Invest In Yourself: the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast - Bob Bowdon - DE

Phil Better

Foreign.

Narrator

Are you fed up with the corporate bullshit holding you back? Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. The ultimate launchpad for entrepreneurs ready to seize control and unleash their creative genius. Hosted by Phil Better, the podcast mogul, each week he's breaking the chains of conventional work with bold strategies, raw insights and inspiring success stories from the entrepreneurs who took the risk and invested in themselves. This is your call to arms. Invest in yourself, break free from someone else's rules and build the empire you deserve.

Now, let's dive head first into today's explosive episode.

Phil Better

Welcome back to another powerhouse episode of Investing Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. I am of course your host, Phil Benner, the podcast mogul, and we're diving into the deep, deep intersection of media innovation and education with an industry veteran who's redefining how we engage in content. Our guest is a true pioneer in the world of digital entrepreneurship and media influence. He's the Visionary founder and CEO of VidaFair or VET Affair, depending on how you want to mention it.

A groundbreaking pay per stream video platform that's empowering creators and shaking up the video landscape. Before, he was a champion for educational reform and media freedom as the founder and executive director of Choice Media, the premier news source focused on school issue choices. With an impressive career spanning roles as a television producer, reporter, commentator on major newsletters like PBS and Bloomberg Television, just to name a few, he's brought sharp insight and compelling stories to audiences everywhere.

And for those who appreciate a touch of satire, you might even recognize him from a few appearances on the Onion News Network where his comedic timing shines through.

Beyond these accompl compliments, he's also an award winning documentary filmmaker. His critically acclaimed documentary the Cartel peels back the curtain on corruption in the public public education system, earning him over a dozen film festival awards for its powerful message. So get ready for an enlightening conversation about challenges, rewards and the future of media and education with non other than Bob Bowden. Bob, thank you so much for being here Phil.

Bob Bowdon

I did not know that a mogul was involved in this program. Now I'm going to pay a particular attention to my performance. I'm going to step up my game now that I know the consequences are so, so deep.

Phil Better

Oh, I'm pretty sure you're going to far superpede any expectations I have for this and my guest, my audience as well. But Bob, I'm very excited to talk to you because the future of media is something that's so important to us as we look to the future and I want to know. But first I want to know why did you decide to go into the 9 to 5? You, you had an amazing career. Why did you leave 9 to 5 to be your own boss, if you will.

The entrepreneurial.

Bob Bowdon

Sure. Well, I guess, I guess the. It might sound cliche, but it is true. I saw a need. I basically was at the, at one point in my career going to the film festival circuit around the country and you know, entering my film. But then in the films you're chatting with other directors who were there in the room or you're having drinks at the bar etc, and conversations come up and you realize some of these people, first of all, this great work that has nowhere to make a penny after really actually at all, you know, let alone.

And they're lucky if they get into one local film festival and they invite all their friends and they maybe have that one screening and then they just go home and start over. So.

But it's not, I don't want to make it just about films. There's all kinds of video content made these days that should have a way for people to monetize it, which is just a fancy word for making money. And I saw a need in the sense that I just was not determining, not seeing the kinds of service that I would think I would want if I were a successful video content creator.

I guess you could argue that there's an extremely top high tier of people who are getting millions of views per episode. You know, the, the Mr. Beasts or the Joe Rogans or there's a certain, I guess Echelon. Maybe those people do get multi million dollar Spotify deals or, or deals from sponsors, etc, but below that there's an enormous space of people who I think deserve a better way to make money from their work by, by setting a fair price and letting people pay it.

So I wanted to build a platform to do that.

Phil Better

I love that, I love how you're looking at the little person. The person that may have that audience but not the size of the audience that that YouTube will let us will give those nice, nice dollars from those checks.

Bob Bowdon

Sure. And if I could just interrupt for a second. Yeah. There's different parts of that audience. So there's the, there's the kind of general audience person who's newer and just hasn't gotten that big yet. But there's the other kind of content that's just niche but perfectly respectable, important and deserves to be supported financially just because, you know, it may not be the most, you know, the broadest kind of type content that one could imagine.

You know, why shouldn't somebody who's does something specific but does it well, why shouldn't they be able to make money from their audience also? And so that's what we try to.

Phil Better

We try to do as, as a podcaster, I truly, truly feel this because it is one of the. It's hard to get money from something that you're passionate about and if you're running a YouTube channel, making films daily, obviously you know how expensive is to make a.

Getting fair compensation is just, just, just fair period and end of discussion, I think. So that's why I really was really happy to have you on. How did you come up with the. Obviously the idea for a vid affair came up from talking on the circuit with these other directors and learning that they're not making the money that they should be because their work is changing and an impactful.

What. What else led to the creation of vidafair? Like how did you come up with the idea that I'm going to do a pay per view streaming service and to fight against these other.

Bob Bowdon

Sure. Where the creator sets their own fee, by the way, I always like to add that part because that's important too. Video lengths can vary enormously. There can be a, you know, there can be a short minute, five minute film, a short form, five minute film. There can be a, you know, a three hour long podcast. So there's obviously, you know, so, so just the duration of course in the. The cost varies as well. There could.

People can put a whole lot of money into production value of one video that's 60 minutes long and another person puts hardly any money in the, into the production of, of a 60 minute. And, and so also the amount of time that you put into something can vary enormously. You know, some people can just take some lovely footage of their puppies playing with each other and might have a great audience, but they didn't necessarily spend a lot of time developing that content.

Whereas obviously people can spend a lot of time. So time, money, duration, all of these factors ought to affect how much money a creator needs to be compensated for the work. And so it seems to me the platform shouldn't be saying or just prescribing from above, like top down, those kinds of things. It ought to be like Airbnb where if you own a condo, you can set your own rental rate for the condo and if you set the rate too high and don't get any rentals, well that's on you.

You know, you probably can.

I. I deserve $1,000 a night for my garage, you know, like, you know, that's funny. I haven't gotten any rentals in the last year. Huh. It must. Must be airbnb's fault, you know. No, maybe this is another reason. So anyway, the idea is that the.

The person who is closest to the work is the person best suited to set the. Their own creator fee. And so. And so that's how we do it.

Yeah. So I wanted to say, as you say, like, what else besides the film festival? Yeah, there was. So I, you know, I've been around a while, and I was actually on TV in the early days of the Internet. And so this was an era that your great, great grandfather knew about phil, called the 90s.

I don't know if you've seen it in history books or something.

Phil Better

I started to see it in the history books.

Bob Bowdon

What. Exactly. So I was around then, and I was a. On television as kind of a sidekick on an. We had this news cable chance cable TV channel that was a news format. But I would kind of be a guy on the Internet who would like a discussion would happen about some topic or whatever. And I would be the person looking up information on the Internet to add to the conversation. So there'd be like the main host and a guest or several guests, sometimes a studio audience, but I would be the guy sitting in the little computer.

Like, I'd be the nerd sitting on the side who'd be like, you know, oh, I have a. I have a quote about this thing you're talking about, or a statistic or a survey result or whatever it is. So I would, you know, that was my job for. For this cable channel. So. And. And I remember at the time, this is something I don't want to get too long winded. I remember the time when.

When the Internet was relatively new and people. At that time, you could pull up news stories from the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the. You could pull up news stories for free on all these websites. And I remember people saying at that time, well, who's gonna buy the newspaper if you can get all the stories for free on the Internet? And I remember thinking, well, I know the answer to that.

Just charge a little micro payment for each story, and that way, no, it'll be fine. I'll be happily paid 15 cents for a news story, or 5 cents, depending on whatever. Depending on the story and et cetera. I like the outlet.

Maybe I'll pay 25 cents, maybe I'll pay 50 cents. But I thought A micropayment architecture was to me the logical answer to the question of how to monetize that kind of text content. Turned out the world did not go that direction. The world with the subscription direction. It ignored my sage and wise advice.

And then I saw that same kind of thinking propagate into the world of subscription monetization. Such that not only do we all have subscriptions that are the streaming service type, like the, like the Netflixes and the HBOs and those kinds of subscriptions, but also the Patreon type subscriptions too, where it's more kind of DIY and like user, user defined content. But, but I always like, I, I kind of don't like subscribing Phil.

I'm like, I'm team hashtag subscription fatigue. I don't want to subscribe to anything else. I'm sick of subscribing to stuff. But if you can give me a way to just pay someone a little bit of money once, I'll do it all the time. I, I actually do it myself. I will, I will super chat on YouTube people, you know, people, because I know I'm giving them two bucks or I'm giving them five bucks and you know, and I'm happy to do that but if you want me to subscribe, then I'm like whoa, hold on a second.

So that's, that's. So I wanted to build a platform, in other words that was not another subscription platform the way Patreon is.

I wanted to build a platform where people could monetize were based on either purely a la carte type, pure kind of TV OD it's called now the old term is pay per view type pay for just to view this one clip. You can do that. But if you do want a discount, which is often the kind of underpinning for why subscriptions exist, you get the sense of like well, it's a volume purchase.

If I subscribe, I'll watch a lot of content and I only pay this one amount. It's a sense of a volume discount. We can do that through packages of tokens that you can buy. So you can buy a batch of our, what we call grain tokens and then use a little bit for each rental. And you've only paid one financial transaction fee.

So it's like you pay a lot less per rental. So you still provide the discount concept, the volume discount concept without ever it. Without any kind of repeating charge. In other words, you, you can decide for yourself if you want to come back and buy more of the Token. The token packages. So that's a long winded answer, but there you go.

Phil Better

I love it. No, because you just recreated Blockbuster in essence, or a video, like, in my eyes. Because like, I.

Bob Bowdon

You.

Phil Better

You have a subscription, quote unquote, a Blockbuster, but you didn't pay monthly for it. You would just go in, pay for what you rented, and have the chance to watch it, which I miss, by the way. I also have that good branding for us.

Bob Bowdon

We could. We're like the. You would be like the YouTube Blockbuster combo. Like, if YouTube and Blockbuster had a baby, then it would be vid affair. Right?

Phil Better

You go, I love it. I just helped. I love it. I think. I love the fact that vidafair not only empowers creators because obviously we're in a creator economy right now. A lot more people are going on YouTubes and podcasts and all that and creating this amazing content, but they're not getting that financial backing. But you're like, hey, we can help you with that. We'll be your Blockbuster.

We'll host it. We'll take care of all the hard stuff. You just tell us how much you want to charge for it and we'll get it done. I think that is genius.

Bob Bowdon

Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, it's hard taking on big tech, though, Phil. We need the help from anyone who wants to download our app, our iPhone app or Android app, or go to our website and check us out. You know, we're still a startup, so we're, you know, we're. We're, you know, we're. We're. We believe in it. And, and.

And it. I. I sometimes feel like I'm sounding grandiose. I think it's. There's sort of. Almost. It's almost kind of a moral calling a little bit like feeling like you're really democratizing the ability for individual people to do the work they like and make money from. Skip the middleman, skip the gatekeepers.

Go right to their social media followers and say, hey, maybe you want to support me and here. And there's no subscription. Just pay this one time and you can watch this special program or film or show or something.

So I feel like, yeah, I feel like it is. It is something that is, you know, kind of a calling a little bit, you know, like, I don't want to sound like I'm a saint. Like, I think I'm a saint, but I think you get the idea.

Phil Better

Yeah, it is a calling because not everybody would take on big tech. Not everybody would be taking on the Disney's, the Amazons, you know, the Netflix to, to help the little person. Because most people go like, how can I get the money from the big tech so that I can relax? Right. That individuality that we're seeing perpet sometimes.

But in the creative space, it's a lot more collaborative because we understand as creatives we need someone who's good at making paint so that we can do our painting or we need a cinematographer to be able to film our vision if we're not, you know, doing those little doggy and cat videos, you know, if we want to make that movie.

Bob Bowdon

Where are you talking to me from today?

Phil Better

I'm talking from Montreal.

Bob Bowdon

Oh, I've been there once. Yes, I know. I don't know if anyone cares. I went to. I was at a. I met. I met the actor Pierce Brosnan in a Montreal jazz bar and he was very drunk and he.

Phil Better

Surprising a few too many martini shaken martinis, I think.

Bob Bowdon

Yeah, yeah, well that's. That's funny line. Yeah. And then he went to. And then he went to, I think, kind of try to start flirting with the woman I was with. So he. That was, you know, I introduced myself and he very quickly turned to her and just started to.

Phil Better

Well, when you're James Bond.

Bob Bowdon

So anyway, that's my Montreal story.

Phil Better

That's a great Montreal story. Luckily it wasn't a hockey player. It was only Pierce Bros. And, you know, James Bond. You can take on James Bond, but.

Bob Bowdon

He was doing that movie about Native Americans at the time, or so I never even saw the movie, but whatever.

Phil Better

Well, I can understand him trying to take away your. Your lady you were with.

Bob Bowdon

No, I know, I know. I actually it was kind of flattering in a sense, like. Well, if James Bond likes her and I'm with her, that's pretty good.

Phil Better

Yeah, James Bond has a liking to her. I'm doing great, but hopefully it kind.

Bob Bowdon

Of makes me a little bit like James Bond, you know? Yeah.

Phil Better

And. And you are. You're on this mission that everybody knows who you are to democratize making money, in essence through video content.

Bob Bowdon

But the content creators need to do also their part of telling their social media followers that it's there. You know, we're new, so I don't think it's not the case. We're not Netflix yet where you can just put it up and just wait for the, you know, just the people to come for the, the Brinks truck to show up with all the money, you know, like you. They need to also promote it to their followers.

Etc. But, but I mean, in terms of our pricing, though, it's, you know, for $6, you can upload a piece of content and then start making money.

Phil Better

You know, I love it. Keeping it as simple as possible for people. So as long as they make their six bucks, boom, they're, they're, they're, they're making money for it. And you're making, you're helping them create a, A livelihood with what you're doing. What is the strategy? Because you're brand new. You're still. I'm not brand new, but you're still young startup. What are some of the ways that you're going about marketing that are going against the grain?

Bob Bowdon

We've tried. We've done all kinds of things. We've done things like we've, we've done podcasts with moguls who are hosts, podcasts. We have. I, I like to tell a story about the money I wasted at this trade show when we were kind of first starting out. And I, we were. At that point I thought, oh, this would be. We're going to try to like, convince everyone we're a big established company.

That'll exude credibility. Then they'll like us. It turns out no one cared like, we. So we've, you know, got this big booth space and we had all these employees there and we had all kinds of, what's it called, you know, you give away all the stuff you give away.

Phil Better

Yeah, giveaways, merchandise giveaways.

Bob Bowdon

That's what I was trying to think of. All. We bought all of this. We had a breakout session. We had all this stuff. No one cared, like. Yeah. And then I'm.

What I learned afterward is like, people would actually rather just hear from me and say like, instead of, instead of believing, oh, it's credible because it's some big company, they'll actually perceive more credibility by watching me come on show, slide doors, or else just going on our own social media with my face saying, you know, hey, you know, I'm Bob. I'm the founder of Vid Affair. Here's the tutorial on how to upload a video.

Let's go, step one. And they'll see me talking to them. And, And I think, yeah, that. That's more Authenticity is more conveyed that way than this sort of pretending you're big. But, yeah, so that's, that's.

But we've had more success. Yeah, so that's. We've had more success. The more kind of authentic we are in saying what we're doing. And if you have any questions, just give us a. You can ask a question on our contact form. We have always answered within 24 hours, if not sooner.

So we're pretty transparent.

You know, I mean, I'm just. I'm a filmmaker myself. I wanted to create. Like, if you just took out a blank sheet of paper and said, what would be the fairest way? And as I like to say, fairness is in our name. Vita Fair. If you. The fairest way to create a monetization platform for creators. Coming from.

As a former filmmaker, like, well, one thing you do, you wouldn't. You would not make it exclusive. And we're not exclusive. Like, so we're basically for the creator. If they want to market it elsewhere, fine by us. They can put the same content anywhere else they want. Why should we tell them no? What else would you do? You'd have, like, no contracts. They can leave anytime they want.

They can. In fact, we don't even have, again, any subscriptions, any recurring fees or charges at all. Anyone who wants. Who just stops interacting with our site, then never one more penny is charged from our site. They're making. They're authorizing every single rental of a content, every single upload of a content is independently authorized. You do that. So, yeah, in a lot of ways.

You wanted to make our platform. Well, here's even a little thing, like in the descriptions of. Of a certain video content that's available for rent. Some sites don't let you put in links, so they're like, oh, we'll lose the traffic. They'll put in a link to their. Well, to their LinkedIn, for example, or to their. To their Instagram page or something else, or their link to their own YouTube, you know, whatever they want.

Like, a lot of sites will prevent outside linking because they're afraid they will lose the customer, you know, the eyeballs to some other site.

They'll go away. My view is like, no design. What the creator would want, what would I want as a creator? I would want the most flexibility. And that's what we try to try to do.

Phil Better

Trying to hark back to the early days of the 90s where the Internet was pretty much free for everybody and you had to pay only for certain things you didn't have these subscriptions for everywhere. I love it. I love it. Oh, you guys are doing so much work. And that's why I wanted you on the podcast, because you're changing. You're revolutionary. You're like podcasting, in essence, changing the way people are listening to stuff.

You are.

You're changing the way creators are being paid, which I love because creators as a podcaster, very hard to get paid unless you're in the top 1% Joe Rogan style number of podcasts, it's hard.

Bob Bowdon

To get that 1% top, you know, 1000th of 1%. Yeah, yeah. I mean the average YouTube, you can look at it. I just saw the new numbers from 2024 on YouTube monetization. Average compensation, it averages to 2, 10 of a penny per view actually went up, I think from 0.18 pennies to 0.2 pennies per view. But in other words, just think about that for a second. Two tenths of one penny per view. Whereas on our site you could set your own fee to be, let's even just say 50 cents of you compared to 2/10 of one penny.

I mean, you're right, that's already 250 times the purview revenue. And then, and someone said, well, so in other words, that's only naturally if you only charge 50 cents. So yeah, so there's the, and of course, yeah, the monetization. So there's, you know, advertising monetization, which is what YouTube is. It's, it's what a lot of, a lot of sites kind of use. It's such low. So that's another. I can, I can talk.

So I was already, I was already also, I'll keep it clean. I was already crapping on subscription monetization. If you want me to subscribe to crap on advertiser monetization, that is that you, you know, you annoy your viewers by making them sit through ads which, who likes to do that?

Separately, you run the risk of the advertisers then exuding some sort of content control because they say, oh, we don't like this person's, you know, controversial or this person uses bad words or whatever it is. Then you have this sort of creeping possibility of kind of a censorship regime that bringing on advertisers might foster. In other words. So that's a second problem.

And then just the low money. Yeah, it's just, it's a, it's again, when you're talking about tenths of a penny per view, you know, you need enormous, you know, maybe, yeah, maybe again if you're Taylor Swift or something, you know, it's fine.

You have, you know, so many millions of views every day that it's, it's, you still make a lot of money. But to put it this way, we can let that exist. We can let advertiser based monetization exists. We can let subscription based monetization exist and coexist with both of those and have what we do, which is pay per view or TVOD monetization as a third way.

Phil Better

I love it because all of these are essentially how we used to live. We used to live before the Internet exploded with all these different things. We used to have subscriptions services, we had newspapers, but they also took in the advertising as well to cut down that costs. But we, and you occasionally had the, you know, pay one to go when you want to buy a CD or something, right. And I think you're bringing it into the digital world and it, you're, you're making it so that the people who think there are only two ways, there's actually that third way.

And it, it helps 100% of the money goes to the artist or the creator, which we need. We need to fund the arts more because we need people to make us creative so that we can be better at our jobs. Because without art, without creativity, what are we? We're robots.

We're doing nothing. Nothing is improving because ideas are sparked by creativity.

Bob Bowdon

Sure. And let me just say too, in the podcast space, it's, it's different than the filmmaker space, where generally a filmmaker, what they do one film a year or something like that, if lucky, maybe it's one every two years or something like that. In the case of a podcast that is more regular, there's, there's, you know, what's become known as kind of a freemium model is the word where you give out this much stuff for fee and then you say, oh, if you're a super fan, then go over here, there's my Patreon over there, or something like that, and you

can subscribe. Right. So you know that we're non subscription. Our view is that that same exact content, if it's already being developed as paywall content for Patreon, could also be paywall content for Vid Affair in the pay per view version. So you could let the customers choose that. You could say, here's my free stuff.

It's, you know, every week on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or wherever, whatever it is, here's my free stuff. But if you're a super fan, you can come over here and watch my paywall stuff. And it's up to you. You can either subscribe or you can pay on the carte and let them decide. And to me, that would be usually when you give customers more ways to buy a product, more often than not, more people Buy.

Because if there are more ways to buy you, they're satisfied, satisfy different kinds of people. And surveys show that about half of the country will not subscribe to anything new. But if you give them some other way to buy, that's just a one time charge, then many of them will.

So it's the point being that we're not incompatible with those other monetization algorithms methods. We're not incompatible.

Phil Better

Oh, you know, although, go ahead, you fit in perfectly. Because for the free stuff I can go to YouTube and I can deal with the ads unless I pay for YouTube Premium which gets rid of the ads. But if I want to deal, if I want to pay with the ads, I can watch there. If I want to be super fan and pay the premium because I always want this creator's content, I can go to their Patreon or their membership.

But if I'm a in between fan that doesn't want to deal with the ads, I can go, oh, they have this person on. I really want to hear what this person's on. Oh, it's only $0.50, $0.20, boom, done. Or I pay and I get all those tokens so that I can, you know, jump around and say, oh, this person's over here.

I want to support this. And it's a better way to spread the love to the supporters instead of sitting through, you know, 50 ads that you never want to have because that was what TV was for. TV had the ads went to streaming because we didn't want ads and how somehow they got into the ads.

Yeah, I think I love Vid Affair, but we're, we're closing in on time here and I hate it because I think we can probably go for another 30 hours. But that's going to be on the VidaFair website. You can get us late afterwards.

Bob Bowdon

Look, you can do it. It's done already. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Phil Better

But I would love to know, where do you see yourself, Bob, in 10 years and where do you see Vid Affair in 10 years?

Bob Bowdon

Well, the, I mean the goal, you know, things always change. Life, you know, we could, all any of us could, could, could die tomorrow. I hate to say, like, I'm, like I'm being morbid but in a way it's also kind of freeing to think of it that way. But the goal would be that we are at least part of an ecosystem where it is easier to monetize work and without satisfying gatekeepers or sensors or things like that.

Where now that said, we have a, we do have a no porn. I basically Say like any kind of video, but not, but we're not. We have like five different flags. We don't accept copyright violations.

You can't just upload some movie that you have nothing to do with. And you can't, you know, you can't dox people and you can't threaten people and no child abuse and no porn. So it's basically things like that. But apart from that, we don't have any kind of ideological, you know, we're. We're kind of a free speech sort of platform really. But. So I forgot where I was going with that. Exactly.

But.

Phil Better

Where, where you see Vidfair in 10 years.

Bob Bowdon

Oh, yeah. I mean, just that we are part of an ecosystem where people can monetize their work just, just frictionlessly to remove the, the bear. All these barriers that are in the way from, you know, keeping people from, from seeing work and then, and then seeing, even if it's a micropayment price, being able to just. Okay, I can make. I can. Someone will just pay you for your content and you'll be able to just very easily make, make money from it based purely on your own skills.

And, and that's why it should be. And your own quality and your own.

The attractiveness of your content that just should be a marketplace. We wanted to create a, you know, I did. I worked while, as you mentioned in Bloomberg Television doing business news. So I would be standing from the, on the New York Stock Exchange or I would be at the NASDAQ or whatever. I kind of. That's a marketplace where people trade stocks, right? It's a central. I view us to be that for video, a centralized marketplace where video can be uploaded and rented and, and therefore it's just removing the friction and the barriers from people trading freely with each other.

I have this content, okay? I want that content and I'll pay you this much for it.

Okay? Shake hands and make a deal. That should be easy. And it has not been easy before until now.

Phil Better

I love it. I love that you're bringing the ease of quote unquote, the free. You're bringing the free market because now we get to pay what we want to and make the decision instead of having to subscribe and go, I don't really want this because there's tons of stuff on Netflix that I don't watch, but I know other people do, and I don't want to pay for that, but I understand that

it's supporting. And then there you got the. Dealing with all the ads that I don't want to deal with on YouTube because God, they're annoying and they're always the same five ads that play every single time.

Bob Bowdon

And here's a good analogy too that if you just go to Amazon prime, like on my Apple TV on my wall, my, my, my TV on my wall, on the Apple tv like if you're on Amazon, the Amazon prime, it says, you know, this particular movie you can rent for 3.99 or it comes free with Amazon prime if you're a subscriber. So that same exact content can be consumed or monetized different ways based on the cut.

What the customer wants, the customer chooses. Do I subscribe to Amazon prime or do I pay 3.99 for this one movie? That's what we're bringing to sort of what I'd call YouTube type content.

Phil Better

I love it. You're, you're, you're in essence just taking what the big guys are doing and bringing it down to the smaller, more accessible because YouTube has, not YouTube but Amazon has a whole bunch of regulations about how and what you can put up. And same with Netflix and the other streaming services. Here you're, hey, we're going to be the boss and allow you to decide except for these five things which is very fairly understandable.

It's pretty much practically across the board. Yeah. I am just so excited to go dive deeper into vid affair after this interview because I want to, you know.

Bob Bowdon

I can't even hear any French accent. I was sort of expecting a guy from Montreal is going to be hitting me up with like French sounding questions. I'm not really getting any of that.

Phil Better

No, you're lucky. I was bilingual by birth so I was able to switch. If you want I can speak with a bit of a French accent and we can try and figure out how we can do this. But my final question to you is, it's a personal question. I love these questions because it gives the best answers. But I have your 10 year old self here, Bob. He's awesome, great, creative person trying to take my camera to film and I don't know why, but I want to know what advice you would love to give to your 10 year old self.

Bob Bowdon

It's, it's, it's the single most deeply profound question in human existence. I think. You know, one piece of advice I like to give people is have a separate email address just for corporate signups.

That's. I actually first of all, number one, I'm not kidding, I literally do have that. I actually have it. You wouldn't believe the differential in spam I get from the corporate sign up email address versus my personal email address. But people always laugh in it.

But then I'm like, no, I'm not kidding, like you actually should do that like right now, you know, so, but, but that's, but on, on a deeper level, you know, I think, I think to myself I was a lot more selfish, which Most kids are 10 year old. You picked a pretty young age for that. You could even say 20. And I would still deserve this advice at. Would have had, would have deserved it at that age.

But yeah, I think that, I think that by building the world, by building your world around your own self, your own search for pleasure, your own search for, you know, glory or self affirmation or whatever, all that's all the superficialities of life, yeah, it, it wears thin and it's not a, it's not a formula for lasting, a lasting happiness. And it's really, it's really the distinction between, between pleasure and happiness, I think.

And so I think, I think my younger self would have needed more lessons in, in the importance of, of other people and, and treating them in a way where after they've dealt with you, they feel respected and just.

It's not that I was a, you know, a terrible, worst person in the world, but just that I, I think that I didn't think about other people as much as I should have at that age. So that's my answer.

Phil Better

I love that. And like you said, this is great advice for someone 10 to 30 years old to 40, 50 years old.

Bob Bowdon

Yeah.

Phil Better

Just start taking compassion for other people. I'm going to jump off stage here, Bob. I want you to let my audience know where they can find you, how they can sign up to vid affair and all those fun things stuff so that they can start monetizing their creativity. The floor, sir, is yours.

Bob Bowdon

Oh wow. Okay, so I didn't realize it going full screen. I probably would have like done my hair better. No, it's just eight letters. V, I, D, A, F, A, I, R. You can say Vita Fair, which is life. That's fair. Or you can say vid affair which is like video affair.

So it's a double entendre. But at any rate, so please download our app on iPhone or Android. Please go to our website vidafair.com. just need a dot com at the end and check it out and then give us feedback, tell us what we could do differently or what worked well. You could try renting some content for as little as a 99 cents or $99 or those kind of price points. You could also buy a little package of our tokens for just $5.99.

This is less than your sandwich at lunch, everybody. So you can, you can try out our platform and just let us know how it works.

There's a contact page right on the website that you can use to let us know how it's working for you. And, oh, and then I'll throw in follow us on social media like The Instagrams and X's and Facebooks and Linkedins and YouTubes of the world, all those. You can just look for vidafair and follow us and get updates and that kind of thing. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Phil.

Phil Better

Bob, it was an absolute pleasure. I'm in the process of downloading vidafair on my phone right now because I'm going to check it out and probably sign up and start monetizing my creativity that way.

Bob Bowdon

So we need, you know, we're, we're a little, we're, we're little, we're a little company. We need your help and we so appreciate it. Thank you.

Phil Better

Oh, it's my pleasure, Bob. Thank you again for being here to my audience. Make sure you check out the show notes down below and do download vid affairs to help you see what else is out there as well as possibly monetizing your zone of genius somehow. So I thank you very much for listening. And as always, remember to invest in yourself.

Narrator

Thanks for joining us on Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The podcast mogul reminds you that your journey to freedom and success starts. Starts with one powerful move. Investing in yourself. If today's episode sparked your fire, hit that follow button on Spotify and drop us a comment. Share your wins, your challenges, and what drives you to break free from the corporate grind. Remember, you're your best investment. Always invest in yourself because your potential is limitless.

Until next time, keep hustling and take control of your destiny.

Phil Better

Sam.

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