Imagine a world where all audio is searchable with natural language and logically connected. It's presented in your preferred language or form factor, with key insights and meaningful excerpts immediately at your fingertips, and easily shareable across networks and modalities. Imagine the impact on the flow of information, the pace of new knowledge discovery, and the possibility of intentional as well as accidental exploration of ideas.
Humanity is a species built on stories, on narrative. We gathered around fires for thousands of years to tell tales and share facts to shape our cultures as people, to improve our chance for survival, and to inform as well as amuse ourselves. Later, religious leaders translated these stories to written form for distribution over greater distances and with more permanence. The literate elites created sophisticated physical distribution systems for moving around messaging with runners, horsemen, pigeons and more.
Then along came the Gutenberg press and the history of the distribution of cheaply produced literature in local languages that followed, which in turn enabled more spoken word conversations and advocacy based on the corpus of written word. A virtuous cycle where audio in the form of spoken word leads to text via handwritten word to the mass-produced printed, multilingual word and, in turn, ever larger audiences of people discussing, debating, embracing, and sharing those ideas at an ever greater scale. The subsequent generation of ideas in the era of enlightenment was exponential, and the progress of humanity followed across many views and definitions of “success”.
We got where we are through spoken word, and in turn that spoken word being reproduced in textual fashion—and later in graphic, photographic and video fashion—enabling a rapid and wide-scale distribution of ideas.
We see DeepCast as part of the next evolution of information distribution and facilitation of meaningful conversation.
In July of ‘23, John Waller and connecsone of eirfavorite passions and primary source of real, meaningful conversations—podcasts. They both reflected that they no longer used traditional media or Twitter (X) to find the richest contemporaneous information out there for any given subject. But they also reflect that the experience of finding new podcasts they might be interested in—or even episodes they were a guest on—was horrible and hadn’t changed in any meaningful way in almost a decade. They also knew they were one of half a billion global listeners yearning for a better podcast discovery experience all around, whether that was through better recommendations, more intelligent search, much easier and expansive ways to share episodes and clips with their friends, further ways to sample more shows to expand their exposure to the “new and interesting”, and much much more.
DeepCast is a reflection of their deep customer-centricity as well as a facsimile of the vision they had in their minds in July ‘23 made manifest in early ‘24.
“Invention comes in many forms and at many scales. The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams.”
— Jeff Bezos in his 2011 letter to shareholders
DeepCast certainly aspires to become that radical and transformative platform that enables and empowers podcasters to further unleash their creativity. We want them to spend less time on the tedious tasks and more time on the efforts that help them pursue their dreams and continue to spread world-changing information and foster much needed conversation and debate.
Ultimately, we’re aiming to build a platform that that requires no effort but high value for you, and on your behalf—with no effort on your part other than creating amazing content!—creates more ways for listeners to perform the following actions:
We believe that listeners are almost uniformly looking for the same things that John and Lucas aspired to build. And we think our initial collection features, functionality and rich data packaged in the list of “killer features” here.
🔖 Summaries of all types
One-sentence sum-ups for the tldr; 140-character crowd that need the substance of the episode in fewer words than a haiku. Back-flap length synopsis for those who don’t want to judge the book by its cover. Either way, it’s just enough (where “enough” is in the eye of the beholder here) to help you decide if you want to dig in and commit 20+ minutes of your time to try something new or revisit something old.
💎 Key quotes & takeaways
The nuggets you want to walk away with and tell your friends, co-workers, and your socials. Or maybe even more important, those gems you want to tuck away for your own quick internalization and retention.
🔎 Advanced search & Intelligent navigation
Jump between episodes connected by high-level topics and concepts like “artificial intelligence”, “creativity”, or “economics”. Or navigate across episodes that discuss people, places, and products/companies like “Donald Trump”, “Sam Altman”, or “OpenAI”. Or ask that burning question (”What are the biggest risks AI presents in the short-term or request an update on the of-the-day topic you’re keen on staying on top of (”What is going on with the current US presidential cycle. We all have different mental models for how we traverse and pick through libraries, movies, and more—and DeepCast tries to address all of those models!
💬 Sharing is caring
Easily share your favorite episodes, quotes, chapters, and transcript snippets. And not only that, but share text excerpts for those who prefer to read or audio “deep-links” for listening—we have you covered on both fronts!
⛏️ Digging deeper with Chapters
It’s one thing to get high-level summaries and the key excerpts across the entire episode, but it’s a whole other thing to peel the onion back and get similar top quotes, summaries, key takeaways & audio deep-links for “chapters” that represent the thematic breakdown of conversational topics covered in a given episode.
📚 Follow the experience outside DeepCast
Podcasters often share their ideas and engage with listeners everywhere, so we aim to help you find your favorite podcasters where they live: their websites, their Twitter or Instagram accounts, their email inboxes, and more. Additionally, the opportunity to learn never stops and a particular episode is often only the jumping off point, so we provide you with links to rich data sources across the web to learn more about covered people, companies, places, and more.
Stay connected with us on your social network of choice—we’d love to hear from you! Follow us on each of these platforms to get a #DeepQuote of the day in a slick, meme-able package. 😃
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/deepcastfm
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deepcast-fm/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deepcastfm
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@deepcast
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/deepcastfm/
Also, if you see something you’d like to see improved, data that needs to be cleaned up, new feature ideas you have or anything else of this nature, feel free to open a chat window and let us know what you need, think, or want!
Check out "Sound Strategy with Lucas Dickey: The Most Meta Podcast About Podcasting Ever"
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