Jeremy Ryan Slate / Building Podcasts and the Roman Empire

From studying Roman propaganda to building an empire of his own, Jeremy Slate shares his journey from academia to entrepreneurship.

Learn how he used his passion for history and podcasting to create a top-ranked podcast and a PR agency that helps entrepreneurs share their stories.

Discover what it takes to create a powerful personal brand, why consistency is key in podcasting, and the secret to commanding your own empire in today’s media landscape.

5 Key Takeaways:

• Consistency is key to podcasting success—commit to the long game.
• Video platforms like YouTube are crucial for discoverability.
• Storytelling is at the heart of building a powerful personal brand.
• Affiliate deals can be a more profitable option than traditional podcast advertising.
• Build your podcast as a tool to enhance your business, not just as a hobby.

Command Your Empire White Paper: Jeremy Slate offers a free white paper titled Command Your Empire. This resource provides key insights on new media PR strategies, including actionable steps to help entrepreneurs and business owners command their own brand and preserve their influence. Listeners can download it at commandyourempire.com

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

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Transcript

Paul Povolni (03:32.053)
Hey, welcome to the Heasmack Podcast. My name is Paul Povolni and I'm excited to have another misfit with me, Jeremy Slate, and he is the host of Create Your Own Life podcast, which studies the highest performance in the world. He studied literature at Oxford University, as well as holding a master's in early Roman Empire propaganda from Seton Hall University. His podcast is named the number one podcast to listen to by Ink Magazine, as well as top 40 under 40 by Podcast Magazine.

Jeremy and his wife Brielle co -founded Command Your Brand, a new media public relations agency designed to help entrepreneurs share their message by appearing as guests on podcasts. He resides in Stillwater, New Jersey, where he raises chickens and is a former competitive powerlifter. Jeremy, welcome, man.

Jeremy Slate (04:21.134)
Hey, thanks for having me, man. I got a little chuckle too, because before we started recording, I had totally butchered your name. So when you properly pronounced your name, I was laughing at myself here. So I don't know if anybody caught that.

Paul Povolni (04:29.525)
Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (04:34.677)
Yeah, yeah, I've had so many different versions of it. You know, even people looking at it and writing it down, they want to add letters to it. They always want to add an I after the L and so it's Pavolini. So it gives me a little bit of Italian vibe. Yeah, yeah. So I've had Pavolini, Pavolini, Bologna, Pepperoni, all kinds of versions. You all got an easy name.

Jeremy Slate (04:50.838)
nice, he makes some good pasta then man.

Jeremy Slate (05:00.814)
When I was younger, I was a country for a little bit because younger kids can't pronounce Jeremy. So I was Germany for a while. So I totally feel you from that perspective, man.

Paul Povolni (05:08.597)
Wow. Wow. Well, yeah, that's quite the difference, Jeremy, to Germany. But man, thanks for being on. I'm excited about our conversation today.

Jeremy Slate (05:20.334)
Yeah, thanks man.

Paul Povolni (05:21.813)
So, you know, I read your bio and it's quite a unique bio, quite a few things that you've quite an adventure you've had up to this point. So I usually like starting with origin stories and just kind of hearing a little bit about, you know, the origins of Germany, Jeremy, and just hear a little bit about, you know, where did things start and what brought you to the point that you're at now.

Jeremy Slate (05:46.35)
Yeah, so for me, my goal was always to be a college professor. And it's the thing I actually ended up not doing. I got my undergrad degree in Catholic theology and Judaism. And then I got my master's in the Roman Empire, purely because it wasn't like I would have this giant plan of what I was going to do with it. It was like, that's interesting. That's kind of how I got through college. I took a lot of courses that were interesting to me. And when I got out in 2011, I couldn't find any

jobs that you could get with a PhD, right? Cause I'm over, or I'm sorry, an MA. Cause I was overqualified for everything that you need a regular bachelor's degree for. And I was under qualified for everything you need a PhD for. So I was in this like really weird, unhireable spot. So what do you do when you, when you're in a situation like that? Well, immediately I started painting houses. So, you know, I was working for a house painter working on old 40 foot wood ladders. He insisted on doing everything by hand. So it was like really grueling work. And

Paul Povolni (06:33.045)
Well...

Jeremy Slate (06:41.774)
So I did that for about a year until I ended up finding a teaching job at a private school because you don't really need any qualifications or anything like that. I think they literally just pull people off the streets, they teach the kids. So that's what I ended up doing for about two years. And I'll tell you, man, like I'm almost 40 now. So you can imagine in my early 20s, like how young I looked, I had real trouble, like, I guess, getting the kids to like be interested and respect me and all that kind of stuff. So it just, it really did not go well. I burnt out really, really quick.

Paul Povolni (06:52.725)
Right

Jeremy Slate (07:11.726)
And this is kind of like early YouTube days where kids were trying to see like how much they could piss me off and get it on video. So like just my days were not fun. And then, yeah, so in 2013, my mom ended up having a really bad stroke and it made me look at a lot of what I was doing and realized like, I am not happy, I don't wanna do this, I don't know what else I wanna do. And I went through a number of different things. I did network marketing for a bit and...

Paul Povolni (07:18.324)
Capture that viral teacher going nuts video. Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (07:38.03)
I didn't like the person I became in order to do that because it was always trying to find a way to sell people my thing. And it just felt me, made me feel a little awkward. I sold life insurance for a while, which I was really good at, but I hated those death conversations. Sold products on Amazon, but I left my, get my product for $1 code on my actual listing. So I lost all my products to the same person in about 20 minutes. And that was kind of the end of like entrepreneur land for me. I ended up working at a friend's marketing firm, building websites.

Paul Povolni (07:58.357)
man.

Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (08:05.102)
And I started a podcast literally just as a hobby in 2014. And it absolutely took off. And that's kind of led us to the podcast being all over the place and starting our company, Commander Brand in 2016.

Paul Povolni (08:17.461)
So with these studies at Oxford and see them what led you to study those topics.

Jeremy Slate (08:23.918)
So for undergrad, I guess a little bit of it was laziness. I'm gonna be honest. Like I went to Catholic school all the way through. So to kind of major in Catholic theology is really easy if you've been going to Catholic school for a really long time. You know what I mean? Like you just kind of like, yeah, you know it's sleeping. So like, you're just kind of like, all right, I can major in this. And I guess the issue I ran into when I graduated was,

Paul Povolni (08:29.813)
Ha ha.

Paul Povolni (08:39.349)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It's ingrained in you. Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (08:51.022)
That's not what I wanted to do for a living. And I'm like, what the hell do you do with this degree? And that's actually the reason I ended up going to grad school. Cause I'm like, all right, well, I guess you do what you do, what I should have done the first time, which is have a history degree. Cause my real goal was to be a teacher.

Paul Povolni (08:56.181)
Right.

Paul Povolni (09:06.261)
Now, you know, the studying of the Catholic, the studies of Catholic things, is that where what led you to the fascination and the direction of the Roman Empire? Did you study that or is that one thing that led to the second thing?

Jeremy Slate (09:23.374)
So logistically, it should make sense because as the Western Roman Empire fades out, the Catholic Church kind of gets into more of a well -known and more powerful space, but that's not actually how it happened. I was absolutely obsessed with Alexander the Great. I thought he was the most interesting historical character. And Roman emperors for some reason had this fascination with Alexander the Great as well, where they all wanted to be him and they all wanted to model themselves off of him. So they'd be like, well, look, I found his breastplate or -

Paul Povolni (09:39.189)
well.

Jeremy Slate (09:53.198)
You know, like I found his helmet, like they'd have all these interesting things. So I read this one random article called Augustus at Actium. And the Battle of Actium is the final battle that ends the Roman Republic and begins the Roman Empire. And the first emperor, Augustus, actually goes to the Actium, which is the city in Greece, and prays before the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great and allegedly breaks the nose off of it by mistake. We don't know if that's actually true. But I was like, that's so weird.

Paul Povolni (10:19.061)
Nobody owned up to it, yeah.

Jeremy Slate (10:21.774)
Yeah, I'm like, that's so weird. Why is this guy praying before the body of Alexander the Great? And the thing I actually understood is Augustus is the smartest propagandist to ever live. So he saw this as a propaganda opportunity to create a worship cult where people worshiped him for, well, not just him, but emperors for almost 500 years. So that was the thing that kind of sucked me into Rome was this obsession with Alexander the Great, reading this one random article and just kind of.

going down a rabbit hole. I'm definitely like a rabbit hole studier if that makes sense. Like I'll get on a subject and read everything about it.

Paul Povolni (10:56.277)
I'm sure you'll have an AI for that as well. That's probably fueling that obsession as well.

Jeremy Slate (11:01.838)
You know, I haven't figured out how to use AI to help me with that. I'm still like, I'm somebody that like, it took me a little bit to get into audio books, but I actually like like the feel of an actual physical book. So I still do a lot of like physical book reading. I haven't figured out how to use AI to help me with that yet.

Paul Povolni (11:17.589)
So initially, you did all that, you studied that and you figured out there's no future in that. So you kind of went into all these other professions. How did you get into the marketing and the web design? It's so unrelated to everything else. It's such a fascinating story.

Jeremy Slate (11:33.006)
So, okay, it's actually very related. Here's why, because as I mentioned, like kind of the last entrepreneurial thing I did was to launch a product on Amazon, which it was a, I'm very into coffee, so it was like a coffee related product and it did not do well, as I say, because we stole that of all of our inventory very quickly by mistake. And when you do something like that, I had to learn how to use Photoshop, I had to learn to use, this is when you built web,

Paul Povolni (11:47.413)
Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (12:00.495)
websites on different platforms. I learned how to use Dreamweaver and things like that before I ended up actually learning WordPress and stuff. So to me, I had to learn these skills to be able to do some of those things I was doing, right? Because I was kind of a one -man band at that point.

Paul Povolni (12:03.925)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (12:12.885)
Right. Right. So yeah, do it yourself is, is a great motivator for figuring stuff out and how to do it yourself. And so.

Jeremy Slate (12:19.694)
Yeah, and then I met somebody that needed a web designer. I'm like, hey, I have taught myself CSS and HTML. I'm in, let's do it. So that, I supported myself right away.

Paul Povolni (12:24.245)
Yeah.

And so, you know, so you went into that and so, you know, now you're, you've got your own agency and, you know, you're helping people with their personal brands, helping them with podcasts, helping them with PR and stuff. What led you into that space?

Jeremy Slate (12:43.598)
I've been a podcast super fan forever. Like I've, I'm trying to remember like what day I even started listening. Like I was like, so podcast started around 2004. Adam Curry, the guy that was actually on MTV in the eighties is actually credited with being the pod father or the guy that created podcasting. And I've been listening since like probably 2006, 2007 to what was called Adam Curry's daily source code. And it was this podcast for people developing podcasts and like kind of coders.

Paul Povolni (13:06.709)
Well.

Jeremy Slate (13:12.558)
So that's what sucked me into the whole podcast world. And then I just kept listening to more and more and more shows. And eventually when things didn't really work out for me, I was like, well, I need an outlet of some sort, right? Cause I had tried for a number of years to be an entrepreneur and a podcast was really just an outlet for me and just having a creative outlet. And I didn't expect it to be as successful as it was out of the gate.

Paul Povolni (13:34.933)
Well, and even for me, you know, I've listened to podcasts for a while. I, you know, I used to listen to like Dignation and Gary Vee when he was still just kind of starting off and stuff. And I would just listen to them while I worked nonstop. So I've been a fan of podcasts for a while, but I never thought about, you know, doing my own until most recently. And so it's been only, you know, just a little over two months since I kind of launched out and did my own podcast.

And because of that, I've had other people that have said, well, man, you know, you've kind of inspired me to do my own as well, you know, to launch a podcast and things like that. And, which is awesome, which I absolutely love that. And so with you with helping people with podcasts, what are some of the first things that you tell people, when they say, I want to do a podcast too, you know, it's so awesome that you're doing a podcast. I want, I want to do one. What do you tell them?

Jeremy Slate (14:05.022)
wow.

Jeremy Slate (14:22.446)
I think the first thing is the commitment level people have because most people aren't gonna commit long enough to make it successful. So I tell people be willing to be in it for a year and see no reward whatsoever because there's a couple different things that have to happen that time period. Number one, you have to find your own voice. It's gonna take a little bit to figure out how you communicate as a podcaster. I think that is a really, really vital thing. The other thing as well is, and this depends on what kind of a show you're doing. If you're doing an interview show,

it takes a really long time to get good at being an interviewer, right? Like you have to learn how to write questions, you have to learn how to write a good follow -up question, you have to learn how to listen better. So I think that skillset takes a while to build. So if you come into it with some of those things kind of already in you, I think your learning curve could be shorter. But I think it's being willing to be in it for a year is really that commitment. And you know what's funny is, you know, we've done well with my show, we've seen a lot of success, but I think...

frankly, we've really hit critical mass in the last six months. And that's with a lot of this Roman Empire stuff hitting everything else where now I'm actually going on the shows that I listen to, which is kind of wild to me. And I think people don't realize that they see that happen and they're like, wow, that's so great that that's finally happening for you. That thing you went to college for paid off. And I think they don't realize an overnight success is doing the right things for 10 years every single day.

Paul Povolni (15:27.509)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (15:43.406)
And you know what I mean? Like if you look at it, like it's literally almost been a decade I've been in podcasting and we've seen a lot of success. We've seen the things that, you know, we've seen things I think that would quantify my podcast as successful. But I think we've only seen like the success I wanted to see literally in the last six months. So I think you have to, I think it takes a lot of work and people don't understand that perspective on it.

Paul Povolni (15:44.104)
Yeah, that's so good.

Right.

Paul Povolni (16:05.589)
Yeah, I think you're right because one of the things that I've had to learn myself and kind of like with you early on is, you know, you just did it all yourself and right now I'm doing it all myself. Like I've, and part of it is just, you know, I want creative control and I kind of am still formulating it myself of what I want to do, but it is, it is a commitment. It is a commitment of time. It is a commitment of energy. It is a commitment of learning and being willing to adjust and tweak and

you know, fix things and just things as you go along. But you know, for somebody that might've just heard that and said, man, forget that. I don't want to do a podcast. Like what's, what's the, the, the base, entry into it for somebody that's like, you know, but I thought I wanted to do it, but man, that sounds a little terrifying. You know, what's, what's the, the, the lowest point of entry for somebody that wants to do a podcast.

Jeremy Slate (17:02.222)
Well, I think first and foremost, you have to decide if it's the right fit for you, right? Like, and I think because there's a lot of people that say, hey, you should start a podcast and you should be out there podcasting. And I think for, for most people, it probably actually isn't the right fit. And one part of it is you have to be able to carry on a conversation. I think that is, that's important. You have to be able to keep that, make that conversation interesting and useful to others, which is another skill to learn. But also as well, there's the business aspect of it. And I think if you don't have a business that your podcast supports,

you have to kind of be okay with it really just being a hobby. Do you know what I mean? Like I think to actually start a podcast and think like, you know, you're gonna get a million listens an episode and you're gonna start selling ads and people are gonna be, you know, buying these food services and stuff off of your show. Like for most people, that's not the case. So to me, I think the best use case of a podcast is it's like a PR vehicle where people know you like you and trust you because of you having these conversations and it increases your authority.

Paul Povolni (17:37.397)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:47.925)
You

Jeremy Slate (18:02.19)
So to me, I think it sits better with a business you already have, right? I think for most people, unless you're okay with it being a hobby and just something you do, which some people are okay with that, that's fine. Like I know plenty of history podcasters that have these little shows that do these really great episodes that I listen to and they've been doing it for years and it's just like a hobby, right? But I think for most people, they start at thinking they're gonna be Joe Rogan and that's not the case. It should be something that supports what you're already doing if you really do wanna do something that has staying power.

Paul Povolni (18:12.181)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (18:31.47)
Now, when you're looking at the barrier of entry, the number one thing I think you need to be doing right now is video. And I think we're doing this podcast right now on Riverside, which in my opinion is the best video recording platform out there. Zoom turns down your quality in audio and video, and you could have that problem where if somebody's internet connection is terrible, you're gonna have a really bad interview. And I think you have to think of the quality you're putting out for people. So your barrier to entry, Riverside is not super expensive. What is it like?

Paul Povolni (18:54.261)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (19:00.366)
30 bucks a month or something like that if you get the pro level. So I think something like that, a decent mic and even just a decent webcam, because I don't know how Windows PCs are, because I've been on Mac forever, but I know Mac, it wasn't even until recently that they put a better camera than 720p on these laptops and even, so you're not getting great video. So even just a decent webcam would help. But I think those few things,

Paul Povolni (19:02.517)
Right.

Paul Povolni (19:18.612)
Right.

Paul Povolni (19:22.869)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (19:25.038)
and understanding where this fits in kind of the broader picture of things you want to do, I think we'll set up for success.

Paul Povolni (19:31.605)
Yeah, I absolutely love where you started with that is understand your why and why you're doing this. You know, is it simply as an outlet, you have ideas, you have thoughts, you have things that inspire you, you have things that you're fixated on, things that you feel you can share with others that would help them out. And you just want to do a podcast. So, you know, and, and you just want to kind of put it out there. And if you're fine with that.

and it's not about the numbers. It's not about, you know, it's not about, you know, selling ads. It's not about all that stuff is, is understanding your why makes a big difference in, keeping you going. Cause you know, if your why is one thing and then you start thinking, well, I want to start selling ads. And, you know, then you start getting frustrated because you're not getting the viewership and you're not getting the attention. And, and then you start, you forget your why quickly along the way, and then you get frustrated. And so I think you're, you know,

What you said is so true is understand what you're doing, tie it into a business. if it is a, you know, related to your business and turn it into that. So when it comes to, you know, you mentioned video. absolutely.

Jeremy Slate (20:39.726)
Can I add one thing on that too before you move on? I think there's an important point too. And because I think when people, like for people, the Holy Grail is getting ads on their show. And for most people, you have to understand how advertising works. Because what happens is the old world radio and other metrics is what they're applying to podcasting right now. I hope that changes in the future, but it's based on the number of thousand listeners you have. So let's say, for example, you have a thousand listeners to an episode and it's usually like after 30 days.

what they'll pay you is per number of thousands you get. So if you have 5 ,000 listens, that's five one thousands. And they'll usually pay like $25 per thousand. Like the going rates are anywhere between $25 and $35. So if you have 5 ,000 listens to an episode, 25 times five is $125. Like you're not making a lot of money off of advertising. For most podcasts, I think the way that you do well and still to this day, even with bigger traffic, the way we do well,

Paul Povolni (21:28.789)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (21:37.166)
is we do affiliate deals. Like that's the thing we actually do the best with. Like what products do I like the most and do I use on a daily basis and have a great commission, right? Because I think if they don't have a great commission system, I might love them, but we also need to benefit off of them. So for us, that's how our show has generated most of its money. You know, in addition to promoting my business is people buy the products that I like and use and we get great commission off of them. So I think to most shows that's better play than advertising, but continue. I wanted to add that. I think it's important.

Paul Povolni (22:06.781)
I love that. I love that. And so it's, it's you, you find a, a coffee brand, you find a whatever, and they have a great affiliate program and you just mention them on your podcast. Is that right? Or is it, are you running some sort of a different kind of ad way to promote it?

Jeremy Slate (22:22.606)
So what I'll typically do, so like I have a couple different products I use, like we, I use the wellness company's products a lot. I use Brave Health's products a lot. There's a couple of coffee products I use. And so what I do is those companies already have affiliate programs. Their commissions are good where they're paying like anywhere to 25 % or 50 % on a sale. So like, you know, you sell a product, you're doing okay. And there are things that I use. So I'll talk about my personal experience. Like, you know, I've learned this and the cool thing about it, and this actually,

Paul Povolni (22:48.117)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (22:51.278)
like this happens every day, is I'll get emails from listeners asking me questions about the products. Cause I actually use these products, right? And I think that's the difference. Like I don't promote things I don't use. So that's typically how I'm doing it. Sometimes they'll send me like a commercial segment, which I might use and then still add my experience to it. But a lot of times it's just me kind of riffing on why I like a product.

Paul Povolni (22:59.093)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (23:15.253)
Well, and that feels probably a little more natural than trying to be selling like the hard sell of something that you don't even really use or you've, you're not familiar with. It's just somebody's paid you some money to promote it. So it's a different vibe as well. And probably feels a little more authentic to your brand as well as, is I'm guessing, right.

Jeremy Slate (23:34.894)
No, absolutely. And because I think the thing you have to consider is if you promote something like that you don't like or you don't use, like how damaging is that to your brand? Because like, yes, you want to make money and you want to have your your podcast do well and pay off for the work you're doing. But at the same time, you have to consider, am I doing damage to my brand with how I'm actually going about what I'm doing?

Paul Povolni (23:43.701)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (23:57.909)
Right. Aligning to something that you're not familiar with and don't know anything about and don't really care about. And it's just, it's just for the money. And, and I think people sense that. so I want to talk about YouTube because you had mentioned the video, how powerful video is. And, and for my podcast, you know, I've started putting some video out on YouTube, but it's, you know, it's kind of the whole thing of doing it all yourself is you only have so much time. Right. And so I've started putting it out there. So talk to me about the value of,

putting it on YouTube and video. You'd mention that. So let's talk about that for a little bit.

Jeremy Slate (24:31.278)
Well, it's discoverability because I think like, once again, I've had a podcast for 10 years. I know how darn hard it is to grow an audio only podcast. Cause there's, for most platforms, there's no algorithm for audio. You just gotta hope people talk about it and share it and whatever, or you're answering a search query on one of these platforms. So audio is really, really hard to grow. Video, if you think about YouTube, YouTube is the number two search engine after the world, after another Google property, which is Google itself, right? So I think you have to be thinking of

Paul Povolni (24:58.037)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (25:00.814)
Even if you're not gonna have people viewing your podcast on YouTube, it's very important for discoverability, like people finding you. But you have to understand too, how do you optimize a video? Because there's ways to get it found better than just throwing up a video and hoping and praying. Number one is your title. A really, really good title is actually gonna help you show up in search and help you get what are called impressions, or people actually viewing that podcast in a list with other videos.

but then the thing that makes people click on it is a really good thumbnail. It creates something called CTR, click through rate. So you wanna have a thumbnail that says, I wanna watch Paul's episode over this video. So if you can start working on those things, and there's some great tools out there to help you with that. One is called taja .ai, T -A -J -A .ai. And it'll actually, if you put in the link to an unlisted YouTube video, because once you've published a YouTube video, it's already hit the YouTube algorithm, you're better off kind of doing it.

and it's part of your publication process though. It's not a bad idea if you already had a video out there to start optimizing it, because it can't hurt you. But I'm thinking of like kind of, you get the most boosts of video when you first publish it. So you can put the link to this unpublished video and what it'll do is it'll write the title for you, it'll write the description for you, it'll give you the right tags, it'll write the chapters so that they're timestamp chapters. And it'll give you like thumbnails you can work with. Now,

Paul Povolni (26:07.893)
Well.

Jeremy Slate (26:22.958)
A lot of times those thumbnails like have misspellings in them because AI can't spell. And there might be some things about them you don't like. Or if the podcast is about a person, it's going to put an image of a person that's likely not the person that you're talking about on it. So the one we'll do is we'll take that thumbnail and bring it into Canva because Canva's AI tools are incredible. And you can actually remove text or edit text in an image in Canva. And you can silhouette out people's photos and stuff like that. So.

Paul Povolni (26:28.053)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (26:49.102)
I was a big Photoshop power user for years, but Canva's tools now are so simple and allow me to do things that take a lot more work on Photoshop that we've moved most of our work to Canva now. So if you can learn how to optimize better, there's also another really great app that we use as well called vidIQ. And vidIQ scores videos out of 100. So what we'll typically do is run it through Taja first to help us write the copy. And then we'll run it through vidIQ to get the score better.

Paul Povolni (27:08.213)
Hmm, okay.

Jeremy Slate (27:17.646)
you know what I mean? So it's kind of like we're doing the best job we can there.

Paul Povolni (27:19.765)
Right. Right. Yeah. That's, that's one thing that I've, I've looked at when it comes to even my podcast is right now I'm using the guest name as kind of the title. you know, that's, that's what I've focused on. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (27:31.406)
Well, unless they're well known, you're missing out on a lot there. You know what I mean? Like that's the thing that's hurting you is unless people are looking for that person, it's going to make it harder to find.

Paul Povolni (27:40.117)
Yeah, that's, that's what I'm figuring out that I probably should, should have the title or the subject a little more prominent, in what's being discussed. Cause you know, I'm seeing the downloads, I'm seeing what people are, you know, clicking on and it's not having the, the reach that I want. And so that's a great tip. So if you're

Jeremy Slate (27:58.638)
We found controversial headlines to work best, like things that are like, wait, he said what? Controversial headlines are really good. And the thing you wanna consider too, I think YouTube gives you 100 characters, your limit to where you're actually doing well is somewhere around 70. If you use the full 100, it's likely not helping you to use those last 30. If you can keep a good title, the title you have to understand is it has to create interest, like, my gosh, he said what?

Paul Povolni (28:04.245)
you

Paul Povolni (28:26.517)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (28:26.67)
but you also have to be able to understand what the heck you're saying. So if people are using like a complex statement where people are like, wait, he did what, but what is that? Like it creates a confusion. So you have, there's a lot you have to do in those 70 characters.

Paul Povolni (28:39.029)
Well, and so for somebody like me or somebody that's already launched their podcasts, they kind of went in there scrappy, kind of like I did. And they, they're like, okay, well now I've got to use this AI app to change my titles or come up with new titles. Are they penalized for changing it at this point or? Okay. So, all right. That's.

Jeremy Slate (28:56.878)
No, no, it's, it's, it's, it's cause there's a couple of different ways you can go about it. Number one, you never want to delete a video from YouTube because YouTube also removes the views and it can, it can harm your channel. But what you can do is, is like, let's say, let's say you want to relaunch the episode. Cause you could, that could be one strategy you could do like, Hey, we did it, but we didn't do it right the first time. So let's just take advantage of the new episode launch algorithm. Make that other video private.

So it's private, meaning it's not searchable or viewable, it's viewable only to you, but the algorithm doesn't look at that video. So then you could just relaunch it, or you could just go back and just start optimizing all your old videos. Like we've had videos that are a year old just start to take off out of nowhere because we optimized them. So there's kind of no right way or wrong way to do it. It just kind of depends on how you want to go about it.

Paul Povolni (29:47.541)
Right. And the key is to change, change it to be more effective. And so how would you, how would you split test? Do you split test things like that at all? Do you, you know, put two versions of it with different titles? Like how, how would.

Jeremy Slate (29:59.502)
So, and that's the reason that if you're gonna repost a video, you wanna go private, is YouTube hates duplicate content. So they'll penalize you for duplicate content. A feature they did ask, did add recently, is a thumbnail testing feature, where you can actually split test thumbnails. The thing I don't like about it is it's for two weeks. And most of the time with a brand new video, your window is kind of like the first 36 hours. So by the time I know a thumbnail works, I've kind of lost steam on it. vidIQ,

And also, what's the other one? TubeBuddy have thumbnail testing features, because to me, you wanna know which thumbnail's the good one before you actually launch the video, because by the time the video's out, if you're already testing, you're kind of losing the ability to benefit off that first 36 to 72 hours of video being out.

Paul Povolni (30:49.653)
You know, so for the person that, you know, is listening to this and they're like, okay, this is, this is amazing. I love that you've shared some AI tools because AI is just changing everything. you know, for somebody that's going to go into doing a podcast and they just feel like it's a little overwhelming. there are a lot of AI tools and they're getting better. Like you mentioned, some of, some of them have tech terrible texts, you know, they're still not quite there.

Jeremy Slate (31:11.374)
Dude, everything in AI looks Russian. I don't know why. Like, it's like, it's like, is that Cyrillic? What were you doing?

Paul Povolni (31:14.101)
Yeah, yeah, it's like they ran it through a foreign language filter and it's just like not even regular characters or and so, you know, it's getting better. You know, we had the issues with the multiple fingers, you know, early on. So it's so it's doing a little better when it comes to even even word creation. But I think for some people that the biggest struggle is even.

because you can get away with, you know, scrappy thumbnails a little bit, but titles and the words are pretty critical, you know, and having an AI that can at least get you to, you know, 80, 90 % there, is always a high value, high value thing. So what are some other ways that you've found that helps grow an audience? you'd mentioned, you know, having the right titles, you mentioned a great thumbnail.

You mentioned getting on YouTube. What are some other ways to grow an audience?

Jeremy Slate (32:09.774)
So I've done a lot on, people used to call it Twitter, now they call it X. Like we've done a lot on there. I actually like their ad platforms, like really robust. So what we'll typically do is target followers of someone that's similar to the, like, let's say we interview somebody that has a large following, we'll target their followers in a small ad set. Now, let's say the person we interviewed doesn't have a large following, but.

their thought processes have a similar audience to someone else, right? Like let's say maybe your guest is like Lewis Howes, who has a big audience. So you can still target Lewis Howes and people that follow him to run your ads. So we've found that's actually been pretty successful is running small ad sets on X. We haven't seen a difference between a video ad and an audio ad because a lot of times you have to understand like these platforms wanna keep people on the platform. So kind of the best thing you can do is the...

You have to pick a result when you're creating an ad. So link clicks is what we'll go for a lot of times. And that's worked the best. We've also started producing in the last year more content on Rumble. And we found that Rumble prefers live stream content. So I don't like live streaming. So because it's just my schedule is crazy and everything else and I got kids. So it's like, what we'll typically do is consistently live stream our new episodes on launch day on Rumble.

Paul Povolni (33:10.101)
Right.

Paul Povolni (33:21.141)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (33:34.574)
We'll use StreamYard to do that with a prerecorded file. So that's been another really good thing to grow that platform specifically. Rumble is a bit harder because what I've found is unless you came to it with an established audience, it's harder to build an audience. That's why people like, you know, a lot of these big YouTubers that have come there, it's worked out for them because they already have a million followers. So like it's easier to convert people there. But what I've found is if you do a live, you do get promoted more.

Paul Povolni (33:56.181)
Right, right.

Jeremy Slate (34:02.574)
to people watching the platform. So for them, it's really just search optimization and doing lives. Those are really the things we're doing. We're also doing a lot of video clips and stuff like that too. We use a tool called video .ai, V -I -D -Y -O .ai. And what it'll do is take a look at a video and create the shorts and the segments and everything else. It's similar to Opus clips, but the thing that I actually like is that it creates these longer chapter style videos, which are what we like for...

One day I'll post a full video on YouTube and the next day I'll post a segment of the video. So it helps us figure that out. We used to have to do it manually and it wastes a lot of time. So for us, those are most of the things we're doing. And in addition to, you know, continually telling our email list what we're doing.

Paul Povolni (34:43.765)
Yeah, I was, I was, I love what you said about the social media. because I was, you know, I was curious as to, you know, when it comes to social, you know, of course, like you said, they want to keep you on the plot platform. They also throttle, you just promoting your podcast without paying to promote it. And so it's not gonna, it's not gonna get the visibility. And so, you know, paying to promote your video is a key strategy. It's, it's, if you just simply think if I'm just going to post about my, my latest podcast.

I'm just going to share the latest episode on social media and that's all I'm doing. It's not going to get any reach. It'd probably get very little reach, right?

Jeremy Slate (35:22.83)
That's an important point too, because I know like even on YouTube, like in testing with our account and other accounts we manage, there's a tab under the, when you go to content tab, the content tab on YouTube, there's a tab called promotions. And that's where you can actually like pay to promote a video on YouTube system. It'll find channels like yours or videos like yours and promote to those. Even just doing a small budget on promotions, like let's say like 25 bucks a week, other videos unrelated to that video will do better just because you're giving YouTube money.

if that makes sense. Like you'll have videos that have no connection to that video, but are on the same channel that'll just start doing well organically because you're giving them money.

Paul Povolni (35:52.117)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (36:00.789)
Yeah. Well, and that's, that's the whole thing is, is, is you pay for exposure on these channels. it's, it's not for free. It's, you know, you don't, you don't get the reach, you know, and, and that's one of the things that I think is frustrating for a lot of people is they grow an audience on social media and they think simply by posting things that their audience is going to see it, but they actually don't, they only, you know, only a small percentage of the people that actually follow you see it. Cause the social media, companies.

they want you to pay to get it out there. So when it comes to some advertising strategies, you talked about some, what are some for as far as, you know, for a podcaster, you know, whatever the size they are, whether they're a big podcaster or a small podcaster, what would you recommend would be some of the things that they should start with? They're not going to be able to go full full blown. They're not going to be able to go as big as maybe a larger podcast. Okay. But what are some, some of the smaller ones, smaller strategies that

that they could do as well. And you've shared some, what are some others?

Jeremy Slate (37:02.766)
Like honestly, the ones I've already covered are the best ones to do. Cause I guess there's a lot of different stuff you could do that's like a lot more complex, but you need a big budget. You need somebody managing it full time. Like you could do some stuff with Google ads with retargeting, but it's a lot more complex. I think frankly, the best bang for your buck right now is a small budget on the promotions tab on YouTube. Just because you're gonna see like, yeah, you're likely gonna kill the average view duration on the video you're promoting since it's to a less engaged audience.

but you're going to see other videos on your channel unrelated to that one do well. So I would think even a small budget there is the best one you can do. Now there's like different goals you can have with those ads. There's views or channel engagement. I find the channel engagement ad is what pays off the best versus just straight views. Because a lot of times either one of those ads you're gonna kill your view duration, right? Because you're being promoted to a larger audience that doesn't care as much about your content. It might pull in some people that care about your content and that's great.

but you're gonna do better with the rest of your channel doing well if you use the engagement option.

Paul Povolni (38:09.749)
Talk a little bit about that. What does that mean? The engagement option.

Jeremy Slate (38:13.038)
So that means like you're promoting your video so that people engage with your channel as a whole. That's why like, if you pay for that video, there's the, I guess to backtrack. Do you know what I mean by view duration? Like the average amount of time somebody watches a video. Okay, so when you have a good video, you wanna have a great click through rate, you know, above 5%, hopefully if you can get seven to 10%, that's great. But you also want a good average view duration. So like, let's say you have a,

Paul Povolni (38:26.805)
Right, right, right.

Jeremy Slate (38:42.094)
For me, I have a 60 minute episode I do on YouTube. We're gonna have a 19 to 22 minute view duration on that, which is great. Organically, it's doing well and people are watching that. Now, if you start running paid traffic at it through the promotions tab, you're gonna see that view duration drop. It might drop to six or seven minutes because you're bringing in some people that care, a lot of people that don't. But what'll happen is you're gonna see that.

Paul Povolni (39:03.829)
Right, right.

Jeremy Slate (39:06.414)
Because of that, it drives engagement on your other videos. That means people commenting on your videos, liking your videos, new people possibly viewing your videos. So that's what I mean by engagement, is people actually engaging with your content rather than just like, hey, viewing this video and leaving.

Paul Povolni (39:24.117)
So when it comes to doing a podcast, the world is flooded with podcasts. And we seem to think that, is my voice going to matter? Is it going to be heard? What are some statistics that you've seen around podcasting that could encourage the person that might be like, am I entering a flooded channel? Is it worth doing something like that? Why should I do it?

Jeremy Slate (39:49.678)
So you have to think there's about three million podcasts out there. And it depends on what platform you look at. Like we're somewhere between three and 3 .5 million. But out of that, you only have about 19 % that actually consistently produce content at least once a month. So right out of the gate, 81 % of all your competitors are gone, right? Because there's a lot of like what are called pod -faded shows out of there. Meaning shows that have started and then they just for some reason still pay their hosting or maybe they're on Spotify for podcasters, which is free hosting. So.

Paul Povolni (40:05.621)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (40:19.086)
They don't... Yeah.

Paul Povolni (40:19.125)
Or they've forgotten about it. They're just, they're paying and they don't even realize.

Jeremy Slate (40:23.15)
Exactly, so their podcast is still out there for some reason. 81 % of people have done that. So you're within a 19 % if you just at least consistently are producing an episode at least once a month. So I think that's one part of it. The other part about it as well is, and this is, believe it or not, gotten better over the last couple of years. It used to be the top 5 % of all podcasts were episodes that get 100 listens or more an episode.

in the last couple of years, it's become episodes that get a thousand views or more an episode in the top 5%. So you could be in the top 20%, you don't have to do much to be in the top 5 % and you can be doing pretty well, right? I think a lot of times the biggest success tip is to just not quit, right? Like if you could just keep going, keep doing something and find something that's manageable for you, as long as you're not, you know.

Paul Povolni (40:55.221)
Well.

Paul Povolni (41:08.277)
Right. Right.

Jeremy Slate (41:14.702)
like nails on a chalkboard to listen to, you're gonna see something doing well eventually.

Paul Povolni (41:19.605)
Yeah. Well, and I think, I think it goes back to what we talked about also your why, I think is important. You know, why, why are you doing the podcast? Why does it matter to you? You know, who are you trying to reach? What message are you trying to reach them with? And, you know, it can feel sometimes, man, it's, it's just so overwhelming. And so many people are in the space, but like you shared, it's not as many as you think. And, you know, if you have a unique message, if you have something to share, if you have something that, you, you feel very strongly about, or you're passionate about.

you'll find an audience. And if you'll find with that audience being whatever size because your your why is strong enough, then it really doesn't matter how flooded this space is. And I think in a time where there is so many voices out there, you know, your voice might be the one that people need to hear. Your voice might be the one that people need to listen to, especially in a in a media saturated culture. You know, I think there's opportunities there, right?

Jeremy Slate (42:00.846)
That's correct.

Paul Povolni (42:17.781)
And so when it talked to me about a little bit about, you know, the why and media and how media is, this is an opportunity for you to put your stuff out there in contrast to what's happening in the culture.

Jeremy Slate (42:34.99)
Well, so I think the thing you have to consider, and I guess this isn't a political point, it's an old media versus new media point. So I don't know when you're releasing this, but in the US, our presidential debate, the first one for the year is tomorrow. And CNN actually put out a statement that if anybody that's not traditional media, so they're licensing Fox News, they're licensing a lot of their competitors to allow to simulcast their debate and comment on it.

They're not allowing YouTubers and TikTokers and people on X and people on Rumble to simulcast it and to comment on it. Now, there have been other people have been like, it has something to do with the president and everything else. I actually think that's not the point. The point is old media versus new media. They're seeing a lot of us in the podcast world and a lot of us in the YouTube world start to take the lion's share of media and they're seeing how their numbers are going down. It's actually just a self -preservation move.

Paul Povolni (43:28.597)
Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (43:28.622)
So I think to me, what we're seeing is kind of legacy media thinking they were the gatekeepers and that's just not really the case anymore. It's actually, people are coming to people like you and I to get our opinions on things or to learn about things. And it's not that somebody goes and waits for appointment viewing television anymore. They watch something when they wanna watch it, right? Like sure, maybe somebody live streams that debate and comments on it, but likely people are gonna watch it the next day. They're not gonna tune into a television channel when people have to tell them they watch it.

Paul Povolni (43:46.805)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:55.445)
Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (43:58.51)
And I think that's similar to why you've seen Netflix do well and you've seen Disney Plus do well and these other platforms do well is because the market has become very consumer driven. It's what the consumer wants, when the consumer wants it and how much the consumer wants of it. And I think that's why podcasts, YouTube and these things we call new media are capitalizing and doing very, very well because we're seeing a change in the old guard. And the funny thing is this change has been happening for the last 10 years or more.

they still don't know what to do with it. I think that's the funnier part.

Paul Povolni (44:29.589)
Right, right. I love that term that you use. I hadn't heard anybody use that before. Is the appointment scheduled programming? What did you say?

Jeremy Slate (44:38.382)
Cause like it's, I don't know, maybe it's, you have an accent, Paul. Are you from Australia or where are you from? Okay. So it might just be like an American cultural term. I don't know, but like back in the day, right? Like let's say Friends was on, you know, a new episode of Friends was on this week and it would be appointment viewing television. All of your friends would get together and they'd watch that episode of Friends and they would talk about it. And that's how like media was really run here in the US for a long time.

Paul Povolni (44:44.725)
Yeah. Yeah. I was raised in Australia.

Paul Povolni (44:52.501)
Right.

Paul Povolni (44:58.933)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (45:07.438)
And that's why you're seeing most of the series are now they're on Netflix and they're on Prime and there are these different things because people don't want to do that. They want to watch it when they want to watch it. They don't want to be told when they have to watch it. So what's called appointment, appointment viewing television isn't really a cultural thing anymore, but it used to be a huge cultural thing.

Paul Povolni (45:11.061)
Yeah.

Right.

Paul Povolni (45:24.149)
Right? Right. Right. Yeah. And I love that term because it has so radically changed. Culture wise is we want, we want to consume when we want to consume, we want to consume what we want to consume, when we want to consume it at our schedule, at our time. and the whole idea of making an appointment to get content just doesn't, it's not how we are anymore. We are just so, you know, self satisfying. I w I want it now. I want it my way. I want it this way.

Jeremy Slate (45:34.51)
Yes.

Paul Povolni (45:53.013)
And I think, you know, the, the podcasting and kind of taking it back to podcasting is podcasting is that is you get what you want when you want it. And if you're a podcaster, you get to say what you want, how you want it. And people are going to be interested in that. They want it. Like you said, they want to hear your take on stuff. And so the opportunity is there, whatever the topic is that you're going to find an audience that, you know,

that was going to care about your view of certain things. And I think that makes the opportunities for podcasters even greater is, if you have a unique view, if you have a unique opinion, unique take and new background that formulates that unique take is the opportunities are there for you to have a podcast and for you to grow an audience through doing that.

Jeremy Slate (46:42.702)
And I think that's important too, because what happened, and this is once again, like why I think it's more of a gatekeeper thing than a political point, like legacy media used to get to decide what you believed and what you watched. And, you know, like, you know, back in the day, I think there were like four networks and you could watch whatever these four networks said at the exact same time. It got a little bit different. We got cable, even more different. We got direct, when things like DirecTV and Dish and things like that happen. But now online, there's...

Paul Povolni (46:56.501)
Right.

Paul Povolni (47:00.149)
Right.

Jeremy Slate (47:12.206)
hundreds of thousands of viewpoints, right? And you can find, the narrative can't be controlled by media anymore. And I think that's what's really interesting is people can really decide what they want to listen to and who they want to listen to it from. They're not told what they have to believe or think or look at.

Paul Povolni (47:28.405)
I love that. And I think that's a good transitional thing to also take it back to the Roman Empire discussion. You know, cause I, you know, the, the control of the narrative, the control of information. and you know, recently there's been a lot of talk is, you know, men really thinking, thinking about the Roman Empire every single day. And so, so how do you see where we are right now as a culture, as a ties back to what was happening in the Roman Empire?

Are there similarities and what are they?

Jeremy Slate (47:58.83)
So I think the thing you look at, and I guess to bring this full circle back to where we started, Augustus was the first emperor. And the thing he did is he was a brilliant propagandist. And this is how he was able to control people early on. Now he's the first emperor of nearly a hundred emperors, right? So it takes a long time before we get to 476 when things take a bad left turn. But like the things he did is like, he put his face on coins.

because then when people use coins, they thought of Augustus. It's such an easy way to put propaganda in people's minds. They're using your face every day to pay for things. So that's one thing. There were statues of him around the empire. And even when he was, he wasn't a very healthy guy in his older years, like didn't really have any teeth, he lost most of his hair, he had a bit of weight problem later in life. All the statues are, if people wanna Google it, there's a statue called the Augustus of Prima Porta. If you've ever been to Las Vegas, it's that big one you're gonna see in Vegas.

Paul Povolni (48:27.829)
Brian.

Jeremy Slate (48:53.294)
All of the statues are very similar to that one, where he's about 30 years old, he's at the peak of his health, he looks very handsome. And it shows people like, he must be divine because he doesn't age. All of these statues we see of Augustus, he's always this young, vibrant guy. And so his ability to run propaganda was brilliant. And I think that's a lot of how media tries to control us, you know, in the way we do our movies and revisionist history and things like that. It's a lot of the way that, you know,

Paul Povolni (49:10.741)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (49:23.502)
television tries to control us and things like that. We use very similar ideas in the way that we work people. Now, if you wanna look at kind of where we're at in terms of like how things are going, Rome has almost a thousand year history, starting in 753 BC. And then in the West, it falls in 476. In the East, which is the Byzantine Empire, but they would have called themselves Romans. It lasts till 1453. So it's a very, very long history.

Paul Povolni (49:50.197)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (49:50.318)
And I'm speaking really only of America, not really of other countries, just because I'm looking at how our economy is at the moment. I put us in what's called the crisis of the third century. And this is where to pay for wars, to pay for the military, to pay for all these different things, they were adding different metals to the currency. They were bringing in foreigners to fight in the army. And they were really destroying their currency and what it meant to be Roman. So if you want to look at that, there's kind of like a hundred and...

Paul Povolni (50:15.157)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (50:18.03)
75 year downfall from that period, but that's kind of squarely where I put historically what's happening in the US right now. They had 15 ,000 % inflation by 284 AD. We're not there yet, but when you don't have a currency that is a currency you can count on, you don't have a country. And I think this is actually one of the things that the EU has really struggled with. The Euro has really hurt a lot of countries national sovereignty because sure they have the ability to trade across borders.

Paul Povolni (50:28.469)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (50:45.23)
but it's also impoverished a lot of countries that their economy is very different than other countries.

Paul Povolni (50:50.997)
Wow. Wow. And so what led to the eventual downfall?

Jeremy Slate (50:55.278)
There's a few different things, but I think number one, the inflation point, because when you don't have a currency anymore, and they had started in the early third century bringing in other tribes into Rome to actually fight in the army, because you have this idea where Roman emperors were actually being declared by their armies, and they were realizing, okay, so I get power by an army, so you have like 47 different guys in a less than 50 year period claim to be emperor.

So they would pay their army more and they'd have to debase the currency to do that, but they didn't have enough people. So they bring in other tribes to do that. So you have, what starts to happen is the money's declining. More people are coming in that don't really have a buy into the system. So when the money no longer can pay these people that are just continually coming into the empire and the currency collapses, well, you have by the fifth century, the people in charge aren't even Romans anymore. It's basically transitioned to barbarian rule and

Paul Povolni (51:50.613)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (51:53.038)
the last five or so emperors are just puppets. They're puppet emperors actually ruled by a barbarian king. And at 476, when it falls, I think there's these, I was talking to a kid at the gym about this. I'm like, that's a really cool weight belt you have on. I'm like, what is that? He goes, it's the fall of the Roman empire. Like everything's on fire. And I'm like, you know, that's likely not how it happened, right? Like what just basically happened is there was a final child emperor named Romulus Augustulus. And he was being controlled by a barbarian king named Odoaker.

Paul Povolni (52:07.445)
Ha ha ha.

Jeremy Slate (52:22.606)
The currency didn't have any power anymore. The emperor didn't have any power anymore. And he was basically like, you know what kid, we're gonna retire you. We're gonna give you some money. You go live over there. You're not the emperor anymore. I'm the king of Italy. And that was just how it ended. Now when we hear about the fall of Rome, it's because the Eastern ruin empire in the late fifth century decides, I wanna rule the whole thing again. And he burns it down to basically try and reunite it. So it's very interesting how we get there.

Paul Povolni (52:46.357)
Wow, wow, wow, wow. So it wasn't a big moment. It was a lot of little moments that led to the downfall, right?

Jeremy Slate (52:57.294)
Hundreds of years of, you know, a lot of little moments, a lot of bad rule. Like you don't get there overnight. You get there by bad policies. You get there by, like in the last hundred years, they had a number of child rulers because like, you know, the father would die or be assassinated and you would need to have like somebody they could look at as an emperor. So you just have this series of bad events over hundreds of years and eventually you don't have an empire anymore.

Paul Povolni (53:24.117)
Yeah. And I think that that speaks to not only culture, I think it speaks to governments, but I think it also speaks to just personal life is, you know, sometimes we think it's going to be this big thing, this super dramatic thing that changes everything. But sometimes it's even just those little decisions that we make along the way. Those little battles that we don't stand up and fight those little things that we don't put guards against that suddenly leads us to a place that we just never imagined being. And so I think all of life is very much like that.

Jeremy Slate (53:37.87)
Correct.

Jeremy Slate (53:54.286)
Yeah, because I know even actually as we're recording this, I just got texted about some breaking news that in the US, the Supreme Court just ruled that the government is allowed to now regulate social media companies. They're allowed to tell them what they can and can't post. And you don't get there overnight. Like these court cases have been going on for five years, right? Like it's these things that happen for time and time and time again. And eventually you get to something, but you get to something over a long period of time.

Paul Povolni (54:09.269)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (54:14.677)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (54:23.317)
Right. Yeah. It's precedent upon precedent upon precedent upon precedent, you know, the line keeps getting moved and, and because the line is moved so gradually, we don't almost don't see it that it's moved. It's kind of like, you know, seeing the laying on the beach and the tide coming in, you know, you just don't notice how, how close it's getting to you until you're like, my goodness, we've got to get up and move now.

Jeremy Slate (54:27.15)
correct.

Jeremy Slate (54:45.006)
And I think even too, like you look at the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 in Russia, and I think a lot of people look at that and they're like, okay, so this violent event happened, right? Okay, but that was the crescendo. That was what we got to. You know, the Bolsheviks had slowly been coming into the country over about 30 years and taking political positions and taking over the Soviets and all these different things. And eventually it leads to a revolution. But you don't get there, like even the American revolution, people talk about 1776 and freedom.

Paul Povolni (54:57.813)
Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (55:13.966)
several generations of fighting that lead to 1776, but America's not free until 1790. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's a series of events that lead you to something. There's typically a crescendo that gets at the end, but there's a buildup.

Paul Povolni (55:16.661)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (55:30.677)
Right. Well, and we see this happening all over the world with the illegal immigration that's happening in a lot of places, you know, that it feels like it's not that big of a deal. You know, it feels like it's okay. We'll be fine. But some of that stuff is, it is these gradual step -by -step things that lead you to a place that you never imagined, you know.

Jeremy Slate (55:55.022)
That's correct. Well, and I think that's the issue too, is it's like, you, and I guess just to step it back, like, there's nothing wrong with immigration. You know, like I didn't just spontaneously arrive here in this country. My family came here, you know, a hundred years ago. Yeah, so there, but there's a legal way and an illegal way to do it, right? There's a legal channel and you go through legal channels and you do whatever it may be. If you need to claim asylum, you try to do that, whatever it might be. But I think when you overwhelm these countries,

Paul Povolni (56:05.109)
Right.

Paul Povolni (56:09.973)
Yeah, I'm a first generation immigrant, yeah.

Jeremy Slate (56:24.398)
you destroy what it means to be a country. And that's exactly what happened to Rome is we started taking in people to serve in the army. They started taking in people from the provinces. And I think the thing people don't know about Rome as well is they had a lot of social programs where in 133 BC, there's a two brothers called the Grokai brothers. And they actually institute a program to start feeding all the people in the Roman empire. So if you lived in the empire, they fed you.

Paul Povolni (56:27.221)
Right.

Paul Povolni (56:53.237)
Wow.

Jeremy Slate (56:53.966)
you're starting to see like the more people come in, they didn't wanna destroy the thing, they didn't wanna break the thing, they wanted the benefits of it. But eventually those benefits and poor currency are gonna kill you. And I think that's what you're seeing globally.

Paul Povolni (57:06.581)
Wow. Well, man, I know we could probably talk for hours about the Roman Empire. It's so fascinating. I mean, it really is such a such a case study, such an amazing part of history, such a place that we can learn so much. And I and I, you know, I want to take from that and kind of tie in everything that we've talked about today. You know, what happened with the Roman Empire was this this gradual thing that led led to their downfall.

Jeremy Slate (57:10.83)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:32.693)
And, you know, I think for our personal life, I think for everything that we're doing is watching the precedents that are being set along the way for positive or negative. And so, you know, we kind of started off talking about launching a podcast. You know, you think it's going to be this big, great thing. Like I'm going to launch and Joe Rogan's going to be like nervous, like, you know, and you think, you know, it's going to be this big, fantastic thing, but sometimes it's just this, this, this step by step by work, by work, by daily.

working on things, listening to things like this, executing on the stuff that Jeremy shared and saying, okay, I'm going to check out those AI apps. I'm going to check out those services. I'm going to make some changes to the things I'm doing. But it's these steps along the way that get you to a place where you find success. And Jeremy shared about 10 years of grind to become an overnight success. Right. And so I think even with our life is, is, you know, watching those small steps, whether in a positive direction or a negative direction.

that lead to the place that either we wanna go or can lead us to a place that we never imagined will end up because we're not watching those little steps. So Jeremy, as we wrap this up, do you have any final thoughts on everything that we've discussed, whether it be podcasting or the Roman Empire to kind of tie a bow in this?

Jeremy Slate (58:49.55)
Well, I think the thing that's important too is to realize like things aren't as bad globally as they were in late Rome. Like they definitely weren't, they aren't right now. So like we still have things we can do about it. So I think that's really cool. And I think the thing where podcasting fits into this is also you have to understand like people in that world, they were very effective what happened to them, right? Because they didn't have the ability to communicate like we do now, the ability to have the conversations like we're having now. And I think

That's the real empowering thing. Like this could be the first time in history that, you know, countries start turning their economies around and, you know, go into a cooler age where we all get along and we can all trade and we can all do things in a better way because we have the ability to communicate and we have new mediums like podcasting. So I think it's really, really vital. And also as well, you know, as you mentioned, we support people in that and we want to help people to have free speech, to get their company out, to make an impact.

Paul Povolni (59:19.957)
Yeah.

Jeremy Slate (59:45.23)
And we want to help people preserve their empires, not have an empire that falls. So we actually put together a really great white paper for your audience called Command Your Empire. And it's going to give them all the basic new media PR things they need to know to get out there, to create more attention, and actually give them some usable steps they can start commanding their empire today and really preserving and protecting that. So if you head over to commandyourempire .com, they can grab that. And we really just want to help people to...

have freer speech to be able to promote their brand and to make a big impact out there.

Paul Povolni (01:00:18.389)
Absolutely love that. And I'll be putting the link down in the show notes as well. Jeremy, thank you for being on today.

Jeremy Slate (01:00:25.07)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, man. I really appreciate this conversation. I think we got to talk about a lot of things in a way I don't usually get to talk about them. So I really enjoyed this.

Paul Povolni (01:00:33.845)
Awesome, and we'll thank you so much and have an amazing day.

Jeremy Slate (01:00:36.686)
at you as well.