Bob Bowdon is the founder and CEO of VidaFair, a pay-per-stream video platform re-shaping the landscape of content monetization. He is also the founder and former Executive Director of Choice Media – the leading School Choice media group. He has been a television producer, reporter and commentator for PBS, Bloomberg Television.
He also appeared as a recurring character in satirical news sketches for the Onion News Network. The Cartel, Bowdon’s documentary, reveals the nature and extent of corruption in public education. The film won a dozen film festival awards.
With VidaFair, Bob and his team are opening door for creators to reclaim their worth by setting their own fees for fair monetization.
What you will learn
- How to amplify your business income and market reach through effective video monetization strategies.
- How to identify and overcome the drawbacks of traditional business subscription models.
- The new era of entrepreneurial content consumption and how to break free from subscription fatigue.
- Innovative approaches to content monetization that empower creators to set their own fees.
- The future of content creation and consumption in a world moving away from traditional subscription-based models.
Transcript
0:34
Jeff Bullas
Great. Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. I have it with me. Bob Bowdon now, Bob is the founder. Yes,
0:42
Bob Bowdon
you do. Sorry. Sorry. I thought that was a question and you were pausing for an answer. I’m sorry, you can start again. Go on.
0:50
Jeff Bullas
Hi, everyone and welcome to the show today. I have with me Bob Bowdon. Bob Bowdon is the founder and CEO of VidaFair, a pay-per-stream video platform re-shaping the landscape of content monetization. He is also the founder and former Executive Director of Choice Media – the leading School Choice media group.
1:16
Jeff Bullas
He has been a television producer, reporter and commentator for PBS, Bloomberg Television.
He also appeared as a recurring character in satirical news sketches for the Onion News Network. The Cartel, Bowdon’s documentary, reveals the nature and extent of corruption in public education. The film won a dozen film festival awards.
With VidaFair, Bob and his team are opening the door for creators to reclaim their worth by setting their own fees for fair monetization.
1:45
Jeff Bullas
you know, satirical news sketches for the Onion News Network. And I’d love to hear a bit more about that because I, we, we Australians love a bit of satire and sarcasm. So um the cartel Bowdon’s documentary reveals the nature and extent of corruption in public education as an ex-teacher. I’m really intrigued about that as well. The film won a dozen film festival awards. Well, it’s no secret where over-saturated content and creators are grappling with countless challenges and from fluctuating algorithms. And I, by the way, we’re in the middle of an algorithm war. In fact, all of us as content creators are fighting with the algorithms at the battle of the algorithms. We’ll talk more about that too,
2:26
Jeff Bullas
right through to copyright issues. And we’re even hearing about, you know, chat GP T and Open A. I have been sued by the New York Times for copyright issues. So we’ve got a lot to talk about here and the overwhelming subscription fatigue felt by consumers. So Bob and his team are rewriting the rules offering a solution that empowers both creators and consumers and video fair allows creators to reclaim their worth by setting their own fees for fair monetization and consumers enjoy the freedom to access quality content without the burden of subscriptions. Bob. Welcome to the show and I’m really looking forward to our chat here. So a fireside chat, um nothing too formal, but I will ask you one question, the end of this, which will be
3:09
Jeff Bullas
If you had all the money in the world, what would you do every day that brought you deep joy? I’ll let you think about that. I must already know what that is, but we’re finishing that. So, Bob, great to have you here.
3:20
Bob Bowdon
Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, let me just interject when you say the term anchorman. I think since that movie, it’s really taken on a different flavor, that specific term, that I think Will Ferrell might have redefined the prestige level of that particular.
3:38
Jeff Bullas
Well, for me, it’s all about prestige and premium. So uh the anchorman hasn’t ruined my impression of the anchorman. So, um yeah, but it was funny. Uh So I’m sure I’m sure you watched it. All right. So Bob, you sort of got, you got here by a convoluted means because you actually went and did science at university. Is that correct?
4:05
Bob Bowdon
Sure. I had a couple of engineering degrees I started out with and that was my launch into this world. Uh Later I did some technology reporting and I guess now I’m a AAA tech founder. So there is some uh dovetailing between that but a large block of my career has been media,
4:22
Jeff Bullas
right? So uh I’m intrigued by uh why did you leave? You? Like, tell me a bit of a story about what happened when you left and you joined a company called AT&T. So tell us a bit about and this is interesting about watching people’s lives and how their careers evolve in that. They’re going, I’m really bored here. Something not quite working for me. I need to move on what happened with AT&T because that’s how you joined. I think after you did your degrees.
4:50
Bob Bowdon
Sure. Yeah, I mean, it was at the time a company that while it was a private company for those who don’t know, maybe the US telecommunications history, it uh had been the monopoly telecom company. It was pro provided all the phones, almost all the phones and phone lines in, in America as well as the multiplexers and modems and data communications equipment uh uh for the country and then was broken up uh in a uh consent decree decree was called and I came after that, but still the remnants of that monopoly culture were still
5:25
Bob Bowdon
everywhere. And so it made it extremely frustrating to be an engineer and kind of soured me. I think that I was, that, that negative experience I had by working in a place where it took forever to do anything and you needed to have countless meetings before you could even have an opinion about anything. Um, and it basically, you know, I, I kind of wondered in the year since what would have happened if I had been with a dynamic uh vital company that was, you know, a tech company was really changing the world, you know, but not uh not the case. So I ended up basically quitting my job and going to film school after that and kind of starting over in the media after my run at AGENT.
6:04
Jeff Bullas
So he went to film school. Where was that? Uh because it’s
6:07
Bob Bowdon
NYU New York University. And, and I would say by the way too, I was working for AT&T uh on the 72nd floor of the World Trade Center. This was before 911. I mean, by the time 911 came, I was already at Bloomberg, but I had been in uh at an, a TD office in the, you know, World Trade Center. So, uh whatever, that’s a little interesting anecdote of my life for the journey. Yeah.
6:32
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. So you moved on and did some other interesting things like uh you did some satirical news sketches for the Onion News,
6:42
Bob Bowdon
America’s finest news source, the Onion,
6:45
Jeff Bullas
In other words, uh quite often, the best form of news is actually satirical news because they can tell the truth with their tongue in their cheek. Um in fact, but it’s deadly serious even though it’s comedy. So tell us a little bit about that because I’m curious about it because we, as Australians actually are quite, have perfected the art of what I call intelligent sarcasm. And I think the Onion most probably has done the same thing, but we did it as a country. So, tell us about your stint at Onion uh news. That’s interesting.
7:22
Bob Bowdon
Well, I will, I went, uh so I had an agent at the time, you know, I had been a TV reporter and uh talk show host and whatnot. And so I was living in the New York City area. I would be getting auditions for the Daily Show, for example, which is a US comedy news show. But this was another one of those I went to, the Onion News Network audition. And, um and I will say having been an actual news uh person in both, you know, reporting on the field and being in the studio, like
7:51
Bob Bowdon
there’s not, there’s nothing that teaches you that cadence, like actually doing it. Like I remember being in there and watching, like other people try to be the fake reporter thing. They had never been reporters. They were just an actor or something and they got an audition, they showed up to the union and they tried to be a reporter, but they didn’t even come close. You could pick out every single person
8:13
Bob Bowdon
and who had really actually done that job before. Even though the lines were, you know, comedically absurdism, uh, you know, absurdist and ridiculous what not, there was no substitute for actually having not just heard that cadence thousands of times but practiced it for years. There were really no subs anyway. So that was, uh everyone else cast had also been in the real news, uh world. So that was when they were starting their youtube channel the Onion. And then they went on to get uh two seasons on,
8:42
Bob Bowdon
uh what in America is called the IFC cable channel. And so I was on both of those seasons, but I did a bunch of youtubers before, uh that as well. So, um my, I, I was a recurring character. My character name was Brian Scott. They wanted, like they saw me as the most kind of generic le whatever just fill, fill in, you know, central casting. It would be the term maybe version of, of what a reporter would be doing these crazy things. Uh uh And so you can still to this day go on to youtube and look up like Brian Scott the Onion and find some old clips of me talking about some crazy things.
9:17
Jeff Bullas
I’m gonna do that after this show. Uh, so, in fact, I’m just, uh, basically making stuff up as we go here anyway. So, um, but 227 episodes in 2, 227 I don’t think that’s a good number, but, uh, I do this for fun actually. Not much else really. Um, no,
9:39
Bob Bowdon
see I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m starting to, I’m keying in with this, uh, your style of humor is starting to, starting to, starting to catch up.
9:48
Jeff Bullas
I hope it’s not too annoying, but, you know, Australians have been known to annoy Americans and vice versa, but it’s ok. Um So what, what was your, what were some of your favorite memories of that? And what was the, um, I suppose, what did you enjoy most about that as well in terms of being on a satirical news show? What did you love about it best?
10:11
Bob Bowdon
Well, everyone there would, I mean, the kind of person that would want to be involved in a project like that, it’s sort of a self selection mechanism that goes in terms of the personalities of the people around, not to imply that everyone was identical at all. They were, you know, uh obviously, but, but still it was, yeah, it was just a group of people really. I mean, um, I guess you could say that’s with most jobs that you like, whether it was when I was a dishwasher at age 14 or, or some other kind of fancier sounding job. It really is. The people always become what you appreciate. Right.
10:46
Jeff Bullas
Maybe, maybe it was 14. Flirting with pretty girls while you did the dishwasher. I don’t know what that would be part of the job? What’s that? Flirting with the pretty girls and the police?
10:58
Bob Bowdon
Of course. No kidding. And I had money as well. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I thought I was doing great as a 14 year old dishwasher. And I, I guess in some ways I was, you know, so,
11:08
Jeff Bullas
yeah. Well, I, I remember my dishwashing days were very much done with my two brothers and I are having what we call a tea towel fights where you wound the dishwasher, the, the tea towel up and you got it slightly wet and then so it turned into a tea towel cracking competition against your brothers trying to hit them in the leg and we, we perfected, you know, that art of dishwashing.
11:33
Bob Bowdon
Yeah. Well, I, I act, I, so, and I eventually graduated to be kind of a cook in a couple of different restaurants in my local area. And, uh, you know, I was underage. I don’t know what the drinking laws are. Not.
11:47
Jeff Bullas
21. They’re 18. Yeah.
11:49
Bob Bowdon
Well, back in those days it was at 18, but at the time I was like 16. But what they did have was cooking wine in the back and I had discovered the joys of sneaking. I would furtively look around and like, you know, and to make sure no one was walking toward the kitchen. And then I would, I would do a little shot of uh cooking wine. It was great times
12:12
Jeff Bullas
girls and drink. There you go. Perfect. Um And getting clean at the same time. So now the other thing that I’m intrigued about, let’s move on to you, I wrote a documentary called the Cartel, which reveals the nature and extent of corruption in public education. Now, I’m very intrigued with this because I taught at, I was a high school teacher. That was my original training. What subject? Uh I took economics and when I knew nothing about economics, I still know nothing about economics, but the economists know nothing about economics actually. So make predictions.
12:53
Bob Bowdon
I suspect you knew more than the economist.
12:57
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. But II, I, I’d sort of be a bit like you. I, I don’t know how many years you were in AT&T. I sort of looked at myself and looked at the teachers that were in their forties, the really old bastards, right? That we were in their forties. And uh you know, me being a, you know, young whipper snapper of 23 teaching 18 year old students. Um What was interesting was I went, I looked at these old guys and said, and they looked tired and worn out and it was, everything was Groundhog Day and you were teaching people that don’t want to learn, they’re called teenagers. So, uh yeah, so, uh yeah, I left um and joined the technology industry because uh it looked like a lot more fun to me and it was so never really left in a way. So,
13:43
Jeff Bullas
So tell us, so tell us about the film. I’m interested where and obviously there’s, you’re looking at the nature and extent of corruption in public education, but then you’ve looked at it and you’ve moved on to creating a bit of AFA. So there seemed to be a bit of a connection. Let’s have a little chat about, um, the cartel and where did the inspiration come from? That?
14:07
Bob Bowdon
Sure. Uh So I was, I had a friend who was a teacher at an inner city high school in New York City at the time and I was hearing on a regular basis the story she was telling me about strange dysfunctions and rules that didn’t make sense at all. And uh things are only the un these kind of union people can touch these, you know, wires and we’re not allowed to and, and, and, and this many feet off the ground and this other person has to be, I mean, things that just sounded insane. And I thought, I just thought to myself, someone
14:40
Bob Bowdon
like the things I’m hearing, most people don’t know, like if someone needs to tell this story and then it turns out to be me. I basically then, um, anointed myself as that storyteller person. So I basically then went on about a almost three year journey of doing interviews and uh sometimes many times friendly, but also sometimes adversarial uh regarding um how money doesn’t reach the classroom, how the great teachers don’t get rewarded, how the bad teachers don’t get fired. How uh um people often just assume that throwing more money at a particular dysfunctional, chronically failing school will fix it. We’ll just fix it. And, and yet, and we looked at particular examples where that had happened for many years and it just didn’t help. It wasn’t usually an issue of, of lack of money alone. And so, um
15:38
Bob Bowdon
and so, yeah, there were all of these stories that really needed to be told and, and so, yeah, it had nothing to do with the, the, the comedy stuff or whatever. Obviously, it’s a very serious subject and it still persists in America today. II I never really looked very much in the Australian school system. I don’t know much about it there, but I know a lot of the problems that I talked about over 10 years ago now in the cartel documentary film still apply to uh inner cities in the US.
16:02
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. Yeah. Look, I haven’t gone into the politics of it, of it all with the corruption side. But I just, for me as a teacher, I just felt a lot of what we were teaching was not relevant. Um And, you know, the curriculum was set from on high by people that never left school. They’re called professors. Yeah. So for me it was, um, and also I think the other thing is that I have an observation of school systems, especially the public school I actually taught in private schools. So, I did some public school teaching later as a casual teacher. And,
16:35
Jeff Bullas
um, the t basically over time that you ended up as a teacher, you were supposed to be the authority figure that was running the classroom. You, you had your power stripped away and the inmates were running the asylum. They’re called students because they got all these rights. And you can’t tell me off when you can’t, I’m about to hit a student with a stick on. You can’t do that. And I went, this is nuts and, uh, this has not been fixed. In fact, Australia’s got some real issues in terms of, uh, the, lots of students in the classroom.
17:06
Bob Bowdon
Exactly the same here. That, that aspect is, is very much the same.
17:10
Jeff Bullas
And how can you teach in the middle of an asylum? Right. It’s really what it is and, and
17:15
Bob Bowdon
you don’t even need a large percentage of kids to be troublemakers. You just need a few of them to be completely disruptive to a class. You know, maybe any more than one or two. You know, if you have three or four that are disruptive, it can be an enormous problem for a teacher. And, um, and so, yeah, often they’re not supported.
17:32
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. And they’re not. And teaching certainly not. Doesn’t generally pay very well. Like in Australia they paid, you know, reasonably well. But, uh, anyway, it’s gonna be interesting to see what the impact of A I and, uh, online education which has threatened the industrial, um, education system which we’ve had around since the industrial revolution really. Um, so it was really prepared people to actually work in uh factories and uh be compliant. So anyway, enough about school teachers and um and students and but let’s move on to. So you, you’ve done that and won a dozen film festival awards. That’s pretty amazing. Can we view that online now? Is that, is that available or is it is
18:16
Bob Bowdon
indeed, it is indeed. And by the way, we’re also on Netflix for five years or so, we also had Warner Brothers distribution, we had an 11 city theatrical release uh with, you know. Uh So yeah, the, the by, by most independent film standards, it did great. But yes, now it’s on my platform, Vida Fair. I now have uh have it monetized there, the cartel. So there is a tie in. Uh yeah, the, the tie in is basically as I was going around the country to these film festivals, I was seeing all of this great content
18:45
Bob Bowdon
and uh that had nowhere to go. Uh If they were lucky, someone would spend half their life savings, making some film that was their artistic dream. And, then if they were lucky, they would get into some local film festival and invite all of them, all of their colleagues who had worked on the film to come and watch that one screening and then they just all went home, there was basically nothing to do. They could put it on youtube. That was pretty much
19:09
Bob Bowdon
their only option after that. And I just thought to myself, why is, why should it be like this? Why isn’t there a way to set a fair price and market to social media followers without a middle man or a gatekeeper and just say, please support my work and here it is if you want to rent it.
19:26
Jeff Bullas
So that sounds to me very much like as you went around doing the cartel and so on, looking at the great content, there was inspiration for her going, we should be able to give the creators better enumeration for their creativity um and give them a voice and you mentioned not having gatekeepers in the way. And I think when social media started for me, the ability to reach the world without the media mogul getting in the way and charging you for that, that was very empowering for me. And I got to where I am today with worldwide distribution measures in the millions per year effectively because I just persisted and created content from my owned platform, not my rented platform. And I think we’re gonna have a chat about that too. So in that inspiration for you was through observation, wasn’t it
20:21
Bob Bowdon
sure? Um you know, it began to, I began to see people uh at the same time, you know, the social media arrived and people would make content for the social media platforms. And I guess their payment was like and shares that kind of thing. But it always struck me as, as kind of the same arrangement as if, you know, a, I don’t know if you have local newspapers still in Australia. But like, imagine, imagine the, you know, local newspaper says we’d like you to write a column for our paper. Oh, ok. Great. Yeah. And then you’re gonna sell ads next, yeah, we’ll sell ads next on, you know, next to your column and that’s how we’ll make money.
21:01
Bob Bowdon
But you create all this content, you know, every week or every day and you’re like, ok, what are you gonna pay me for that? And they’re like, oh, nothing. It’s, you write the content for free, then we sell ads against your content and we keep all the money. That’s basically the social media bargain that they have announced. And I think if a newspaper asked you to do that, you’d say, well, this is insane. I’m not gonna write content for you so that you can make money on ads and I get nothing you know, and yeah, that’s, that’s exactly the,
21:30
Bob Bowdon
you know, because there is a dopamine boost if you get a like or a bunch of likes and a bunch of shares on your, on your tweet or your x whatever it’s called or your, you know, Facebook or Instagram or something, you get, you see a bunch of people like it that makes you feel positive or good about the work you did or something. But I um yeah, it’s simply not fair to have all the ad money go to the platform and none of it not, you know, we could debate a percentage. But when it’s literally zero of it goes to the content creator, that’s a problem.
22:03
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. And I totally agree. And uh the reason and this is where the platforms are tapping into uh the primal human which is seeking affirmation and approval. And when you get likes and that it’s, it’s, it’s like a dopamine hit. It’s basically almost, it is addictive. In fact, social media platforms are designed to be addiction, addiction platforms. They were designed on neuroscience, which was created in Las Vegas on slot machines. Yeah. So I totally agree with you. And uh lucky, luckily for me, I was able to monetize what I did even though I did it for free for about three or four years. Um But it, it’s fascinating, isn’t it that the platforms they’re using basically human primal primal nature to actually create um free content globally at scale and Facebook has turned into what, earning 25 billion profit per quarter.
23:06
Jeff Bullas
Um So
23:07
Bob Bowdon
it
23:07
Jeff Bullas
was
23:07
Bob Bowdon
OK. Yeah, I mean, look, I, I uh my, my vision of this is to not say that, you know, free content needs to go away or that I’m against it. You know, I post things on social media for free, you know, periodically, not nearly as much as I used to, I’ll tell you that. But um
23:25
Bob Bowdon
but sure it has a place or something. I mean, uh we, we’re not a subscription platform and I’m, and we can talk about that too. Like I, I’m, I’m, I’m on the team hashtag subscription fatigue. Like I don’t, I’m, I’m sick of subscribing to content and maybe that’s your model. I don’t wanna be uh if that offends you. But I’m like that can, that has a place too, like there’s no reason for that, but we should also at least as well have a place for content where a supporter can pay a la carte and support the creator. Yeah, then that’s so that’s what we built.
23:57
Jeff Bullas
Cool. So the inspiration from the observation of seeing creators not getting paid, not getting the attention they deserved even. So how did you cos quite often as an aspiring entrepreneur that wants to start something is that you sort of approach, you sort of got all these ideas, you sit down and have some beers with your friends, people with money, some people with no money. Um and go and say how we can do this. And then as you approach the line, the start line, you’re going, oh, this mightn’t work this fear and doubt creeps into us as, again, as a human part of being human. So I’d like to hear the story of how you
24:39
Jeff Bullas
from the inspiration. Was it just yourself on your own? And how did you cross from, as we say in Joseph’s Campbell, the hero’s journey. How did you cross the threshold from the ordinary to the extraordinary? I’d like to hear that
24:55
Bob Bowdon
interesting question. Thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, I guess the first step was I had friends who had been working in tech. Uh even though I, you know, I had kind of a start as a technology. Uh but I had been for many years, I had been just a media guy. So I went and met with some of these friends and they would often recommend I would say, do you know anyone who would be the right partner for this as a tech person? With me being kind of the content, media person?
25:20
Bob Bowdon
And so yeah, I ended up meeting with some people and some of them, you know, everyone responded to the idea. I, in fact, one of them, I mean, some of them gave me pricing that I thought didn’t make sense and I kind of moved on from that. Um And then eventually I hired some people and then they, uh, very quickly, then outsourced all the work to Indian, an Indian programmer group. I know. Exactly. And then, um, the next thing that happened was they started fighting with the Indian group that they had hired and so they wouldn’t even talk to each other anymore. Now, I had to be the go between, between this original group I hired and then the secondary group they hired. And so it became, uh it became a mess. In the end. We basically had to
26:08
Bob Bowdon
II, I then found someone way better who, who is, uh uh uh and then grew from there. But the point is we eventually had to throw out all the code. We tried to fix it at first, but we eventually had to throw it out, and had to start over. So, uh but you do learn things along the way as you’re imagining this like a new paradigm. It’s one, you know, there’s plenty of entrepreneurs who are not doing something that’s that new. They’re a franchisee, for example, and they have, you know, the next KFC franchise or, you know, hardware
26:36
Bob Bowdon
or, or something and they’re, and, and, and please, I’m, I’m supportive of those people and they take a lot of financial risk uh as well. But when you’re doing something completely new and even in the failure stages, you are learning a lot about the business model and the things that you learn don’t make sense. And so I, I can’t, I can’t just kind of throw away the, that time as just a, you know, utter write off loss embarrassment because I was learning as I went.
27:03
Jeff Bullas
Right. Yeah, it’s, um, and that’s in terms of, uh, what you said about you, sort of, even though you did an engineering degree where you were playing or wanted to play was totally different and you needed to find your way to that. So were you, did you start this as a side hustle or did you leap into the leap into the chasm? Um and bootstrap and said I can make this work in 12 months or six months. How was it with it or you had a, you had a full time job or you were working on other projects? Um How did you start? Was it bootstrapped or where
27:42
Bob Bowdon
it was a bit of a side hustle? Yes, exactly. That’s a good term for it. Yeah, because at that time, I had a media group and I was uh working full time at that, doing more media regarding education policy because after the success of the documentary film, uh then, you know, people kept asking me, am I gonna make a sequel? When is my sequel? And I kind of didn’t want to just repeat the work, but I’m like, I can continue to do media in this subject matter but it still interests me. Yeah, but not necessarily another documentary film. Instead I would uh create a group that did uh podcasts and interviews and uh on a daily newswire and a website and an app and all kinds of things to still uh message those same ideas and, and follow current events in, in education policy,
28:27
Bob Bowdon
a vertical news group about the one issue of education, I used to say the way ESPN only covers sports or C NBC in America only covers, you know, markets. We’re a news group only covering education news. So, and it was, and we kind of saw it as a um uh uh lack of coverage in that space because it’s, it’s ubiquitous, billions of dollars go to education. There are these huge problems and yet there’s really not that much media about the subject anyway. So I was in, I was doing that as a full time job and I was able to, when I hired these people on the side, it wasn’t, I wasn’t actively working every day. Yeah, it was a kind of a thing where I was able to uh explain the vision for, for the company and um
29:08
Bob Bowdon
you know, send them off to execute the initial phases of at least let’s get the basics of a website up to start with and whatnot. So those phases, it was a side hustle.
29:17
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. The reason I asked was I actually have a website called side hustle Strategies, which is uh basically how to build a business in a digital world because for me, uh my online business came out of a side hustle. I did it while I had a day job. Um So, and for me, for example, uh I needed to create content. So, I discovered a love of writing. So my way as a side hustle was, I got up at 4:30 a.m. five days a week and wrote a blog post and had it published by 9 a.m. when I did my day job. Um and I did that for four years. So I created a shitload of content over four years doing that. Um
29:58
Bob Bowdon
Were you limiting it to one subject area or were you kind of doing it well,
30:03
Jeff Bullas
So I think anything that works in the end is something where you follow your bliss or your curiosity, which then becomes expulsion, which then can often be a healthy obsession. But I think I’m and I’m going to use Joseph Campbell again is that he said our purpose in life is not a purpose given from and hired, but it’s following your bliss. And I think that is something that you are curious about. You maybe want to make a difference about you wanna talk about and wanna create about. So, um and for me, that was a difference. My topic area was I was intrigued by social media because it gave everyone a voice and that’s the term you used. You actually could bypass the gatekeepers that for me was intoxicating
30:49
Jeff Bullas
because in the past I’d spent money on, you know, advertising, paying the gatekeepers to get attention. Almost none of it worked apart from cold calling and door knocking. And so for me, social media, for me, is a democratization of content creators and becoming your own publisher. And for me, social media was very much a rented land because I’d seen the Facebook algorithm destroy businesses overnight. A million businesses a day algorithm changes, business disappears. So, um and I’m sure you, I suppose started to observe that as well that, that, that you wanted to give the voiceless a voice, for example, um those that needed attention because they were damn good at what they did. And I’m sure you met a lot of great filmmakers that just, just didn’t get the attention and sometimes it’s just a matter of luck and timing, isn’t it?
31:52
Bob Bowdon
No, we’re, it’s the, we almost had a parallel journey in a, in a sense, my AT&T, you know, uh bureaucracy I was talking about is not really unlike some of the kind of gatekeeper media bureaucracy in a sense too. The idea that there’s these big entrenched rich groups that, you know, you can’t even access or can’t even talk to and they’re off somewhere else and yet they are kind of in control of so much of our society and you, you sort of think to yourself, the fundamental principle would be, you know, I kind of believe in is that when, you know, power distributed is inherently healthy and power consolidated is inherently unhealthy. And so, yeah, if we, you and I are both in the business of distributing power, yeah, that’s sort of, um, that’s the high calling, I think in this space,
32:40
Jeff Bullas
I totally agree with you. And for me, the side house of strategies was basically cited by someone, uh you’ve got more power than, you know, the only way you discover that is by actually putting your creation out to the world. Um And I innately believe that everyone is innately creative um in just so many different ways, whether it’s music, whether it’s writing, whether it’s, you know, baking, it really doesn’t matter. But I think the or of being human is that we are creators and
33:10
Bob Bowdon
it could be cooking, it could be decorating, it can be uh words, it can be all kinds. Yeah. Creativity is uh a lot of the joy in life is, is based on being creative.
33:21
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. One of the, one of the biggest things I love doing is I, one of the reasons I write is trying to make sense of the world because I’ve got to distill it from noise and complexity across books and resources and try it and put it into 1000 words, for example, which is a blog post. Um And then I’ve got to write it and distill it. So it actually makes sense to me So then hopefully it makes sense to someone else. And uh
33:42
Bob Bowdon
I just keep thinking about, you said 4:30 a.m. Are you one of these guys who doesn’t need a lot of sleep or are you going to bed early every night?
33:49
Jeff Bullas
Thanks for asking the question. Uh I should be asking you questions, but I will get on back to those. Now. What was OK? I’m still fascinated today. Um Dan Peak has a Pink, has a book called Drive and there’s a lot of books called, you know, about Flow. And there’s a lot of people with passion. Oh, don’t do anything just on passion that’s not gonna work. You know, it’s just flaky. You gotta have a business idea and you gotta chase the money um out of this curiosity that I had that became compelling and I was signed up for because I saw I’ve usually got on Twitter, for example. And I’d see America wake up from 14,000 kilometers away. Um That’s about eight or 9000 miles for Americans. So the reality is
34:37
Jeff Bullas
I got onto Twitter and I went, wow, I, I could see the beat of the street. I could see the heartbeat of the planet as the sun revolved around, went around the world. In fact, no, we went around the sun. So I was trying to wind science back to the ancient past there. But really, for me, for me, the drive, it was like a nuclear power plant. I can’t tell you where it came from, except that I had a curiosity that became a compulsion, then became an obsession.
35:15
Jeff Bullas
And then I discovered a love of writing and then I loved and I do love learning and I love reading. So it’s maybe the intersection of innate things that are within me that um coalesced into one focal point. And it was, I wrote about social media and its rise. And I wrote about smartphones. I wrote about everything that interested me around that sort of core philosophy of democratizing
35:40
Jeff Bullas
uh the creator and content and being a publisher. That’s what intrigued me. And then I had little dopamine hits because hubspot had a little platform going. OK, what’s your website grade? And I could see my traffic going up. And in other words, my creation was being affirmed and my attention and then people started reaching me around the world and said, uh would you come to speak and be cos you’re a social media expert back in 2010 11? And I went, yeah, and we’ll pay you and also we’ll fly business class. And I went, wow. Um So that where that drive came from, Bob to me, I still don’t know where it turned up. It was almost like I was channeling the world, channeling the energies coming from the universe somewhere. It just was something that
36:36
Jeff Bullas
I didn’t plan for it. But basically as Joseph Campbell said, I followed my bliss and it became an incredible driving force. So that’s how it happened for me. And
36:50
Bob Bowdon
I heard a quote, I heard a quote recently it was, uh, something to the effect of I’ll probably mess it up, but it’s something of the effect of, um, you know, the real regret in life is not that if not, that we weren’t able to hit the target, we were aiming for the real red in life is finding out that the target we were aiming for really didn’t matter. And we were aiming for the wrong target. And so I think, yes, finding purpose in your, in your, in your life and in your work is, you know, gee, so it used to be something I think that was, uh, talked about a lot more. But, yeah, um, anyway,
37:29
Jeff Bullas
yeah, it’s, it’s, it fascinates me today and, um, maybe I was younger then as well in terms. But, uh, yeah, 4:30 a.m. five years got up and I would not stop until I’d hit the publish button. And
37:42
Bob Bowdon
When were you going to sleep?
37:46
Jeff Bullas
I went to sleep at about 1030. I actually started writing at night and I realized then that, uh, my partner was getting slightly annoyed because she never saw me, uh, at night. And also what it got the way too is you go out for friends on a, on an evening and you had a couple of drinks, you come back and you go, oh, I’ve got to get that blog post out. The idea. I had that I wrote down on a piece of paper or, or on my phone. Um, and I went, you know what if I get up at 4:30 a.m. no-one’s awake, no-one’s gonna annoy me. Um, I’m, it’s just me and the milkman and the rubbish guy. Right. And, uh, but
38:21
Bob Bowdon
you’ve never said to yourself, oh, it doesn’t really have to be tomorrow. Let me just sleep late. I’ll do it the next day. You were not that guy.
38:29
Jeff Bullas
No. And the discipline that wasn’t forced on me was a revelation. And uh so, and it just came out of me and so I am still on the search for the f magic formula for that. Um But I think also we as humans have got different levels of motivation and different things matter and that’s absolutely fine. Um So now my intrigue and curiosity is learning into the intersection of A I and humanity because A I ask big questions of what it means to be human. For example, you can get an image created by an A I platform, you can get it to write a document and you as a writer go shit, that’s actually really, really good and it’s getting better and I’m going OK, what about my story is my story good enough. So this
39:28
Jeff Bullas
A I is challenging and for me, it is asking big questions of what does it mean to be human? Geoff, if A r does everything, what’s the purpose of being human? So, anyway, that’s my, that’s my next curiosity, which is becoming a compelling and a call and a calling, I suppose that’s the other thing too. It’s, it’s like a calling. It’s, that’s really it. Um, now I, that was a very good question, by the way. And you got me on a five minute rant. But that’s, that’s OK. I think I’m so now I’m curious about you. You’ve got these guys working on building your platform. Did you, so you said it was an idea, you said this is my vision. And did you do like wire maps for a website or anything or you just went?
40:21
Bob Bowdon
No, but again, I had, I, I had some pro I had done some programming myself. Uh Although, you know, my languages were out of date from, you know, uh modern uh programming, but a lot of the concepts I, it, I was, I surprised myself at how many of the concepts still apply and how I would uh critique code without knowing the language it was written in. But I would just say, why is it doing this when it could just do this? And yeah, so, so a, a lot of some of the, some of the experience pertained, I would say um but i’m not, but yes, I would, I think I would ex I would have.
40:56
Bob Bowdon
Um Yeah, II, I mean, I take, for example, a logo I had that developed online by someone who lived far away, whom I never met, you know, and, but, but I went and saw, you know, a bunch of samples of a bunch of different people and then I said I picked three and then I got some sort of, you know, test samples and so then I picked one vendor and, and then finished it from there. Um I’m not sure it was that unusual in that way, in terms of those stages of development.
41:22
Jeff Bullas
Yeah. So let me ask the next question is that, did you create uh cos one of the things tossed around for startups, especially in the tech world is uh an MVP. And I’m gonna explain what that algorithm means. Cos I hate algorithms. It means a minimal viable product and it’s something simple that tests to see if your idea works. Did you do a minimal viable product? Um
41:47
Bob Bowdon
Not really, I mean, it, no, because I kept thinking about my II, I guess, I guess the first phase of the first phase of the product was that, but then there is no point where we just continue to add features. There’s no point where we said, OK, now we’re just gonna wait. But you know, because I believe in the concept so much, I didn’t say OK, now let me wait and see how much business will be generated or how much growth will ensue from the kind of 1.0 version that’s released. Uh I almost just felt instead that uh it’s, it is, it is self evident that people should want to monetize content and want a fair way to do it and, and we do it in a way no one else does. Now, I mean, now you have this fear of every entrepreneur that,
42:34
Bob Bowdon
You know, at some point, you know, the day before your big launch, a multibillion dollar company will announce the exact same product, you know, an offering that you have and then you know, what do you do then? And so, OK, if that would have happened, maybe then II, I guess I might have been more uh thoughtful of circumspect or uh
42:53
Bob Bowdon
et cetera about gee maybe this won’t work, but that really was not where my head was at. I just kept saying that I have zero doubt in the viability of the business model. Even though at that point, there were no customers yet, I just thought it just, it can’t fail. There has to be, there has to be a way for and maybe it’s not our, our platform, it’ll be someone else but someone has to do this. It has to be a way to have content and say I’m gonna set my own fee, I’m gonna market it to my social media followers and those who want to support me can rent my content. And so, yeah,
43:28
Jeff Bullas
so, I have two questions arising out of that, which you partly answered. Um Number one, how did you market or how do you market your platform? What’s worked and what hasn’t, that’s actually two questions, but it’s the same topic. Uh Number two. When do you go? Oh, shit, this is actually working. Has that happened? Um So there’s,
43:55
Bob Bowdon
it’s a moving target, isn’t it? That’s uh that’s always uh I mean, in terms, I can tell you plenty of things didn’t work and, and, and uh maybe this won’t be so surprising now that I, I say it with kind of 2020 hindsight in retrospect. But um the, the ways that we tried to market Vida Fair um that were connected to prestige, they all failed, the ways that have had no connection to prestige have been much more effective. And what I mean by that is so, for example, we went to a big film festival in the US called South by Southwest. And we had a big
44:32
Bob Bowdon
reception for all the filmmakers and we uh basically got everyone drunk for free and because we were going, we were, you know, and we gave a little talk about, you know, our platform and now you, you’re a filmmaker and you’ve made this amazing film that’s gotten into a, a very prestigious festival. Gee maybe you wanna monetize it on our platform and they’re like, OK, that’s Great. Thank you, Bartender. Can I have another round? And so it was not effective because that’s not our target audience that the people that I’ve just been selected for a prestigious film festival are thinking to themselves, they’re not caring about monetizing their existing work or even future work. They think they’re gonna be the next big star hired by HBO or Netflix or who
45:13
Bob Bowdon
or one of these big, I mean, they, they see themselves as the next Spielberg or the next, you know, fill in the blank of a director like the, the, their mind is not about monetizing their previous work. They think they’re about to get the big money. They’re, they’re, they’ve hit the big time. So it was the wrong market. Another example of that is a trade show we went to called the Vidcon trade show there, there are several held around the world. Um The last one I had been to was in 2019 when I kind of perceived it as a good fit. It was a youtube style youtuber focused trade show. Vidcon is like a video conference. Uh And so come around 2023 and I’m like, OK, now we have a great product to show
45:55
Bob Bowdon
and now we’re gonna get a big booth at the Vidcon trade show and uh we’re gonna have a breakout session before that and we’ll have a big giant staff there and we’ll pay everyone and we’ll have all these T shirts and giveaways and all this stuff because the conferences feel like something that like big respected companies do, you know, turned out to be a complete failure. But by the time 2023 came around, the vidcom trade show had morphed from a youtuber type trade show into a tik tok type trade show. So it seemed at least my impression was that the vast majority of the attendees there were interested in marketing their, you know, 62nd dance tik tok video. They were not interested in monetizing. The kind of content that’s monetized tends not to be the extremely short form content. So,
46:43
Bob Bowdon
so that failed too. So anyway, but the things that have worked better have been things along uh have been more uh online and um and social media marketing work, things like this. I’m talking to real people and people can see my face or when other times that um we’ve done videos where it’s um it’s a human being talking to them, you know, when you just advertise
47:06
Bob Bowdon
Another thing we did, we can just advertise our name and our logo on our services on Instagram or on or on Facebook or Twitter. You can. And what happens? I mean, you can imagine yourself just seeing some name of a company pop up on your feed that you’ve never heard of before. What are the odds you’re gonna like? Well, let me open this up and create an account and generally that’s not the way people behave. Um In this era, authenticity is associated with um seeing an individual and being real to them and not hiding behind the facade of impressive looking corporate logos and fancy language. And that kind of thing usually doesn’t appeal to the modern social media era participant.
47:49
Bob Bowdon
They want authenticity. They don’t want that feeling of being advertised to like you’re a madman person selling, you know, coke or you know, Chevrolet, you know, in the 19 fifties or sixties with a big company rich looking presentation that’s now almost a negative. And so um that’s some of the stuff we’ve learned.
48:13
Jeff Bullas
So out of that rise for me is tiktokers and Instagrammers and short videos. Um So let’s dive a little bit into the world of influences. So when I started my blog in 2009, I just wrote about how social media video was short video, basically didn’t exist youtube had risen but was still getting traction, smartphones really hadn’t given everyone the tool to be, everyone became a publisher after the iphone rose and you could record yourself on video. And then we had the selfie camera arrive and it all took off at the perfect storm intersection of a smartphone with a selfie camera and social media. The Perfect storm. So, and uh I sort of became an influencer before I was even tossed around really in the sense that um I was asked to speak at events around social media and so on and blogging and everywhere.
49:14
Jeff Bullas
But influences today are very much more about short video and the numbers show that influences in America, I think it’s Gen X or Gen Z as Gen Z as uh 65% of Gen Zers wanna be an influencer which comes to creating content. Do you uh appeal to that type of audience? Uh Are you because there’s two types, there’s different types of content on a scale of frivolous to, to, you know,
49:44
Jeff Bullas
great, right? Or deep content, you know, love the work, um deep work. Um But for me, do you cater to superficial content as I call it, like here’s me in a bikini. Um I’m not doing that by the way or is it like here’s something really interesting uh about a topic that like global warming, where do you sit on that spectrum or do you play to all of them?
50:09
Bob Bowdon
Well, I would say that I, it’s given me a lot of pause to think about the kinds of content people are willing to pay for versus the kinds of content they will watch but they will not pay for. Um you know, and yet a third category they won’t watch. So there is, there, there is this new distinction that, that making a company like a bit of fair forces you to consider. Yeah, for sure. There’s a lot of um
50:32
Bob Bowdon
there’s a lot of uh, people perceive, first of all it’s like a Hollywood movie, they sort of think. Ok, that’s something that we should pay for. That’s, um, that’s, I’m used to paying for that and my friends pay for that and everyone knows that’s, you know, yes, you go to Amazon Prime and you can either subscribe and maybe get some movies for free or otherwise you can just pay to rent those movies. And so, and so, um, but it’s not always high production value. It could just be a niche interest if you’re um, if you’re doing a, um,
51:07
Bob Bowdon
I mean, everything from a tutorial on how to change the oil of your motorcycle and you have that exact kind of motorcycle and that exact video is answering the question you need answered then yeah, you’ll be willing to pay for that if it’s a fair price or um something else like that, you perceive this other like stock market advice, you know, where someone is advising you on how you should invest your money and you might think to yourself. Ok. Well, that’s, that’s gonna make me more money than I, you know, that I’m paying to rent the content. Um
51:38
Bob Bowdon
uh Other times someone can just be so popular. You just love a comedian and you just, and you’re such a big fan of that comedian, you want to support them. That’s probably the biggest category for us of someone who is already familiar with somebody’s Instagram. Or Twitter feeds and they already like them. And that person now says my content is now on this other platform and if you want to support me, go over and you know, yes, I’ve given you this free thing and that free video and this other free video and you got this other free video. But now I have a paywall video over here that you can pay a buck or two for if you want to support me, that kind of uh content also works.
52:22
Jeff Bullas
OK? So you’re talking about what’s called the premium model, isn’t it? So in other words, I’m gonna give you something for free, but then I’m gonna ask you to pay for the premium content. So that’s where the premium turn word came out of and on the one of
52:35
Bob Bowdon
them.
52:35
Jeff Bullas
So
52:38
Bob Bowdon
I mean, let me just quickly add, you could also have it like you could have it make some, maybe you make an independent film and you have an amazing trailer, you put that for free on youtube. But then in the and then at the end of the video, it says if you want to watch the whole film, click the link in the description in the youtube. So the link in the description is to our where you know the content on our side on Vida Fair, it’s the Vita Fair link. And then people say, well, I never, I did never know about that guy, but maybe that’s not a premium uh example, but wow, that’s an amazing trailer. So they are, you know, they feel like they’ve been, you know, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve been convinced.
53:14
Jeff Bullas
So you, you’re obviously having the big question you’re asking all the time is what will people pay for? Um which is a, which is, you know, something between a guess and a hope and a bit of science. So, uh is it, is it all of the above in terms of how you’re identifying, um what people will pay for because you’ve got to get paid because you need to maintain a platform, the creators wanna get paid. So what are some insights about, what will people pay for that you’ve learnt?
53:48
Bob Bowdon
Uh Yeah. Um it, it’s part of it is that it’s, I think it’s more likely. So a couple of answers, number one is, it’s, we kind of want them to figure out what people pay for more than we figure out the people to pay for what people will pay for. So that, you know, we want the, we want people to experiment and, you know, we, we basically charge a dollar for an upload. I mean, that’s if you buy our tokens, if you don’t buy our tokens, it’s $2 for an upload, but it’s such a low amount of money that
54:14
Bob Bowdon
We sort of feel like it’s, you know, there’s virtually, virtually no cost for trying it just to see what kind of response you’re. So, I mean, maybe you have 10,000 social media followers, maybe you have 50,000 or 100,000. I don’t know whatever the number is. It’s not unusual for people to have many thousands of social media followers. And they can imagine. Well, I wonder what percentage of those people would support me for a buck by watching this other content over here. Um The second answer is that we have the advantage of the fact that a platform called Patreon already exists. Patreon is a subscription platform and we are not.
54:53
Bob Bowdon
But what we have in common is that this kind of freeing thing to which you refer, that people will say I’ll give you this for free. But if you want to support me, here’s my paywall over here and that’s a subscription to my, to my Patreon. So those existing artists are already there. They’re already making uh the free content as well as the paywall content and we can come to them and say, well, why not? Just
55:18
Bob Bowdon
In addition to the paywall, the paywall content that’s sub-subscription monetized, why not also offer it as a pay per view monetization? You’re already making it, you’re already making that paywall content. Just let the consumer decide if they want to subscribe versus whether they want to, some percentage of them may not want to subscribe but will be willing to pay for it, right? Um And, and I quickly add too, so we, we believe that, you know, a lot of times people do subscriptions because they think of it as a discount
55:46
Bob Bowdon
uh for instead of paying for every single video that might be on a Patreon site. But we do offer our grain packages. It’s our tokens, basically grain token packages. So that it’s a form of a discount. It’s still a volume purchase concept. They buy a big package of our tokens and then it’s a lot cheaper because the financial transaction costs are distributed over more rentals. So anyway, I just want to throw that in because uh when I talk about subscriptions, I tend to, I tend to add, you know, make sure people under
56:13
Bob Bowdon
and it’s not only 100% pay per view, which we offer that option, we offer discounts for volume purchases through these grain packages. But the larger answer is I’m, I’m, I’m prattling going. Aren’t I the main point that I need to answer your question is that Patreon is already there. There are already people who are today as we sit here. They’re in, in uh they are making free content and they’re also making payroll content so we can just climb on to them.
56:40
Jeff Bullas
So you get some. There is sometimes you uh we can talk about other questions I have um where we’ve maybe got a time limit here. Um Let’s, can you give us a thumbnail sketch of how a creator would engage with you? And then how people would watch what you do. In other words, cos you’re a two sided marketplace effectively, right? You have the creators offering content that people hopefully are willing to pay for. Then the people who actually want to pay for it are the consumers. You’ve got the creator and you’ve got the consumer. So um what’s the uh on the boarding process? And you mentioned a part of a creator going OK, I wanna use Beta Fair. So uh how do people get on your platform in a thumbnail sketch?
57:24
Bob Bowdon
Sure. Uh Coincidentally tomorrow morning, we’re releasing a new tutorial video on youtube. It’s uh gonna be premiering so they can just go to youtube and look at the Vida Fair youtube channel and see uh or rumble uh or our linkedin or wherever else we put it um and see our tutorial on that, but we have an earnings calculator basically. So if you go to our homepage Vida fair.com, it’s just eight letters V ID A Fa ir.com. Uh and then on the top left, there’s a menu icon. You go to the bottom of the menu, it says earnings calculator. So there, what they can do is they put in, they can enter the duration of their own video or what they’re guessing of future video might be in duration.
58:07
Bob Bowdon
They can then see the selection of creator fees. They can say, do I want 50 cents for each rental? Do I want a dollar for each rental? Do I want $2 for each rental? They can see the list of options there for them and then they can put in how many, well, how many rentals might happen in the next year? And they can think about how many social media followers do I have? What percentage of them would want to support them through a rental? They can enter that number and it basically then generates how much money would go into their pocket
58:35
Bob Bowdon
uh for uh a year or whatever time horizon they have in mind when they’re estimating the number of rentals. So I, so the easiest way, I just tell people if you want to understand our platform, just go to our earnings calculator on vitaa.com. It’s in the menu, it’s at the bottom of the menu. You can just very easily fill in the questions that it’s, you know, you pick the numbers, you make the estimates that ask you to make and you look at how much would come into your pocket if your estimates are right?
59:00
Bob Bowdon
And, and by doing that, they end up walking away with the sense, not just of how the logistics of how it works, but also it gets them in terms of thinking of monetizing and thinking of, gee I wonder, I wonder how many, what percentage of my social media followers would rent my content? I’ve never thought of that before. Maybe then they start thinking about those kinds of things. So that’s what I recommend for kind of on boarding.
59:24
Jeff Bullas
Um So what in terms of, are there, is there some content on there that people paid for that surprises you or has surprised you in terms of this creator, put something up and going? Oh, that’s not gonna work or uh or else then you and then it is fantastic. Are there any sort of content types? I’ve surprised you with how well that worked.
59:47
Bob Bowdon
Sure. There’s some stuff that I don’t like. But then I want, you know, of course, uh like, that’s what would you, what would you expect? You know, like, I think um there’s, there’s stuff that I absolutely love. Um, this film has a special guest, and I cry. Every time I watch this film, it’s a little short film, everyone should go rent this film, a special guest. I wrote the director myself personally who lives in the UK and I was like, I have watched your film multiple times. It makes me cry. Um
1:00:14
Bob Bowdon
And so, you know, incidentally, we do have some content rules. We have like no porn, for example, we have uh no copyright infringement, someone can’t just upload the latest, you know, top gun movie and just monetize it on our platform. We have um you know, no child abuse, no doxing, no threats, you know, of uh people that kind of thing. But apart from those very narrow exceptions, we want to be a free speech kind of platform to be open to a lot of kinds of content and some of its exper you know, there’s some very experimental films on our platform that you can’t even some, you know, some, I maybe sometimes wonder why people
1:00:55
Bob Bowdon
might bother her. But anyway, if they’re extremely experimental, uh although that said there are some art films I absolutely love too. Uh But anyway, so I don’t, I don’t know how to answer that question apart from just going case by case.
1:01:09
Jeff Bullas
In other words, let’s just have some fun experiments. See what works and what doesn’t, which sounds like life really, doesn’t it? Are you seeing it because there’s been some and it’s always been postured since shortly. Well, images were created by A I. Are you seeing any A I created short films yet?
1:01:32
Bob Bowdon
Not that I’m aware of. Uh I’m not sure how I know. Um I think I can tell usually when images are A I, there’s a certain look to them somehow there’s a certain way people’s faces look. Um that seems, I don’t know. I’ve, I’m uh I’ve dabbled in photography myself. I sort of have a think I can tell that. I’m not sure IIII I can’t say that. I know. But to your point earlier, Jeff, you were saying like, it’s only gonna get better. The A I will only get smarter, it’s not gonna get any dumber. And so, you know, some might, it’s a kind of wax philosophical for a second, like some might say, well,
1:02:08
Bob Bowdon
at some point, right? Won’t the robots be smarter than all of us won’t they, you know, like won’t uh will any of us be able to compete with? Uh the robots? I don’t know, will they come kill us all? Maybe. Um Yeah, we’re not quite there yet.
1:02:24
Jeff Bullas
No, for me. Uh I think a I as a writer is I see a I as my assistant, not my front of the house for a restaurant. For example, for me it’s, I use A I to actually create a meaningful structure for a blog post. Potential. I might use part of it. I might use some of it. Uh But that gives me uh I suppose a skeleton to actually hang my words and stories around. Um uh Yuvi Har, you know, Yuval Harari who wrote SAPIEN is um he had an interview with uh Mustafa Suleiman, the one of the co-creator of DeepMind.
1:03:05
Jeff Bullas
And uh he’s concerned about the fact that the core of being human is being the storyteller and that’s how we created our myths and legends and give ourselves a meaning. And he’s worried that I could actually end up creating fictitious stories, which a lot of, a lot of stories crafted by humans are fictitious. Um uh One of those is um we have a mythical drop bear in Australia, which is a carnivorous koala bear, which is completely mythical, but it makes a really good story. So, um but the reality for me is I think A I offer is on a promise. But uh but it sits on a spectrum because of sci fi movies from dystopia to utopia. So, and as with anything according to, you know,
1:03:55
Jeff Bullas
Buddhist philosophy and its act, the truth is gonna lie somewhere in the middle. So that’s my take on it. So, and you’re right.
1:04:05
Bob Bowdon
So you’re not afraid of becoming obsolete.
1:04:11
Jeff Bullas
No, not because I’m, I’m maybe a bit older so maybe I might escape that apocalypse. But um
1:04:19
Bob Bowdon
I mean, I, I say that I’m not, not really either, but I know there are people that think about this, that worry about it. Um
1:04:27
Jeff Bullas
Well, it is interesting in that I interviewed Nick Bostrom who wrote two books, one in, published in 2014 called Super Intelligence, which is a quite a dystopian look at the rise of A I before chat G BT turned up in 2022 and he’s recently just put out a book called Deep Utopia. Uh and he talks about things like even at what he calls artificial purpose that A I will be able to help you do that. Actually, I will help us create machines that actually keep us fit all the time because of technology. So a fascinating book. Uh a lot of big words, um interesting cat. He’s a polym mouth out of Oxford University, originally of Swedish origin. But I,
1:05:14
Jeff Bullas
I read both his books and I interviewed him and for me it was fascinating. Big brain polymath, neuroscience, physics, economics. And the list goes on. And um but for me, I’m, I suppose, a quiet optimist. And for me, I’m, I’m hopeful. So I may lean towards utopia rather than dystopia. But I think we’ve got to put guardrails in place though. I certainly think we need to do that. Um And uh we didn’t do that for social media and look what’s happening with social media, you know, uh mis disinformation, fake news challenges to democracy list goes on and on selling of your private data. So uh cos we thought social media was a nice fluffy koala bear in Australia, as we would say um or you know,
1:06:08
Jeff Bullas
fluffy panda, but the reality is that social media has its downsides as well as upsides. So, um yeah, so let’s wrap this up. I know you need to maybe go and have a drink with friends or go for a bike ride or um have dinner with the family. But what does success look like for you as a fan?
1:06:31
Bob Bowdon
Oh, yes. You mentioned the question earlier that I was to think about. Um
1:06:35
Jeff Bullas
Well, that’s, that’s the next question, but that’s the
1:06:37
Bob Bowdon
next one. All right. Yeah. Uh I think success, well, uh 11 easy metric would be profitability. We’re not profitable yet. That would be a good, a good uh form of success where we’d be uh anticipating and looking forward to. Um also just general um, I guess, um, general awareness. I mean, you, you, you have the sense that, um, you know, we’re new, we still, you know, are absolutely a start up. And so, uh, we tend to like, you know, when we, when we reach out to people, they tend to not know about us. So one form of success would be when we reach out to people, they already know about us. How about that? That would be, that would be some form of uh of success point. Yeah.
1:07:21
Bob Bowdon
And in terms of the uh this is if I’m a, I have all the money in the world or something and I can do whatever.
1:07:27
Jeff Bullas
OK. Let, let me, let me pose the question, then you can answer it. Um Because what we might do is we’ll use A I to actually capture this and post it up. So, Bob, if you had all the money in the world, what would you do every day? That brings you deep joy?
1:07:43
Bob Bowdon
I think I would be telling stories as a filmmaker full time. That’s what I’d be doing. And sometimes the story, it could be sometimes realistic documentaries and all other times could be scripted stories. And I would do both, probably alternating in between.
1:07:59
Jeff Bullas
OK. Are they stories that make a difference? In other words, make people cry and make people laugh and inspire as well. Is that
1:08:07
Bob Bowdon
oh, sure. W while I am a voracious consumer of escapist content and I don’t mean that in any kind of shy way, I watch plenty of meaningless content all the time. What I choose to create is uh in my humble opinion, at least strives for some sort of meaningful aspect uh rather than just pure escapism. So that’s uh yeah, what I, what I, what I like uh working on tends to be something where I feel there’s a point.
1:08:37
Jeff Bullas
OK? In other words, creating content that makes a difference.
1:08:41
Bob Bowdon
It makes people think.
1:08:42
Jeff Bullas
Yeah, great answer. Thank you very much for sharing that. And thank you very much for your insights and your stories. And uh it’s been an absolute joy for me to actually have this chat, fireside chat with you. So thanks, Bob. It’s been a week.
1:08:59
Bob Bowdon
We gotta get you to tax
1:09:00
Jeff Bullas
Jeff where, where, where it’s on the list. Um So uh Tim Ferriss is there now, apparently. So. Uh there’s a bunch of other people and uh Elon Musk is going there as well. Apparently he’s pulling up stunts all around America and heading to Texas. Uh cos they don’t, they don’t tell him off down there. They think he’s a demigod. So I think he’s going, I need, I need the right attention. I think he’s saying it anyway. And less tax, of course. But thanks Bob, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
1:09:30
Bob Bowdon