Jeremy Toeman with Augie Studio

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

AI video editing, Augie platform, Jeremy Toeman, industrial talk, marketing, video clips, transcript analysis, social media, API integration, chat GPT, content creation, automation, human interaction, founder at 50 podcast.

00:00

Scott, welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go Well,

00:21

hello there, industrial professionals. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk and thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates you, industrial professionals all around the world. You're bold, brave and you dare greatly. We thank you each and every day, and we celebrate you on industrial talk. Now, if you know one thing about me, I'm passionate about marketing. I'm passionate about getting that message out, passionate about efficiency. And in the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of Jeremy Toeman. He is the founder and head honcho for Augie, which is an AI platform to help you. It's on his it's on his stack card. Here. Videos are hard. Augie is easy. It helps you make videos and gets them down into clip form. Now, I do that all the time. I do that too, but here's Augie, it does does it? Does it for you. All right, let's get on with the conversation. Now, I'm all about marketing. You got to do a better job marketing. You got to just put yourself out there, whether you like it or not. I'm going to continue to harp on you, on you do it. Your story needs to be told. You need to succeed. You need to engage people, and it's all coming through marketing and telling that story. And industrial talk is here for you. I say it all the time. Hey, just go out to industrial talk.com and say, Scott, I want to be able to amplify my message. I want more opportunities. I want greater visibility into the solutions and problems that I am addressing. That's what that's all about. It's all out there. Just come and talk to me. I'm a I'm an open book. I'm a warm and fuzzy guy. So, you know, I look forward to talking to you. So make it happen. Captain, all right, I go through the process of, when I make my videos, I create little snippets, you know, you should, you should repurpose it. It's, you know, best practice out there. I have these great conversations, and I need to be able to sort of not say, yeah, here's a 30 minute one, which you should listen to go out to industrial talk. But the reality is you need to be able to sort of effectively and efficiently take that content, snip it down into something that's meaningful, powerful, impactful. Attention getting and solutions are are coming forward, and they're there. And here's Augie. Here's a solution that does take that, AI, that ability to be able to take a video and then work its magic, and it's not difficult. I I've used it, it's not difficult, and to be able to do it and cut it down, yeah, it's a it's a pretty cool tool and and so I you know you're going to have the links out there on industrial talk, you're going to be able to reach out with Jeremy, because he definitely has a solution that that is for today, not yesterday, for today and into the future, right? It's, it's really good. Helps me out. All right, let's get on with the conversation. Enough about me. Jeremy Toeman, the solution is Augie. So enjoy, Jeremy, welcome to industrial talk. I am looking forward to this conversation. We've already chatted over a couple of well, just a zoom, and we talked about your technology, but I am all geeked up on goofballs here on news, because I want to have more of that conversation, and I want to be able to share with the best listeners on the planet. How are you doing today?

04:13

I'm doing great, Scott. Let's, let's jump in. I'm excited to talk about

04:16

this stuff with you. Yeah, before we do because we just can't, we just can't, you know, we need to give it perspective. Give us a little background on who Jeremy is and what why you're such an incredible professional.

04:28

06:50

That's tight. Yeah, you explain that real tight. That's good. Good. Good job, man. I can't do that. I I can't just string it together in a cogent messenger. You're amazing. That's incredible. Whereabouts in Canada when you say Canadian roots whereabouts,

07:04

I'm originally from Montreal, so Go Habs. And the reason I could do that, to be really honest, Scott, that was not whipped off at a random because of so much of my career spent pitching venture capitalists for doing startup work. You often have to give your bio in a really sort of concrete, solid minor. So I got pretty used to saying I have a slightly faster version of that. I have a slightly longer one, but there you have it. All right.

07:32

Let's venture into Augie. The website is Augie dot studio, right? That's right. And I have to ask the question about why the name Augie, what? What's, is there anything there? Or was it just, hey, that's a cute name,

07:46

a little of both. So we incorporated as Aug X labs. The original idea was augment. Was, this is my wife's idea at the time. This was augmented audio experiences. She's like, that's sort of what you do. And I'm like, Yeah, you're right. And then I kind of played with that in my head and reduced augmented to Aug media to x, because there's sort of this transmedia thing. And from experiences, I went to labs, so that was ag X labs, and a colleague of mine was helping us on just sort of getting all the original, all of the guts of the guts of the company together those early days, and literally on the Zoom call one day, he's like, why don't we just call it Augie? And that was that it was never looked back. That was the end of the whole process right at that moment.

08:34

I like it. Yeah, I like it. It's cute and meaningful. Oh yeah, no, I like that, alright, take us through what Augie is.

08:43

So Augie is designed as a video editor, sort of for the rest of us. And the quick backstory is, when I was at Warner media, I was trying to learn how to do video editing. Actually, I was, there wasn't my job. It was, I've always been in media, and it was, it was trying to promote my old podcast using video. And I took 40 hours of self paced Premiere Pro tutorials, and I got absolutely nowhere. Scott nowhere at all, you know. And that Gail a comment, yeah. And I'm like, maybe this is an old dog, new tricks thing. But I actually started thinking about it slightly differently. I started realizing, like, I'm trying to teach myself a tool that is used by absolute professionals, right? Like, when I do minor home repair stuff, I get a Makita drill at Home Depot. I don't go to Home Depot Pro and get, like, a whatever, super fancy industrial thing. I get the I get the everyman version, right? And so that was sort of the idea is like, Oh, the reason this is hard isn't because Premier Pro is not a good product. It's because I'm trying to learn how to do a thing that professionals are doing. So to make the analogy I used to make, it's like me trying to learn how to fly a Holic. Helicopter, when all I really want to do is go to the corner store to get a carton of milk, right? It's so when, you know, as an entrepreneur, as a guy who likes to build products and tinker with things, instead of saying, Well, okay, I'll just kind of lower my set of standards and needs, I decided to build a startup addressing the problem itself. And so that's augies, meant as the video editor for busy business professionals who need something to promote their business by video, but not the same thing you could do with all of the Master Pro Tools, right? I need to install a floating shelf in my living room, not build a house from scratch.

10:42

See, I like that because I had that similar situation. Somebody said, yeah, just go premiere pearl. That's how you do it. Scott, so I go out there and I, right off the bat, took about 10 minutes. My ear was bleeding. I'm not I'm not turning and I'm not turning around them fast. I want, I want some sort of speed behind this. You know, we're talking we want to get it out. We want to be able to do it in a an effective way. So I'm looking for speed now this is, this platform is has an underpinning of AI, right, correct? So, you, you you develop this? Did you? Was this your brainchild after AI or before AI or right? It just converged at the time AI, all of a sudden, just said, We're here

11:34

13:20

How does it How does it take a video? Because I've, I've used Augie, you know, I used Augie. How does it know? You know, it gives you options the same, you know, this one, this one, this one. How are you refining that? Or, how does it know to say, hey, here's a great little segment that's 30 seconds or a minute or whatever. How do you How does that happen to feel like I I'm confident in knowing that, because all I care, honestly, all I care about is when I load it and it gives you recommendations. I want it right? That's it. That's my thought process. And, yeah, create it and then publish it. That's, well, that would be ideal.

14:08

15:24

is interesting. How does it know what resonates? What? Because that's like the, you know, because of inflation, That's the million dollar question. And it's, it's like everybody wrestles with, is that going to resonate is that, does that capture my attention? Does it? You know, fill in the blank? That's everybody's struggle. How does it do the the

15:51

unfortunate reality is there's actually a lot of data behind what does resonate. A lot of it is words to use, right? A lot of it is sound bite length, right? So you and I going back and forth quickly on the topic, likely implies there's something exciting happening. You and I spending a series of prolonged time talking about a highly contextual topic can also right? So if we were to spend the next three minutes, just talking all about growing plants with AI or something like that, it's easy to recognize some of those patterns, right? It's easy to tell a chat bot like chat GPT or others to ignore what might seem like filler content. We also do have some orientation around things like storytelling. We're looking for speaking blocks that might be slightly either highly interruptive or longer form, kind of not speeches, but strong sound bites. And I'll be honest, I think we're all, you know, there are other startups doing similar things. I think we're all still trying to adopt in as much pattern recognition as we can, to get better and better at that.

17:08

Yeah, that's that, from my perspective, sort of the the Holy Grail. Because here I I'll be I am your I Am your video muse, because i i I do the videos, I edit the videos. I do what it is, but I don't go I have another product that I use to do that. And I do it because, well, it's simpler. It's an easier product to use, sure, but I want, I want to create those snippets fast. I want high, you know, trust that it will identify. I don't want to go through that. I not to say that. I'm not hanging on every syllable that you're bringing forth. But, you know, I want to streamline that and and again, the faster I compress that time from the conversation to the social media publication, and I don't have to sit there and sweat. I think that's a heck of a use case. Thanks.

18:14

We think that too, and part of the reason we've done it the way we have so in our experience, what Scott's alluding to is we show you three suggested clips from your transcript.

18:25

Why part of what? Why not five? Why not why three?

18:30

Three comes out of paradox of choice. So we believe that there's a lot of data that when you give a user more than three things to choose from, you actually make the selection process less satisfying, more confusing and more drawn out.

18:44

So, yeah, there's psychology there, baby.

18:49

20:15

Again, I think that I'm on the other end of that spectrum. I want. I want high confidence. I want limited human interaction. I want boom, man, move, go.

20:30

Well, the good, the good news is we serve that need to we're just trying to make sure that that, you know, what we ended up having is a lot of our users were using other, other clip making tools, and they came to us with a basic the thing we learned was they love it, but they want those they want the human, the loop. They want those little tweak possibilities. And so we designed an experience where, you know, you've used it. It's like editing a Google Doc. It's just that easy. And so you can do what you're doing, right? Oh, I like this clip. Click, publish, download. Off we go. But if you're someone like me who really nerds out on every word, we serve that need as well, and that's we've tried to basically cover both bases, where the person who, yeah, yeah,

21:15

yeah, that makes complete sense. Is there in the future? There are the opportunity through an API saying, Okay, I gotta, I got a video here. Here's the link, and instead of me, you know, doing the manual, put it in there, let your system pull it up and do whatever it needs. The magic there. Do you foresee, like an API that says, Yeah, we're connected to your we're connected.

21:46

It's already we, yeah, we already have the API. Now it's about doing all of the end to end integrations, right? So the trickiest part becomes, where do we want to take that? Right? Our approach has been make that API available to other developers so that if, whether it's a platform like this one streamyard Or I use Riverside, being able to take video coming straight out of that platform, shove it through Augie and then straight to say, YouTube or LinkedIn or Instagram, that is possible as of today, but it takes, you know, it's almost like it takes a village. We have to go create those partnerships, because we can't control all of it ourselves unless other parties also have API endpoints. I don't know if you're familiar with Zapier, but we've been creating our platform so that Zapier will be able to control it in the coming months.

22:43

Actually, see that's pretty interesting, because that's again, me being the most impatient person in America. I just want that too. I want that so that it just happens. I don't have to think about it. In fact, there's going to be a point when my part of the brain will just atrophy, just because I've automated everything that I could possibly automate, and I just it just happens.

23:07

Yeah, so you're just gonna upload a picture of yourself and some bullet like talk about cars and tech and coffee you got 40 minutes and make it good and be a little snarky. Go, exactly, right?

23:23

Yeah. I'm not sure if that future is bright. I guess I like a little of the human interaction that, see,

23:31

I don't like the idea like, there's part of me that right now that can almost picture a very imminent future of the Internet where, like 80% of what's happening is bots talking to bots, watch, watching each other, do things, commenting, forwarding, sharing and like us humans are sort of sitting on the sidelines, like Are any of these people? Is anything you know who's real?

23:57

It's scary. I it. I'll go off on a tangent. It's this voice creation that somebody could create, some AI can create my voice. It sounds like me. It's that close.

24:09

Scott, I don't know if you try that. Augie can do that. Augie can clone your voice today. And then you could write, you could write intro scripts, all using, uh, all using our platform. You have to say a word.

24:24

Great, congratulations. Yeah,

24:26

I don't know what to say. It's like, these are the things that are happening right?

24:30

Absolutely spot on. Absolutely spot on. Now, I have to ask this question about Riverside. Yeah, Riverside has a component that way, right? Don't they have a way of creating snippets within Riverside. I don't use Riverside. I use they do. That's correct. How does that compare with Augie? What? What I mean? Yeah, maybe it's a touchy subject, but it's no just like many, there's there. There's so many systems out there. And me. Yeah, I'm looking at them going, well, how's that different? How what's, what's the secret sauce, what's and then you get all confused, and you don't know what to do, and you don't know what decision to make, but anyway, you get the picture.

25:11

27:40

I like that well said, i Great. Word pictures, everything is excellent. And then I want that up so that he knows I'm assuming that augies a he, he knows that I said Excellent.

27:56

You know, when I was first envisioning the brand, I actually had it as sort of a scrappy robotic dog kind of thing, and then, yeah, except if you do like, five seconds of research on the internet, there's a lot of scrappy looking robotic dogs as icons and mascots. So in my head, it still is that it's sort of like, it's, it's sort of like your BFF, you know, it's like you, we used to make a joke. It's like, we're giving you your own Steven Spielberg in your pocket. But that just sort of doesn't make any sense to anybody.

28:32

Well done. What? So put your future hat on. Where do you see Augie going? What's, uh, what's the it's, yeah, the vision happening, yeah.

28:40

Well, a lot of it's what we were just talking about, is making is making the API and our so there's a technology now called MCP, for anyone who's really diving into AI work. It's basically the platform or the construct by which agent AI technology can control an app. And this is something we're building right now so that chat GBT or Zapier or other automation systems can actually use the Augie infrastructure to accomplish video editing. So in an ideal world, Scott, you'd be able to upload your video actually to chat GBT and say, Give me three great highlight clips from this and chatgpt on its own. Could use Augie to do that. That's a bit of our current stage vision. And then you could say things like add closed captions or put my logo in there and stuff like that. So that's, yeah, that's the imminent next step for Augie is that,

29:40

see, I'm all giddy with the future. I just think that this is so interesting. It it's changed my life. I mean, I I think that it's just, it's been an amazing journey, and seeing how it happened. I remember having a conversation I was broadcasting from Barcelona, and it was a number of years ago, and. We were talking about AI. We were talking about trying to create, sort of the guard rails around it. This was before, before, way before anything with chat. It's like, all of a sudden a light switch popped, and now all of a sudden, we're in the world of AI. But it was before, and now we're having these conversations and and the speed and the rep, how fast it's happening. It's, it's, I'm all excited about it.

30:27

You should be. It's a fun time. It is,

30:30

I love it. I love it. What about you know, let's just real. Here's here it is. It's happening. Listener, whether you like it or not, it's happening, either you embrace, you understand, you, you learn and you, you, you leverage whatever, or you don't. But if you don't, yeah, trust me, you'll be left behind. What would be the pushback of any of this? I mean, your your solution. It just makes sense. I can upload, I could dip. I mean, I've just compressed time, and time is something that we can never get back. What's some pushback?

31:07

I think the pushback is, how far do we take it all? I think there's two areas that I see the most pushback is one, if pushed to the very limit, the argument that this the concept of agentic AI taking on most white collar jobs is pretty accurate, right? It will be able to be your accountant, your attorney, most things that a doctor might do, not with a surgeon or a nurse, but most of the analysis, most analytical and those kind of roles AI is going to be really good at that in the next 24 months, at the absolute maximum. So I think there's a concern there on. We do know that, again, not going political or anything like that, but we do know that inherently, speaking, Wall Street incentivizes companies to have smaller staff whenever there's layoffs, stock prices go up. Stock prices go up means CEOs stay retained and get salary bumps. So we know that there's sort of this inherent incentive to fire all the people. So I think that's certainly scary bucket number one, that we haven't quite figured out what to do about yet, and I think scary bucket number two is, well, what if every one of us to your point earlier, if we all are comfortable saying, hey, AI publish this for me right then, and AI can clone my voice, and AI can write my script, and AI can generate a visual, yeah, then what if we just start farming out all of the content creation to AI, which we already are seeing AI slap. And I think this is also risky, because, again, there's financial incentives to create more and more and more content, right? You and I are both talking, how do we get more clips live? Yeah, right. So this is an area where, you know, I am both concerned and also crazy optimistic at the same time, is that the way I look at what AI does is it sort of up levels everybody to even keel, right? So I could use Augie to make a clip from my podcast, put it on LinkedIn, and I'm going to look great. I can't use Augie, on the other hand, to make a Super Bowl ad, right? And so there's clearly somewhere between those defining lines. And I've used the term good enough video a lot, and I don't mean as a pejorative, but more of if the video does its job, right? If a 45 second clip of you and I talking Scott gets you 10 more listeners. Whatever that clip was, did its job, right? So I look at it like, if we can help people, humans make the content they're trying to create using AI to level that playing field, I think that's awesome, if, on the other hand, we're using it to just automate a whole bunch of just garbage feeds that are using algorithms to figure out what the other algorithm wants to see here. Or do I think that's just going to be, for lack of better word, boring. It's I'm not even worried about it being slop. I'm just worried like, I just don't want to see everything algorithmically designed to just it becomes Wally, where I'll just sort of sitting around with our brains turned off, and that's, that's the scenario I don't want.

34:26

Yeah, no, I agree with you 100% that well said, well said, I, yeah, I agree. I, I read, I, I do the old fashioned thing and I read. And the reason I read is just because, well, I don't want to just be inundated with information and because that's what social media does. That's what you know. It just, it just makes you lazier me, maybe not others, man, I'm not, I'm not, not speaking to others as that's just me. I like. It. I like what you're saying. How does it do? We got to wrap it up. How does anybody get a hold of you? What? What? What's the best way to say? Gosh darn it. Jeremy, I want to know more about Augie. I want to know more about you. I want to connect with you for

35:13

Augie, head straight over to what you said before. Www dot. Augie, dot Studio. You can start using it for free. In fact, we have, most of our features are freely available. Everything Scott and I were talking about the highlighter feature you can use off our homepage. You don't even need an account to get started. You can just try it out to reach me. Good news is, I have a unique name. Find me on LinkedIn. So Jay tohman on LinkedIn is me, and I try to reply to every single random message I ever get unless it's really obvious you're just trying to spam me with some crap I don't need,

35:46

which I'm sure it happens, I understand you occasionally have that human component saying, I'm not going down that road. Yeah, you are absolutely wonderful. You didn't disappoint. You're fantastic. I'm a better Scott Jeremy,

35:59

oh, that's that is very kind of you to say,

36:03

Yeah, that's cool. That's a good way of explaining it. You did a great job, man. I love it.

36:08

Thanks. You guys great questions, and I hope we get to chat even more in the future. I'd love to keep this going.

36:13

Yeah, absolutely. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for Jeremy as well as Augie dot studio, and he has a podcast. We didn't touch upon the podcast. Give it. Give a plug for the podcast.

36:27

Sure. It's called founder at 50 and, uh, I'm cheating. I'm actually 52 now, but I decided to start getting people's stories out there in a relatable way. I've been listening to great podcasts like how I made this, or made the scale and some of those, and so many of them are telling journeys of such unbelievable people, but I've been realizing like they're out of reach for most of us. I can't copy everything Jeff Bezos ever did. I mean, it's not even in scope. So I'm talking to people like myself who have had interesting careers, built stuff, done stuff, accomplished things. Have had some great journeys. Have had some sad parts, some exciting parts, some distressing parts, and trying to get those stories out in a way that other people can can listen to and really relate, from, learn from, maybe enjoy, but maybe also put the practical use. And it's called founder at 50.

37:20

Founder at 50. So we've got a number of things that you need to make sure that you connect with Jeremy. We've got the podcast that you need to subscribe to. You need to go out to Augie dot studio, and you need to start, you know, kicking the tires and playing around there that's all available. And then you need to go out to LinkedIn and reach out to Jeremy Toeman, right out there, and we're going to have it all at industrial talk. So hey, thank you very much. Jeremy, thanks. Scott was a pleasure. Yeah, pleasure is all mine. All right, listeners, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

37:54

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network. You

38:03

Yep, another one, another. Great industrial talk conversation. I heard a quote today, and it was interesting, everybody is interesting. Everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. Again, everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. He made it easy, Jeremy, right there. I'm looking at his LinkedIn stack card. Very, very engaging, very interesting about how we can use today's technology is, I'm telling you, tip of the iceberg. Tip of the iceberg. So, a lot going on. So you got Augie, you got Jeremy, you got Jeremy that's passionate about, you know, delivering a solution that really meets your needs. It's fantastic. I love I love industry. Industrial talk is here for you. We want to amplify your message. We do go out to industrial talk. Talk to me. Say, Scott, I want to talk. I'm there. All right. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly. Hang out with Jeremy. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.