RealmIQ: SESSIONS with Jeremy Toeman

FULL EPISODE: In this episode of the RealmIQ: SESSIONS podcast, host Curt Doty interviews Jeremy Toeman, founder and CEO of Augie, a company pioneering the use of AI in video creation. They discuss Jeremy's extensive career in media and technology, his various roles at major companies, and the development of Augie. The conversation covers the evolution of video technology, the impact of AI on content creation, the ethical considerations of using AI, and the future of AI in filmmaking and video production. Jeremy emphasizes the importance of empowering creatives with AI tools while maintaining ethical standards.

List of Topics Covered:

1. Introduction of Jeremy Toeman and his background
2. Development and acquisition of early streaming technology
3. Evolution of video streaming and media technology
4. The founding and mission of Augie
5. Use of AI in video creation and its benefits
6. Ethical considerations in AI content creation
7. Market research and understanding customer needs
8. Impact of AI on different industries, including filmmaking
9. The role of AI in promotional and social media videos
10. Future prospects and roadmap for Augie

Quotes from Speakers:

1. Curt Doty:
   • "You're fulfilling a need and breaking down barriers where there's a lot of creative people out there."
   • "I appreciate the fact that you're a David against the Goliaths and I wish you the best of luck."
   • "I think creative people are going to be the future of AI. It's not, not going to be every day person."
2. Jeremy Toeman:
   • "We were the first one that was sort of making a consumer-grade product."
   • "Our platform was very simple. We use computer vision technology. We used AI-based transcriptions."
   • "We're entering a time where hopefully we can make the rules work such that the creative spirit of the individual is allowed to come through in any medium."
   • "We are just looking like, how do we put regular people in charge of their own destiny?"
3. Both Speakers:
   • Curt Doty: "How do you plan to continue developing Augie using AI to help streamline things for your customers?"
   • Jeremy Toeman: "We're constantly using AI to pull in new features and enable more scenarios but also do so in as responsible brand forward for our audience possible."

• Jeremy's Linkedin → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtoeman/
• LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/augiestudio/
• YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@augiestudio
• TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@augie.studio
• Instagram → http://instagram.com/augie.studio
• Facebook → https://www.facebook.co

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Transcript

Hi, I'm Curt Doty of the Realm podcast, Realm IQ Sessions, where we talk about everything AI with AI leaders from around the world. Please give us a follow or subscribe. Today's guest is Jeremy Toeman. We both share a studio past, you at Warner Media, I was at Universal. He is a seasoned product leader and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in innovating at the intersection of media and technology is the founder and CEO of Augie.

He is pioneering the use of AI and video creation, making it more accessible to storytellers and content creators worldwide. Jeremy's career includes executive  roles at Warner Media, Etsy, CBS, interactive and Viggo, shaping the future of content creation and storytelling through ai. Blockchain, AR, VR, and more.

Welcome, Jeremy. That's a mouthful. So let's get into it. Please elaborate on your background and let's talk about your new product as well. So I think we're gonna have a lot of fun. It seems like our Paths virtually intertwined many times, but they quite hit there. I guess I started my career in kind of media tech with a startup that I co founded called Mediabolic back in 1999.

Basically think Roku, but way too soon, right? Before most people were thinking about any of these things, but we built the first ever streaming device. It was partnership with HP. We built a product called the digital media receiver, and it let you get your photos and music. Off your probably desktop tower computer and watch them on the TV or stereo, but way back in 2000, 2001, and that company ended up getting acquired by macro vision, which also got bought by TiVo.

And so now there's this whole family of some of those. Formerly super advanced TV technology companies from there. I went to Sling Media. I'm sure they were in your world at some point. Tivo is in my world. They were a client of ours back in the day. Stacey Jonah. And I mean, what an amazing product, right?

And I still like when you can talk to people and you can do the Tivo sound effect  thing with the other remote.  It was a crazy concept way back then. And, and, and I was just taking it for granted. It's so cool. But anyway, keep going. Yeah. So then I went over to Sling Media and built the original Slingbox.

And so if you think about like Tivo changing the way you watch TV in your house, what Sling we were doing was letting you watch TV out of the house. For your listeners or viewers who've never heard of it back in 2005, it was basically a product roughly the size of like a, like a Mac keyboard these days.

And it would connect to your TiVo or whatever cable box you had and let you stream it over the internet. Now this is key because we're pre YouTube and pre Netflix streaming. So it was really the first commercially viable solution for kind of streaming TV. There were a lot of ways that like. Hackers and nerds like me could do it, but we were the first one that was sort of making a consumer grade product.

And the, I guess, fun trivia for those who hadn't heard of it, the sling TV brand today, which is part of digital eco star. Was the evolution of that platform all the way back from 2005. Okay. Awesome. Oh, great legacy. And then I for a few years was basically a fractional head of product helped launch a bunch of startups, mostly around media, a couple of knots.

So I actually worked and got ways off the ground with some folks, then helped get companies like boxy voodoo Sonos and really shape up their products into this kind of. Digital connected realm, the 2010s. I kind of got that bug for doing the startup again and built a platform called next guide. Next guide was the first TV guide app to combine live TV and streaming all into one view and let you, you know, our philosophy was you, you were starting to care more about the show and less about the time, day or network. 

We were acquired by Vigil who was doing an not affiliates, kind of a fan program for TV viewers. You would check into the TV show you're watching and then you could get rewards and points and And so they bought us and we became the Server Combined Guide Program. From there, honestly, I had kids and they were at an age where I really wanted to be around them a lot.

So I knew it was time to take a startup pause. And I went over to CBS Interactive for about four years. Mostly in the Bay Area, but then moved to New York for the last little while. And I've been in New York for the past Seven and a half years since moving here, spent a little bit of time, as you mentioned at Etsy, helped launch a German TV startup called join with a Y and then spent two years running product and innovation for WarnerMedia.

And that actually kicked off with the facility. We had the WarnerMedia innovation lab, and then unfortunately COVID hits and a very cool new media high tech facility became a lot less relevant in the, in the world at hand, as we all know. Can recall. I left Warner in October of 21 to start Digit and, let's start Digit, that was the last one, to start Augie in January of 2022. 

Okay, I've been at it ever since that's the quick not so quick history. That's great. Well, it's a very very well founded history entertainment and entertainment navigation and Dealing with video. So let's hear about augie because it's you know I've been playing with the platform and you're doing some really wonderful things certainly with ai which is An overarching theme on this podcast So I hear it's going to be big Yeah, evidently.

Can you tell me a little bit about, you know, it seemed to time with the launch of ChatGPT at the same time that you're launching Augie, was the intent to understand AI and what it could offer as you were developing your product in its early stages or did it come after you had decided you, you know, you want to develop a tool to help content creators?

We, the latter. So ChatGPT showed up sort of in the middle of our, Of our path toward our first beta product. And so my co founder actually comes out of the AI world. He was using tools like Dolly too, and a lot of computer vision tech and et cetera, in his past. And so back in 22, before we knew LLMs were going to take over the world and all the things that were happening, our platform was very simple.

We use computer vision technology. We used AI based transcriptions. We use the same source that powers Alexa. And we used what  NLP, which is natural language processing. The less technical folks listening, basically try to make sense of what a sentence means. Right. And so what our first vision of the product was you give us audio, we give you back video.

And what that meant was Apple would listen to your words, right? That's the transcription. It would use NLP to understand your words. So if I said last week, I flew to France, right. It should be able to figure out that there's a subject, France, a verb, flu. My English teacher would kill me right now. I don't even remember which, which parts, but that's what the NLP does.

And then we would use that to pattern match against internet assets, like gifts and open source content through open source or creative commons content. And basically let someone take a, make a video out of virtually nothing. That was the very first vision once chat GPT showed up all sorts of new things happen, and I'll be candid.

Some things made it easier for others to compete with us, but some things also let us take our vision and move much, much faster with it. So, for example, we had never even thought of the idea of what if I could write you a script for your ad and voice it for you. And then Augie will go do all the other stuff that we were already pretending.

And when, if you're familiar with, I'm sure you're familiar with Eleven Labs, when they launched I think it was the same day they launched that we download their API docs and started coding because it was like this instant aha moment. Like, Oh my gosh, we're already tackling a market segment that doesn't know anything about video creation.

Wonder how much they know about script writing, right? Wonder how much they know about voiceover work. Wonder how much they know about these things. And it let us really flesh out the products in a really meaningful way. Well, that's awesome. And you know, you're fulfilling a need and breaking down barriers where there's a lot of creative people out there and some pseudo creative people where, you know, video creation has always been this impasse.

It's like, oh, I gotta shoot something. I have to hire an actor. I have to script something. And it's just it was way too intimidating, right? And it just, that means certain people in their evolution of becoming some type of creator or producer just wouldn't do it. Right. Because it was a cost prohibitive out of their wheelhouse.

And, and, and now the floodgates have opened for creative opportunity, creative expression, and empowering people who have ideas. That want to express them through video, you know, you, you've empowered them. And so, you know, I think it was a, it was a great vision. It still is. And a great product and market fit, which, you know, that always doesn't happen.

You've, you've been in the startup world for a long time. I I've, I've been in the startup world as well. And. Sometimes there, there is not a market fit and either sometimes you're too early with the product or bad implementation or you run outta money. Any, any one of those could all, all, all very valid concerns for sure.

Yeah. So I think you've really, from an early stage, you know, you, you caught onto something. Did you do market research to really help define your customer base and understand truly their needs versus assumptions? Coming from the video and media tech world. How did that research go? That's a great question.

I don't know if I've been asked that one before. A little between the two. So we've always done market research. I want to be straight from the very beginning. We were showing the idea to people. Would you use this? How, what problems do you have with video? And it's probably worth framing a thing really quick.

So when we think about what we're here for, I'm going to just. For, for rudimentary sake. Use this framework. There's only two kinds of video. In one kind of video is destination. We might say edutainment. It's basically anything from a movie to a funny cat video to a lecture. It's where you're there for the video as an audience.

And everything else is in service to that in the sense of every other kind of video is either a promo, ad, sales, Whatever, where the purpose is to get a audience person to do something. Maybe it's sign up for a cause. Maybe it's watch a movie in the theaters. Maybe it's buy the latest thing. Maybe it's smash that like button, but, but that is basically promotional video.

And so in the world of promotional video, which is where we're focused, 70 percent of businesses don't do any, and it's to the point you were just saying. It's too hard. It's too confusing. It takes too long to learn the budgets for preparing professional video. People do amazing work, right? And they charge a lot as they should.

And the way we look at this problem space is that it's about the tools, not the people or anything else, right? We're either forcing. Business people into use tools that are great for personal branding, like CapCut coolest video, portable video app I've ever seen. It's amazing. Right. But it's really designed for that kind of influencer style video.

It's not designed for car ad. Right. It's not to say that, that you couldn't make an ad with I'm not. Nothing of the sort. It's more of, if I want to be doing different kinds of video, it's not really what's suitable.  And so that leaves us with like premiere pro and, and avid and final cut pro, which are great if I want to make Barbie and Oppenheimer and not great.

If I want a 40 second promo on Tik TOK for my company tomorrow, that's going to be expired a week from now because nobody looks at old content.  And so Augie is designed to fit into that space of help the 70 percent of business people who have never even tried making a video before for all the reasons you just said, get their first video in a year.

So when we talk to that community, long answer to your question, but I think it was important is we knew some baseline. I don't need market research to tell me things like, I need closed captions in a video. I only market research to know that if we're going to include stock content, we're going to need commercial rights to it, which is why we have a partnership with Getty.

I don't need audiences to tell me they want transition effects. Now, market research might tell me I probably only need so many transition effects or so many features, something that. But where we start talking to the, to both our current customers, as well as, as prospects and, and other people with marketing pain points, we are honing in very, very specifically on where they were in trouble.

So as an example, we hear over and over again, these days, we have some great content. We hired this company a year ago. We spent eight, they made this amazing video. They gave us 40 hours of extra footage. And it's all sitting in the Dropbox somewhere, right? And it's like it's like the Ark of the Covenant in the, in the warehouse.

In Indiana Jones, yeah. Yeah, and so, super long answer for you here, but what we're learning is, they would love to be able to repurpose those assets, right? So we are currently building a whole lot of features that are like, upload us all your stuff. We're indexing with computer vision, we're indexing with transcription, and we're making it all super searchable.

So if you want to find that one time you interviewed the guy, what was his last name? Toeman? Just type in Toeman and just find it from the text written, not the, not hoping you wrote metadata. Right, right. We know, I don't know what I label that thing. Yeah, so yeah, no, that's fantastic. All types of companies, not just small companies, are sitting on a mountain of content that lies dormant.

I had a, for a while, I had an agency, So when vertical videos taking off and we were focused on helping MTV convert or verticalize  their content for a tick tock and reels and Snapchat and and there was a market there, right? We knew it was a limited window. Just like with a vertical video. Soon become ubiquitous and you're, you know, trying to do original content with not much luck, but we did verticalize hundreds of shows for Viacom.

Are you, are you like me? Were you, were you dragged kicking and streaming into the video vertical video world? No, I saw the, I mean, I, I knew the research and I saw the writing on the wall and I was an evangelist in terms of understanding from a user experience how people held their phones and consumed Content on their phones and it was vertically right, right.

And it was, you know, I have so much that I also, I mean, I was going to have so much. I recorded of my kids as a horizontal and now sometimes I'll look at it and be like, like, it'd be cool to watch that the other way that, but yeah, but trying to convince everyone is, you know, being a lone wolf.  Saying it's got to be vertical, but you know, traditional people, you know, in video were like, can we just stop with the vertical stuff?

So, you know, there was, there was friction as with any kind of tech disruption based on user behavior. And I think user behavior. Really needs to dictate what the user experience is. And once you understand that you should develop products freely and now look where we are and how popular Tik TOK is. And, you know, all, all these things that became ubiquitous.

So. Absolutely. But, you know, speaking about Ubiquiti, AI now is integrated into Adobe, into Premiere, into many big tech platforms big tech, you know, still controlling a lot of the dollars spent and the development and the acceleration of technology is controlled by big tech. I appreciate the fact that you are what I call alt tech, small guys going, going against big tech and, and, you know, maybe more.

nimble in terms of developing product features that are more innovative and what the consumers need versus some roadmap in big tech, which I don't even know who's guiding some of that development, but I appreciate the fact that you're, you're a David against the Goliaths and I wish you the best of luck.

So what are your challenges right now? What's your roadmap for continuing development? Using AI help to help streamline things for your customers? Sure. Great question. So we use ai. I think in, I think the last time I did a whole mental map was like seven different ways in our product. So the way we see it, so we call it the overall platforms called the Augie Studio, and it's meant to be kind of everything you might need for a video marketing suite.

So we think of it like, actually a, a mentor of mine had this great analogy once, if you're gonna, if you need a doghouse, okay. You can just go to Walmart and buy a doghouse. You could also go to the depot or maybe IKEA and get a build it yourself doghouse. You could also go to the internet and get the plans for a doghouse, go to Home Depot and get all the parts and do it.

Or you could just draw one up, cut all the wood yourself, etc. And there's nothing right or wrong with any of those things. We look at it very, very similarly. If you know how, if you're a great script writer, cool, write the scripts for all your content, go for it. If you have no idea how to do that, use AI for it.

If you have a great voice, I don't, I sound, I think I sound a little nasal most of the time, but nobody likes their own voice, right? So if you want to record it too, if you don't, use an AI. If you have shot footage, use the footage. If you don't have the footage and it's sort of traditional, Times Square, use resources like Getty.

But if you want something unique that never invented before, like, Me riding a Pegasus through Times Square. That's where generative AI comes. And so we look at it as there's no, neither are actually better or worse. They all have different uses. We did our first round of incorporating generative AI very early in the product.

Actually, first, obviously script writing and speech, speech reading. Our next pass was to include image generation. So still image for filling out maybe a bit of B roll or things like that. We've advanced that earlier this year with the stable diffusion video diffusion model. And that allows you to actually create animated sequences, which can be photorealistic, which can be, I think we have 137 distinct styles, anime, claymation, I think there's felt, you know, there's a lot of different styles you can make, and so you can use that to fill in the blanks of your store, as tools such as Sora, Pika, Runway 3, I mean, there's, but you know, a week from now, there'll be 10 more, as all these things become more and more prime time, we're going to be incorporating them into the product.

What we've learned, you asked earlier about market research, what's interesting is marketers are very, I love the idea, a little nervous about the implementation right now, and that a few of those lawsuits that were fired off by the Times, by Sarah Silverman, by others, really made everybody kind of have this, well, can we use this content?

Right? Like, so we have this part of it mentioned in Getty, which means, You can use the content. Everybody knows what that, what, what a Getty integration entails when it comes to something with video diffusion, you know, the way, or, or any of the video generative models, the concern is that are you using copyrighted material for training purposes?

We don't have enough clarity insight into that yet. Our intent as a brand is to maintain transparency. So if we're using models that have been. Ethically trained, we're attempting not to use any, as far as we are aware, we're not using any unethically trained ones. If anybody catches one, please let us know.

Same thing with things like AI voices. We have over 200 something AI voices now, and not one of them is Scarlett Johansson, right? So we're really using the AI and making it available to our customers, but trying to be very responsible about it as we go. Another example, we offer voice cloning, which is a very, I don't know if debate is the right word, but it's a contentious area right now.

Well, we require you to have your microphone on for voice coding. We know you were talking, not uploaded the file of, say, a presidential candidate or something like that. Yeah. Right. And so we plan to constantly use AI to pull in new features and enable more scenarios, but also do so in as responsible brand forward for our audience possible so that they know what they can do with it. 

Yeah, that's fantastic. I so appreciate the fact that you bring up ethics and ethically sourced materials and I mean, I, I was called out by one of my consultants because we're doing education and micro learning using AI and she said, well, what's your AI policy, Kurt? And it's like, Oh, Crap. I, you know, preach about all this.

It's like, I should have one. So I had to go out and write one, right. And included in contracts based on who we're contracting with in terms of talent. So do you actually have an AI policy? You talked to me about some of your guide rails, but do you actually have something written and documented? You know, I, it's a good question.

I don't think we do. I think we know it internally. It's like an internal value, but I feel like maybe Take a little note, like we should write up and put make that public because I think, I think our, our users would appreciate that.  I know they would. And I, I think it's a marketing advantage. If you can claim that you are ethically sourced, I think it's a powerful position.

Because as you mentioned, the fear and ambivalence of companies and brands wanting to use certain technologies because of these gray areas that are being contested in the courts, if you can show through your marketing and policies that you're a safe company, it's got to make a difference, I believe, and help.

Help the thought of the fear that does exist within corporate entertainment organizations around certainly AI video. I, I, sorry, the last 10 seconds, I wrote that down exactly what you were saying now, cause it was exactly.  You're totally right. And I think, I think we're going to get proactive about it. So look at this real time, real time impact on a startup during your podcast.

Yeah. Okay. We're serving mankind here, serving humanity in a good way. It's funny because it's actually a thing that comes in, this is, this is where life and work overlap in a weird way. Ever since reading certain books in the, you know, kind of mid 2010s about our food system, I got very much into food transparency and sustainable practices and whatnot.

And so I actually look at there's, there's, you know, in the food world, we're abusing our animals and our environment and such. It's interesting in the AI world where we're, in my opinion, we're, we're, there's still too much taking advantage of content creators. Like, I think if you create a thing, you, you own some amount of right of that thing you created.

Maybe. You know, about, I'm not going to comment on the copyright system and all those kind of things, and I do believe that it's okay to learn on the shoulders of others, right? We wouldn't have modern music if there hadn't been classical music. We wouldn't have modern art, classical, I mean, everything we're doing, right?

Even video storytelling, right? Why is it like my, my old eldest and I, my, my, she's 17. We watch all the eight 24 movies together. Right? Like not all, but pretty close.  And she talks about modern storytelling. I'm like, you wouldn't have that. Oh, she made a comment. I want her to watch a sports movie. I think it was like Hoosiers or Rudy.

And she's like, well, let me guess under accomplishing team gets a good coach, get some training and they win the thing. I'm like, right. And you wouldn't be able to do that. If that story hadn't been told at some point in the past. Right. Right. You know, we're all building on those. So.  We're all building on the hero's journey, right?

I mean, yeah, yeah, that's right. Invention of storytelling for thousands of years that certainly takes its twists and turns and has variations. But, you know, ultimately people like positive outcomes and want to root for someone and, and find the good in people. And these are, These are good things that help propel great storytelling, right?

No matter what vehicle, whether it's a dystopian universe or world, or it's Rudy, you know, and Notre Dame football, right? So people want to feel good. You know, there's a lot of crappy stuff happening in the world right now that What's wrong with watching an older movie? And I want to speak a little bit about movie making, AI movie making, because I, it's very controversial.

There's a lot of, you know, newbie, quote unquote, AI filmmakers. There's AI film festivals and, you know, these new platforms, Sora, which hasn't even launched yet. Launched yet, right? I mean, there's, there's people playing around with it by invitation, but from what I've seen to me, these are not Hollywood films, these are not traditional storytelling.

They're highly imaginative, creative expressions using technology built on the shoulders of others that create some amazing effects and stylizations of reality that could be. Could never be recreated through special effects shooting. And so to me, I'm, I don't think it's AI filmmaking. I think it's a new art form.

Just like music videos were a new art form for MTV launches. Like what's a music video. When I was growing up, it's like there was Don Kirshner's rock concert at midnight. That's how you watch rock bands. Right.  Yeah  So a dick Clark right from going back further But but music videos created something else and just became huge huge cottage industry for filmmakers A lot of current filmmakers today started in music videos because it was highly creative and then they got noticed by the studios so You know, are we in that same kind of inflection point with A.

I. Filmmaking where there's a lot of experimentation. There's a lot of young and experienced talent playing with these tools, labeling themselves filmmakers when, you know, there's there's a certain craft with filmmaking, you know, you grew up the video and entertainment world, you know, it's like, You know, a good story, but what, you know, what is, what are your feelings about where this is going or where it is currently and what, what do you see the future of AI filmmaking?

I'm super excited. I think you said it all very well. So let's agree for the rest of this, there are ethics issues and they're going to have to be worked out because while it's okay for me as a person who has seen, I don't know, the Godfather. And if I want to write a film about a mob story, et cetera, et cetera, Of course there's things I'm going to reference about the world where they got, right, because it's, it's prior art, it exists, it's in our universe.

And then there's a thing where I say, write it as if it sounds like the words used by, whether it's the script, screenplay writer, etc, or, or, or Concordion, the character. Exactly. So, to me, there's, there's That's a tricky line. And it gets, by the way, blurrier, right? Like, let's pretend I'm writing a, a, a funny mob movie, right?

You know, that somewhere in that movie, I'm putting in the line, I'm going to make an offer you can't refuse, right? And it's, you know, whatever it'll be about. One would assume the AI would probably think similarly. Right? Because that would be a trope or whatever.  So we have to be careful not to say, looking at works of the past is bad, because it's not.

We have, that is the history of art and storytelling.  And at the same time, we also have to say you must, there's got to be some clear lines of what's theft and what's not. So putting that all aside, I think everything you said was spot on, right? The music video didn't exist. Now it does. YouTube didn't exist.

Right? And you talk to people under our age, and I don't mean to be ageist here, but if I talked to my 17 year old and I said, what's the difference between a TikTok video, a YouTube video and a real? From Instagram and she'd have an answer for you, right? And she would tell you, those are different things.

She'd say, Oh, well, tick tock is going to be more like this or whatever. And so I think as our world is in this sort of transformation of media itself, I think the storytelling goes with it.  I don't want to watch, maybe I do, I don't think I want to watch a two hour Godfather movie in portrait mode on my phone, but maybe if someone made one great enough I would, I don't know, it's hard to think about that.

When you think about what AI brings to the table, I look at it as like, it's almost like our, we had this arts and crafts room in our house, and there's like, and I literally told the kids like, this is the room you can get paint on the floor and crayons on the walls. Right. I think of that room for a second and, and like one of my kids did the thing that's come combined crayons, colored pencils and paints, right?

That seems very AI ish in a, in, in its kind of way. So what I hope happens is that both the tools and the medium evolved to the point where new kinds of storytelling is allowed, right? We, and I'm trying not to be self serving here, but Buggy was used at the Allentown Film Festival. They had their AI challenge.

What they did was. They interviewed people, they had them read the script aloud, and then they used Augie to make that story kind of come a bit more to life. And it was a really fascinating experiment, right? I mean, it's a small town film festival with really avant garde thinking. And, you know, we didn't tell, I was there without being told what the videos would be, by the way.

I was sort of being, I was brought on for a panel, a discussion panel at the end, and with me were the actual filmmakers who had done some of the regular films. And we were all sort of talking, and they were like, you know, That was a lot more interesting than I was expecting. I was expecting to be offended, I was expecting it to be something it wasn't, and instead I actually was entertained and found new things there.

So, I think it all comes down to, humans are incredibly creative creatures, and the more ways we let them create, the more things that they go off of. Like, have you seen, there's a guy, I think it's J. Ben Art, he does sand art patterns, and he goes off into a serene beach. And uses both brushes and his feet and makes this intricate diorama.

But they're only interesting because he then pilots a drone straight up to look at what it looks like from a few hundred feet up. That's a new thing. We didn't have that before drones or drones art. No, right. It's sand art. I don't know. So I looked at it like we're entering a time where hopefully we can make the rules work such that.

The creative spirit of the individual is allowed to come through in any medium, and not at the expense of other individuals. That's sort of my break it all down. That's great. And what you're mentioning is what I call creative centered AI. Not just human centered AI, but really empowering creatives  with the tools and elevating new art forms.

And I think that's the opportunity and that's the way creatives should feel empowered through the use of these tools and technology to transform themselves, their creativity, their expression, to elevate where and guide where this is all going.  Because I think, you know, this is not to be snobby, but, you know, normal individuals who have no creative bone in their body or they don't have what I call the esthete, right?

That eye or that vision of. Storytelling, you know, they're out there making a bunch of crap And filling the internet with a bunch of crap, but you put it in the hands of you know A seasoned film editor with 30 years experience of editing movies and what would that person do? With these tools, right? How how is that in support of a filmmaker, right?

Right where you know, maybe the filmmaker can do some pretty cool stuff Previsualization to help, you know, with he could do it. He doesn't have to hire his production designer, but he would still have the production designer, but he wants to play and be inspired and use these tools to elevate his craft, but that's a seasoned.

Director, right? Oh, that's right. But again, the power of these tools in the right hands, the right creative hands is, is where I think we move forward and we get out of the quagmire of legal lawsuits and, you know, whiny talent. Being afraid of being digitally cloned and, and, you know, with creative people trying to use it the right way, ethically sourced and elevate their own creativity.

I think, you know, I think creative people are going to be the future of AI. It's not, not going to be every day person. I think that's fair. I think that that's a  really clever way of thinking about it. Like, and, and almost like to give everybody the avenues, like if you're creative with For example, plants, you might be a gardener, right?

That doesn't mean you should be making AI videos, you know? And I think to your, to, to a point you sort of went through, like, will there be use of AI where there once were people? Yes, this is happening in every field. There will be less accountants, there will be less lawyers, there will probably be less doctors, probably won't be less nurses, probably be less screenplay writers, prop, like, and there will be a whole lot more of other things that will come out of all of these worlds, right?

Like, how many CG artists were there 40 years ago, and how many are there today, right? And so, I think that's all right. And, and what I also like about it is we also can separate the difference of people sort of tinkering and having fun with tools in tech. Versus trying to make a buck off it. Right. And I think those things change a lot.

Like, I don't know if you've been seeing all the people who made like the West Anderson, Lord of the Rings or, or, or star Wars or whatever. No one was trying to monetize that. Right. And that to me goes into sort of the Lawrence Lessig remix fan culture, fan service. Like I'll tell you something I did with our product this week.

I uploaded the movie, Ocean's 11.  I said to our tool, I don't have the rights to do that. Okay. This was me experimenting on my own, on my hard drive. Not etc. I upload the movie and I we have computer vision on things and I said make me a version write me a version of a trailer. I don't remember the exact prompt but write it a trailer for Ocean's 11 as if it was a rom com and  and it did and then it picked out the scenes to match and so now I have on my hard drive a 30 second trailer for Ocean's 11 the rom com and I show it to my friends because it's fun.

I'm not, you know, and that's where I take Right. And so I really like what you were saying earlier. It's like give creatives the ability to do things. You see how far that's as far as I go. Right. Would someone else like go off and make a whole new thing? Of course they would. And, and that's, I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah. And again, that that's parody, right? And parody is actually legal. There's, there's like making fun of something, a cultural meme. And this is your take on it from a comedic point of view. I remember there was a game of Thrones main title as if it was. Done in the 80s and it was hilarious, right? Where the new game of thrones main title is like the most epic main title of all time I think I come from that world, but I grew up in the 80s designing main titles And so I so appreciated the parody of game of thrones in the 80s So, you know, I I think all that is good and fun You're not going to monetize your little trailer right from oceans 11.

So, you know, what's the harm?  By the way, I also made I made Big Lebowski as if it was a a movie about a bowling tournament and you know, like, right, like I'm getting you to laugh. So my minor bout of creativity has entertained a person, right? Yeah. Now what happens when we give real creatives some of these tools, right? 

I would love to give.  You know, we are, we actually talking with a few studios because the art, I mean, I know this part of your background is making trailers is a pain in the butt, right? And an art form. And an art form. And an art form. Yeah. So what can you do in AGI? Well, in five minutes you can have a very mediocre trailer made like that.

Yeah. But it's a very mediocre trailer made. That said, if I were to give you the tools of being able to search movies visually by language, by spoken word, by sound effect, by on screen element, The person whose job is to make the trailer who spends a good week just sourcing bits, right? Their job just got faster and easier, right?

We didn't displace anybody or anything through that. We made one human more proactive, productive than they were before. And so I think about that a lot in what we do, especially around the world of video editors to go back all the way to where I framed this, where we sit in the middle of that sort of promotional video  Well, that's not really in the industry today.

There's no industry called I'll make you all the videos you need for your business for like a hundred or two a month. That, that doesn't work. Right. Right. You can go to Fiverr, you know, but that, but, but it doesn't really, truly scale for business. So the way we look at what we're doing is we're going to empower a lot of people to enter the world of video.

We're not going to allow them to be better than the best video talent you've ever worked with because our products will never get that good. That's what Premiere is for, but in the sort of midstream market of not personal branding and not pro tool, we are just looking like, how do we put regular people in charge of their own destiny?

Yeah, so Yeah, that's how that all works together for us And I I believe a lot of that is going to be funneled into social media, which is disposable media That's how I look at it. It's cool Moment you click and watch it and then you maybe click through for you know from some cta that goes somewhere But you know, I I think There's, that's a, serves a purpose as people are endlessly scrolling again, back to user behavior.

You know, what is that endless scroll filled with and how has made compelling and how has social media marketers, how do they pump up the volume of content? Again, a lot of companies sitting on mountains of content. How is it  repurposed? I believe most of it will be run through social media. It's not going to be in the big screen in a movie theater.

It's going to be consumed in the smallest way in the smallest screen for the least amount of time and is part of what consumers want consume every day. So I think there's your market fit and I congratulate you on your vision and what you're doing and keep up the good work. And I know we're going to be in digital Hollywood together.

Very soon, so I'm looking forward to that and I'm just going to give you a chance to promote your platform and tell us how our listeners can get in contact with you and experience Augie. Awesome. Well, you can learn more about the company at www. augie. studio. And if you want to just dive into the product and start using it, it's just my.

augie. studio. We have a free trial for everybody to get up and running and learn how the features work. Even in the free trial, you can export videos. We have all the content you you'll be using is commercially licensed. If you upgrade to the premium tier that includes the Getty catalog, a lot of other features, a lot of proprietary stuff coming shortly and pricing starts at 34 a month and goes up from there.

We'd love for you to try it out. Send us your feedback where you can find us anywhere and everywhere. We'll always send a lot of emails, reply to them. We love making the product better for people. So try it out, get in touch, see if we can help you with your video journey.  Awesome. Well, thanks, Jeremy. And thanks for tuning in.

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