around forever. Pro tools.

Harry Duran 00:08:56:

Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:08:57:

So I was using, you know, pro tools on my laptop, doing what I could and. And then that sort of morphed into college radio through an Internet only station we had. And then I started reading ad copy on an actual non profit station called KXP in Seattle.

Harry Duran 00:09:12:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:09:12:

And then they called me college boy because I could read the underwriting without messing up the underwriting which mattered to the underwriters.

Harry Duran 00:09:19:

That's funny.

Lucas Dickey 00:09:19: And steadily I just took over more and more of the show to the point where like every second show I was DJing three hours straight. And then I was like, oh, can I produce my own remixes to these? So I would use like the original plus acapellas switch from one to back. And then I was like, I love this. And so like more and more. So I have both bought and sold gear three times. I sold, gave away a collection of 16,000 records.

Harry Duran 00:09:46:

Wow.

Lucas Dickey 00:09:47:

So anyways, I very much loved music and I go deep when I. And like and again inside baseball, like publishers, labels, ascap, bmi, csac. Once in Europe, like what is the radio industry? How do you like collect revenue on that versus and this was pre everything except for itunes and Pandora at the time. Really like in a meaningful way. So anyways, that's my sort of entry point into it which led me into my professional career in the digital music world. Right.

Harry Duran 00:10:15:

So I saw that you shortly after that went to go work at Amazon.

Lucas Dickey 00:10:19:

I did. And even the company before Amazon was a white label music provider. So we did content licensing, we wrapped in the digital rights management because this was the DRM era. We did billing customer. We basically did everything but the UI presentation layer and editorial. And then our customers were like Microsoft Zune for that short lived period. Yahoo Music Unlimited, hmv, Virgin Digital and Tesco in the uk. But I got to know metadata really well. I got really good at writing shell scripts to clean up things that were like malformed XMLs.

Harry Duran 00:10:55:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:10:56:

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

Harry Duran 00:11:16:

Tyrone did work on that one.

Lucas Dickey 00:11:18:

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

Harry Duran 00:11:31:

What was the biggest kind of takeaway or lesson that you got from working? You're spending your time at Amazon.

Lucas Dickey 00:11:38:

Getting to one lesson is very hard when you've worked at Amazon that long. So I was there for four plus years, but maybe give me three lessons. How about that one? Systems level thinking. Because I operated in a single business unit, digital music. Right. However, at the time Amazon had 55 business units of which AWS was just one business unit at the time. Right. So this tells you how long ago I was there. Now it's hundreds of business units. But I was advocating for as part of creating this cloud storage solution for consumers, you could think of as like Dropbox or Google Drive, but specifically to store music in so that you could listen to your music anywhere that you purchased from Amazon or upload to your cloud storage locker in the sky. And this was at the sort of transition phase. Spotify was live in Sweden and Finland, but had not made it domestically yet. I was VPNing into Spotify as soon as it launched so that I could experience the whole thing and said this is where it's going to go. Senior leadership wasn't ready for that yet. However, I did advocate for this other solution Amazon always opts for. You know, it's a value selection and convenience. In this case it was a convenience play. And so I actually advocated for buying Dropbox at the time I was advocating for 150 million acquisition.

Harry Duran 00:12:56:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:12:56:

They're a multi billion dollar public company now. Right. But it happened to be the number two customer of Amazon at the time, or AWS specifically. So Andy Jassy, who is the now CEO, was the senior vice president of AWS at the time. And he said, Lucas, you know, I don't want you buying my number two customer out from underneath us. This is what Facebook had been doing at the time, by the way. So they would launch an API, they would enc. Encourage people develop on it. The best app would like be the cream of the crop. They would buy that app or they would reproduce it and then shut down the API.

Harry Duran 00:13:30:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:13:30:

So he's like, this is not what we want to do if we're going to create AWS is the business that we have in mind. So again, like I had not through saw through his lens, which was much bigger Than my lens.

Harry Duran 00:13:40:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:13:41:

So now when I think about you, we talked about it a little bit offline. Like, I think a lot about incentives of players and things. So I have my purview, but what is my investor purview? What are my two customer purviews? What are their purviews? Right. Like going through the stack of the entire system and then recognizing that in parallel, there's a little bit of a chaos engine always at play too. So that's probably one takeaway is like thinking bigger than like my myopic focus point.

Harry Duran 00:14:08:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:14:09:

I think another was I really did like their process for working backwards from a customer. I'm a very like document driven person. So I don't like PowerPoints. Bezos is famous for not liking PowerPoints. He's like, that's what lazy people do. Or that's how lazy people communicate ideas. It's just too easy to put three bullets in an image and gloss over the details.

Harry Duran 00:14:30:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:14:30:

So he's not a fan of it. And it leaned toward like I had a liberal arts, you know, poly philosophy, comparative religion. So I was used to writing a lot and I've just always written a lot. I was also doing music journalism While I was DJing and working at Amazon. So a writing centric that sort of forces clarity of thought, which arguably I'm still struggling at 20 years later or whatever it is, because I'm always too verbose. But then I go through this editorial process and work it's back. And I think working backwards from what the customer wants as opposed to it's very much solutions oriented instead of problem oriented. Okay, like. Or rather it is problem rather than creating a solution where a problem might not exist. What is the problem the customer's facing, which in the case of what I was building at the time, which was called Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player, was customers want to be able to access the content they buy from Amazon anywhere. And if I buy it on my computer, laptop or my laptop at work or home, I have to figure out how to get the content between the two. And for folks who are not old enough to remember, like, like smartphones were basically brand new then and Google didn't even have Google Drive then. Or the list goes on and on. So like working backwards was the right way to approach it and it lent itself to be a nice stepping stone to what Amazon music ended up being thereafter. And the integration, much better things. So anyways, I would say like systems thinking and very much like the customer obsession. I pay attention to competition, but Only in as much as it might inspire features that are like what I think my customers want. But I'm not sitting there just like feature for feature watching them and sort of parody play because that's like death by a thousand cuts. Sometimes you don't get to focus. So I'd say those are two takeaways. Maybe the third is I can survive in a highly volatile, aggressive environment where some people couldn't do it. I thrived in it. That means the pseudo combative style was just fine for me. I thought it, I kind of thought it was all as like academic.

Harry Duran 00:16:13:

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

Lucas Dickey 00:16:37:

It's funny that you put it that way. Like as a child, self motivated, like early reader for fun. Right? Like John Grisham in the fourth grade or something like that. I think it read time to kill then because my grandpa thought I would like it despite my age and he was right. Sort of like the autodidact, you know, a lot of self teaching fun fact. Like you will often time hear autodidacts like pronounce words wrong because they've read it so much in literature but they haven't heard it used verbally because common layman term or layman speakers don't use those term, you know, terms. Right?

Harry Duran 00:17:09:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:17:10:

So kind of. I was also a bit of a lazy but successful student. So it meant that I could apply my time elsewhere for fun. But I was, you know, student council president, vice president, something like that. Class president one year.

Harry Duran 00:17:23:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:17:24:

Model United nations president, captain of the tennis team. I played soccer. So like very motivated but self. Like my parents, I was the middle child with two very black sheep, older and younger brother. So I just like did my thing and whether I got validation from them or not, I did it anyways. Although later in life maybe I'm still seeking validation. And then hitting college, that got a lot harder in terms of studying and whatnot because I just didn't study. But yes, I have always been that. And it gets to, it's like infinite curiosity and like to really scratch it. Just sometimes I feel like you have to do things. So I'm just a fan of trying. Right. And Doing the thing and maybe minimal fear of failure and, you know, knowing that I'll get a lot of credit for trying even if it fails.

Harry Duran 00:18:06:

That makes sense.

Lucas Dickey 00:18:08:

So it can. Gift and a curse, by the way, because I spread myself thin and I'm fine with it, but others can't necessarily. Right. Like, I can parallel process a bunch of these ideas, but how do I keep people, like, at my pace on all of these things?

Harry Duran 00:18:22:

Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:18:23:

Which can happen within a company, too, where I'm like, I can balance a bunch of competing priorities and pursue thought exercises. Sometimes those thought exercises get other people, like, anxious and concerned because they're like, wait, are we going to do this thing? Like, no, no, that's not what I was asking. We just need to think this thing through. Where does it lead? What's the eventuality? How do we scenario plan? So that can be exhausting for people, especially if you're thinking about tons of things in parallel. Right.

Harry Duran 00:18:47:

So is that different than multitasking? Because I find myself sometimes, especially if I'm microdosing, my mind starts, like, working in a bunch of different directions and I have the two screens on and I can, like, make, like, nudges towards things that I have an idea and I'm, okay, let me just get. Put that in motion. And then I'll just set it to the side. And then another thing comes up. And I guess if anyone was watching me, they'd think that I'm like, wait, you're very scattered. But I think in my mind I can sort of, like, organize the thoughts processes, keep it all going in a way. I'm not, like, trying to, like, complete, like, 10 tasks at one time, but I think I nudge them along. And then I'm like, okay, I've nudged that one. And I can just close it and put it aside. I'm just trying to find different ways to work for me because I'm a slightly neurodivergent and, you know, I always have ideas percolating. So I'm just like, I gotta find a way to figure out, you know, signal from the noise and all that sort of stuff. And what's 8020? All this?

Lucas Dickey 00:19:40:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:19:40:

With. Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:19:41:

Did you happen to read Walter Isaacson Bio of Elon Musk?

Harry Duran 00:19:45:

No. I've heard that was pretty interesting.

Lucas Dickey 00:19:47:

So it is interesting. One of my takeaways was like, you know, and this is probably me trying to project myself to someone I am not necessarily on par with in many ways. But, you know, is he a multitasker? Because he's managing Whatever number of businesses at any given time. And so Walter's Isaac was like, no, he's like a serial single threaded, hyper focused individual. So he will time box four hours on a thing. Nothing else exists during those four hours. I time box the crap out of my days and I will close other applications. There's always like one sitting open just in case I need to drop a note to myself which for the most part is just slack and I'm slacking myself.

Harry Duran 00:20:29:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:20:30:

Set reminders to myself off of slack, et cetera. But otherwise, I mean this is how I like I can go from podcast with you deeply focused on this, not paying attention to anything. I'm going to get off of this. I'm going to switch to another very focused task or an hour. Right. I may do an hour on a personal project mid work day knowing that like I really want to knock out this hour and then I'll flip back to the other mode and just keep going. It's kind of how I've operated so it works for me. So I don't think of it as multitasking. I think it was like this, you know, serial single tasking and it's just all Daisy, Daisy chained one after another.

Harry Duran 00:21:02:

Makes sense.

Lucas Dickey 00:21:03:

Being able to quickly context which helps. Which it sounds like you can probably do too.

Harry Duran 00:21:07:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:21:08:

And I'm. I've always been really good at that and like inference of conversations. So like stepping into something that I know nothing and trying to quickly ramp up based upon what's going around. I don't know if that's a superpower or not, but I've always somewhat been decent at that.

Harry Duran 00:21:22:

Yeah, it's something that I think people need to be self aware of their like learning styles and you know, and I think I'm trying to become more aware of what works for me and especially with someone who's got like a lot of ideas percolating. It's trying to figure out like what I can get rid of. And so I don't have a lot of open loops because then the open loops float around for a couple of years and then just then it becomes a lot to start to manage. But the time helps a lot.

Lucas Dickey 00:21:46:

It's time boxing then the other one. By the way. I was like a not a productivity hack person but I was a fan of sort of like the Getting things done book.

Harry Duran 00:21:54:

Yeah, same. Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:21:55:

Or sort of zero inbox thinking or.

Harry Duran 00:21:58:

If you've ever forte's building a second brain.

Lucas Dickey 00:22:01:

That one. Or if you've ever read High Output Management which is Andy Grove okay, that's the top business book I ever recommend. And Andy was sort of like the originator of the 0m box and a lot of these sort of activities years ago. And then you know, when he was at intel and then wrote it all when he was a GSB professor at Stanford. But there's some other things that folks do, like if you can answer the email in under two minutes, just do it. Like don't keep it in your cognitive overhead. And a great example of this, the consumer CEO of Amazon, Jeff Wilkie. No longer, but what at the time invested in my previous business. He was my senior vice president when I was there. And when we like did a follow up to arrange a call with him, he responded in under 10 minutes and it wasn't his EA. And I emailed back and I was like, Jeff, how the heck do you do this? And he's like, delegate as much as possible. Pull myself out of decisions I don't need to be in. If it's a one way door versus a two way door decision. If it's one way, include me. If it's two ways, figure it out yourselves. Right? And so how do you push those things away? And if you don't keep the cognitive overload, then you're not stressing about that stuff. So like my inbox is partially zero because I use what was formerly the boomerang function now called snooze. And I will snooze to particular times to manage it so that I am not going into my email saying oh wow, when am I going to get to that? I'm like, I know when the responsible moment to get to it is. It's tomorrow afternoon. So I snooze it tomorrow afternoon if it requires more than two minutes. If it's under two, I just bang it out. So yeah, that's how he managed to do it.

Harry Duran 00:23:33:

Same way I've heard it described as defer, delegate or delete or delete, defer and delegate. I don't know, there's some border flip.

Lucas Dickey 00:23:39:

No, that's the one. Yeah, I think they use it for email in particular. But he kind of expanded that beyond email to just like everything.

Harry Duran 00:23:44:

Right. So there's a new service I'm using called Quora that basically does that for your inbox and it just delivers you a summary, an AI summary at 8am and at 3pm so it's been helpful for me because I, you know, I like to have the, to think I have the discipline to do that. But if I see stuff floating around in an inbox, you know, I'll be like, maybe I should answer that. Yeah, it's been running for the past couple of weeks and it's been kind of like calm interesting down me and my inbox. You should read some inbox sanity.

Lucas Dickey 00:24:11:

You should reach out to Kevin Ruse at New York Times and the Hard Fork because recently he's been talking about like an obsession with getting his inbox managed. Oh yeah, to the point that he was trying to vibe code his own version of it and he's like just kept on running into a bunch of Google related issues, but which is always the issue. He doesn't want to send his data to a third party either, which is part of the challenge. I was like, well your data's already with a third party.

Harry Duran 00:24:33:

I'll Google it.

Lucas Dickey 00:24:34:

They're the ones monetizing anything more than anybody else on that front. So what's your concern?

Harry Duran 00:24:38:

Yeah, so I'm curious as we get closer to the concept for deepcast, after Amazon, you spent some time at a couple different companies, Deltwig, Telenav, Adam Tickets, rival, did any of those experiences help kind of shape, you know, this path? That's this path that you were on for sure.

Lucas Dickey 00:24:58: S

o like Double Twist was my first foray into sort of startup world and jumped from Amazon to San Francisco to pursue that one. At the time they were like kind of nicknamed the itunes for Android because Android hadn't yet had the Google Play ecosystem.

Harry Duran 00:25:13:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:25:14:

And those guys were great in ter. Like they were just like if there was a gray zone, they played with it. And I kind of learned where I was comfortable or not. But like wwdc, first day, Apple's got all its people coming to town. If you know San Francisco all that well, there's a Apple store on market, which is where they always do big announcements. Okay, well there happens to be a bart entrance that runs up the side of that no one ever advertised along the escalator all the way up.

Harry Duran 00:25:45:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:25:45:

So they bought the ad space for under 10k and on W it launched WWDC Day 1 and it said set your music free and had like a big X through itunes because they just hated DRM. The founder was DVD John, who, you know, reverse engineered the DVD encryption as a 16 year old in 1998 because he wanted to be able to rip DVDs to play on his Linux machine. So he was all about sort of like your media should be free. And he hated drm, but they love to do things like that. And by the way, the media company who Owned the outdoor space. Apple came and said you have to take it down immediately. And said, we sold the space, it was sitting empty. And you're like, we spent so much with you guys, offer them something to take it down. So they gave us, I think it was another half million in order to make it go away. And it got. Wired magazine covered it. Everybody did. So interesting lessons around, like leverage in an, what do you call it, like asymmetric fashion. It's almost like warfare between, you know, street fighters and big planes. Right. So we were the street fighters, the gorilla fighters.

Harry Duran 00:26:50:

Gorilla marketing.

Lucas Dickey 00:26:51:

Yeah, exactly. I also built with them 12 different media players. Same player, but across 12 different platforms.

Harry Duran 00:26:58:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:26:58:

Which most people wouldn't know them. It was like WebOS. Intel has one that's called Tizen, which now use for smart TVs, but it was heavily used in India and China for some phone manufacturers at the time.

Harry Duran 00:27:09:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:27:09:

Some an integration with Sonos, just a bunch of stuff. So again, media management players within that context, I wanted us to have other things to generate revenue for the company. So I was just constantly looking for things and one of them was like, should we have our own subscription radio station to compete with Pandora? So we built one. And for those who, you know, like are familiar with some of Spotify's acquisitions, they had a company they acquired called the echo nest circa 2017. The echo nest is what basically created their recommendation algorithm for music. Because they were doing a music genome.

Harry Duran 00:27:40:

Oh yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:27:41:

And it was like two MIT PhDs that one was like digital signal processing and music theory. And the other, I don't remember what it was. But anyways, the Echo Nest, I took the Echo Nest and I took this white label music service provider called seven Digital out of the UK combined. The two built business logic, launched a radio station within the context of what we were doing. So it was like continuing that media move. And then when I switched over to Telenav, it's technically a company called Think near where they were acquired by Telenav in my month between accepting the job and starting the job. But I stuck around kind of as a key man clause because they were anticipating me playing a major role in the business had it not been sold. And I just switched titles, you know, in a different context. But that was an ad tech company. So we were buying media on behalf of advertisers and agencies based upon geolocation and historical geolocation. So where you are now versus where you had been and then attempting to infer things, location based against that. If you're half mile away from McDonald's. It's a great thing to advertise McDonald's to you if you've gone near the McDonald's 18 times in the last week. Great. Right? This was also before a bunch of the privacy stuff came into play. The Wild west days of early mobile advertising. But I learned a lot about monetization in the context of advertising. So how does real time bidding work from both sides, Buy side and sell side. How do you create those opportunities with information that makes this interesting, whether psychographic, demographic, historical behavior patterns, whatever it is we use. Location obviously is one of them. Sort of Working with agencies versus brands. What is so like selling a sponsorship that is not an insertion order that is not fulfilled in an RTB fashion or a real time bidding fashion, which is applicable in the world of, you know, dynamic ad insertions versus sponsorships. Right. So very relevant in this world to media, to ad tech. And then Atom Tickets was a movie ticketing. They compete with Fandango or at least that was. And they were heavily funded by all the studios. And I launched their ads business there. And that one, the ads part of it was a little less interesting to me because it was, it was kind of rote for me at that point. But I was also standing up as sort of a data, as a service that we were going to try to sell back into the studio ecosystem because we had first party data around who was buying tickets for what movies, right? Meaning we had their email address, we had their phone number, we had either the AID or IDFA at the time, the unique identifiers for their device. So it went to a Star wars franchise movie. I would say Disney. You guys should be retargeting these people for merch visiting the park. Another use case was let's say the movie. There was like high correlations with traditionally Hispanic, like Central American, South American names. You can assume that they speak Spanish. Should you consider that a bunch of these people going to this film, that when you sell the digital or the distribution rights for this film, which may not have been sold yet internationally, when you're showing the film domestically, should you consider those markets or those streaming services that are unique to that market? How could I find and exploit interesting data to help them? So you take all of those like music tech, ad tech, this like data exploitation play, moving across multiple medias. Right. I did radio, I did digital music, actually sold physical music retail at one point, like multiple times in college. There's a journalistic perspective then film and television, right. So a lot of perspective that would make this arguably like a good sort of founder marketer, founder product fit. Maybe more founder product than founder market. Because I didn't know as much about podcasting at the time.

Harry Duran 00:31:17:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:31:18:

You know, as a consumer, less someone living it. I also then Furnish was on there, which was the company I co founded in 2017. And that one was just like what it meant to be a co founder of a business and grow from the two of us to 250 employees. Having nine physical locations because it was a furniture rental and sales company. So we had warehouses, nine major metro areas serving surrounding areas, physical movement of goods, recirculation because it's rental. So we also had to take what's called reverse supply chain and take possession of it, refurbish it in our warehouses. So we had to train, refurb techs, go learn how to do all that stuff. Again, completely new vertical. I knew nothing about. But because it's co founder and I'm a consummate sort of like king of hacks, generalist, whatever you want to call a range oriented person, I got to just tackle problem after problem after problem. Which fits my sort of profile of a person. Right?

Harry Duran 00:32:10:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:32:11:

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

Harry Duran 00:32:39: So a lot of you even got a little bit of experience with Trellis law, which I hope I get to you on the legal front now.

Lucas Dickey 00:32:45: So Trellis is interesting. The founder of Trellis did techstars LA with me, which is accelerator program.

Harry Duran 00:32:55: Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:32:56: That I did in 2018 and ended up just like loving the business and so loosely listed there as an advisor and still the case I law school by the way. That was what I thought I was going to do and then did not. So some of my like podcast junkie ism is like Amicus, which is Dalia Lithwick about the Supreme Court and current activities with the the Justice Department. Etc. She's a former Slate. I think it's the Slate. I don't actually remember who puts out the podcast, but it's called Amicus and I love those sorts of things too. And like data exploitation, artificial intelligence. Machine learning, application of data to unique fields as like, love this.

Harry Duran 00:33:34:

Checks all the boxes. Yes.

Lucas Dickey 00:33:36:

Generally, if there's something that's like, complex like that and technology can play a part, I'm a fan of, like, thinking it through.

Harry Duran 00:33:41:

So that was very helpful. And I know it's a meandering path for. And I'm grateful to the listener and the viewer for sticking with us here because I think it really sets the stage for, like, where we are present day. So, you know, it looks like you started Deepcast around July 2023. So talk to me about the. The origin story, like those early conversations. How did podcasting come into your world, you know, and what was, you know, coming alive for you to decide that this is something you might want to start working on?

Lucas Dickey 00:34:13:

So I was briefly chief product officer at a company that I was miserable at. So part of it was like, I don't want to be miserable again. And partially because it was. That one was a complex space, but I just wasn't interested in it. So, like, I had sort of fell into it because when I was doing furniture rental, I learned a lot about rental properties and multifamily housing and all that stuff. So it kind of put me in a position. But when I left, trying to figure out who I wanted to be next again, which happens roughly every four years for me or less, I was talking to a number of venture capitalists about potentially joining firms in some role and chatted with, you know, longtime friend in that context. And we were just kind of shooting the breeze about problems that we were both experiencing somewhere in our lives that we were interested in tackling. And the both of us happen to be big podcast listeners. Him for health and wellness, me for tech, AI, politics, and then news. News, right? So I don't listen to any true crime. I don't listen to any fiction. It's just like this information overload stuff that I love.

Harry Duran 00:35:23:

Same.

Lucas Dickey 00:35:24:

And the two of us, you know, he basically said, I don't understand, like, Spotify, you know, introduced podcast support, what was it, over a decade ago? And I was like, yeah, it's like, why is it still so crappy? And he's like, and I don't just mean Spotify, it just happens to be what I use. But why is it the same on Apple and anyone of these third parties? Like, I don't get it. Why is Discovery, like, why is it a top down hierarchical navigation like Yahoo in 1998? Why are we still doing that? This editorial and paid placement? He's like, we've introduced so many things. Google changed everything here, right? He's like, I just don't get why there's not more sophistication here. And I said, I agree, let me look into it. Right? So started thinking about, I think the problem statement for SO users is like why is it so hard for me to discover like net new content? It's easy to find the Star Power folks. How do I get to other things that are not collaborative? Not using collaborative filtering to say I listen to this and you listen to that. But it happens to be the thing that that was like call her daddy because I listened to Joe Rogan, right? Like sure, sure that they have similarities because they're both talk format shows. But like there's not a lot of similarity otherwise in some ways or better example, Joe Rogan and then it recommends to me up first or the interview. But there's no similarity between those two things. It's simply saying these are like top 10 shows. And so we're recommending it to you because other people it's in top 10 shows. So he's like the both of us were thinking again, he built a search engine related business at one point that was an enterprise internal system. He'd also built and sold an ad tech company in the late 90s that went public. And so both of us were thinking like why are there so many. Again it just feels like technology and user interface and like the advent of better speech to text quality and the introduction of large language models with GPT and the ChatGPT moment. And oh, why is there also this secular trend of like adoption of podcast consumption happening at this rate, the creation of new podcasts happening at this other rate. But sort of like as the delta increased between you got to figure out how to articulate this. So like the delta of discovery actually increased as there were more listeners. It felt like so you had more compression of Star Power. So your top 250 shows are listened to by 80% of people, top 2500 which means the other 320,000 active podcasts in any given moment are only being listened to by sub 10% of listeners. Right. Like does it make sense in a world where we have the technology we have today, given there's so much niche, we all have these niche interests and yet there's not a thing that helps me do that other than top down navigation between category and subcategory. Right. So we said how do we tackle that? And that was the start was with deepcast, the consumer facing offering. The creator side was in our Roadmap, but wasn't intended until two years from the inception. I ended up pulling that sort of in early for a number of reasons. But that was the incarnation of the problem going back to sort of like the customer statement. We both have sub problems. Like he wanted to be able to search for episodes by transcript snippets because he would remember he heard a thing but he couldn't remember if it was on Atiya show or it was on Hyman show or you know, Sam Harris, whatever health wellness he was into and he wanted to be able to find it, he couldn't do it. And he wanted to be able to share with a friend. Couldn't do it, right? So he's like, for him it wasn't new discovery, more so like enabling him to revisit content for his own knowledge management purposes and dissemination to others. For me, it was like, I'm a junkie and I actually do want to find completely new podcasts that are related to the spaces I'm interested in. Why can I not do more of that? And so, you know, we contemplated things. The other thing we contemplated was is this a player or is this a discovery platform? And what does the discovery platform mean? Right? You might think of it like, I think in the podcast nomenclature it's like a listing service, right? I didn't really like that because I'm like, we're not just doing listing of an RSS feed, we're doing a bunch more things beyond that. So sort of thought of it more as a discovery platform. I've positioned it to some folks as a second screen experience. The sort of thing like you would use IMDb in parallel to sitting on your couch looking for a thing to watch or who that actor is or who did the actor act with, et cetera. Very genius.com or Wikipedia, you know, the. The tried and true and how can we do more things along those lines. It ended up netting out like I love alliteration. So I think I came up with this later but and backed into it. But it was around discovery, distillation, dissemination and digestion. So the first one being like how do I find the thing? Second one being I found it. Am I interested in this thing? Right? Like the distillation stuff that we do to decide a bit of try before you buy the dissemination. Like word of mouth is 87% of discovery or whatever it is independent, whatever the status these days, how do I make it easier to share with friends? Like any part of it, Can I maximize the shareability of the thing in order to Drive more word of mouth for any given podcast at the same time, because I want to be able to brand Equity Coat ride and say, well, Harry said this thing and the guy's a genius. Oh, wait, what did he actually say? Now I have to sit down and manually transcribe this garbage. Right? So. And then the sort of digestion came later when I was thinking a lot about some of this is just knowledge management. Like I listened to it, but I wanted to be able to go back and quote, exert, save you and I talk about our scatter brains. Like I want to be able to drop it somewhere so that I can revisit it later, but couldn't do. I felt like I couldn't do those things. And I also wanted to be able to discover in ways that made sense relative to like an interest based instead of just a volume based. So like Spotify introducing plays as of today and showing that to people, I think that's just going to escalate star power and sort of like compress the power law curve is just going to be even more.

Harry Duran 00:41:18:

It's going to be like. Like YouTube.

Lucas Dickey 00:41:19:

Yeah, exactly. And I was like, what I want is you discussed a topic. How do I navigate to other episodes that discuss topics the same topic you discussed a person? How do I go to an episode that discussed that person or product or company? What are all the other episodes that are discussing at the same time?

Harry Duran 00:41:37:

How much of what's out there are you ingesting? Because obviously it's dependent. I mean, are you ingesting all 300,000 or no?

Lucas Dickey 00:41:44:

I mean that was a sort of a commercial decision in the short term that we had to do is like, we are. And this is oscillated. Right? So we were doing up to 6,500 podcasts at one time that I was sort of like picking based upon what I thought would be good sort of customer acquisition drivers initially and then figure out how we could do more and more and more sort of mid and long tail over time. Which is where what was called deepcast Pro, which is now deepcast creator, came into play. I was like, look, if you guys can come to the platform and claim your podcast and then start augmenting it so the data that's on there is richer than what we would otherwise get. It's worth you being on my platform, even though I'm in sort of paying for the operating expense or the cost of goods sold for transcriptions, AI hosting, et cetera.

Harry Duran 00:42:26:

When you say come to the platform, is it register my show and you'll ingest my RSS feed. Or do you need to move over from your current host?

Lucas Dickey 00:42:35: You do not need to move over free current host. I think this is where it's like similar to a listing directory where some of them you're not ma added automatically, others you have to manually like submit yours, do the verification thing, et cetera. We do that right. So you don't have to host with us. And that gave you also as a podcaster, an open web version of your podcast that is now highly Googleable. You will come before, in many cases. Now, the random Spotify, itunes, et cetera, listing that might not have anything to do with what they were kind of looking for. Precisely. Especially if they're looking for an episode or topic or a person place product that you discussed. If you type podcasts that discussed, blah, blah, blah, sure, we're oftentimes the number one return there. And if it was someone who was kind of interested in hunting down this episode because we talked about Amazon Deepcast and whatever, you'll be able to find it typically because of that. So on the other hand we've had to manage costs. So we are now very much leaning towards those who do choose to claim their podcast gets them in the creator ecosystem, gets them doing more things for the fm. So there's like a bit of a virtuous circle between the two, which by the way, was an analogy there between IMDb and IMDb Pro. So Amazon owns IMDb and that business. Its revenue split is roughly 50, 50 between the two businesses where IMDb is ad sales, right? Sponsorships, full page takeovers. IMDb Pro is you're registering to be part of a network, you know, and you're paying 1750amonth. I mean, maybe they're a little bit more now, but part of what you're paying for, big part of what most people pay for independent of the Rolodex, like agents being able to look up producer contacts, et cetera, is being able to augment your profile on IMDb. So if you're an aspiring actor, producer, writer, and you know it's missing credits you pay to augment, right? If you're a big actor, your agent does it because they want to rotate the images that are included in the image section, you know, carousel or they want to add to the trivia about you because there's a thing they want to emphasize to make you look better to the media or whatever happens to be right. So there's value bi directionally though, because consumers love that stuff. Like the richer it gets on that side, it's good for all parties. So this is where at that point we started thinking more and more and more about the podcasters as first class citizens. And there's always been the aspiration that we will ultimately push revenue back to podcasters for the consumer side of it. So GPS FM under ideally a YouTube esque split model or maybe slightly better. And there are things we haven't monetized yet. For example, the entities that I was alluding to, people place product companies on top of referencing them within our own catalogs. What's known as like a graph network. We also try to target the authoritative URL for us. You can look at it off platform, which somewhat makes us like Wikipedia in that respect. Right. Like we're okay driving traffic away from us, which is very uncommon. But you can imagine I'm on an episode that mentioned like four different supplements and they were GNC supplements that we have links off to them. All of a sudden you as podcaster who mentioned them passively, are getting passive income through that relationship. And we pass the revenues to you. You don't have to sign up for an affiliate program. We wrap it all and then we distribute. Now we're not there yet, but like that's the intention with being able to use, you know, like it's an alternative way. This gets to my thinking that I oftentimes have with like some dogmas and what I think is like myopia within the world of podcasting where people are like, nope, nope, this is the only way to make money.

Harry Duran 00:46:06:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:46:07:

I'm like, no, no, TAM could be significant. Sorry. Target addressable market revenue could be significantly larger. If you looked at a bunch of other different business models and thought how they might be applicable here. The one I just made up, Spotify could do that, right? Of course they're doing transcripts, they're doing entity extraction. They could be passing revenue back to.

Harry Duran 00:46:23:

But they're not thinking they don't have the best interest of the. I don't think they have the best interest of the podcaster, the indie podcaster in mind. And I think everything you're speaking to here speaks to kind of this is like your ethos. How do we take care of the. I mean, I've podcast since 2014 and I see companies come and go and they're always trying to. And everyone that comes up with directories, it's always like the same shows being.

Lucas Dickey 00:46:43:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 00:46:43: And discovery. Everyone keeps just talking ad nauseam about discovery. But it seems like you've really given it a lot of thought. In terms of how you create something that's a win win. Because I'm thinking about, like, as you know, I was just kind of playing around with some of the links, how they kind of take you deeper. If you're talking about, like, I think one of the topics was like, what's happening with, like, Doge currently? Because it's. Yeah, I don't know how much of it you're syncing up, what other conversations, because you could look at, like, what's trending on Twitter, what's trending on LinkedIn, and you could kind of do an amalgamation and some sort of sourcing of, like, what's happening in the ecosystem of, like, what are people talking about? So that could give you a starting point and it takes you into these podcasts. And then as a podcaster, I'm like, oh, wait, I want to know how many people landed on my deepcast page, because, you know, deepcast sent them there because of something that was mentioned in my show. So I don't know if you're at that point where we can see like, traffic for our profile or anyone's visiting or kind of browsing on our page, because that would be interesting.

Lucas Dickey 00:47:36:

Not just yet, but we're both for fm, so the consumer product. And then for POD sites, which is like our competitor Pod page and podcast page, that's within deepcast creator. Yes. We want to be able to share metrics with you on that front because it is your authoritative website and you should be getting all those metrics. But I also think, like, the thing we alluded to very early in the conversation around systems design and thinking about that way, like, you're alluding to things that I experimented with. So at Amazon, we got pretty close to. And I think we're far enough away. I don't have to worry about NDAs at this point, but, like striking a deal with Twitter so that you could use a special hashtag in your tweet in order to reference a song on the Amazon catalog. It would be inline playable and then it would be purchasable. That was 2010. We had that conversation. Didn't end up doing it because they were contemplating something else and didn't end up pursuing it. And maybe like, it was a foreshadowing of their NFL deals that came years later, but that is the sort of thing, like, how do we. Can you prime the pump or, like, warm the cash, if you want to use technical terms here, a little bit like, can I use trending topics on one? And I did experiment with Grok and do things like, can I draw correlations here? And you know, their API does have access to the Twitter, right? So can you draw those? And the answer is like, do we want to do those things? Of course. And I want to programmatically associate every podcaster on our platform and their guests with a social account as well, so that when you share their tag, then they're identified as well. No one's really doing that. Like, it's just these things. To me, I'm like, why aren't more people doing it? And to the point of your 2014 to today, or, you know, talking to it, Rob Greenlee or Dave Jackson or whatever, folks who've been around for 20 years, many of the things I'm talking, you have seen folks come and go, but now feels like the era where technology is in a place to be able to do those things significantly, you know, cheaper and enable some sort of more expansive exploration there. And now I take the attitude a little bit of rising tide floats all boats. And if some things that I advocate for manifest themselves in a different platform, that's okay. I think there's plenty of opportunity for us to collect, like, create value and sort of collect our part of that value. But I'm also happy, you know, if topic navigation became a thing within Spotify, that would be great. Wondery is doing it within their Wondery app. Amazon Music's not doing it for podcast purposes, but at least within the Wondery app they are. And they introduced that sometime after we came out.

Harry Duran 00:50:10:

And so how do you, when you look at the experience on the discovery side, how are you, what are you measuring to know that it's succeeding and people are getting value from it?

Lucas Dickey 00:50:21:

That's a very good question. So typical sort of metrics around, you know, page views. And on top of that, is there time on site for those? For me, it's. We have other features therein, right? Like you can bookmark or you can subscribe to what's called the deep digest, which is a semi, depending on how many podcasts you're subscribing to. Could be every day or every other day where we're sending to your email inbox like a one paragraph summary and two bullet key takeaways of any new episode for podcasts you're tracking. So KPI for me or successful was like getting them to using that functionality, getting them to use a bookmark on the consumer side and ultimately like capturing enough of those signals that like, can we figure out with some subset of them how they would like to engage more Deeply with those podcasts they are following or which discovery mechanism. Honestly, we're still in sort of the product market fit learning phase and trying to get signals there. I can tell you that, you know, semantic search is hard and so like it works for us like 50% of the time in a good way. And I think there's like vast room for improvement. And part of that is because we have not hooked for your technologist on the listening, you're the retrieval augmented generation where we were factoring in actual like LLMs interpreting it. Instead it's just the storage of the transcript. And there are algorithms that predate modern LLMs that can help with that, which is what we're leveraging. But on the other hand, people, when you have the.

Harry Duran 00:51:44:

When someone finds something through deepcast FM and gets to, let's say a podcast page or an episode page and they play. Can we see those plays in our podcast host? Similar to.

Lucas Dickey 00:51:57: Okay, yeah, in every way. We're fetching your audio enclosure value, um, and your accounts as a download playback. Um, James Cridlin went and looked when we released our episode and he said here's the op3 tag breakdown of. Right. So yeah, everything. Every download on us is registered.

Harry Duran 00:52:14:

And then again, it'll show us if we go like, if I go captivate my podcast host, it'll show as a deepcast play.

Lucas Dickey 00:52:19:

We have registered as a namespace in the open source library. Yeah, that was. James had also suggested that. That being said, like, I don't think playback on us is more I think of as a try before you buy a lot of it is discover you don't watch the whole film on IMDb, right. You're like kind of get a sense.

Harry Duran 00:52:38:

Sure, sure. No, no. Yeah. I think it's just for a matter of like an interesting stat because, you know, it's almost like if I see activity happening on deepcast and I'll start to talk about it on my show and be like, hey, and if you're searching for any topics, you know, we saw that some folks found our show through that, you know, encourage people to kind of do the same and do the same. And I think it's like that in especially within the indie world of like the podcasters, you know. Yeah, the Nacho Rogans. We all kind of like support each other's shows, you know, whenever we can. So I think if this was like touted and seems to be everything that's like indie podcaster friendly, like, you know, it's something that, you know, word of mouth gets out and People start doing more and more about it and you know, even to the point of like, you know, if you're going down the player route or discover more about us on deepcast or it could be even a way for, you know, for podcasters who've got a limited budget and don't have like a big website saying, hey, if you want to search my back catalog of 300 episodes, go do it on Deepcast. You know, go do it on Deepcast. And you could like learn about, you know, that could be something again, marketing brain is kicking in. Yeah, but like if you had a sort of like plugin or something on the website for a podcaster and says, you know, AI powered by deepcast, you know, search through our own catalog and it kind of which self references back to the deepcast catalog, that could be something interesting.

Lucas Dickey 00:53:51:

We have very much thought about because we are an API first technology company when we created POD sites. These are like your own. You can get a custom URL for it. I think it's easy for folks to think about as like pod page or podcast page, except for it's not just RSS regurgitation. We're generating a bunch of the content for you. So it kind of won't POD sites S I T E S. It's podsitesingular fm.

Harry Duran 00:54:16:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 00:54:16:

But POD site is just a feature set within deepcast creator. We just happen to have a landing page to do some explanatory stuff. But if you go to SoundStrategy FM, you can see it in action, which shows off things like Deep chat where you can chat with an episode, chat with a podcast which you're talking about interesting signals there. Like that one happens to be one where we've talked about do we use Deep Chat, like integrate that back into the consumer experience for one to create that as an embeddable thing that you can put on your website. You're hosting wherever it happens to be. And then another cool feature we have there and a lot of this is sort of like we're resource constrained like every startup. So where do we focus? But when you as a user, when you chat with the Deep chat great experience, everything you would assume on that front, like we do citations. So if there's a quote we'll and it's on an episode page, it deep links to the transcript. If you're on the podcast object it will. The citation will be to the episode. So you might ask it a question. And so again we're like really big into sort of citations for concerns around hallucination. But also because it's basically journalistic and we do want to share those things. But the flip side of you as a podcaster represents a whole new way to sort of like, what are my fans actually interested in? What are the listeners like? It's. There's a different modality when you Google versus you chat with something or when you fill out a contact form. So like, hey, contact me, go to my website, fill out the contact form. Very different. Like, even the, like the barrier to entry to do that. Are they interested versus going to chat? And did Harry ever talk with so and so in Harry's episode with Lucas? What was Lucas's big takeaway on X? Right. And you can start getting a sense for. My hope is, are people asking about specific guests? Might that help you think about your show planning in terms of guest bookings? They're asking more questions of your weekend summary episodes versus your individual episodes. Like, all the different.

Harry Duran 00:56:16:

Yeah, it's almost like you could take a recap of the questions that are.

Lucas Dickey 00:56:20:

Being asked, create a grab bag episode and.

Harry Duran 00:56:23:

But also you could. Because I think about how much I use chat GPT for just like my third. My second brain or whatever. Yeah, I'm just like, I have a thought. Like, it's not a, like, properly like, polished thought. So it's just like a jumble of ideas, but I just dump it in there anyway. A lot of times it's like, helps me iterate and figure out, did you mean this? Or ask me. Like, I'm like, push me. If you're not clear, ask me. And so it's kind of along those lines for the show. If people are searching for specific topics, you could have that kind of saying, hey, here's a recap of everything that's been happening around your show. We've positioned and we've created like, a summary of what a next episode could look like. Here's the format, here's the outline, here's what you could talk about. And it's based on some of the things that people are engaging with. Also, as an aside, people are in general talking, asking a lot about these questions. I noticed your podcast covers this topic. They weren't specifically asking it in relation to your show, but they were getting fed episodes from your, like, competitor. Call them competitor competing shows. So it seems like this is something that's bubbling up in the world of alternative health. Let's say there's like 10 mushroom podcasts and like nine people are asking a bunch of questions. If you're like, at the bottom of the pile but you see that this conversation's happening because of the deep cast, like, learnings. You could be like, well, I want to kind of like leverage that momentum and I'll do a podcast about what everyone else is talking about in the space. And I could see how that could kind of like, lend itself towards like helping indie especially. I always think about indie creators. They're just like, trying to figure out what to talk about next or who to have next or even if, like this. These topics are being discussed, who would be. You should probably reach out to this thought leader in the mushroom space because he talks about this topic. Maybe get a leg up. He's only been on two other shows. You know, can you kind of see how, like, you can kind of put this intel together? You could probably. He hasn't, from what we've been able to see, you know, based on podchaser, all this other data, I, you know, that. Which is the IMDb of podcasting. Like, he's kind of like an up and coming, you know, riser in the mushroom space. You should probably have him on your show. So there's a lot of, like, interesting ways, you know, to kind of help from a creator perspective. Like, have that, you know, like AI really put AI to good use the test.

Lucas Dickey 00:58:35:

Yeah, I think you're totally right. And you are quickly going off on like the right tangents, I think, with like, what's possible. Um, so, you know, I never really thought I. When I talked about this, I think the deepcast creator page says the. And I'm horrible at remembering Copy that I write, but something to the effect of, you know, you create the show. Let us help you with what comes after.

Harry Duran 00:58:59:

Sure.

Lucas Dickey 00:59:00:

That's now a misnomer. Right. Because I never thought we would be getting to show planning or the creative part of creation of the shows, except for with this data signal. You're getting that. Right. Like your point. There are themes that are emerging. So initially, if we just give you raw. Raw transcripts back and you know what they're asking. That's interesting. The other is where you start surfacing themes that are emerging. On top of that, we do have a tool that is not public, but we have access to it internally. I was part of a content intelligence thing we were working on, which because we've done this topical analysis, we can look at either. The next step was to identify like shows. 20 shows like yours.

Harry Duran 00:59:41:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 00:59:41:

And then do a topical comparison. Like in the trailing 7, 38, 60, 90 days. What topics are they discussing and what topics are you discussing? And where are the deltas? And you could identify more or less popular shows or those you think are more or less akin to yours. It's kind of like what you're getting at. So if four shows have topic, talk this about the topic and you're like, I don't even know what the heck this thing is. But like these guys are talking about it, there's sufficient interest. Maybe I should go look into it. So it's kind of melding you. What you're describing is like, where is the interest from a topical basis plus what we can infer from the interactions, like consumer interactions or fan interactions with this, you know, LLM model based chat interface. There's also getting back to the passive income idea that I was telling you about, which is just pause it for a second.

Harry Duran 01:00:26:

How are you on time? Because I want to make sure I'm good. Okay. Okay, cool. I'm loving this. So I just want to make sure we keep going.

Lucas Dickey 01:00:32:

We didn't keep riffing for 15 minutes where it was headed with the sort of deep chat. And earlier I was alluding to entities and the fact that we can do external URLs. Imagine someone going to your page and saying what you know. Harry talked about being neurodivergent in a given episode and he talked about books that he used to help him learn how to manage or medications or whatever. All of a sudden you've got like 18 monetizable things that can be surfaced. The description coming back to you is normal. But like anything that's a purchasable object is all of a sudden a link targeting a new tab for you to go buy that thing. Can I give you, as the creator, some large portion of that revenue because it was happening on your page? Yes, of course. Can I charge you some basic platform fee to coverage my costs? Yes. So that gets to. There's like commerce involved in a way that you hadn't necessarily. Like these don't have to be your sponsors. Like, this is just something you discussed in passing in your show that could be an actionable event. I talk about books all the time.

Harry Duran 01:01:33:

Sure.

Lucas Dickey 01:01:33:

And like, if you wanted to find that my Ezra Klein ends every one of his episodes with tell me three books that you would recommend. I buy one out of three of every one of those. I have to go hunt it down. Imagine it was just like right there and I click it and I purchase and some revenue gets passed back. Indies would love that. They don't have to do much work. They're not.

Harry Duran 01:01:52:

That's been the Challenge for indies of setting up all these like plugins and the Amazon affiliate and all this other stuff.

Lucas Dickey 01:01:57:

Yeah, don't want you to have to do that. And even with that.

Harry Duran 01:01:59:

Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Dickey 01:02:00:

There's a company that's called the Skim that basically they identify all the affiliate programs associated with a given purchasable product. You sign up with them and then they will farm out the appro. You know, find the appropriate affiliate programs and boil it all up and then I will wrap every these and then I distribute revenues back to you because I've identified from an accounting perspective where.

Harry Duran 01:02:21:

To finish that thought.

Lucas Dickey 01:02:23:

Sorry, no, I was going to say this is a non built thing here but this is like having done attribution logic for other businesses having worked in E comm across a bunch of my career as well. Like digital music was really me and E commerce but for music, you know, furnish was E commerce. Figuring out how to properly attribute the revenue back to the original like creator. That ends up being easy too because we can create like UTM parameters that we pass along with it and then they attach it to the affiliate and then gets passed to me for accounting purposes. But yeah, there's just a lot of things if you start rethinking the paradigm of I have this really good well structured transcript upon which I can do a lot of things and if you just throw it up on Apple in a non searchable way with no diarization, with no speaker identification, it's failing. If you do it as a read along on Spotify it's failing. Like and the problem is like all the indie creators on the sorry, indie podcast apps Harry have basically said what's Apple doing? That's good enough for me. So they're all replicating the same thing which isn't helping this sort of like expansive thinking that there should be more of this happening. Unfortunately you know, to your point like does Spotify care or not? Well they only care if it's honestly if like their stakeholders care. So yes, indies are okay with maybe they would appreciate the passive income. But you know what like YouTube like call her daddy gets a crap ton of money not just off of her sponsorships but off of YouTube serving ads against it.

Harry Duran 01:03:51:

Yeah.

Lucas Dickey 01:03:52:

So if they can passively get a bunch of income because listen to any health and wellness you'll be recommended 15 different things of course, whether they're a sponsor or not. Right?

Harry Duran 01:04:01:

Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Dickey 01:04:02:

The guest that comes on. So how do you monetize what is effectively a passive income source that people are highly in market for the thing. Right. You know, you're a marketer, like, right person, right time, right place, you know, are they in the moment to buy?

Harry Duran 01:04:15:

Sure, sure.

Lucas Dickey 01:04:16:

This could be a great way to do that.

Harry Duran 01:04:17:

Yeah. If you think about like analyzing the transcription to see like what are all the shows and feeding that data, you could have marketing companies or companies with marketing departments not knowing that there's like these 10 shows or this two or three shows that talk a lot about this product. Yep. And you could take that data and say, hey, marketing person, you may haven't even heard this show. It's got a very tiny audience. So you probably wouldn't have come up on your radar because you wouldn't have done an ad buy on it. But they're crazy passionate about it. And then we've cross referenced it against their like social campaigns.

Lucas Dickey 01:04:49:

Yeah.

Harry Duran 01:04:49:

So we see they've got a decent social following or large or rabid fan base. So it could be something to try out, you know, as a low level buy. It's anything that any podcast can get from revenue perspective is a nice win if they're getting 50 bucks, 100 bucks an episode. So it could be this nice way. And if you could facilitate the mechanism through which they could do those buys, you know, maybe that would be helpful.

Lucas Dickey 01:05:10:

Yeah, that's definitely.

Harry Duran 01:05:11:

Given the experience you've had before with ad buying, it might be interesting. That would come back into play.

Lucas Dickey 01:05:16:

We thought a lot about like I'm debating how much to share here, but like what. What it would mean to be a vertically integrated platform if you were hosting with us. Yeah, we're not a host today for deepcast creator, but if you were and you did not have to go back and forth between our platform and your host. And as we're building more of our all in one stuff, currently do not have host that ends up presenting us with an opportunity on the back end to our own ad network or sell our inventory through the trade desk or something similar. And if you can decorate the ad opportunities with this metadata is potentially a target. Well, like you can keyword target on display. Can I keyword target my brand on podcasts? Why not? Right, of course. And we've thought about this. You know, I don't think anyone's going to do it, so I don't mind sharing it because it's just the pace at which development happens. But imagine you like we've chapterized the thing. We know when a rough break point is between switching between topic A and topic B within the first chapter. You discussed Starlink favorably as a Way to get Internet remote Internet access because you happen to have a show around the quote unquote flyover states and non access to these, you know, higher bandwidth whatever. Oh my God. That's like positive sentiment about Starlink. Yeah, that break point. Starling should be investing in their saying that. Right. Or their competitor, positive sentiment or negative was using Starlink but it failed for this reason. And now like the French equivalent satellite company that's out there says no, don't use them, use us instead. Right. All these mechanisms that exist within digital advertising everywhere else except for podcasting. This is why I think that like TAM is much larger. If you start throwing like the technologist of ad tech who've been doing this like for a long time, there's fewer of those in this industry. A lot of the sort of the ad oriented folks in this industry tend to come from radio and radio survey based and it's non like directly attributable. It's more like brand list studies and.

Harry Duran 01:07:16:

One more idea and then we'll take some of this offline because we could talk about a lot of this stuff and I want to wrap this up, but the other idea that popped into my head is because you're gathering sentiment about what people are talking about, what's interesting. You could literally go. I don't know which would come first, but go to Quora and like ask questions in Quora that could be answered by deepcast conversations or something like that or some. There's something along the lines there that just kind of popped in. Just like where are people asking questions and where are questions getting answered? It could be interesting, something to think about there.

Lucas Dickey 01:07:46:

There's something I've also thought about which is funny. So I was listening. Speaking of conversations with Tyler, one of my favorite podcasts or maybe sorry I mentioned, different episode but it's something I listen to a lot. He interviews the co founder of Anthropic Today. It's usually Dario Amade who's the CEO is the one who gets interviewed, but in this case it was Jack Clark. Jack's background is in journalism. He was a Bloomberg reporter. Then he got into tech and the role he had at OpenAI and then anthropic when he moved was in public policy.

Harry Duran 01:08:16:

Okay.

Lucas Dickey 01:08:17:

Liberal arts background. Right. He. Where was it headed with this? The. Your idea? Sorry.

Harry Duran 01:08:25:

Oh, the core question.

Lucas Dickey 01:08:27:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Leverage. Where can we take this data and make it accessible in a way that is non exploitative?

Harry Duran 01:08:34:

Yes.

Lucas Dickey 01:08:35:

It's always the way. I'm trying to think of like I had so Many friends who were indie musicians when I was, you know, DJing and going to the clubs and spinning there and opening etc, how do I put food on their tables? Right?

Harry Duran 01:08:47:

Yeah, for sure.

Lucas Dickey 01:08:49:

So, you know, the idea of it maybe like handing it all over to OpenAI or Anthropic or Perplexity is like, it's cool. It would make it accessible to a lot of people. But is that even more tried? Like, do they never try before you buy? They just try. I never buy in that context. I have thought about, you know, that a lot. So again, like, if we're doing it, how do we do it in a way that's like responsible and provides revenues back to the creators because thing doesn't exist, just the creator's not there. But also how do you take this pool of stuff? Like, the other reason why you might want to vertically integrate like we were talking about is I can create like run of network ad buys. So I can say these 10 things, shows mentioned your brand. I can pool these together to a collective impression count of N where you usually wouldn't spend it if. Unless you can spend at least Y dollars Y. Why can't I do that? And the answer is I, you cannot. Today, like, I've talked to ad buyers, I said I want to buy for Deepcast. I want to target shows based upon this segmentation. Nope, can't do that. I'm like, what do you mean you can't do that?

Harry Duran 01:09:50:

Like, can't do it yet I can.

Lucas Dickey 01:09:51:

Identify them for you. Right. And in some cases, folks who run their own network are also augmenting it with real time bidding in order to hit the total insertion order value. And we could hypothetically do the same thing through RTB buys, but the RTB buys have to leverage certain like, you know, our tech on them in order to buy on our pool of inventory. And yes, it'd probably be at a lower ECPM versus a direct buy, but it's revenue you never would have captured before. Right. So how do I do that? And that's a, like, that's a TAM growth centric thinking. Like, how do I actually take a hundred hairy podcast junkie, like shows of I don't know how many podcast junkie shows? There's a lot. Right. But like, and all of them fascinating. But how do I potentially turn that into, you know, buying and selling something into that audience? Right. So yeah, I. This is where again, system syncing across all the parts of my brain like yours, I'm. I connect all these dots. I'm like, why aren't we doing these things biggest challenge is how do you do it all, cost efficiently and maintain sufficient focus. Right. Which is always a problem for me.

Harry Duran 01:10:51:

Something we'll be tracking very, very closely. This has been a really fascinating conversation, Lucas. I'm glad we had the part one on your show. I kind of had an idea as we were chatting that we would have a really good conversation on this show. It's been so interesting to see kind of like how all the pieces came together for you with all of your past experiences, how you got started it just from a love of music and how that kind of like, you know, Yellow Brick road its way to all the things that you've kind of been fascinated and had the experience with. And it just, it's very obvious now when you look back how all the pieces came to play to kind of put this together to what is now deepcast and why, you know, it's in your DNA to kind of, you have this indie mindset and you want to support podcasters and you're always thinking. You have the systems thinking way of approaching things. So it's been really fascinating to see how it's all coming together. And from seeing so many companies that come in and out of the space, you know, I can really say that this is truly something that I feel you're passionate about. You really have the creator, the indie creator in mind with everything you do. So I'm really excited to see where this goes for you.

Lucas Dickey 01:11:55:

Me too. Me too.

Harry Duran 01:11:57:

We have just a couple of questions that I usually wrap up with.

Lucas Dickey 01:12:00:

Sure.

Harry Duran 01:12:01:

One is, what is something you've changed your mind about recently?

Lucas Dickey 01:12:06:

That's always a hard one for me because I change my mind constantly. I am a big sort of like strong opinions loosely held and that can make it hard to interact with me sometimes. Ask my wife. So I change my mind constantly, I guess is the long story short, it's a hard to hit a big one. Let me think about. I'll circle back to it while the others and see if anything fun popped up.

Harry Duran 01:12:30:

What is the most misunderstood thing about you?

Lucas Dickey 01:12:33:

I do think it's the idea of being like scattershot with approach versus like what actually motivates me. I think those folks who, you know, I stepped away from the last company I co founded four years into it for two reasons. One is I was no longer able to scratch all those itches and keep myself intellectually satisfied. And so we tried to pursue strategies like where do we find me because I'm a 10x er when I'm excited when I'm not, I'm 0.5. You're better off not having me, right? So I was like, we have the E Commerce platform set up. We've done all these things. Sort of like my traditional E Comm background and sort of novel things we were doing in the warehouse were more and more rote for me. And so trying to like that was thing one I recognized is like I do have to be constantly stimulated. But the flip side to that is like, look, if you can set me loose on a problem, then you don't have to worry about this distraction stuff because I will. It's that like singular mind, singular minded, but in batches of singular mindedness to just let me do it, right? So like I had a friend as I was pursuing a job, you know, an idea three years ago and his advice was like, dude, I think you should just go into find a company to let you consult on the side or run a VC micro cap fund on the side because you're going to be able to be. You're going to switch between. And he goes, you definitely gain energy bounce bouncing back and forth. And in sort of a VC world, if I get to talk about a thousand other people's businesses, I learn a lot. So I guess the misunderstanding is like I'm a. Distraction's not the appropriate word for it. I'm just seeing really focused multiple times on multiple things. Let me do my thing.

Harry Duran 01:14:15:

I love it. Well, thank you for this just fascinating conversation. Really, really enjoyed it. And the best place to send folks on the especially since this is podcast centric. We'll have all the links in the show notes but deepcast FM for discovery.

Lucas Dickey 01:14:29:

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

Harry Duran 01:14:53:

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

Lucas Dickey 01:14:55:

I appreciate it as well, sir.