The Benefits of Descript with Jay LeBoeuf
Episode Show Notes
Welcome to PodOn, the podcast where we share stories from other podcasters and talk with them about the challenges we all face when beginning the podcasting journey. If you are a podcaster, we would love to hear your story and your feedback. If you love this podcast, please subscribe and share it with your friends.
We are all storytellers, and it would be a disservice to the world to stop anyone from sharing their content; yet, as popular as it is today, podcasting isn’t necessarily an accessible industry. In today’s episode, TJ and Julian sit down to chat with Jay LeBoeuf, Head of Business Development at Descript, to talk about the diversity of the industry, the importance of inclusion, and how a single tool is making a major paradigm shift in the podcasting ecosystem through empowerment. Are you eager to start your new podcast? Then find a way and start today!
Jump straight into:
(00:45) - Paradigms and tools: On Jay’s Pro Tools and Descript journey - “So much of what we’ve been trying to do is take things and make them simpler.”
(06:49) - Solving the blank canvas problem, boosting creativity and making things simpler for any user - “There is really no reason why someone couldn’t tell their story using Descript.”
(13:23) - The high impact value of repurposing content and the magic of Descript’s stock voices - “In the context of every amazing conversation there are going to be several pull quotes, so why don’t we get those out there?”
(19:43) - Reframing old rules and creating inclusion with a single software - “When you’re working with a tool that’s revolving around transcription as its core DNA, you have no excuse to not make everything accessible.”
(24:50) - The thin line between high quality and over editing - “Yeah, with one click you can fix everything, but with a few more clicks you can back it off a little bit and insert some feeling.”
(29:56) - The revolution of the industry - “Every business person now has to be a creator in charge of their own messaging and communication style.”
Resources
‘Pro Tools proficiency’ may be keeping us from diversifying audio by Michael McDowell
Building a searchable news firehose by James Shield
Drop The MIC Podcast
Podcast Accessibility & Inclusion with Sage Levene
PodOn is hosted by TJ Bonaventura and Julian Lewis, founders of the full-service podcast company based in San Francisco, StudioPod. If you want more details on how to fully record and produce your podcast with our services, you can reach us at http://studiopodsf.com, send us an email at info@studiopodsf.com or contact us through our social media channels as @studiopodmedia
Episode Transcript (via Rev.com)
Jay LeBoeuf:
So we have 50 students using Descript. They're collaborating in ways that we have never designed the tools to be used for. And that's just really great to see native storytellers who do not know the rules. They do not know how clunky it should be. And they're just using it. Again, like Google Docs.
TJ Bonaventura:
This is the PodOn Podcast. We're your host, TJ Bonaventure, that's me. And Julian Lewis.
Julian A. Lewis II:
That's me.
Julian A. Lewis II:
As founders of a podcast media company. We had to start a podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
So join us each episode as we and our guests drop knowledge on podcasting for you, the curious and scrappy podcaster.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Welcome back to another episode of the PodOn Podcast. As always, here's Julian and TJ. Together, we are StudioPod. And we have a very special guest. We have Jay LeBoeuf, who is the head of business development at Descript.
Julian A. Lewis II:
If you guys have been listening to the show and specifically this season, you will know that you might as well be thinking that the Descript is a sponsor of the show based how often we talk about them, but they're not. And we're super lucky to have Jay with us to talk everything about podcasting as it pertains to Descript. And so, Jay, why don't you just go ahead and just give us a quick little intro about yourself and Descript.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me guys. Thanks for using Descript and you can pronounce it however you want, fun fact, we have Descriptors and we have Descriptors. There's no official pronunciation. So I joined the company about a year ago. I've got about 20 years of experience in the media and media technology industry, which I'm happy to talk more about too. But I joined Descript to help build, basically, a Google Docs for audio and video. And just in the same way that we all can use Google Docs to edit and create content, and you can select things, and delete them, and copy them, and you can invite collaborators.
Jay LeBoeuf:
You just don't think twice about the tool. And it's just so easy to use in just such a natural extension of our creativity. We wanted to build that same tool with Descript. So for the folks that don't know, basically you drag in audio or video, or you can even record it natively using a mic or a screen capture tool that we have, and instantly you see a transcript. And if there's multiple people, you see a transcript with multiple speaker labels. And you just start cutting, copying, pasting, and unleashing your creativity. And there you go.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So I've joked about this before, but I have to say it again. If I knew Jay and Descript before I knew TJ, we might not be a thing right now. So I really appreciate the ease of use of the tool from somebody who was very much... What would you call it? A JV... Not even JV. A Freshman podcaster when I first met TJ a couple years back.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So Descript is definitely a great tool and we're so glad to have you on. I personally would love to dive a little bit into your media background and get an understanding of, why Descript? Why did you land there from all the other places that you've been?
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's a fun journey. And for those of you listening, who know Pro Tools and you're thinking like, "Oh no." I've spent a decade honing my chops on Pro Tools. I've done 19 certifications, I've taken night courses, I watch all the latest YouTube videos. I worked on that tool for almost a decade. And through that time, after about 10 years, I think I feel like I finally started understanding how it is to work.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And what's incredible about it is, here's a tool that was designed going back about 30 years ago. And at the time, Pro Tools was truly revolutionary. It was doing something that you could only do with tape editing before, literally a razor blade and tape. And it was basically taking that paradigm, but making it 10 to 100 times faster and then allowing you to do creative stuff, like, "Yeah, you could have all these micro cuts and tape, but just do it with a computer."
Jay LeBoeuf:
And now that's a paradigm that we all naturally understood. And then, initial leap is why Pro Tools became so popular. You could just record and edit very quickly with the paradigm we all understand, just make cuts and paste them together.
Jay LeBoeuf:
The next 29 years of development are about adding really complicated features that... They're not meant to be complicated, but you're just trying to add every bell and whistle and every new product feature. And every time you release something, you're expected to have something outwardly facing that you can use to sell a new version of it. And we've just created these very complicated tools. And so much of my time on the Pro Tools team or after that, I did a startup called Imagine Research. And the goal was, "Let's use AI to make these professional tools simpler." So much of what we've been trying to do is take things and make them simpler.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And what attracted me to Descript was, you have this paradigm where we're all storytellers and we all can look at text, and that's, kind of, our common language when we're collaborating around audio and video. And so the creators on this call will know, maybe you'll do an interview with somebody, but if you want to collaborate, maybe you got to transcript of it, and you mark up notes in Google Docs and you structure what you want to say. You're doing that all around text. Anyway.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So here we have this, once every 30 year paradigm shift where content creators are embracing a paradigm they know and love. It's just, instead of going from cutting from razor blades with magnetic tape, and then you have Pro Tools. Now you have a transcript going to an edited transcript that conforms to your audio and video and that's Descript. And so that's really, if I had to summarize, what attracted me to it. It was that user experience paradigm of how simple it is for anybody to get going, let alone the professional content creators, and how much time you can solve.
TJ Bonaventura:
You're very well spoken in how you felt when you first experienced it and how easy it is. For me, it was like, "Holyshit! Something like this exists." I didn't know that editing audio could be this easy. Here at StudioPod, we don't shy away from it. We have a full editing team that we work with, but we also like to get our hands dirty and have our clients get their hands dirty. And Descript is an awesome tool that lets us do it. I guess the question for you is because we have editors that are in it. We have us as producers that are in it. We have our clients who don't know anything about editing in the tool. How would you describe an ideal user or who do you as a power user in your mind?
Jay LeBoeuf:
Well, the ideal user, the answer is yes. I so strongly believe that there's really no reason that someone can't tell their story using Descript. And we have this really powerful group of professional podcasters, people at NPR, and Gimlet, and VICE, and the New York Times, and Al Jazeera and just top podcasts that we're all listening to on a regular basis, these top studios. They are Pro Tools shops and have very rich sound design. And some of those podcasts use Descript, exclusively. Some of them use it for rough edits, some of them use it for daily podcasts. And that is the only way you can get out a daily podcast in a fully remote collaborative way of working.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And so you'd look at those companies and the caliber of editors that are working on it, and you'd think that it's a professional tool. And yet our marketing and many of the YouTube videos that, kind of, really got us on the map are about those people that are like, "Today's the day I'm going to start a podcast." So Julian, maybe that was you. You're just like, "Yeah, today's the day." And to actually have a tool that you can do that, you complete the tutorial and grab a microphone and pull it up and then just realize it's, kind of, to get something on tape. To go from blank canvas to, "Cool, now I have a framework for an episode." It's pretty darn simple. I'm not going to say that nobody's going to listen to it, but at least you're getting rid of that blank canvas problem.
Julian A. Lewis:
Yeah. And the one thing that I want to talk about... I'm glad that you brought up your spots that you have on your website and that are on YouTube because they not only do such a good job of explaining the product, but they also show a diverse set of people that are using the tool, both in race, gender, age. And recently there's an article that came out by The Verge that was talking about the expectation of people being able to use Pro Tools as a barrier to diversifying the industry, because not only is it complicate, but it's also extremely expensive. And so, not only are you providing a tool that's easier to use, but you're also showcasing that, "Hey." Really, anybody can use it.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. And I experienced that when I was on the Pro Tools team and we had launched these certification courses, which you provide a nice level of badging and credibility. But those certification courses were, kind of, becoming for profit colleges in the way that people are incurring intense amount of debts for the promise of securing employment using their Pro Tools 301 skills. And that was never the intent. It was really to just have a bar where people could talk about themselves and have a standard curriculum. So I'll put this out there, when we have a Descript 101, and 201, and 301, those will be free programs really to just gamify the learning experience around it. Not additional revenue generating tool. That's just not cool.
TJ Bonaventura:
And I think the one thing that I love about Descript is, it is really, really easy to use. I remember when I first got my hands on it, I just wanted to learn every little thing that you could do. Everything from recording directly into the application, to exporting different files, to creating audiograms. It was just something that took not a whole lot of time. I did have to dedicate a weekend to it, but nothing compared to what you're speaking about Pro Tools or any do to become an expert. And that's why I think lowering the barrier of entry, what Julian talked about, is so powerful and getting more podcasters out there. Because now, there, you don't have that barrier. You have a lot of opportunity to go ahead and just record and see what you can do and play with it. And you're not going to hit that podfade.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Yeah. It's also a unique moment. I'd say it's not a deep application. You can go through every menu item, pretty quickly. Try doing that with the... So I do video editing with Adobe Premier and wow, if I were to try to go through every menu item and then explain what every setting is... We're really trying to be minimal in what we expose to the user and also keeping up a very rapid pace of innovation, so that way we're only putting in the app, what it absolutely needs and what people need right away.
Jay LeBoeuf:
One of my favorite things that TJ you didn't mention, but maybe I'll introduce you to something new. So there was a good post late last week by James Shield, who works on the stories of Our Times. It's a daily news podcast from The Times of London and the Sunday Times. It basically walks through how they're able to create new stories in Descript, very rapidly using a feature we have, which is called Copy Surrounding Sentence.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So let's say you have all of your interviews that you've recorded over a season, or even over all of your seasons. And you want to create a highlight episode, which is talking around people talking about Spotify. You can literally type in Spotify into the Descript project and it'll pull up all the sentences where someone has said the word Spotify. You can say copy. And then if you click on Copy Surrounding Sentence, that full grammatical sentence, where they're introducing a concept, saying something, is then copied and you can paste all of them. It could be 10, it could be 110. Paste them into a composition. And now you have the source material potentially, for an entire episode on that topic.
TJ Bonaventura:
I used to be a sales engineer in my past life for a couple different companies. And we used to demo products and just be able to create videos or be able to create some sort of audio that explains all the different types of collateral that we as a tech organization had developed. That's just a game changer just like podcasting itself. There's so many use cases for Descript that we love. And that I had no idea about going into this episode, Julian, I don't know about you, but that's just-
Julian A. Lewis II:
Nope.
TJ Bonaventura:
I know we're going to be creating some highlight episodes now.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Love it. So we've talked a lot about the value of Descript and lowering the barrier of entry, making it easy to use, I guess not to try to forecast where the industry is going. I feel like companies like Anchor had tried to do that as well to a certain extent. What's the focus of the company overall and where do you see the continued growth of podcasting being leveraged by a tool like Descript?
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. First of all, let me zoom out and just talk about... Our mission is to empower storytellers. And so those creatives and those podcasters, we know we have a lot more work to do to make Descript the number one tool of choice for podcasters always. So we're going to stay focused on that for 2021. But a trend in something that it might look like we're adding in new feature just to add new features, but we're building upon what's going on in the industry. Is to really help people repurpose content, and that includes around the video. So, I gave an example earlier around Copy Surrounding Sentence. Imagine you can do that. It works just as well if you had hours and hours and hours of video content, and you copy the video content of that surrounding sentence.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And this is something I think you guys actually do really, really well. You have this content, it's 45 minutes of content or an hour content. This is a moment in time, this is kind of the expensive stuff to get this moment captured down. So we're going to and really want to invest a lot more in helping people realize the potential of repurposing content through audiograms, through making video snippets, sharing things out to their communities, to collaborators, publishing short snippets. There's so many online events and webinars going online that never get redistributed or repurposed as evergreen content because people don't take the time to edit them. It really isn't hard. You just ingest it and then start highlighting the interesting bits. That's really something that I feel passionate about, is to help people repurpose their content.
Julian A. Lewis:
Yeah. And I think exactly with that snippets, we've talked about that on previous episodes, the ability to sit down, have this conversation and then allow for it to have legs beyond just this conversation. Is exactly what we try to have the curious and scrappy podcast or think about. It's like, "This is not just one thing that you have to do and then you have to go do 10 other things, use this to create those 10 other things and allow for you to really make an impact and still have quality content."
Jay LeBoeuf:
Yeah, In the context of every amazing conversation, there's going to be several pull quotes. So why don't we get those out there and why don't we actually do our audience a favor? Because I listen to, and I consume a lot of content, but I don't always have time for the full episode. But maybe if I hear a couple of things exposed to me or I see things visually in my social media feed, then I'll double click into it and engage.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to have a little fun for a second here. Because I'm going to put you on the spot. I feel like you get exposed to a lot of different podcast ideas or different interesting stories of how people are using Descript or potential clients or partners. Can you share some just fun examples of how you've seen clients use Descript?
Jay LeBoeuf:
That's one of those questions you ask, because you're trying to buy yourself a little time and you're hoping people go one direction and then it never works out. So I'll tell you a couple things that... I consider this pretty clever. Let's say you're doing a very factual presentation. It can be a conference presentation, because most academic conferences for example, are live to tape. Everybody has to submit their presentations in advance or it could be a factual podcast. The chance is that when you recorded it, you actually got everything totally right. And you expound it upon everything that really needed the full level of detail. You're never going to get it right.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So this is a good trick. I've seen in a lot of back demo conferences where you record your presentation, it's like a live sync to PowerPoint or something. You record it, bring it to Descript. First thing you do is remove all filler words, second thing you do, remove word gaps. So that way you can actually pause for 10 seconds and not have dead air like now. And that just suddenly vanishes.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So they do those two steps and then you review it and you realize where people are lost or where something needs clarification. Now you double click in, you select one of our Stock Voices. So these are some of the 10 free overdub voices. They're synthesized high quality voices. And you literally type in the explanatory text that you want to be read during that point in the presentation.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So it could be like, "What Jay's really talking about here is that the ADVAC is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you put that in and it's in a different voice. So it sounds like you have a narrator who's coming in and clarifying moments in the storyline. And then that actually becomes a theme where this person that's perhaps slightly irreverent, dry voice comes in and corrects you. That's been something I've seen actually in a number of conference presentations and also in some... There's some news podcast or science news podcasts where they'll use one of our Stock Voices and come in and, kind of, correct you.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So I'm just going to jump in real quick and say that I'm angry with TJ now, for the second time today. The first time is because he set an alarm for our podcast going alive at what? 2:30 AM. And then I had the 10 minute alert before it. So I've been up since one o'clock in the morning or whatever time that alarm went off. But number two, I actually, probably three months ago, did a guest speaking appearance where they wanted me to tape it, which I was just... For me, I love being live and having conversations where I could feel people. And I was filler word to the nth degree. But Descript allowed for me to sound so polished. I just wish I had that voice that was narrating me and announcing me and all of that stuff that I could have thrown in there.
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's, kind of, good because now you're writing, when you're writing a script, you're just writing in your own voice, not a lot of us are writing screenplays. But that's how I tend to do if I'm invited to do a talk live to tape where if you guys submitted a list of questions in advance and you were like, "Yeah, just record your answers." I'd record everything spontaneously, and then I'd go in, clean it up. And then I might actually use either my own OverDope voice to fix, fix my stuff or I'd use one of these Stock Voices to, kind of, be my sidekick. That's, kind of, one of the more creative things I've seen.
Jay LeBoeuf:
One of the more audacious things I've seen has been being invited to jump into a podcast that's being worked on by Pushkin team or the NPR teams, and you see seven people in a podcast at a time. There's 13 gig of searchable content in here. That's when you start sweating and you know this is a professional tool. There's amazing world class engineers working on the scenes behind this. But at the same time, you're like, "Oh boy, I hope this works."
Jay LeBoeuf:
And I'm actually doing something similarly crazy. So I teach a music business class at Stanford every year and I have 50 students creating season two of the Drop The Mic Podcast, which is a music industry conversations podcast. So we have 50 students, you using Descript. They're collaborating in ways that we have never designed the tools to be used for, and that's just really great to see native storytellers who do not know the rules. They do not know how clunky it should be. And they're just using it, again, like Google Docs.
TJ Bonaventura:
I love it. I think just where I go for the curious and scrappy podcaster or our audience here is, creating a podcast that has narration can be an awfully large lift and expensive lift. And so what Jay just explained was that you can come in, record your audio, edit your audio, add in narration and publish it potentially, all in one day, all within one tool. Just let that sink in for a second. That is phenomenal, it's amazing, it's game changing. I don't know. Julian, what do you think?
Julian A Lewis II:
Yeah, exactly. For me, kind of, taking a step back a few years when I first started podcasting again, I don't even know all the bells and whistles and I'm glad that I didn't at the time because I think TJ and I are building a good thing as hopefully helping people get acclimated with things like Descript. But you address the curious and scrappy podcaster and even the individual that works at a corporate company who is one person on a sales enablement team or on a team that's focused on internal communications. You can use a tool like this and going back to what Jay was talking about earlier, you can use a tool like this to create the main piece of content, but then you can also leverage it to create the micro content to get your employees engaged. So it's not just for the podcaster who is broadcasting externally. It's also for those individuals who don't have a large team that want to do it internally.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And Julian, can I jump in with one thing?
Julian A Lewis II:
Please.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Another yes ends to that, and this gets into making these tools... If you're going to do this work, it's really important that you make these tools inclusive and accessible also by adding subtitles and captions. And I'm sure we all emphasize how, "Okay, if you're going to put something on social media, it has to lead with the visuals, you have to burn in the subtitles, which you can do with Descript with one click." All good, but honestly, to just put a podcast out there without a rich transcript that people can digest and without the option to have a playable transcript, so people can listen to it and experience it in a way that they're comfortable with it. Whether they're a different style of learner, whether it's just that are searchable for them or whether they're deaf in hard of hearing.
Jay LeBoeuf:
I think it's just really important to make your content accessible. Yes, it's awesome that there are incredible marketing benefits and now you're creating different styles of content too, but it, previously, was something that people would have to send out to a caption house where you send it to a professional transcriber and then you'd have this thing where only the top hundred-ish podcasts would have that material available to it. And when you're working with a tool that's revolving around the transcript as its core DNA, the benefit of that is, you have no excuse to not make everything accessible.
Julian A. Lewis II:
I love that. And what we had to say to The Vernon a while, back from more recreative, where we talked about accessibility. And for a lot of people, it's like, "Okay, over time, we'll get there." But exactly to what you said, Jay, the ability to leverage a tool that will just help you get there right away is key to making sure that not just audio learners will access it, but people who want to read it or people who want to experience it in a different way. Yeah. So, that's so important.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to talk real quickly about best practices. We don't have to go too much into this, but I think one thing that we have seen, and it's just the benefit of Descript is that, because you can now listen and read at the same time, we tend to see that our clients tend to get very critical about themselves and the filler words, and crutch words, and over editing. And we always tend to let them feel like, "It's okay. You sometimes want to have some filler words in there. It's okay to be overly critical, but don't over edit." So coming from your background in Pro Tools, and now seeing this paradigm shift with Descript, what recommendations or best practices would you say for those who are seeing the over editing happen within the application?
Jay LeBoeuf:
The lazy thing that I sometimes do, and I probably said this a bunch, was like, "Finish recording and then just remove filler words." That's like slapping on an Instagram filter and just being done with it. So that is a tool, that is a preset, that is something that you can do. But that's what really differentiates people who are real editors and crafts people. Is, you take the time to figure out where does it need to be in there? Where does it not be, need to be in there? Where do those long pauses, actually add something? Like what I just did. It actually adds something, it adds a moment of tension. It brings the listener in a little bit more. So if you're trying to crank out like a radio spot and then this advert has to be 30 seconds long, by all means, get rid of the filler words, get rid of the word gaps, speed it up by one and a half times. You're good to go.
Jay LeBoeuf:
But if you're actually trying to tell a story, think about who your audience is, think about what the person is trying to convey. And yeah, when I do intros for this music industry podcast, of course it's short, it's punchy. If there's a filler word in there, it's gone because that's just going to distract the listener. But once we get into some real conversations, especially as they get a more emotionally rich, I back off on doing that. And I just, kind of, keep it raw, authentic and pure. I don't know, that's just like taste, so that the Pro Tools analogy... Most of my background is on the music recording side and Pro Tools has this tool called Beat Detective.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Beat Detective can look at your drumming and... I'm a drummer. So I'm critical of people going in and tightening up my timing, making everything sound like robotic. And the default is to just go through and all of your stuff sounds like mechanical, super robotic. And then you realize that the song has lost its soul. It basically just sounds like you went to a drum machine, hooked up a couple keyboards and just hit play and cranked it out, but it needs to breathe a little bit more. So, that's where the art is. And what I love is now that we can make it such that, "Yeah, with one click, you can fix everything." But with a few more clicks, you can also back it off a little bit and start inserting some feel.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Yeah, that's an absolutely great point in terms of making sure that you are listening to everyone and TJ always provides this to our clients and making sure that there's that continuity there. If you remove it and it doesn't make sense, or it sounds choppy, or it sounds mechanical, so to speak, just keep it in there. It's natural. And so I think I just did, "I'm", right? So, hopefully we'll leave that in there. But no, I think that's really important in terms of making it feel like it's naturally authentic because at the end of the day, you're communicating to other humans and they're not perfect either.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Right, people aren't... We were just talking about publishing the transcripts. But you're not publishing the article and the blog as it's first piece of content. If you're publishing the audio first, then just concentrate on that. The fact that you can edit using the text is great. Because you can just ignore the Waveform. The Waveform is probably the 10th thing you should be looking at on the Descript screen. But it's just there in case you need it as a further reference and to do some fine tuning, the other advantage of being on the transcript.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And this is also true for video. When you think about video, both audio and video, you can only review them at one times speed, maybe one and a half times speed. And so you have all this raw footage and you basically just have to sit there and start tagging it, and logging it, and cutting it. And you have to stop every single time you have to do that. So what's great about text, you really can just eyeball and search. And if you guys, through this conversation, you might have been jotting down some cool keywords that I said that could be your pull quotes. And all you have to do is search those keywords later, get those pull quotes pulled out and you could have those online as we're doing this episode, whereas you've never had that capability before to edit content faster than real time.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to switch gears for a second. You've been with Descript for a year and a now you seen the company grow, you guys just raised another round of funding, which is super exciting. Congrats on that. But I want to talk about what you've seen from an evolution standpoint within not so much the tool itself or the company itself. Just overall like the industry. What gets you excited to continue going forward with the business, with the application and potential opportunities that you see within the industry overall?
Jay LeBoeuf:
So when I came in about a year ago, I was familiar with podcasting. I was familiar with the content creation aspect of it. One of the things that's been the biggest surprise to me... And I was just how talking about this to somebody this morning and kind of blowing their minds, is how throughout the course of COVID, as we've all been working from home, we're seeing not only this huge growth in people getting into content creation for the first time. So creating their first podcast, creating their first YouTube video, just getting their audio and video material out there because they're home, now. We have time to download and play around with tools. So we see this on one side, huge growth of creatives on the beginner side, but the business use cases are, kind of, crazy.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So if you would've told me that I'd spend a whole bunch of time talking to people that worked at Shopify and that they would have people doing internal comms and people doing training and learning podcast and people who are creating source material for their end users and that this isn't handled just by one content creation and team, now, because everybody's distributed.
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's, kind of, your department's job to create its own content. So each department in these companies have become many podcast studios. And people who are used to just be humble, old managers are now head of creative. That's pretty cool. And from a business opportunity, that's great. Because it means the total addressable market of the number of creatives that you can serve with your tool is really expanded upon because every business person now, kind of, has to be a creator in charge of their own messaging and communication style. But just as a fan of the medium, I'm also excited that so many more people are getting into it now.
Julian A. Lewis II:
I absolutely love that you said that because I'm an adjunct at the university of San Francisco and one of my former students, he started a podcast. And we helped him get started, but he's been doing phenomenal on his own, but he paid it back by having TJ and I on his podcasts. And he asked a great question. He's like, "When do you feel like corporations have really leaned into podcasting?" And what I said was when you sign up on your first day or you get there on your first day and they hand you your laptop, your badge, and then they also hand you a mic. And now, as we're having this conversation, it's like, "And a tool like Descript." So you can do exactly that.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Because being that we coming from a sales background, the ability to create content for your clients, to communicate things to your clients, or even to being a sales manager to my team and having pitch competitions or something of that effect where it could be more engaging and then live in a place where people are going to want to go back and learn from it, is phenomenal.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So yeah, I really love the direction in which this industry is going because it's not just about creating the next True crime podcast. There's so many different applications from a content creation standpoint.
TJ Bonaventura:
It's also great to hear that an industry leader like Shopify is leveraging podcasts internally at the department level. I think, we still have yet to see that domino fall to make it an industry standard across all organizations to create internal podcasts. But I think I'm right there with you, Jay, it's going to be a massive, just waterfall, of organizations, departments wanting to create quick and easy podcasts without a lot of lift and Descript is going to be an awesome tool for them to do so.
Jay LeBoeuf:
I agree. And it also means for the people listening to this, the curious and scrappy podcasters who are maybe working somewhere else right now, this is not your day job. This is your call to action. Think of a way that you can actually, maybe, take some of your executives or your managers messaging and offer to help turn their one hour weekly Zoom digressions, and just make a little highlight real out of it. It doesn't have to be your own original creation, just, kind of, taking something down and, kind of, distilling out the core messaging in from it. Maybe add some intro music to it. If you want to do a little video, it's really quick to just add a logo, add some, some good stuff in there, publish your creation. There's so many ways you could actually incorporate this into your daily life. That's kind of the fun part. We don't have to do this as our professional career. This could be your hobby within your day job too.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Yeah. And as long as you keep it as a hobby, we're here to help you. Yeah.
TJ Bonaventura:
Probably, our last question was going to be, what is your advices to the curious and scrapy podcaster? But you kind of lean into it right there already. You, kind of, said, as you mentioned, "Find a way to use it, find a way to get into podcasting hobby you'd like." But I guess with that, is there any closing thoughts that you would give or anything else that you would like to mention to the audience?
Jay LeBoeuf:
We were talking about repurposing content, kind of, near the beginning of this. That's something that if we all reflect on it, I think we can all find material that we've either previously done or that we could get some more mileage from. That's not being lazy. It's about being frugal, and resourceful, and up cycling content into new things. That's one thing. And the other thing I'd probably end with is something I share with all the students I have right now on this podcast. I do not give them any resources for bringing in guests for our podcast. All I do is, I tell them to dream big. And I tell them this is curly fries for life. And then they look at me and they say, "What the hell does that mean?" And I tell them, "All right." There was this little newspaper story.
Jay LeBoeuf:
This is a true story of a third grader who received an assignment from their teacher. And the assignment was "Okay, we're going to write a letter this week to someone asking for whatever you want." And so, you would think that this teacher's giving them the assignments so they can learn how to write a business letter, so they can use the U.S mail system, so they can have professional correspondence. But the real impact from it came from what happened as the results. Out of this entire class, something like 70% of the people that were of these third graders got exactly what they wanted. Their biggest wishes, kind of, came true. So they got autographs in the mail. They got free stuff sent to them. And my favorite one was a student writing into Arby's and saying, "I want curly fries for life." And Arby's being like, "Done."
Jay LeBoeuf:
So they create a certificate, send it for their local, small town, Michigan Arby's that they can take in anytime. And for this third grader. Well, of course she wanted a curly fries for life. What is to stop her from asking for it. So I tell this to these Stanford students who often feel like they didn't even know where to begin. And we just say, "Just ask." So go for the biggest guest you can, worst that's going to happen is they'll say no. And just apply that thinking and go for your curly fries for life all the time.
Julian A. Lewis II:
That is absolutely phenomenal advice. And I'm definitely stealing that to give to my students at USF.
TJ Bonaventura:
Anything you want to plug about Descript, how to find You.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Really, only other thing to add is that Descript's available completely for free to get started.
TJ Bonaventura:
All right, there you go, everyone. So go to descript.com to sign up for freeing and just play with it.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Jay, thank you so much for all the knowledge that you dropped on the podcast. The curious and scrappy podcasters are definitely wiser for this episode. We really appreciate the time.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Thanks for having me guys.
TJ Bonaventura:
Every episode of the PodOn Podcast is produced and edited by StudioPod Media. For more information about our work and our clients go to studiopodsf.com.
Julian A Lewis II:
Shout out to Gary Oakland for the fire track.
TJ Bonaventura:
Gary O.
So we have 50 students using Descript. They're collaborating in ways that we have never designed the tools to be used for. And that's just really great to see native storytellers who do not know the rules. They do not know how clunky it should be. And they're just using it. Again, like Google Docs.
TJ Bonaventura:
This is the PodOn Podcast. We're your host, TJ Bonaventure, that's me. And Julian Lewis.
Julian A. Lewis II:
That's me.
Julian A. Lewis II:
As founders of a podcast media company. We had to start a podcast.
TJ Bonaventura:
So join us each episode as we and our guests drop knowledge on podcasting for you, the curious and scrappy podcaster.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Welcome back to another episode of the PodOn Podcast. As always, here's Julian and TJ. Together, we are StudioPod. And we have a very special guest. We have Jay LeBoeuf, who is the head of business development at Descript.
Julian A. Lewis II:
If you guys have been listening to the show and specifically this season, you will know that you might as well be thinking that the Descript is a sponsor of the show based how often we talk about them, but they're not. And we're super lucky to have Jay with us to talk everything about podcasting as it pertains to Descript. And so, Jay, why don't you just go ahead and just give us a quick little intro about yourself and Descript.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me guys. Thanks for using Descript and you can pronounce it however you want, fun fact, we have Descriptors and we have Descriptors. There's no official pronunciation. So I joined the company about a year ago. I've got about 20 years of experience in the media and media technology industry, which I'm happy to talk more about too. But I joined Descript to help build, basically, a Google Docs for audio and video. And just in the same way that we all can use Google Docs to edit and create content, and you can select things, and delete them, and copy them, and you can invite collaborators.
Jay LeBoeuf:
You just don't think twice about the tool. And it's just so easy to use in just such a natural extension of our creativity. We wanted to build that same tool with Descript. So for the folks that don't know, basically you drag in audio or video, or you can even record it natively using a mic or a screen capture tool that we have, and instantly you see a transcript. And if there's multiple people, you see a transcript with multiple speaker labels. And you just start cutting, copying, pasting, and unleashing your creativity. And there you go.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So I've joked about this before, but I have to say it again. If I knew Jay and Descript before I knew TJ, we might not be a thing right now. So I really appreciate the ease of use of the tool from somebody who was very much... What would you call it? A JV... Not even JV. A Freshman podcaster when I first met TJ a couple years back.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So Descript is definitely a great tool and we're so glad to have you on. I personally would love to dive a little bit into your media background and get an understanding of, why Descript? Why did you land there from all the other places that you've been?
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's a fun journey. And for those of you listening, who know Pro Tools and you're thinking like, "Oh no." I've spent a decade honing my chops on Pro Tools. I've done 19 certifications, I've taken night courses, I watch all the latest YouTube videos. I worked on that tool for almost a decade. And through that time, after about 10 years, I think I feel like I finally started understanding how it is to work.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And what's incredible about it is, here's a tool that was designed going back about 30 years ago. And at the time, Pro Tools was truly revolutionary. It was doing something that you could only do with tape editing before, literally a razor blade and tape. And it was basically taking that paradigm, but making it 10 to 100 times faster and then allowing you to do creative stuff, like, "Yeah, you could have all these micro cuts and tape, but just do it with a computer."
Jay LeBoeuf:
And now that's a paradigm that we all naturally understood. And then, initial leap is why Pro Tools became so popular. You could just record and edit very quickly with the paradigm we all understand, just make cuts and paste them together.
Jay LeBoeuf:
The next 29 years of development are about adding really complicated features that... They're not meant to be complicated, but you're just trying to add every bell and whistle and every new product feature. And every time you release something, you're expected to have something outwardly facing that you can use to sell a new version of it. And we've just created these very complicated tools. And so much of my time on the Pro Tools team or after that, I did a startup called Imagine Research. And the goal was, "Let's use AI to make these professional tools simpler." So much of what we've been trying to do is take things and make them simpler.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And what attracted me to Descript was, you have this paradigm where we're all storytellers and we all can look at text, and that's, kind of, our common language when we're collaborating around audio and video. And so the creators on this call will know, maybe you'll do an interview with somebody, but if you want to collaborate, maybe you got to transcript of it, and you mark up notes in Google Docs and you structure what you want to say. You're doing that all around text. Anyway.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So here we have this, once every 30 year paradigm shift where content creators are embracing a paradigm they know and love. It's just, instead of going from cutting from razor blades with magnetic tape, and then you have Pro Tools. Now you have a transcript going to an edited transcript that conforms to your audio and video and that's Descript. And so that's really, if I had to summarize, what attracted me to it. It was that user experience paradigm of how simple it is for anybody to get going, let alone the professional content creators, and how much time you can solve.
TJ Bonaventura:
You're very well spoken in how you felt when you first experienced it and how easy it is. For me, it was like, "Holyshit! Something like this exists." I didn't know that editing audio could be this easy. Here at StudioPod, we don't shy away from it. We have a full editing team that we work with, but we also like to get our hands dirty and have our clients get their hands dirty. And Descript is an awesome tool that lets us do it. I guess the question for you is because we have editors that are in it. We have us as producers that are in it. We have our clients who don't know anything about editing in the tool. How would you describe an ideal user or who do you as a power user in your mind?
Jay LeBoeuf:
Well, the ideal user, the answer is yes. I so strongly believe that there's really no reason that someone can't tell their story using Descript. And we have this really powerful group of professional podcasters, people at NPR, and Gimlet, and VICE, and the New York Times, and Al Jazeera and just top podcasts that we're all listening to on a regular basis, these top studios. They are Pro Tools shops and have very rich sound design. And some of those podcasts use Descript, exclusively. Some of them use it for rough edits, some of them use it for daily podcasts. And that is the only way you can get out a daily podcast in a fully remote collaborative way of working.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And so you'd look at those companies and the caliber of editors that are working on it, and you'd think that it's a professional tool. And yet our marketing and many of the YouTube videos that, kind of, really got us on the map are about those people that are like, "Today's the day I'm going to start a podcast." So Julian, maybe that was you. You're just like, "Yeah, today's the day." And to actually have a tool that you can do that, you complete the tutorial and grab a microphone and pull it up and then just realize it's, kind of, to get something on tape. To go from blank canvas to, "Cool, now I have a framework for an episode." It's pretty darn simple. I'm not going to say that nobody's going to listen to it, but at least you're getting rid of that blank canvas problem.
Julian A. Lewis:
Yeah. And the one thing that I want to talk about... I'm glad that you brought up your spots that you have on your website and that are on YouTube because they not only do such a good job of explaining the product, but they also show a diverse set of people that are using the tool, both in race, gender, age. And recently there's an article that came out by The Verge that was talking about the expectation of people being able to use Pro Tools as a barrier to diversifying the industry, because not only is it complicate, but it's also extremely expensive. And so, not only are you providing a tool that's easier to use, but you're also showcasing that, "Hey." Really, anybody can use it.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. And I experienced that when I was on the Pro Tools team and we had launched these certification courses, which you provide a nice level of badging and credibility. But those certification courses were, kind of, becoming for profit colleges in the way that people are incurring intense amount of debts for the promise of securing employment using their Pro Tools 301 skills. And that was never the intent. It was really to just have a bar where people could talk about themselves and have a standard curriculum. So I'll put this out there, when we have a Descript 101, and 201, and 301, those will be free programs really to just gamify the learning experience around it. Not additional revenue generating tool. That's just not cool.
TJ Bonaventura:
And I think the one thing that I love about Descript is, it is really, really easy to use. I remember when I first got my hands on it, I just wanted to learn every little thing that you could do. Everything from recording directly into the application, to exporting different files, to creating audiograms. It was just something that took not a whole lot of time. I did have to dedicate a weekend to it, but nothing compared to what you're speaking about Pro Tools or any do to become an expert. And that's why I think lowering the barrier of entry, what Julian talked about, is so powerful and getting more podcasters out there. Because now, there, you don't have that barrier. You have a lot of opportunity to go ahead and just record and see what you can do and play with it. And you're not going to hit that podfade.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Yeah. It's also a unique moment. I'd say it's not a deep application. You can go through every menu item, pretty quickly. Try doing that with the... So I do video editing with Adobe Premier and wow, if I were to try to go through every menu item and then explain what every setting is... We're really trying to be minimal in what we expose to the user and also keeping up a very rapid pace of innovation, so that way we're only putting in the app, what it absolutely needs and what people need right away.
Jay LeBoeuf:
One of my favorite things that TJ you didn't mention, but maybe I'll introduce you to something new. So there was a good post late last week by James Shield, who works on the stories of Our Times. It's a daily news podcast from The Times of London and the Sunday Times. It basically walks through how they're able to create new stories in Descript, very rapidly using a feature we have, which is called Copy Surrounding Sentence.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So let's say you have all of your interviews that you've recorded over a season, or even over all of your seasons. And you want to create a highlight episode, which is talking around people talking about Spotify. You can literally type in Spotify into the Descript project and it'll pull up all the sentences where someone has said the word Spotify. You can say copy. And then if you click on Copy Surrounding Sentence, that full grammatical sentence, where they're introducing a concept, saying something, is then copied and you can paste all of them. It could be 10, it could be 110. Paste them into a composition. And now you have the source material potentially, for an entire episode on that topic.
TJ Bonaventura:
I used to be a sales engineer in my past life for a couple different companies. And we used to demo products and just be able to create videos or be able to create some sort of audio that explains all the different types of collateral that we as a tech organization had developed. That's just a game changer just like podcasting itself. There's so many use cases for Descript that we love. And that I had no idea about going into this episode, Julian, I don't know about you, but that's just-
Julian A. Lewis II:
Nope.
TJ Bonaventura:
I know we're going to be creating some highlight episodes now.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Love it. So we've talked a lot about the value of Descript and lowering the barrier of entry, making it easy to use, I guess not to try to forecast where the industry is going. I feel like companies like Anchor had tried to do that as well to a certain extent. What's the focus of the company overall and where do you see the continued growth of podcasting being leveraged by a tool like Descript?
Jay LeBoeuf:
Absolutely. First of all, let me zoom out and just talk about... Our mission is to empower storytellers. And so those creatives and those podcasters, we know we have a lot more work to do to make Descript the number one tool of choice for podcasters always. So we're going to stay focused on that for 2021. But a trend in something that it might look like we're adding in new feature just to add new features, but we're building upon what's going on in the industry. Is to really help people repurpose content, and that includes around the video. So, I gave an example earlier around Copy Surrounding Sentence. Imagine you can do that. It works just as well if you had hours and hours and hours of video content, and you copy the video content of that surrounding sentence.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And this is something I think you guys actually do really, really well. You have this content, it's 45 minutes of content or an hour content. This is a moment in time, this is kind of the expensive stuff to get this moment captured down. So we're going to and really want to invest a lot more in helping people realize the potential of repurposing content through audiograms, through making video snippets, sharing things out to their communities, to collaborators, publishing short snippets. There's so many online events and webinars going online that never get redistributed or repurposed as evergreen content because people don't take the time to edit them. It really isn't hard. You just ingest it and then start highlighting the interesting bits. That's really something that I feel passionate about, is to help people repurpose their content.
Julian A. Lewis:
Yeah. And I think exactly with that snippets, we've talked about that on previous episodes, the ability to sit down, have this conversation and then allow for it to have legs beyond just this conversation. Is exactly what we try to have the curious and scrappy podcast or think about. It's like, "This is not just one thing that you have to do and then you have to go do 10 other things, use this to create those 10 other things and allow for you to really make an impact and still have quality content."
Jay LeBoeuf:
Yeah, In the context of every amazing conversation, there's going to be several pull quotes. So why don't we get those out there and why don't we actually do our audience a favor? Because I listen to, and I consume a lot of content, but I don't always have time for the full episode. But maybe if I hear a couple of things exposed to me or I see things visually in my social media feed, then I'll double click into it and engage.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to have a little fun for a second here. Because I'm going to put you on the spot. I feel like you get exposed to a lot of different podcast ideas or different interesting stories of how people are using Descript or potential clients or partners. Can you share some just fun examples of how you've seen clients use Descript?
Jay LeBoeuf:
That's one of those questions you ask, because you're trying to buy yourself a little time and you're hoping people go one direction and then it never works out. So I'll tell you a couple things that... I consider this pretty clever. Let's say you're doing a very factual presentation. It can be a conference presentation, because most academic conferences for example, are live to tape. Everybody has to submit their presentations in advance or it could be a factual podcast. The chance is that when you recorded it, you actually got everything totally right. And you expound it upon everything that really needed the full level of detail. You're never going to get it right.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So this is a good trick. I've seen in a lot of back demo conferences where you record your presentation, it's like a live sync to PowerPoint or something. You record it, bring it to Descript. First thing you do is remove all filler words, second thing you do, remove word gaps. So that way you can actually pause for 10 seconds and not have dead air like now. And that just suddenly vanishes.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So they do those two steps and then you review it and you realize where people are lost or where something needs clarification. Now you double click in, you select one of our Stock Voices. So these are some of the 10 free overdub voices. They're synthesized high quality voices. And you literally type in the explanatory text that you want to be read during that point in the presentation.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So it could be like, "What Jay's really talking about here is that the ADVAC is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you put that in and it's in a different voice. So it sounds like you have a narrator who's coming in and clarifying moments in the storyline. And then that actually becomes a theme where this person that's perhaps slightly irreverent, dry voice comes in and corrects you. That's been something I've seen actually in a number of conference presentations and also in some... There's some news podcast or science news podcasts where they'll use one of our Stock Voices and come in and, kind of, correct you.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So I'm just going to jump in real quick and say that I'm angry with TJ now, for the second time today. The first time is because he set an alarm for our podcast going alive at what? 2:30 AM. And then I had the 10 minute alert before it. So I've been up since one o'clock in the morning or whatever time that alarm went off. But number two, I actually, probably three months ago, did a guest speaking appearance where they wanted me to tape it, which I was just... For me, I love being live and having conversations where I could feel people. And I was filler word to the nth degree. But Descript allowed for me to sound so polished. I just wish I had that voice that was narrating me and announcing me and all of that stuff that I could have thrown in there.
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's, kind of, good because now you're writing, when you're writing a script, you're just writing in your own voice, not a lot of us are writing screenplays. But that's how I tend to do if I'm invited to do a talk live to tape where if you guys submitted a list of questions in advance and you were like, "Yeah, just record your answers." I'd record everything spontaneously, and then I'd go in, clean it up. And then I might actually use either my own OverDope voice to fix, fix my stuff or I'd use one of these Stock Voices to, kind of, be my sidekick. That's, kind of, one of the more creative things I've seen.
Jay LeBoeuf:
One of the more audacious things I've seen has been being invited to jump into a podcast that's being worked on by Pushkin team or the NPR teams, and you see seven people in a podcast at a time. There's 13 gig of searchable content in here. That's when you start sweating and you know this is a professional tool. There's amazing world class engineers working on the scenes behind this. But at the same time, you're like, "Oh boy, I hope this works."
Jay LeBoeuf:
And I'm actually doing something similarly crazy. So I teach a music business class at Stanford every year and I have 50 students creating season two of the Drop The Mic Podcast, which is a music industry conversations podcast. So we have 50 students, you using Descript. They're collaborating in ways that we have never designed the tools to be used for, and that's just really great to see native storytellers who do not know the rules. They do not know how clunky it should be. And they're just using it, again, like Google Docs.
TJ Bonaventura:
I love it. I think just where I go for the curious and scrappy podcaster or our audience here is, creating a podcast that has narration can be an awfully large lift and expensive lift. And so what Jay just explained was that you can come in, record your audio, edit your audio, add in narration and publish it potentially, all in one day, all within one tool. Just let that sink in for a second. That is phenomenal, it's amazing, it's game changing. I don't know. Julian, what do you think?
Julian A Lewis II:
Yeah, exactly. For me, kind of, taking a step back a few years when I first started podcasting again, I don't even know all the bells and whistles and I'm glad that I didn't at the time because I think TJ and I are building a good thing as hopefully helping people get acclimated with things like Descript. But you address the curious and scrappy podcaster and even the individual that works at a corporate company who is one person on a sales enablement team or on a team that's focused on internal communications. You can use a tool like this and going back to what Jay was talking about earlier, you can use a tool like this to create the main piece of content, but then you can also leverage it to create the micro content to get your employees engaged. So it's not just for the podcaster who is broadcasting externally. It's also for those individuals who don't have a large team that want to do it internally.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And Julian, can I jump in with one thing?
Julian A Lewis II:
Please.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Another yes ends to that, and this gets into making these tools... If you're going to do this work, it's really important that you make these tools inclusive and accessible also by adding subtitles and captions. And I'm sure we all emphasize how, "Okay, if you're going to put something on social media, it has to lead with the visuals, you have to burn in the subtitles, which you can do with Descript with one click." All good, but honestly, to just put a podcast out there without a rich transcript that people can digest and without the option to have a playable transcript, so people can listen to it and experience it in a way that they're comfortable with it. Whether they're a different style of learner, whether it's just that are searchable for them or whether they're deaf in hard of hearing.
Jay LeBoeuf:
I think it's just really important to make your content accessible. Yes, it's awesome that there are incredible marketing benefits and now you're creating different styles of content too, but it, previously, was something that people would have to send out to a caption house where you send it to a professional transcriber and then you'd have this thing where only the top hundred-ish podcasts would have that material available to it. And when you're working with a tool that's revolving around the transcript as its core DNA, the benefit of that is, you have no excuse to not make everything accessible.
Julian A. Lewis II:
I love that. And what we had to say to The Vernon a while, back from more recreative, where we talked about accessibility. And for a lot of people, it's like, "Okay, over time, we'll get there." But exactly to what you said, Jay, the ability to leverage a tool that will just help you get there right away is key to making sure that not just audio learners will access it, but people who want to read it or people who want to experience it in a different way. Yeah. So, that's so important.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to talk real quickly about best practices. We don't have to go too much into this, but I think one thing that we have seen, and it's just the benefit of Descript is that, because you can now listen and read at the same time, we tend to see that our clients tend to get very critical about themselves and the filler words, and crutch words, and over editing. And we always tend to let them feel like, "It's okay. You sometimes want to have some filler words in there. It's okay to be overly critical, but don't over edit." So coming from your background in Pro Tools, and now seeing this paradigm shift with Descript, what recommendations or best practices would you say for those who are seeing the over editing happen within the application?
Jay LeBoeuf:
The lazy thing that I sometimes do, and I probably said this a bunch, was like, "Finish recording and then just remove filler words." That's like slapping on an Instagram filter and just being done with it. So that is a tool, that is a preset, that is something that you can do. But that's what really differentiates people who are real editors and crafts people. Is, you take the time to figure out where does it need to be in there? Where does it not be, need to be in there? Where do those long pauses, actually add something? Like what I just did. It actually adds something, it adds a moment of tension. It brings the listener in a little bit more. So if you're trying to crank out like a radio spot and then this advert has to be 30 seconds long, by all means, get rid of the filler words, get rid of the word gaps, speed it up by one and a half times. You're good to go.
Jay LeBoeuf:
But if you're actually trying to tell a story, think about who your audience is, think about what the person is trying to convey. And yeah, when I do intros for this music industry podcast, of course it's short, it's punchy. If there's a filler word in there, it's gone because that's just going to distract the listener. But once we get into some real conversations, especially as they get a more emotionally rich, I back off on doing that. And I just, kind of, keep it raw, authentic and pure. I don't know, that's just like taste, so that the Pro Tools analogy... Most of my background is on the music recording side and Pro Tools has this tool called Beat Detective.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Beat Detective can look at your drumming and... I'm a drummer. So I'm critical of people going in and tightening up my timing, making everything sound like robotic. And the default is to just go through and all of your stuff sounds like mechanical, super robotic. And then you realize that the song has lost its soul. It basically just sounds like you went to a drum machine, hooked up a couple keyboards and just hit play and cranked it out, but it needs to breathe a little bit more. So, that's where the art is. And what I love is now that we can make it such that, "Yeah, with one click, you can fix everything." But with a few more clicks, you can also back it off a little bit and start inserting some feel.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Yeah, that's an absolutely great point in terms of making sure that you are listening to everyone and TJ always provides this to our clients and making sure that there's that continuity there. If you remove it and it doesn't make sense, or it sounds choppy, or it sounds mechanical, so to speak, just keep it in there. It's natural. And so I think I just did, "I'm", right? So, hopefully we'll leave that in there. But no, I think that's really important in terms of making it feel like it's naturally authentic because at the end of the day, you're communicating to other humans and they're not perfect either.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Right, people aren't... We were just talking about publishing the transcripts. But you're not publishing the article and the blog as it's first piece of content. If you're publishing the audio first, then just concentrate on that. The fact that you can edit using the text is great. Because you can just ignore the Waveform. The Waveform is probably the 10th thing you should be looking at on the Descript screen. But it's just there in case you need it as a further reference and to do some fine tuning, the other advantage of being on the transcript.
Jay LeBoeuf:
And this is also true for video. When you think about video, both audio and video, you can only review them at one times speed, maybe one and a half times speed. And so you have all this raw footage and you basically just have to sit there and start tagging it, and logging it, and cutting it. And you have to stop every single time you have to do that. So what's great about text, you really can just eyeball and search. And if you guys, through this conversation, you might have been jotting down some cool keywords that I said that could be your pull quotes. And all you have to do is search those keywords later, get those pull quotes pulled out and you could have those online as we're doing this episode, whereas you've never had that capability before to edit content faster than real time.
TJ Bonaventura:
I want to switch gears for a second. You've been with Descript for a year and a now you seen the company grow, you guys just raised another round of funding, which is super exciting. Congrats on that. But I want to talk about what you've seen from an evolution standpoint within not so much the tool itself or the company itself. Just overall like the industry. What gets you excited to continue going forward with the business, with the application and potential opportunities that you see within the industry overall?
Jay LeBoeuf:
So when I came in about a year ago, I was familiar with podcasting. I was familiar with the content creation aspect of it. One of the things that's been the biggest surprise to me... And I was just how talking about this to somebody this morning and kind of blowing their minds, is how throughout the course of COVID, as we've all been working from home, we're seeing not only this huge growth in people getting into content creation for the first time. So creating their first podcast, creating their first YouTube video, just getting their audio and video material out there because they're home, now. We have time to download and play around with tools. So we see this on one side, huge growth of creatives on the beginner side, but the business use cases are, kind of, crazy.
Jay LeBoeuf:
So if you would've told me that I'd spend a whole bunch of time talking to people that worked at Shopify and that they would have people doing internal comms and people doing training and learning podcast and people who are creating source material for their end users and that this isn't handled just by one content creation and team, now, because everybody's distributed.
Jay LeBoeuf:
It's, kind of, your department's job to create its own content. So each department in these companies have become many podcast studios. And people who are used to just be humble, old managers are now head of creative. That's pretty cool. And from a business opportunity, that's great. Because it means the total addressable market of the number of creatives that you can serve with your tool is really expanded upon because every business person now, kind of, has to be a creator in charge of their own messaging and communication style. But just as a fan of the medium, I'm also excited that so many more people are getting into it now.
Julian A. Lewis II:
I absolutely love that you said that because I'm an adjunct at the university of San Francisco and one of my former students, he started a podcast. And we helped him get started, but he's been doing phenomenal on his own, but he paid it back by having TJ and I on his podcasts. And he asked a great question. He's like, "When do you feel like corporations have really leaned into podcasting?" And what I said was when you sign up on your first day or you get there on your first day and they hand you your laptop, your badge, and then they also hand you a mic. And now, as we're having this conversation, it's like, "And a tool like Descript." So you can do exactly that.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Because being that we coming from a sales background, the ability to create content for your clients, to communicate things to your clients, or even to being a sales manager to my team and having pitch competitions or something of that effect where it could be more engaging and then live in a place where people are going to want to go back and learn from it, is phenomenal.
Julian A. Lewis II:
So yeah, I really love the direction in which this industry is going because it's not just about creating the next True crime podcast. There's so many different applications from a content creation standpoint.
TJ Bonaventura:
It's also great to hear that an industry leader like Shopify is leveraging podcasts internally at the department level. I think, we still have yet to see that domino fall to make it an industry standard across all organizations to create internal podcasts. But I think I'm right there with you, Jay, it's going to be a massive, just waterfall, of organizations, departments wanting to create quick and easy podcasts without a lot of lift and Descript is going to be an awesome tool for them to do so.
Jay LeBoeuf:
I agree. And it also means for the people listening to this, the curious and scrappy podcasters who are maybe working somewhere else right now, this is not your day job. This is your call to action. Think of a way that you can actually, maybe, take some of your executives or your managers messaging and offer to help turn their one hour weekly Zoom digressions, and just make a little highlight real out of it. It doesn't have to be your own original creation, just, kind of, taking something down and, kind of, distilling out the core messaging in from it. Maybe add some intro music to it. If you want to do a little video, it's really quick to just add a logo, add some, some good stuff in there, publish your creation. There's so many ways you could actually incorporate this into your daily life. That's kind of the fun part. We don't have to do this as our professional career. This could be your hobby within your day job too.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Yeah. And as long as you keep it as a hobby, we're here to help you. Yeah.
TJ Bonaventura:
Probably, our last question was going to be, what is your advices to the curious and scrapy podcaster? But you kind of lean into it right there already. You, kind of, said, as you mentioned, "Find a way to use it, find a way to get into podcasting hobby you'd like." But I guess with that, is there any closing thoughts that you would give or anything else that you would like to mention to the audience?
Jay LeBoeuf:
We were talking about repurposing content, kind of, near the beginning of this. That's something that if we all reflect on it, I think we can all find material that we've either previously done or that we could get some more mileage from. That's not being lazy. It's about being frugal, and resourceful, and up cycling content into new things. That's one thing. And the other thing I'd probably end with is something I share with all the students I have right now on this podcast. I do not give them any resources for bringing in guests for our podcast. All I do is, I tell them to dream big. And I tell them this is curly fries for life. And then they look at me and they say, "What the hell does that mean?" And I tell them, "All right." There was this little newspaper story.
Jay LeBoeuf:
This is a true story of a third grader who received an assignment from their teacher. And the assignment was "Okay, we're going to write a letter this week to someone asking for whatever you want." And so, you would think that this teacher's giving them the assignments so they can learn how to write a business letter, so they can use the U.S mail system, so they can have professional correspondence. But the real impact from it came from what happened as the results. Out of this entire class, something like 70% of the people that were of these third graders got exactly what they wanted. Their biggest wishes, kind of, came true. So they got autographs in the mail. They got free stuff sent to them. And my favorite one was a student writing into Arby's and saying, "I want curly fries for life." And Arby's being like, "Done."
Jay LeBoeuf:
So they create a certificate, send it for their local, small town, Michigan Arby's that they can take in anytime. And for this third grader. Well, of course she wanted a curly fries for life. What is to stop her from asking for it. So I tell this to these Stanford students who often feel like they didn't even know where to begin. And we just say, "Just ask." So go for the biggest guest you can, worst that's going to happen is they'll say no. And just apply that thinking and go for your curly fries for life all the time.
Julian A. Lewis II:
That is absolutely phenomenal advice. And I'm definitely stealing that to give to my students at USF.
TJ Bonaventura:
Anything you want to plug about Descript, how to find You.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Really, only other thing to add is that Descript's available completely for free to get started.
TJ Bonaventura:
All right, there you go, everyone. So go to descript.com to sign up for freeing and just play with it.
Julian A. Lewis II:
Jay, thank you so much for all the knowledge that you dropped on the podcast. The curious and scrappy podcasters are definitely wiser for this episode. We really appreciate the time.
Jay LeBoeuf:
Thanks for having me guys.
TJ Bonaventura:
Every episode of the PodOn Podcast is produced and edited by StudioPod Media. For more information about our work and our clients go to studiopodsf.com.
Julian A Lewis II:
Shout out to Gary Oakland for the fire track.
TJ Bonaventura:
Gary O.