Brad Hill: Eric Nuzum, I’m so glad to see you. Thank you for making time to do this.

Eric Nuzum: Oh, it is my pleasure.

Brad Hill: Good, you’re the co-founder of Magnificent Noise, an elite podcast creative production company. And we’re going to talk about that for sure. But first, I want to backtrack many years to your NPR period, if you don’t mind. You were with NPR for 10 years at the beginning of your audio career from 2004 to 2014, and you were a Director of Programming and Acquisitions. That’s a fascinating span of time for our conversation. The first generation of podcasting started in 2005, that’s when it was basically invented. How did podcasting start to creep into your consciousness and workflow when you were at NPR?

Eric Nuzum: Podcasting was actually invented in 2001. The first podcast feed was put out the day of George W. Bush’s inauguration, but it took a couple of years before anybody really kind of figured out what to do with the technology.

Brad Hill: Okay. I’m glad for the history correction.

Eric Nuzum: It’s quite alright, because a lot of people get this wrong, and there’s people who argue as to what the date is, and I think it’s pretty clear the first time someone put out a podcast feed that someone else could download and listen to, that was a podcast and that counts.

Brad Hill: I’m not going to argue.

Eric Nuzum: So it wasn’t until a couple of years later that a German named Chris Lydon who had hosted a show on WBUR for a number of years, and then when that ended, started a fellowship at Harvard and met the guy, Dave Winer, who invented podcasting. And Dave’s like, “You should try making a podcast.” And he’s like, “I have no idea what you mean.” So they set up this really kind of ragtag operation to record an interview to an mp3 file, and they did that, and that was arguably among the first show like podcasts where someone had actually had a beginning, a middle, an end. It was structured like, as we think of a radio show, and that actually happened in 2004. And then because Chris had connections to public radio, it started to bubble inside of public radio that there was this thing called podcasting and a number of member stations and a number of shows that NPR distributed, and my role at NPR I was working with, at that time, was working with a lot of the shows that NPR distributed, but didn’t create like Car Talk, which is an independent production, On the Media from WNYC, Fresh Air with Terry Gross from WHYY and they were all starting to…

Brad Hill: Still ongoing shows including Car Talk, mysteriously.

Eric Nuzum: Mysteriously, yes, they’re all still going. But they were starting to experiment with podcasts. Specifically, On the Media was an example of a very early, Science Friday with Ira Flatow was a very early proponent of podcasting. And it became very clear to me, it showed up on my radar because a lot of the shows I was working with were playing around on the space and saying, NPR needs to get their head around this and needs to get involved in this before it’s too late. And that’s kind of how it all kind of showed up. It was weird timing that I was… It didn’t feel like a big deal at the time, but I was at NPR and had been there for less than a year when we kind of decided to pursue podcasting. And that’s kind of crazy to me to look back at that. At the time, it just didn’t feel like a big deal. It just felt like something we’re going to try and experiment with.

Brad Hill: I was going to ask about that, what did it seem to mean to you during those early pre-serial years? Did you see it adding up to anything?

Eric Nuzum: Oh, it added up to a lot. You could see its potential really early, you just didn’t know when it was Brad Hill actually or how it’s going to break through and become much more of a mainstream thing. And if you look back at the evolution of the Internet itself, the Internet did not become popular when it was available.

Brad Hill: No, it took decades.

Eric Nuzum: It took decades, and even when it was starting to bubble into the mainstream in the early mid-90s, even then it was not a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal until you could go buy a device and everything you needed to access the Internet was on there.

Brad Hill: Let me tell you a story about that, just to emphasize this. Not meaning to swing the conversation over to me, but this is pretty interesting, I was the national media spokesperson for a device called Web TV. My job was to go around the country going on TV and radio, evangelizing Web TV, the product and explaining why people needed it, which was, it was a lot easier than a computer and much less expensive. This was 1996 when people were just beginning to buy computers for the actual purpose of going on to the Internet, and when I talked to program hosts and journalists, that idea was often scorned. People didn’t understand even in 1996 that regular folks might want to go online and I got questions like, why would anyone want to be on the Internet? All this just supports your point that things do take a long time.

Eric Nuzum: It did, it did. No, that’s a great story actually of people who are not understanding technology. A technologist named Neil Postman once wrote something that stuck with me my entire life, I read it when I was in college, and he was talking about technology way before the Internet. He was like, “Technology is great when it solves a problem.” And that to me is when you’re looking at the technology, you’re looking at its features and its… It’s features like what it does. You’re not thinking about the benefits, which is what problems it solves. And I think that you look at the history of internet innovation, look at the history of podcasting, the ability to do it has never been the driver, what you can accomplish with it becomes the driver and when people…

Eric Nuzum: People often misattribute, I’ve heard you talk about this before when you’re talking with Carrie Hoffman, misattribute what happened in 2014, thinking that Serial blew the world of podcasting open. And not to take anything away from Serial, because it was the right kind of innovation at right time. But six weeks before Serial debuted, macOS, or excuse me, the iPhone OS came out, that put that podcast app on your phone without you having to try. And it went from nine clicks in an app download to listen to podcasting to two clicks and no app download. One to click through and one to hit play, and you’re listening to a podcast.

Brad Hill: That’s right. The ease of use, man. Ease of use means so much, and Carrie did bring up that too.

Eric Nuzum: Yes, no, that is the thing that happened. Was that suggesting that Serial would not have been a hit? Not at all. But the hit it was had less to do… It was the perfect moment in time where technology kind of met editorial innovation. It was the perfect connection.

Brad Hill: Well, speaking of that, do you think ease of use is still a problem with broad podcast discovery and uptake?

Eric Nuzum: No, I think that if I was… It depends who I would be advising. If I was advising a podcast platform, I would tell them to figure out who… Not everybody, you’re not going to serve everybody. That’s a very old way of thinking. Who are you trying to serve? And then how do you come up with a way, probably a mixture of algorithm, but a human component as well, of connecting people to content? That’s different than discoverability. Discoverability is basically unlocking how I can get my content in front of people, and that’s not really, that’s not an effective way to look at marketing podcasts. And if I was saying to creators, the single biggest problem creators have now is coming up with a scheme to connect to audiences to monetize. And the ones who do well with it are the ones who think about it really early on, and it’s not an afterthought, or we’re launching in two months, let’s hire a publicist that’s just… I think everybody lops towards discoverability, because discoverability is solving our problem as an industry. What’s a frictionless process to get in front of an audience? And that’s not a listeners problem. A listener doesn’t give a hoot about our ability to distribute things and monetize things and build an audience. They don’t care.

Eric Nuzum: They only care about what’s in it for them. And when you look at Neil Postman’s “technology is a problem”, he actually had a multi-part test for new technologies. One is, what problem is it solving? Two is, whose problem is it? Whose problem is that thing? And the third is, does the solution create more problems than the original? Create more problems than it solves. Or what new problem… Actually, to be honest, his test, the third part of this test was, what new problem am I creating when I’m solving the old one? And if you look like even in podcasting at like exclusive content deals, for example, everyone makes big money about all the big money going into that. Who wins in that? Who wins in that? It’s not the creator oddly, they get a big check, but in a couple of years they’re not going to have an audience anymore, because putting behind that paywall really decimates in a literal sense, their ability to build audience. They got a big check, but in three years, will they… Ask all these people who sign these big deals, would they renew their deal, and I think if you get them to give you honest answers, it’s not quite what you think. Wouldn’t expect.

Brad Hill: Have you asked?

Eric Nuzum: I can’t comment on things.

Brad Hill: I’m not asking who you asked!

Eric Nuzum: Yes, I have.

Brad Hill: I do get your point. So to drive deeper into that thought, what do you think of Apple subscriptions as a product and the consumer value it delivers, and what value does it deliver to podcasters?

Eric Nuzum: I have a newsletter that I write every couple of weeks–

Brad Hill: Oh, we’re going to talk about it later.

Eric Nuzum: Okay, great, well, an upcoming episode of that or a dispatch in that newsletter is looking at this issue from a very personal perspective of the show that we launched this year. And I would say if I had to summarize my thinking about subscriptions, I think directionally, it is absolutely the right move for everyone involved. It’s the right move for the creator, it’s the right move for the audience. It’s actually even the right move for platforms. Anything that unlocks diversified revenue is good for creators, right? The problem with it is that I have experienced, and I don’t know, I’m going to find out between now and whenever I finish that newsletter thing if this is unusual, is that the consumer doesn’t really understand what we’re doing with subscriptions. They get really lost in it. They don’t understand the value equation.

Brad Hill: Is that because you’re taking a product which is traditionally free and asking for money?

Eric Nuzum: Partially. We’ve had a lot of feedback on subscriptions that people are upset with us because they don’t want to pay to listen while you can listen for free. In our world, a subscription gets you early access and ad free.

Brad Hill: So nothing really changes, there are just additional benefits for those who are attracted to them?

Eric Nuzum: Yet if you’re not subscribing, you see the content that someone else is going to get for free early or get… Excuse me. When you are a free listener, you see what the subscriber is getting and when they’re getting it, and you’re a little miffed that you don’t get it. Even though they’re paying for it. Right? And that does not build. I think the bottom line is there’s a lot of… It’s just an amazing amount of potential when you can better connect to audiences, it’s not just the money that changes hands and deepens the relationship, but at the same time, we’re way ahead of our consumers are, and I think that that’s something we have to figure out.

Brad Hill: Yes, that’s a good point. I have an amusing story about subscriptions. This was a few years ago. I’m not going to mention the executive I was talking to or the podcast company he represented. It was a network which was an early mover and podcast subscriptions where the ads are removed and you get the show a week early. He told me that they got complaints from subscribers that the ads were removed because the host read ads were so entertaining and really part of the show, so they missed hearing those ads.

Eric Nuzum: I’m sure there are people like that, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t care about ads. It’s just about one out of five people do enough that they would pay, and so if 20% of your audience is interested, then that’s your goal for your subscription.

Brad Hill: Oh, is that a broad metric across subscriptions generally?

Eric Nuzum: I think… Well, I don’t know, I think National Public Media, published some information a couple of years ago that… Saying four out of five people don’t mind advertising, which I then flipped around and said that means one out of five do, which is great in both directions. It’s great. If you could get 20% of the subscriber to almost any podcast to subscribe, give you a couple of bucks a month, it’ll be a game changer.

Brad Hill: Alright, now…

Eric Nuzum: We’ve been all over the place!

Brad Hill: I know we’re supposed to be tracking through your career and we’re going to resume that now.

Eric Nuzum: We’ve actually gone from 2005 to 2022 and now we’re going to circle back somewhere right?

Brad Hill: Yes to 2015 when you joined Audible, and you were there for three or four years. You were the SVP of original content and development, that must have been an interesting and intensely creative time. Many people associate Audible with audio books, but it became an audio programming entity more generally than that. During your time there, how much did podcasting play into your work?

Eric Nuzum: That’s interesting. When I worked at Audible and I was there for about three and a half years, there was a constant existential wrestling match with podcasting that Audible had been very early, very early and time shifted audio delivery. Even shows, I known Fresh Air did this, and I think, This American Life did it with them, of where you could purchase digital files of shows way before there was ever any discussion of podcasting or a kind of subscription automated delivery. And so in that sense they were way ahead, in fact, I think there’s a number of people at Audible who’d like to claim they invented podcasting. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, but that’s not to diminish the fact that they saw the value in digital delivery of spoken word content, including things that were from the radio. And along that journey too, they made a number of things themselves, but they were kind of ad hoc here and there, they would do things, and never really had been able to… Until I arrived there, kind of gotten it together to have a systemic and line of their business, which was focused on things that felt like podcasting, and yet they also, I think, felt a great deal of existential dread about podcasting as many people do in the audio space it’s not confined to them.

Eric Nuzum: If I was a satellite broadcaster or a terrestrial broadcaster, I would look at it the same way that they did. It’s like, what is this Brad Hill do to me? And so our efforts there were brought in to… I think it was the fairest way to say is to build a bridge between the world of audio books and the world of podcasting, and which economically function entirely differently from each other. And it’s kind of hard to figure out what metrics to use in that. We were so kind of trying to figure this out, that we deliberately didn’t use the word podcasting, but then we would talk to users and they would say, “Oh, that’s podcasting,” right?

Eric Nuzum: And so I think now Audible is a bit more open-minded, at least what I’m seeing publicly, that they’re much more open-minded to embracing that term, and that podcasting now appear inside of the Audible app, and I think that’s actually an incredibly healthy thing for them, but… We, during our tenure there, lived out some of that existential dilemma of what is podcasting to us, how do we play in that space, how do we use that as a space to build bridges for… A two way bridge to bring people from podcasting into more audio book-like experiences and also, how do we… With the current customer base that we had, how do we allow them to go into the podcast universe without having to leave us to do it? They can still say in our experience, because people not liking to download lots of apps, if they could do that inside of the Audible app, that would be fine.

Eric Nuzum: So we did lots of things while we were there over the three and a half years, it’s kind of hard to summarize, but I think the primary one was really trying to find out that… Or play out the idea that these are not two binary spaces that you could find a way to create things that were kind of almost in some degree blended, taking successful audiobook artists and create things that kind of sounded like podcasting, but weren’t really podcasts. And try to create audio experiences, which would have been very difficult to make work in the podcast space, but they were original and were not based on pre-existing intellectual material. And so we got into a lot of things very early on there that are becoming much more mainstream now, such as health and wellness content, meditation content, all those kind of things we were playing with way back then that have become fairly mainstream now.

Brad Hill: Alright, let’s get into the present tense. Now, you are with a company you co-founded, Magnificent Noise, which is probably the coolest name in the world by the way. And you are an elite podcast creation and production house.

Eric Nuzum: You said that word earlier. I’m not sure I would say elite. It’s… We do a very specific kind of production, and we have a track record because of our tenure in doing it. That I think puts us in the kind of a little bit of a different category than most production houses.

Brad Hill: Alright, there you go. Your clients include New York Times, ESPN, Ted, and many others. Let’s start, if you would, by telling me the roles you have with these enterprise clients. Does it start at the conception of a podcast? Do you consult midstream? How does that work?

Eric Nuzum: It’s all over the place. We work with a number of companies and organizations. And on one hand, we will do consulting with them. In fact many of our production relationships started off as consulting relationships. Where we tried to help someone figure something out, and along the way as we did, we helped… We decided, “Oh, we want to help make this thing.”

Brad Hill: Let me pause you there. I know you can’t give me details, but somebody comes to you with a podcast conception or maybe an ongoing show and wants something figured out. Can you give me an example?

Eric Nuzum: A couple of things. We’ve worked with a number of companies that produce audio or podcasts when trying to expand what they do or elevate it into a different place, or try just to find something… Try to do something that is a little different and they’re very good at doing something, but maybe not good at expanding that. And so we kind of help them figure some of that out. What’s a lot more common is that some of them will come to us and say, “We have a lot of assets, but we don’t know how to make a podcast from those assets. So help us figure that out.” Like a great one that just got announced I can talk about publicly is we have a show coming out with the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer called Immaterial. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has never done a podcast before, and yet they have millions of objects, they have 17 different museums, 1600 staff. There’s an armorist at the MET on staff. Someone who is just making armor and printing… There are chemists, there’s a whole laboratory in there.

Eric Nuzum: [laughter] It’s a nutty, nutty, expensive, crazy place in the best way. They have people who are the leading world experts on so many different facets of art. And in doing this… And so they were kind of overwhelmed. Like we haven’t done a podcast because we can’t figure out what to do. [laughter] In those kind of situations our advice is, “Well, let’s find something really small, really niche and very specific, and let’s do something that only you could do.”

Eric Nuzum: And so we’re doing a podcast with them, called Immaterial. Comes up this summer. Which is just looking at the materials that are used in art, alloys, concrete, paper, linen, all these different things. And looking at the material, because everyone focuses on the artwork, but the material in the artwork tells them a very fascinating story. And only place in the world that could take this thing on, this audacious thing is the MET. And so that thinking of what can only we do is… That’s the question, which drives a lot of our work. And in that case, we help them think it up and we got really excited about it, we said, “How about we make it with you?” And so our staff is producing that show, and they’re elbow to elbow with a small team at the MET.

Brad Hill: Do you have production facilities there? Is there a “there” there? Do you have a building? Do you have offices?

Eric Nuzum: Yes, I live in Montclair, New Jersey. And I spend an awful lot of time in this very room. In the attic of my house. If I look out that window, I can see the skyline of Manhattan. And a block from Penn Station, we have an office that we’ve had since before the pandemic, we’ve kept it and has a studio in it. And it’s a fun place to go, which is focused on work, which is great. But yes, we do have… We have 11 full-time people that are spread out all over. About half of them are in the New York area, and occasionally we’re all together in that office.

Brad Hill: Alright, cool. What’s your day-to-day like?

Eric Nuzum: [laughter] It’s interesting because if you look at Magnificent Noise, we deliberately did not want to be big. We wanted to… We intend to grow, but we’re taking a very slow trajectory of it. Mostly because when we were at Audible, my co-founder was also with me at Audible and worked with me at NPR as well. And we had just gotten off this hamster wheel at Amazon and Audible of let’s do 40 things this year. And we’re like… We were putting things out in the world that I hadn’t seen or heard since we green-lit them, and I’m like, “I hope this is good.” Not everything, but there were things that were coming out that I just didn’t have much hand on. So we said when we start, lets…

Eric Nuzum: Let’s not put anything out in the world that you or I being Jesse and myself. One of us has to have a hand in it and making sure it can be good. And so a lot of my day-to-day is articulating that idea from very unromantic things, like finding a producer in Rapa Nui, which we know is Easter Island to record an interview, like I’ve gotta go find someone to do that, to editing scripts or giving feedback on things like, if you look at today, I got up, I wrote an article that’s going to be coming out in a public radio magazine or finished an article, I edited an episode and I listened to another one that I hadn’t heard in a while and just got sound design and mixed, I wanted to give notes on that mix, and then I’m also working on a deal for a new show.

Eric Nuzum: So it’s the high things. It’s like any small business, you’re also the IT guy, and the janitor, and the HR department. I do all that. So does Jesse, but also… When we started Magnificent Noise, I had a couple objectives for myself in addition to the ones that Jesse and I share. And one of them was that in the world of podcasting, which is growing so fast and there are so many people flooding into podcasting, even at the executive level, the one thing that makes me different than other executives is I actually know how to make something. I know how to technically make it operationally, I know how to editorially make it. I know how to make things better that are already good, how to make them better. And I just want to do that for a while. That’s like what I want to focus on. I’ll go back to some big company at some point in the future, but I just want to make things for a while, and so Magnificent Noise is really kind of focused on just doing the stuff we love to do, that’s really the guiding principle of it is. If we’re going to spend all this time working, we might as well do things we like with people we like.

Brad Hill: Alongside of that, you have your thought leadership, and I don’t know whether you like that phrase or not, but that’s what I’m applying to you.

Eric Nuzum: I have my loud voice about thoughts, but I don’t know if that’s leadership.

Brad Hill: You’re a megaphone about thoughts! You’re an original thinker for sure, certainly a provocative one, always seeking to identify and evangelize true and sometimes hidden values of podcasting and podcast creation. That’s how I see it. You like to debunk truisms. A lot of this is expressed through your public talks and also your newsletter, it’s called Audio Insurgent and everybody should be reading it. I want to bring up a couple of examples and see if I can get you to hold forth on them. One is, you recently said, “Don’t be boring.” That’s good advice, but what is the exact problem with boringness in podcasting?

Eric Nuzum: Boring to me happens most often when you assume people are more interested than they are or that, “Oh, this is a boring section, but then the next section is great,” or this is 45 minutes, it really is 35 good minutes, but I don’t have the time to cut it down.

Brad Hill: I think we’re all familiar with that.

Eric Nuzum: It’s the typical response from any editor of, “This is great. Can we make it shorter?” And the answer is almost always yes. But kind of that relentless tenacious pursuit of making something really good and not settling for okay. I always tell people that the worst thing you’ll ever hear me say, worse than “This is terrible” is, “It’s fine.” Fine to me is the lowest form of okay.

Brad Hill: Because it’s just like everything else.

Eric Nuzum: It’s just that. Who cares? Who cares? If I hear something that captures me, I can tell you where I was when I heard it. I can tell you that after hearing it, told five people about it that day. And I want everything that we make to be a candidate for that kind of a reaction from somebody. And you have to look at if that’s the goal, what has to happen in order for that to… What has to happen in that episode? And I take a very Hemingway approach to things of if something doesn’t need to be there, why is it there? And if you… And the best way to increase your average is to get rid of the stuff that doesn’t get a very good score. And I think that applies, and I think that the things that separate things from being good and great are that tenacity of, I’m just not going to let a soft moment into this thing.

Brad Hill: In the first show of this series, I asked Tom Webster what he’d say to a starting podcaster who asked him for advice. Tom’s answer was realistic to the point of pessimism. He certainly said, “Don’t do it for the money.” You’ve gone a step further saying, “Don’t be a podcaster.” Could you unpack that?

Eric Nuzum: Yes, it seems like it’s a flip comment, but it’s actually I’m quite literal about it that I still have a lot of conversations with people in broadcasting who are still in broadcasting, who feel very resentful about podcasting and very resentful about Spotify, and very resentful that these things have happened that have disrupted what their… The work they do or the position they felt they were occupying in the world. And if you’re standing still, you can’t expect the world to stand still with you. This world is still going to move forward, and if the world’s going to move forward why not move with it? That kind of… Everyone who has ever worked in radio has that feeling of their heart beating in their throat when they weren’t touching a control surface, a mixing board, turning the pots to bring something up or to play something, and to share something with people. Everyone has that story, and those moments happen in other ways now, but they still happen. Sometimes I wake up in the morning when we’ve released an episode I’m really excited about, and I look at the download count, I think wow, 10,000 people have heard that this morning already. That’s a thrill, and…

Eric Nuzum: And so when you are a radio broadcaster your world is confined to that and you don’t get to have any of those moments as they materialize in other places. And the reason I say don’t be a podcaster, don’t just be a podcaster, because something is going to come along in a couple of years, that will disrupt podcasting where the podcasting has disrupted other things, and if you are a podcaster only, you’re going to miss out on that. And so I think that it really is a matter of, don’t limit yourself to a technology or to a platform or to a specific expression of what you do, where the listener… I’ve always been very listener-centric in both my creative approach and my thinking of what’s in it for the listener, what do they want, what do they need? And that they are the king, not me, I serve them. And that as a public radio, I think playing out in my life, but that really is the way I look at things. And if that’s the case, where are they going? And how can I be there, too?

Eric Nuzum: And then when you see something like Club House happened or Twitter spaces, you’re not saying, “Oh my God, here’s something that’s going to disrupt our podcasting.” You’re like, “No, I’m the first one in the door. I’m going to define that space because I’m going to go there, there are people there, and if I talk about… I make podcasts about Legos or something, I don’t know, whatever it is. I’m going to go to Club House and I’m going to have a conversation about Legos there, I’m going to be the person, and it doesn’t matter what platform it’s on, I am the person who knows about this and cares about this and leads this community wherever it is.” So I think that’s probably a very long version of the answer.

Brad Hill: Yes, I like it. I’ll look for your Legos podcast later. One more from audio insurgent for you, podcasters are not in the audio business.

Eric Nuzum: That’s true. They’re in the community business. I think that they are… A lot of people, especially people who come from legacy media, radio people are very guilty of this, they look at podcasting and say, “Oh, this is just a different distribution system for audio, and so I can play by the same rules, create the same things.” Have the same relationship to an audience that I did have on FM broadcasting, or if I made a TV show or if I was a reporter for a newspaper, which is very arms length in traditional media, the relationship to the audience strangely, even things that have the patina of having listener involvement like talk radio or something like that, really don’t have that deeper level of engagement. And podcasting is a space I’ve told people a lot over the past several weeks, and just did a newsletter about this about podcasting to me qualifies as being a social media like much like Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, podcasting, when it’s working best, is a social media. And is social media. It is social media, and the reason I say that is everyone can point out to a handful of shows that succeeded without really having a direct relationship to the audience and there…

Eric Nuzum: Whatever, but the truth is, is that most all successful podcast, so I’m talking like 99% of successful podcasts where the creator’s getting out something out of that that makes it feel like it was worth it, they can either it’s their full-time job or they’re able to support a staff or return positive revenue to their company. Every successful podcast has had a direct relationship with that listener, that the podcast is either the beginning, middle or end point of the conversation with that audience, and that conversation is happening also in other spaces, or it’s just like, it’s a community, and this is where they connect. Like if you’re a real estate agent, lots of real estate podcasts, real estate agents are in their car all day, and not like they’re hanging out together in a diner, they’re out in their car Brad Hill properties, but they listen to this podcast and they send comments into the podcast or they send questions in, and that’s the way that community exists. If you’re into something like really niche, like 16th century vampires, which there are 16th century empires.

Eric Nuzum: And there are podcasts about not 14th, 15th century… Not our current vampires, only the vampires of legend of the 15th century, and if you’re into that 15th, 16th century, whatever it was, they’re not going to find that many other people set up a meet-up at the library or a bar, but you can create a podcast community around that, that’s social media, and you think about that, that becomes the rocket fuel that makes everything else work.

Brad Hill: I want the audience to know that you’re flying to Europe today and still made time to do this, for which I thank you very much. Thanks for chatting today. And I hope I see you again soon.

Eric Nuzum: Thank you. I enjoy that we’re starting to see people in person again a little bit, at least until the next variant arrives.

Brad Hill: Have a great trip today. Thanks again.

Eric Nuzum: Alright, thank you very much. Talk to you.