Monetizing Expertise: Protecting Intellectual Property in the Age of AI

Speaker A: All right, ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome back once again to the longest running show in the world about data. It's called DM Radio. Yours truly, Eric Gavanaugh is here. And folks, you know we love to talk to innovators, entrepreneurs, people who come up with great ideas and then put them into action and build cool things. And our guest today has a very interesting proposition in that space. He is defending IP and he's really helping his clients leverage and protect their intellectual property. And I said M before we hit the record button. I have jokingly tell people that these large language models are like a giant hammer to intellectual property because everything is out there now, but that doesn't mean it's dead. And I think it is definitely worth saving. And this gentleman is focused on that specifically. So hats off to Dan Curran. He is the founder of Chapters, as it's called. And it's basically a vault for your intellectual property to help you protect it and make, manage it and monetize it. So it all sounds good to me. With that, Dan Kieran, welcome to the show. Thanks for doing DM Radio. Tell us a bit about this idea, um, where did it come from and how does it actually manifest?

Speaker B: Yes, thank you for uh, allowing me to speak today and have a conversation, uh, really appreciate it. So you know I've been an entrepreneur for quite some time but the through line is always working with uh, industry experts, subject matter experts and, and, and collecting their, I really at uh, corporations and technical writing, uh, from working with pharmaceutical companies and technology companies and eventually went into the publishing space. And what we noticed was that um, a 50,000 word book or 100 blogs was uh, just the tip of the iceberg. Um, most people, most thought leaders, subject matter experts have a corpus that's much, much larger. And on the surface if you think about it, it's just sitting in files, PDFs, Word docs, you know, Google Drive, et cetera. And up until November 2022 when Open OpenAI launched Chat GPT, I don't think a lot of us gave much, you know, worry about that, the disorganization or the fragmentation of content.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But a light bulb went off in our head a couple of years ago that wow, there seems to be a lot of IP and that maybe in the future that will be something very, very important. Uh, as we were joking before the show, maybe it's not, maybe we're just uh, the robots will run everything. But that would be uh, sad and very um, you know, not, not a lot of original thinking there.

Speaker A: Right

Speaker B: so why don't we just, uh, organize it and aggregate it? So we set out to create Chapters Vault to capture, protect and mon IP for industry experts. And when I say industry experts, just people that, um, are in a business of creating content and thought leadership, um, in, in many verticals such as finance, academia, um, healthcare, wellness, et cetera. So we're building a global platform for these experts to again protect and monetize their ip.

Speaker A: Yeah. So let's talk about what that looks like. If it's a vault, it sounds like it's like an S3 bucket with security strapped on. But maybe some metadata discovery, for example. Do you find a way to summarize and articulate the value of the IP such that a potential buyer or partner can scan something, review it and learn more about it? How does that work?

Speaker B: All of the above. And I'll just, um, let's just focus, uh, on the needs of that financial thought leader and bond trading or someone in healthcare. And they have a lot of IP and thought leadership that could be blogs, white papers, books that they're writing, speaking engagements. One, um, thing that they're woefully lacking is really provenance is just some sort of chain of custody. Again, they have the files, they have quote, unquote, copyright protection, but not, not really the receipts, the proof. So our tech stack has, um, it is a tech stack of timestamping and C2PA and some other, um, tools that we use to give it this chain of custody. And we're not trying to be policemen, so to speak, we're trying to be a ledger. Just to say that. Hi, I'm, um, Bill Smith, and I thought this and wrote this on this particular day that I have some sort of agency over what I wrote. Um, the use case of pulling out those receipts are varied and kind of highly unlikely. Um, now that you would need all these receipts. But in the future, if I wanted to license my content to an LLM or other similar entity, or if there was a, uh, legal case, or if I was no longer employable at a corporation and I had to depend on my own ip, I do want to protect it. Just like ASCAP helps protect artists, uh, they're a ledger for, you know, uh, composition of music, so to speak. So we do have provenance that once it comes in, um, it's, uh, it's a, it's a library for the existing work that they might have written sometime or said sometime before. But moving forward, um, they can also garner in real time. So they've chicken scratch random thoughts, be it audio, video, or typing it in, we want them to vault it.

Speaker A: That's interesting. So you are a storage container for intellectual property and the mission is to help individual thought leaders protect and then monetize that content. You made a very interesting comment there in your last statement about how maybe at some point in the future someone may want to license their content to a large language model. That's very interesting. I mean, you, you know, we just gave a show here in Pittsburgh last week, the Agentic Road Show. It was our inaugural conference, it was a huge success. We worked with the University of Pittsburgh's Hub for AI Leadership and this topic came up and the way I described it is original, uh, sin. So there's original sin in the LLM world, which is namely that these companies went and scanned and absorbed massive amounts of copyrighted material without paying the copyrighted people who created that stuff. Now Anthropic ultimately settled the lawsuit, I think for $1.5 billion. And so that's all being shaken out basically. But I view that as an original sin because here you took all this stuff that wasn't yours, you used it to train a model, and now you're spitting out stuff that looks a whole lot like what you, what you grabbed and trained your model on. But there may be something else in the future. I mean, everyone keeps talking about small language models in our industry and so maybe that is a space where someone could actually license their content to a small language model. In fact, I'm getting emails now from people saying, oh, would you want to license your corporate data to an AI company for X amount of dollars over a couple years so they can train on how an analyst company works? I mean, that's an interesting business model too. But what are your thoughts there about that happening, about this being a viable business model? And have you actually had conversations with people about making that happen?

Speaker B: Yes, I. My short answer is the deal doing for that original sin and the one word you didn't include there. I'm not saying you should have, I'm not saying I'm saying it, but it's stole. They stole. Some people say that, but I didn't say, you know, I don't want to.

Speaker A: They borrowed indefinitely.

Speaker B: They borrowed it, definitely. That's correct. Um, so as far as the deals being done with Anthropic and the list goes on these, I characterize those as one off deals. And by the way, those are global lawsuits that are happening, um, that we aware of and assuming many that we're not even aware of. So there's a lot. The constituency of constituencies of government entities and private entities doing these lawsuits is coming up in my newsfeed every day. Um, so one would think that there would be a system worked out and there's a lot of people, there's a lot of middlemen, so to speak, that are saying, hey, well, we'll be a broker and help sell your content language models.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I believe that's very, very new that there's no standards in place. I don't know if you've noticed in our government and societies, we're all not, we're not getting along and collaborating and solving big problems a lot right now. So we, we are building ours where there's a toggle that it can, um, be licensed with it when you put your, your, uh, content in there, uh, or it shouldn't be licensed or should be scraped, but the, the actual transaction to make that happen. We believe we're many months away or a year away from really monetized, uh, really having, um, a feature that, that, that makes sense for all parties. So I think we're very, in the very beginning of that process. Um, but that when we say monetization at Chapters, there's other ways to monetize your ip. So we're looking forward to that date. We've already got everything in place for that. We're having conversations. But there's even us, we, we don't quite have the. We're not where we want to be to really have, um, a lot of a heavy stick where we carry a lot of might. So we're building towards that. We have hundreds and hundreds of users, not tens of thousands of users that we, we look to have in the coming months. So all that though, you can still monetize your ip. Uh, and so we have a storefront. So think of it as a LinkedIn or Substack storefront, but without the social likes commentary. But the signal we send with Chapters Vault is this is a place of serious people, serious thinkers. If I have lung cancer or if I have a parenting problem or if I have a wellness question, I might go to WebMD, but I'll also go to Chapters because I know that these people are putting their reputation and original IP on the line for me to buy purchase. So we think monetization can happen more than just to the LLMs. And a lot of people will, uh, and have already told us they refuse. They do not want to be part of that at all. And I'm sure that's what will happen in the future.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is Interesting. So if I can characterize this, tell me if I'm wrong here. It's like a deeper sub stack with some additional services on top. And it's designed again to be a vault for intellectual property. And is there a blockchain underneath by any chance?

Speaker B: No, it's. I get asset quite a bit. And we're able to build, uh, so the front end is a storefront. It's, it's, you know, people are familiar with Shopify for products and so shopify for ip. So you know, Eric, Dan, uh, all these category experts would. Or on. On it. And you would sell your services. You could be hired to speak, you could sell your book. You can sell one chapter of your book. You can contextualize the book to the Spanish, you know, to um, a Spanish language, or to uh, someone getting out of college. So we're, we have a lot of features to, to take that IP and make better use of ip. A lot of people write a book. Well, a book is wonderful in a lot of ways, but it's not a great business model. It's kind of one and done. It's perishable. But that IP could benefit. You know, um, you're dozens of people, hundreds, thousands of people. So we try to atomize that content on that storefront. So all, you know, we. An average book is like 50,000 words, but a lot of our clients had a million words of ip, so that could be used a lot of different ways. That's the front end on the back end. On our provenance, it's, um, we explored blockchain, uh, but we're choosing, um, to not use that right. Right now for our safe harbor chain of custody. So we have

Speaker A: interesting

Speaker B: other tools we use.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, you, I mean, so there are a lot of useful things you're already providing. One of which is this set of receipts basically that says this person wrote this. I mean, you know, I'm, um, I'm an author myself and I've had some big ideas and I wanted to go out and publish it on LinkedIn or publish it somewhere so that there's a time marker that says, okay, here's where that idea came from. Not that there are all that many new ideas, but there are new ideas and there are new ways to essentially couch ideas and deploy ideas. You know, and speaking of, at our agentic roadshow, I remembered to uh, throw my favorite quote. No army in the world can fight an idea whose time has come. Right? That's Victor hugo from about 100 and some odd years ago. And it's a very compelling line. I get chills every time I think about it because that is very poignant for today. So this AI stuff, it's everywhere. You're going to have models of all shapes and sizes. Uh, we're in a very strange place right now in terms of original content because there's so much stuff that's just being populated on LinkedIn and other places. And it's good for people who aren't good writers. So there's nothing wrong with that. But it is very generic is the point. And that's by design. I mean, these are consensus engines. They give you the average of what they've seen based upon their training and your prompt. So, you know, people say they can tell. Can you? I don't know. My kid says she can always tell if it's AI and the kids don't like AI. There's a real backlash on AI from this younger generation, which is understandable when you think about how it's been positioned. When you get these AI CEOs saying, oh, all white collar jobs are going away in 18 months. It's like, first of all, no, it's not going to happen. But second of all, why are you doing that? Like, I don't really fully understand that,

Speaker B: but the data centers too are giving them heartburn. Uh, young people to the right. Just the optics of what's going on. Yep,

Speaker A: right. Sure, sure. So you're, I mean, I kind of see you as a, uh, David against the Goliath. Right. You're trying to create this vault to help people protect their IP and also find a way to sort of coalesce it and synthesize it. Do you actually wind up generating books for people? Or like, what are some of the outputs so far from what you've built?

Speaker B: So the company was born from an observation I hinted, uh, towards it earlier. We started out as, um. Well, I started out a few years ago or years ago with a successful company where we would parachute into large companies to interview subject matter experts, clinicians, doctors, PhDs. Uh, smart people are really smart, but they're very slow sometimes to create their content very careful and studious. Or politically they internally, bureaucratically, they just weren't. So a CEO CMO would call us to say, hey, can you talk to this doctor PhD at this pharma company? And we need it for an annual report or for a white paper. And then as technology got better transcription services, um, eventually a light bulb went off that we have enough ip, we have enough content words. If I talk to you for several hours, I will have thousands and thousands of words in really smart, um, wisdom and expertise. Um, but it's. Could we use AI to, um, could we train a model, like a transcription service to organize it better and really accelerate the editor or the writer's job when they were interviewing someone, letting them be very present. So as that went on, um, you know, a light bulb went off in our head and said, why don't we do this for non fiction, uh, writers? So we recently said, earlier this year, celebrated 100, 100 authors that we did it for. And it worked. Uh, it would just allow. It's like a podcast type setting or a radio show setting like this. We would just have great conversations.

Speaker A: But

Speaker B: what happened was that the editor or the interviewer was able to be really present. You know, someone, someone said, um, I'm making this up, but I hugged my grandmother. They could just be really presence. Okay, well, what was it like when you hugged grandmother? What was. What did the room smell like? Those kind of things, you know, real, real person to person type interview. While our technology behind the scene was moving those words around like Legos. Not using. And we put. We were not using outside AI influence at all. It did not know the outside of the world. It only knew the inside of the world. And so we started writing these books and pretty soon we had a dozen and, you know, now 100. And we noticed they all. As I mentioned before, each one of these people had more IP than they even knew. And so how do we just. How can we just be more efficient? So we're not anti AI, we're just anti theft. That's what we're just not. We're just like, uh, I don't know if I had to write a quick email or something, or a birthday card. Yeah, I'm using AI. Sometimes I'm tired. I got to get something, you know, a birthday card or wish to sound smart. Sorry that trains left, but if I'm thoughtful and I have a story arc or I have something really contextual to something very important in my industry or whatever, uh, and 20, 30 years thinking about it, we want to reward those people.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. Well, don't touch that down, folks. We'll be right back. You're listening to DM Radio. All right, folks, back here on DM Radio, a fascinating conversation with Dan Kieran. He is the founder of Chapters, which is a organization focused on protecting ip, respecting ip, protecting intellectual property, and helping its clients monetize and make use of that. And Dan, I think this is a fascinating idea. I mean, I think it's really interesting because there are so many ways that you can repurpose and organize and then leverage intellectual property, which is basically all the ideas that someone has had. I mean that's what IP is, right? It's your ideas, it's your original ideas that you came up with. And you know, how do you do that? Like use OneNote, use, you know, you have a folder full of stuff. I mean that's kind of the de facto, uh, reality is that you got all these files in some cloud environment or on your computer or whatever and collectively they represent your intellectual property. So you're, you're trying to grease the tracks and help individuals, authors formalize and then optimize the, the usability of that IP is I guess one way to put it. And there are similar examples. They're like speakers bureaus for examp example which have been around for years. My experience with them has never been great, but maybe I just never had a good agent. Um, you wind up paying a lot of money for people to speak and it's like, was it really worth the money? I'm not so sure about all that. A lot of that is changing. But the content game itself is in flux right now. And I think what you're providing are some moorings around individual thought leaders that can help them survive this crashing wave of AI slop, as some people are calling it, and really stand out. So tell us a bit about where you are going forward and how you plan to help these individuals monetize and leverage their ip.

Speaker B: Sure. So I'll use a couple of examples. First name and industry. So everyone is in a very niche industry. Uh, your next door neighbors, your best friend. Everyone is in their swim lane of, of industry. So it's a lot of our clients are not the ones that you see on Substack all the time or the ones that you see on LinkedIn all the time. They're very prolific in their writing and their contribution, but it's very industry specific. So we have um, one client that is in a b, um two b, um enterprise level bond trading. Way over my IQ as far as of institutional investors that he works with. And he really doesn't have that many clients. It's in the hundreds that he has. But within those hunt, those big companies, there's thousands of people that he would like to touch, so to speak. Um, so he has this wealth of knowledge that he's built up over 20 or 30 years. And how does he get it out? Um, a book he doesn't need to sell a book to 10,000. He doesn't need to be Elon Musk or Hillary Clinton or someone that just has, you know, going out for a big nonfiction push. He wants to have more evergreen presence in their life and be uh, someone that they would reach out to. Um, though he could be a consultant or he could be speak. So he would, he has uploaded his information to us and he has just two or three different ways. There's about 20 ways to monetize the content within our system but he wants to one have all that provenance on the back end. Uh, and he's very encyclopedic and very, you know, very, very, very intelligent person in his space. So he came to us with, he's the one with a million words of content. So I'm m gonna give one with a lot and someone who's just starting uh, this process. Um, so he had a large library of content so he wanted to come out of the gate. He doesn't want to be a speaker, he wants to write, he wants to be a consultant and he wants to sell curriculum basically to these organizations in so many words. So he uploads it all. He has a public facing presence and now he has an access. So it's kind of eclipsed his current website. That's how he looks at it. It's an E commerce and it sounds obvious to have a storefront for your expertise. Consultants and coaches have had it for a while but you know, if we're going to have a lot of white collar layoffs with AI, you know we remains to be seen. Or if people are just wanting to uh, have agency over their career, it's a perf. We're standing up a storefront for these people is no more complicated than that. The provenance, everything on the back end is it's I need to make money now. And that's whether you're a high net worth person or not high net worth everyone, you know as financial goals generally. And so that's the example of someone with a wealth of content but very focused. And he wanted to get this in front of these 300 companies but the thousands of people in there then I have people that are let's say in the wellness space on how well one on parenting. Uh, this person is a new author, does not have a million words but wants to have again agency over um, their revenue stream and wants to create a brand for themselves. Well currently you'll go to LinkedIn, you'll build a website, but nothing really e commerce, nothing. That's just a single point of sale where I can sell everything. And by the way, not everyone coming here to their, to their chapters Vault or even their website is going to be a clone. They're going to have different needs. Some might be in their twenties, some might be in their fifties, some might be in crisis, some might be worried about someone else in crisis for this particular um, client of ours. So the content, when they come there, Instead of like three or four ways to monetize, they have about 10 ways they monetize the content and be able to make it contextually relevant. So we're trying to help, um, I guess you can, you would say the archetype is a consultant type or a coach site, but very industry specific and someone that um, believes that their tenure in the business world or healthcare world is worth something. And so it's, it's ah, I often call it a shopify for experts.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's interesting and I can see why there's a lot of value and again having a trusted place to keep your, your content. What's the, what's the succession plan? Um, I would imagine you'd have to think of that, right? Like how do you ensure that this survives your involvement in it and others involvement in it? Have you kind of gone through what's the long term succession plan for this?

Speaker B: Um, that's a great question. That's an awesome question because that's, that's my, now I got to put on the operations entrepreneur hat, business hat. You know when we face questions like that and there's others like that that are pretty safety, um, security, all these things, they're unintentional uh, issues that you have to deal with. We knew they were out there. But as a company you have to face it and be really buttoned up in this very uh, litigating world we live in. We do have a couple of redundancies. Um, everything we do, we try to uh, make it all about the creator. There's somewhat similar companies to what we're doing right now, but they're very, I hate to say it sounds conspiracy like, but they're very in bed with like the publishers or the companies. No one's representing the little guy or girl so to speak and say we're, we're, I uh, often call it like fracking back in Oklahoma. You know, it's like all this is there and we're walking over it but we don't know how to get it. Well we're trying to do, we're trying to get all that oil that's there. It's just. So we work with the millions of, you know, globally. We want to work with millions of thought leaders out there and really protect them. So yes, they own 100 of the IP, um, they can get put, you know, put a kill switch on it anytime. And there are some timelines that they're responsible for. Uh, but we, we do not want to be ultimately responsible. We're just a ledger. At the end of the day, we're just a safe harbor for that, for that content.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's interesting. It's, it's a very cool concept. And you know, I sit there and think about how these technologies can be leveraged all the time. You could basically have an option where you would auto generate posts, LinkedIn posts, for example, based upon the corpus of content, if an author agreed to authorize that basically to let you do that. But you know, it's interesting, uh, I'll throw this over sort of a philosophical observation or question, uh, because I think you're obviously a philosophical kind of guy and you think about this stuff I said at the conference at the agentic roadshow last week that folks, privacy is dead. I mean it really is dead. But that doesn't mean respect has to be. And I would argue that privacy is really just a construct that is designed to encourage respectful behavior. So you can still respect someone even if you know something about them. Right. You can kind of turn the other way or just, just not pass judgment is the key. Right. When someone wants privacy, they want you to not pass judgment on them. I think is really what's going on and what you're doing aligns with that in that you are trying to protect this content. And there's a certain, it's not so much privacy as it is respect of who came up with the idea. But what do you think about that just philosophical concept that privacy is a construct designed to encourage respect?

Speaker B: I think it's excellent. And this is, I guess more philosophical or meta kind of conversation, uh, on this particular topic, because 100% I'll hear, well, people are going to steal it anyway, et cetera, et cetera. I, I don't even give that a lot of thought because that's such a true but chaotic. You know, it's, it's such a statement that. Yes, but um, that's only one way of looking at it. This whole. The word I used earlier, agency. You, you know, having agency over yourself, but also you use the word respect. I think, and I don't want to speak For ASCAP on the music side that has been doing this 70 years. I think they've been the ledger for. For artists and their. In their music. Um, just. I don't think they're going into court, helping them litigate. They're just saying, hey, no, this person put it here. And I think that sends. And this is where this world is. Difficulty with this. Not to be a naysayer here, but nuance is. Is very difficult for people. So when you say respect, I think there's a lot of sarcasm around that kind of word. And I don't. I think, yes, we're just. We're putting a little chalk outline. Don't. This is mine. And be respectful of what I've come up with here. And. And I think when you do that doesn't mean people can't steal it, but you're sending a signal that I'm someone of substance. I'm someone. And that will attract people that need people of substance. So I probably need to better articulate that. But when we build our company, I'm getting into a little inside baseball. It's not just a product. You have to create a great product, number one. Number two, the timing's got to be right. So that's. I think number three is the UX has to be stupid simple. There cannot be any friction. Someone's gonna. We're all ants in our pants and add now. So I gotta get on it in five minutes and feel a win. And then the final thing is the signal is this, um, trustworthy? And in what we're planning, our flag in it all has to be trust. So, um, we think that has an outside influence or importance for this company. And it goes to exactly what you said. It's just a matter of respect. And people like working with people that they respect. So that's. What.

Speaker A: That's cool. Uh, is there a collaboration angle here? Because it seems to me, since you've got X number already already of folks who have. Who've gotten in here, that's an interesting angle to take. Right. Is to kind of align people. In fact, you know, you and I got together because of Bordy, which is a. Technically is a voice agent. And it's. It's. It's very interesting. I mean, I have to say, I took a conversation with Bordy, the voice agent, I don't know, maybe two months ago, and it was very impressive, I have to say, for knowing it's just an AI. It did a remarkably good job of listening to what I said and then parsing that out and understanding the business model. So I'm not sure what the model is underneath that thing, but it's pretty impressive. But you would seem to have this repository of experts who could collaborate with each other along certain dynamics, along certain vectors. Is that part of your business plan?

Speaker B: Yeah. So short term it's um, working with partnerships like publishers, speaker associations. Actually just a mastermind group, scholarly publishers, um, and inviting them into. So we're really a network, it's one half dozen or the other on selling a seed and monetization through a year on a monthly basis. But nonetheless we position this as a community that people join and all these different verticals. Um, so as far as long term growth, it's exactly what you just said. It's the choir singing the praises. It's a bottoms up. Um, you know, Eric invites Dan because we're peers and you know, we. So that's uh, and the reason, you know, the whole again the business creation part of this is how do we, how does AI not take over what we're doing? And I don't think they'd want to because we're creating the network, we're creating people to people. So at the end of the day we're really about networking and a community. And that's, that's not AI, that's just people.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. And I think there is tremendous value in focused networking. I mean uh, so just uh, we've got a next break coming m up here in about a minute and a half here. But uh, I've had some ideas for a long time now. I'm a media guy and I watched as the media suffered its first fatal blow which was the interwebs and then its next fatal blow which was Facebook. And now it's third nail in the coffin is large language models. So first you disintermediated the ad salespeople really because in the old days trade press, and that's where I am. I'm not consumer media, I'm trade press. And trade press, you have to be serious and focused and know stuff because you're not just high level drive by reporting. Whoever Taylor Swift is dating this month or something, I know she's married now, but that's not what we talk about in, in trade press you have to be focused and you have to go deep because otherwise you're not providing value. The people in this niche as you've talked about in this little industry, there are many things that they need to know and there are many things that they want to know, especially in an era like this, where AI is coming in and offering all this functionality, much of which overlaps with existing workflows and processes. So I've, uh, long had this deep respect for trade press and I think that's what you're keying into here. And even though you're sort of, um, a horizontally organized organization, you are focused on depth and quality and finding people who really know certain aspects of a particular industry and helping them fine tune their own repository, if you will, of, of information, of knowledge, etc. I think that's got a very interesting value proposition going forward, especially in these agentic times where, you know, AI is going to do a lot of different stuff. But folks, folks, we'll get deeper into the weeds with Dan after the break. We'll be right back. You're listening to DM Radio. All right, back here on DM M Radio with Dan Curran. Very, very cool guy, is working on some really good stuff and he has a lot of respect for content creation, for original ideas. You know, I joked at the top of the hour that sometimes it feels like intellectual property is dead just because LLMs have so much access to everything, but it really isn't dead and we really should protect it. And it matters a lot in a particular niche. So in whatever vertical you focus, there's a lot of stuff that you know that people outside of your business don't know and probably don't need to know, but in your niche, it does really matter. And you had some thoughts about that, Dan, Go ahead.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, uh, this is more of an open question or opportunity, uh, that we're solving for right now. And that is especially we noticed when we were doing these manuscripts and we started, um, you know, on the publishing side that there are obviously insanely important people, insanely, uh, smart people that are not marketers, don't want to be a marketer. They've had their heads down for 40 years in their business, but they are beyond wise, um, poignant, um, witty, but just have a wealth of knowledge to share. And let me even back that up, have knowledge to share that might not be a large corpus, but might just be just what you need or someone needs. Really. Really. So part of our, um, approach to everything is how do we get a voice like that, not the loud one, not the person that's on LinkedIn all the time, but just that wise soul that really has. And to your say, it could be in a big niche and just in a niche and be very geeky within that niche. How do we make sure that doesn't get Crowded out. And I'm uh, just telling you we're working on it, uh, because I. That is just an aha, uh, thing that we have seen that wow, this person is wicked smart and has the stature, you know, in their career. But you know, that it really illustrates the point why we do not want to be another LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably like everyone fails. Half of it's amazing. I depend on it, you know, to get someone, find out who someone is. The other half is just terrible. And we, that terrible part, we don't want that just sludge of constant. And that was happening before I. So I just made some more. But, um, so we, we want to find those voices. We want to make sure those voices have uh, a place that if someone's doing a query, they can easily find that person and they're not pushed out because someone's. Louder.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, uh, well, it's very interesting that we're talking here because I have just recently formalized our offer under the brand Trusted Voices. And I'll give you my theory on this and let's see what you think because it does align perfectly with what you're talking about. The idea is that SEO search engine optimization is now waning. I would argue that for the last 10 years it's really been window dressing and more of a facade and that the reality under the covers has been pay to play for Google and for YouTube and these different channels. Not that SEO can't help you, but if you remember back in the day it was all like, all right, well you have to do SEO so that you're fine, but you're found by the, the Google web crawlers and all this stuff. And that was true. But I think about 12, 13, 14 years ago they pulled the string because they just wanted to make money on ad sales. And you know, I've heard for example from various smart people that if you don't do any advertising on Google, you're probably not going to be found by their search engines until you do. And then it kind of. So, you know, these organic results are not as organic as people thought. Not just the sponsored Stu, um, so there's that. But geo or aeo, depending upon how people describe it, is different. And I think it's significantly different in a couple different ways. Number one, Google SEO is all about adwords. It's keywords, it's one word and you throw it together with some other words and see who is writing about that. So people would just pile onto words like big data and observability and analytics and AI or whatever and buy all those slots and Google almost became muscle bound in that regard. But AEO or Artificial Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, I think likes video a lot more. And the reason for that is pretty simple text. We all think text is this great way of communicating, which it is only because we have so much context in our heads. But really text is just a very flimsy layer of abstraction that sits on top of the real world and only ostensibly represents what it is. That's why you have semantic issues. That's why it's very easy to misunderstand what someone's saying in the written form. It's why you have so many fights on social media, because people think you're being sarcastic when you're not. I mean there's all kinds of weaknesses around text, but video is a much richer medium because in video and of course audio comes along with that av, you can now gauge confidence of voice, thoughtfulness of questions, response, engagement of the audience who's on the call. These are all different aspect that you can now measure and thus score to understand it. What these alums are trying to do is they're trying to understand who is authentic, who really knows what they're talking about and who doesn't and point you in the right direction. Well, I threw that theory to a very uh, senior level person at Google who's been there 23 years, she's VP of brand and she said, yeah, you're right, she said our data shows 40% or more of LLM responses have some YouTube content baked in. So YouTube of course is the dominant player. There's rumble, there are other ones, But I mean YouTube is just crushing it in that regard. And I think that what you're doing is very good in that regard because you are cultivating individual voices, really building out their content portfolio, organizing it for them. And so what you're doing actually plays into that very nicely and could, depending upon how you set up your site and set up the beacons for that. Because that's the other concept I've got here, is that if you have a YouTube channel with lots of videos and they're all focused on a particular niche, you're going to get noticed when people are searching for that particular niche. But what do you think about all that?

Speaker B: Well, a lot of great points there. Um, I do believe we try to be distribution agnostic. I mean that's the goal. There's only so many ways a book, speech, there's only so many ways to consume media. Uh, but you can Contextualize it in lots of ways. Each one language, you know, all different kind of reading level, etc. Um, so I agree with what you're saying. And so when it comes to video or social, any m. Any channel, um, we're just careful listeners right now. Especially as, you know, B2B is, can be different than B2C. And how we consume, right? I mean, how we consume media. So our first goal is to protect, uh, and then we move on to monetization. So that will be an ever moving, evolving, you know, thing that we'll just try to, uh, you know, be a chameleon with as people, you know, because I think that's what makes the book industry, you know, you know, obviously a lot about media, uh, and journalism. And I, I'm more of an observer as far as that. And then also, um, uh, music. So I kind of, I'm probably wrong in this, but I kind of feel like music took a lot of their heavy hits, that the album and CDs kind of went away and Spotify and kind of on demand. And people are consuming music how they want to consume it might not be great, might be wrong, it might not be like the old days, but that's how they want to consume it. And it'll probably change again. Um, I don't think book publishing has changed. They're very devoted to their distribution. Amazon did come about in the last decade or so and a couple decades in ebooks and uh, audiobooks. So there has been some innovation. But who's like Seth Godin, right? The writer Seth Godin. Like, I've never bought a single book of his, but I do like what he says. I'd like consuming. I've used some of his quotes and all that. That's how I look at what we're building, is building it, uh, so people can consume the media in a way that they want to consume it. And so that's where we focus real quick as far as SEO, etc. And for the AEO. And we're making our front end the storefront. We definitely want that to be noticed and to be scraped. So we're teasing basically. And that recipe of how much content we give them is. It's a cake recipe that we're always suggesting. Now the back end, it's firewall, paywalls and so forth. So, um, again, it's not like someone can't steal this. If someone wrote a book, it's already out there. But like you said, we're trying to protect, uh, what we can protect. And then also uh, insist on some respect like you said.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, yeah, that's great. Well, we got about a minute and a half left. Final thoughts from you. Is there a particular focus now? Are there particular kinds of people you're looking to gather and how should they get involved?

Speaker B: Well, I'd love to help anyone that feels like their IP needs to be protected or they would love to monetize. So, um, Dan Curran at Chapters I.O. dan at Chapters I.O. and you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, I think anyone that's um, looking to do a stand up their career, depending on their ip, uh, should reach out. Um, we're, we offer no cost, you know, your first month. So we, we really. I'm a, I'm cursed by wanting to create my companies as Blue Ocean. So when you have, you know, you pay your fee, you're getting 10x value. So um, we'd love to you know, engage uh, your audience and appreciate the time today.

Speaker A: Hey, well, thanks so much for your time. I think like I said, you're, you're focused on a very valiant effort. I think it is a very worthy cause and it focuses some attention. And I think that probably the Gen Zers are going to appreciate this maybe more than some other generations because they are sort of intrinsically anti AI because they don't like the fake aspect of it. They don't like deep fakes, they don't like the threat of losing their jobs, not being able to find jobs. They don't like a lot of stuff about it and how it's been positioned. I think some of that falls on the uh, heads of the AI CEO saying wacky things and doing things that are dubious at best. But look this gentleman up online, Dan Curran of Chapters, very cool stuff and uh, we'll talk to you next time. Folks. You've been listening to DM M Radio.