Schmoozegasm at Podfest: Unveiling Audio and AI Innovations

You already history. Welcome Hi the pro Audio this week. Those guys are professional and motivated thanks to Try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road, voice recording and Austrian audio making. Passion Hurt introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging Sydney, to the video stars, George the Tech Whittam from LA and Me, Andrew Peters Voice Sober Talent and Home Studio Guy, and don't forget the code t r I PAP that will get you two hundred dollars off your Try Booth. Now, George, you've been wheezing around the country like crazy. You went to Podfest. What were you actually doing at the Podfast? I was suitcasing. That's what we call the only people's suitcase suitcasing. Suitcasing is when you show up in an event that you didn't sponsor and you start schmoozing and handing out cards and selling your wares. Yeah, you don't have a booth basically a booth. Yes, thanks to Jody Krangle. Thanks Jody. Jody's was a sponsor this year. She actually got an award as she got a Community Award from the podcast event, which was really cool. They also had an awards show there for the it's you know there, every community needs an award, so they have their they have their own awards event there. They call them life ID you call them like Lifetime Achievement award type awards. And doctor Drew was there giving out the awards. He's a famous as a TV personality he had He's been on numerous shows over the years. He's kind of shilling stuff a little bit, isn't he, Like, like you see him on like fed stuff and so so here's the deal. The podcasting community is an interesting one, right. So it's a mixture of a lot of solopreneurs, right, which is why I'm there. I'm a solopreneur. Then you've got a lot of people that have something to say that would not fly on traditional media, right, So extremists on whatever thing it is, you know, they because you can get your podcast, you can say what the heck you want. So you have a lot of people, like I saw a lot of like, you know, people that we're wearing like don't try it on me shirts and you know, yeah, like survival like buy all this food and stockpilot and here's how to live in a hole for eighty days during the apocalypse. So there was a represented some people on that community were represented. And you have a lot of people that are women. You know, every interest group. You can imagine, there's somebody at the podcast podcast because they want to either they have a podcast they want to start, they want to learn about it, or they have one and they want to promote it, or they just want to get better at what they do and more efficient. So that's why they come. And I was spending my time bouncing between the expo hall and some of the different talks that were there, and there were many, many, many panels. And so what's cool about this conference, which I think sets it apart from every other conference that I've ever been to, is they use an app called Hoova spelled like whova awhova, And the Hoova app is a community app that lets you know exactly who's at the event. You know exactly who they are, you have their contact info, you can exchange info. It's kind of like the Namshow app on the on the phone. Did you use the NAM Show app? I was gonna say this sounds just like the Namshow app, which was kind of annoying. Yeah, just not as crappy, although the Namshow app got better, but it was terrible for a long time. But so now you have a way to contact every single person at the event. And so I'm looking at the app right now and it says the total number of attendees was one eight hundred and sixty nine. Wow, that's pretty good. That's not bad, that's good. Yeah, so definitely bigger than Vio Atlanta. They would like to be that big. I'm sure. In fact, J Michael Collins from Via Atlanta was there actually at Podfast with a boot. But what kind of price, I mean, what kind of price? View Atlanta is really expensive to attend. So when you're talking about seven hundred people being at that show, you're still talking about a lot of coin. Whereas was this one like a hundred bucks a ticket or is this seven hundred dollars a ticket? They do the thing which a lot of conferences do, which is having a lot of different tiers so you can go you can start at like two hundred, you can go up to one thousand bucks. So the one thousand dollars ticket is a VIP, and that's actually the ticket that I had because Jody, as a sponsor, actually got a companion ticket and she offered it to me, which was extremely kind. So I went as a VIP, which was cool because I could go to every single happy hour and you know all those special things where they give out they have ore dervs and you can schmooze and stuff, and that was really valuable because while I was in line for one of these, you know, waiting in line for a drink, I met a voice out or not sorry, I met a podcaster who runs a show about the chemical industry. And here, you know, I'm thinking, okay, that could be the end of the conversation. But I didn't let the conversation in and instead I kind of dug in and said and I came at it from an absolutely entrepreneurial mindset of like, Okay, everybody has a need, every industry has a need. Is there a need in that space that I can fill? Right, So, by the time we got to the front of the line to get our drinks, I had already figured out a niche that I wanted to fill. She said, I'd like to have you on my show. Let's you know, I'd like to share this with my community. Let's work on maybe a package for the people that listen to my show. It was like, all this came out of just standing in line. Let me, let me make sure I understand this. She's got a show about chemical engineering, chemical industry, like she does a show or the audience are people working in the chemical industry. You are co marketing with her? Now if she replies to my email, yes, okay, So this is the thing you have to I also realize you go to these shows, these people come, they it is an absolute like schmooze gasm. Yeah. Right, You're meeting hundreds of people, making tons of connections, talking about amazing ideas, and then after that event, it is up to you. You have to be you really have to follow up. I mean, I've so one guy he has a calendarly link on his website, so he's like, hey, let's chat. So I immediately made a point with him and I'll be talking with him as soon as he gets over COVID. Yes. Yeah, because that's the other thing that these conferences are for. I mean, that's certainly what I got from from freaking nam. Yeah, I got my COVID by hanging out in Venice Beach a little more fun. But I got it head over a couple of weeks ago. But so so as soon as he's off his thing, I'm gonna be talking about his studio that we're gonna we are going to build in Dallas. So that turned into another gig. Hopefully he seemed very keen. So for me, on a B to B level business to business, I had made some really great contacts and then on a B two C level business to what consumer, I handed out my card to a lot of people and it was really nice because the vendors that I did know there, which was BSW and Centerance and Yellow Tech, all know me, Oh you have great relationships, and they were all willing to keep my cards at their table and I would just circulate the room and every time I stood near the table, someone would walk up and say what is all this stuff? And you know, and they would and they would often mention me and say, George is the guy that can help you. So it was extremely valuable for me to be there to network and connect with folks. And whether it turns into a true ROI who knows. You just never know until the deposit comes, but I did make some really good, valuable connections there. I also hopefully endeared them to the point where they will involve me in the production of the show next year so that they will not have super loud PA systems blaring in a very large, echoey room to the point where you can't hear the you know, the person presenting, or you can't talk to your vendor that you're trying to talk to because the sound system's blasting. It's funny because podcasting is all about audio, but at the same time, it kind of has this like it's just such a broad demographic because everyone is really like, I just want to have the podcast done. I'm not really about the process of podcasting. I just want it to be good. Oh yeah, there's a lot of networks and producers at these events. I want you to sign on with them, you know, that will get you AD dollars and do all the marketing for you. And there was quite a few of those companies there too, you know. But for me, it was like it was just learning about the community. Who's doing it, who's producing it, how do they do it, what are the issues that they're having in producing it? And what was cool with the Hoova app is I was able to meet when there was an issue with the sound and it was too loud, I was able to immediately post something in there and get the attention of one of the organizers who within probably twenty thirty minutes was asking me, where are you Let's talk. That's pretty awesome. I really loved that when I was a podcast movement that was not happening, that was not going to get through to somebody. Our biggest podcast movement compared to this one, you know, physically it's a bigger space. It was a larger space, more vendors, but I'd think in the actual turnout it probably wasn't all that bigger. But podcast movement attracts more corporate entities. So you had iHeart Podcasts from iHeartMedia and Iheartradioye. You had Amazon. You had all these very big brands there, you know, there to represent their podcast interests and hopefully find their new new hit, big hit show, you know. So that was a very different thing. They were not doing that at Podvest. So these big companies that usual can but they were looking for podcasts to put on their platforms. Is that is that correct at podcast movement. Yeah, they're they're they're there to schmooze with their with their big sellers. You know, they're big shows. They had what you would expect, they had beautiful sets with couches, and you know, they spent some big time money big to be there. And podcast wasn't like that at all. Podcasts felt a lot more like a voiceover convention with a smaller expo hall, and it was and as Jody told me before, it's very more, much more grassroots and more friendly me. Both have like an educational thing, tons and tons of education. Like the one gentleman I'm going to work with named Larry Roberts. He had a thirty minute thing on how to write your next book using chat GPT and it was an absolute paint by numbers. This is exactly how I did mine. Just do it like this and you can have a two hundred page bound book in about a week, right, I mean literally. So I'm like, dude, I want that PDF, and he said, here, scan this QR code, download the p right. So I'm going to use that because I have been gathering my own knowledge with my own custom language model to create my own chatbot. So now I actually have all the content that I would need to make a book, and that's the thing that's kept me from wanting to do a book, because the research and the time to compose a book is eternity in the pre chat gpt ai era. But now I can very very quickly outline a book and write the chapters with the help of a language, you know, a chat GPT. And the beauty of it is it's my own knowledge. I'm not scraping from anybody else. So that was a really cool revelation. So there was a lot. There's a lot to learn there. I wonder if you could, you know, sort of ingest our podcasts that we've been doing for the last five years, of course, and then write a book from that. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean it is frighteningly simple to do it. I mean it is crazy easy. I could do it in two days. It just really is bizarrely simple. But you want it to be good, so there's going to be more time involved. You want to read the entire book, right, You want to make sure everything that's being written is in garbage, right, so, and you have to make sure it's factual. So there's time involved. But still Yeah, it's wouldn't be that hard because we have what six or seven years worth of content on YouTube. All that content is easily scrapable. You create a site map from all that content, and you load the site map into a chatbot utility and that's you're done. I mean, that's how easy it is to build a chatbot from any content. But where what's the additial chatbot from? Like, where's the infant ai Robert that I can go put on the server and start for and feeding it like farguas, Oh, what's the what's the service amusing? Yeah? For that, wouldn't you like to know? Ye? Well, because we'd like to like to write a book. But yeah, yeah, well this isn't a book. But from my own think if I was going to do a book here big coloring indt, Yeah, yes, exactly do For my custom chat two PT, I'm using a thing called custom GPT. That's actually what I'm using as a service to build my chatbot. And it's extremely user friendly and they have all the right tools. You have to be a little bit savvy, but it's it's you don't have to be knowledgeable about code. You don't have to be knowledgeable about a lot of things because they have a lot of good content on there. And how to do it. You have to learn how to write a persona. Your persona is literally how is your chatbot going to talk to people? Is it going to be mean and abusive? You can make it do that if you want. You can. You can have it be abusive and angry. You can have it be overly effusive. You can have it be friendly, you can have it be way too verbose. You can tell it exactly how you want it to behave So I've been working on my persona to make sure my chatbot is friendly but still gives very direct information and at the end always plugs my business. That's how it works. You know, you should give it. You should give it a brief, like most of the voice of a brief that we get nonsensical sort of garbage that it's impossible to understand in that voice. Time should be a little more purple than blue. Yeah, it'd be interesting just to like make this thing follow you around, Like if you just videotaped every day and this thing ingested one day behind what you were so yeah, and then it just whatever, this conversation here, all of it, it's just like oh yeah, no. There by the way, there is a little device that you can slap onto your iPhone and just it just lives on the back of the phone like a little barnacle, and it does that. It records every single phone conversation and then does a chat GPT, you know, transcription of it. For what purpose, George. It's the ultimate note taking device. I mean literally every phone call you make is recorded and converted into notes and summarize. It'll it'll record, you know, it has a mic, so will record what's in the room, but it'll also record what's coming out of the phone. Like we're all going to have a AI sachs on a copy of ourselves and when we die, that's going to live on in some form or an hour Google what that is. That's already east. You see the crap it gets, It gets thrown at me. But that you know today and I have talked about in the kitchen. Oh yeah, he's listening. It's just crazy. Absolutely yeah. So I'll tell you. I'll tell you the story. This is a really wackos story. This goes back to the eighties. Mick Fleetwood was in Australia and he came in to do an interview, and he was sitting there with a little cassette recorder recording everything. And after we'd done the interview, I said, you know, were you just getting a copy of the interview? He said, no, no, no, I record everything. He recorded every conversation. He has everything. So he was an archivist or a librarian type person. Yet No, but when he gets home, he said, when I get home, I'd like to sit in the house and listen back to all the cassettes. He's got time for that, And I'm like, what smiles, But I think there were a few things they did in the seventies. Soself, as he come back to home, do you I reckon? I reckon absolutely Either that he's just very proud of himself and just really wanted to hear what he had to say. It was so yeah, Well, I mean it's in the same way I'll watch our show occasionally or listen to the show. It's just a different experience to hear back what you were saying on the show, and I might pick up something you guys you said that I didn't notice. You might edit and listen and it's a different format than the way we did it. But at this point, I'm looking at it and I know we've gone off topics from podfast to AI again, because this is the way, that's the way the show goes. It's like, I just want to I want to make sure I have my IP in my chatbot before somebody else does. I can't stop somebody from taking all my YouTube videos and putting it in their chatbot, but at least I can have mine and have it in my call stop somebody from taking all your YouTube videos and putting it in their chatbot. So I could go into YouTube tomorrow and just say these are all enlisted and they're gone. No. I know that. But even though you have your stuff up there on a platform where it's basically monetized, and that's one thing that you should be allowed to do, having someone ingest it it's like still your ownership. They can ingest it, but they can't turn around a commercial chatbot. Well I can. Well, yeah, this is why New York Times is suing chat GPT. Right. That's literally how the year started out. That news story came out and I was like, hmm, I can't afford to sue anybody. That's never going to happen. But the least I could do is at least have my chatbot and at least put it out there before somebody else does and market it. And I figure that's the best ot I can do. I can't. I can't stop anybody from stealing my content. There's there's unscrupulous people in the voiceover world who would do that, for sure, people that are just trying to make a buck and have content on their website, and people of it all the time anyway, just not to the scale of a chat pot, you know. But that's going to be the thing of twenty twenty four is making Yeah, so what there's going to be at some point there's going to be lawyers or just like like, for instance, we had a film, a commercial, and the producer was telling us that Ford sued the company, and I was like why, And well, it turns out it wasn't really Ford. So essentially what they got sued for is the commercial had a cop in it and the cop was sitting in a crowd Victoria because that's like your cliche cop car r right. So next thing you know, Ford gets a letter from some lawyer that just says I can get you two hundred thousand dollars signed here. Yeah, Ford ce not CEO, some lower who knows who signs it. Next thing, you know, the guy the lawyer now has Ford behind him and he goes and sues the director or the production company of the car for not getting a license to use their likeness of a car because it's so associated with police, and they extract two hundred thousand dollars out of them. Wow. So same thing, like some lawyers, some company is gonna be there and they're just going to go through and be like, oh crap, I can tell where this chatbot's been trained, going to reach out to all the people that trained it. We're also going to be replacing the lawyers with a with a chatbot. Yeahah, it will be a chatbot. That's exactly right. There's gonna be a chatbot that's going to go see where other chatbots were trained, and then when it catches them, it's going to go sit a letter of season desist and you're gonna be like, untrain your chatbot, which I don't even know if you can do that. Oh yeah, yes, you can go and I can go into mind at any time and just say take that out of the database and it gets gone, I can put an entire YouTube channel on my thing and go, I don't like I've done it. I put a whole YouTube channel in my chatbot. I didn't like some of the answers it was giving, and I just took it back out again. Okay. So so basically you'll get a letter, some assist letter like that, like remove this this content from your chat. And that's why what's going to happen. So you listen to the show and we will drivel on into ai Land with no matter what the topic is. That's what we're all going. It is true. The next up used the outro is the Pro Audio Suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peaters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. George don't forget to subscribe to the show and joining the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just take it. Drop us a note at our website.