Episode 1 Who do we think we are?

This first episode explores that question from a personal angle, using background, experience, and curiosity as the starting point. The conversation moves through ideas about punditry, storytelling, history, belief systems, and why understanding where things come from matters more than quick answers. It establishes the mindset behind the podcast: unscripted, wide-ranging, and grounded in curiosity rather than certainty.

Episode Shownotes: 

• Origin of the podcast name Curious Pundits
• What it means to be a “pundit”
• Curiosity, opinions, and audience acceptance
• Personal background and formative experiences
• Reading, storytelling, and learning through fiction and nonfiction
• History as a lens for understanding modern systems
• What the podcast is and is not about
• Episode length, structure, and future topics
• Defining an audience through curiosity rather than demographics

Kevin: Hi Kevin.

Emanuel: How are you?

Kevin: I’m good. Good. I’ve had coffee. I’m wearing a shirt with a collar. I’m ready to go.

Emanuel: Likewise myself, as well. Welcome. What are you doing here, Kevin?

And I suppose that question might go for me as well.

Kevin: Yeah, that is the appropriate question and my initial answer is, that’s a good question. We decided to,

Emanuel: What’s your answer?

Kevin: Well, I’m working on that. I’m thinking through it as I talk right. We decided to start a podcast. We bantered a little bit about the name.

I liked the word curious. You liked the word pundits. So we are now curious pundits, but that carries with it a presupposition that we are in fact pundits, that people might have an interest in what we have to say.

Emanuel: Before what does a pundit do? What is a pundit? What does it mean to have a definition?

Maybe there’s many people…

Kevin: i’m gonna go off the top of my head. I could go to perplexity and look it up, but I’m gonna go off the top of my head. Pundits are people who offer opinions, pretty much unsolicited, like they think they know something that the people wanna hear. So if you travel around the Internet, you’ll find political pundits and finance pundits and business journalist pundits.

So my personal definition is a pundit is someone who thinks that they have something to say that other people care about.

Emanuel: So based on that definition, would you consider yourself a pundit?

Kevin: Not yet. I think you have to be accepted by your audience in order to be a pundit. Now…

Emanuel: But do you think you have an opinion?

Kevin: As you know, I am a voracious reader. You’ve commented on the bookcase in the back and over the course of my life… as you can tell by my facial features, I’m older than dirt. Over the course of my life, I’ve read thousands of books, and as a result, I know a little bit about a lot. So I’ve had people say things to me like.

That’s really interesting. Tell me more. And for what it’s worth, and this is for listeners and viewers, that’s actually how this podcast came about. Emanuel basically said, that’s very interesting. Tell me more. So here we are.

Emanuel: Actually, yeah, because Kevin and I are working on different projects, and you’ll get a chance to know both of us sooner.

In this episode, because that’s the purpose of this episode, to introduce ourselves, to introduce the podcast. And I think we had a, pilot title, something like WTF are we doing?

Kevin: Yeah.

Emanuel: I was saying, Kevin and I have many projects that we’re working on, and we also have these side conversations that are simply too interesting not to hit record. And I’m praising now, but Kevin is the sage. What’s the, is that the correct pronation in English? The sage, the sage.

Kevin: It is pronounced sage, but I don’t know that I would personally go there.

Emanuel: That anyone should have around them.

Kevin: I’m gonna fall back on my prior statement that I know a little bit about a lot.

Emanuel: Exactly. That’s one of the reasons why, and I thought at one point, you know what, we should simply hit record. So the idea, how I envision it behind this podcast is to simply hit record to our interesting conversation.

But there is a method to the madness. I do have like a vision. I do have a structure, I do have, let’s say some topics that I wanna prepare in advance and debate and discuss them during these recordings as well.

So more things will come as we, as we go, as we develop. But I thought that, curious pundits is the best name as you said, because we are, I believe that you have an opinion that people are interested in. I believe I might have an opinion that some people are, would be interested in.

And to summarize, to come back to actually what you said about examples, I often turn to TV essentially where. The pundits started, they started writing newspapers and even in IRL in, in real life. But right now, pundits, when I was introduced to the terms were in fact the people that commented on television and, often more often that didn’t necessarily had a.

Any relationship with the topic or the people they were debating, they were like permanent guests. So I’m assuming to a point that we’re, pun it in a sense that we observe what’s happening around us, around the world, with different things, events, people, and we simply have a conversation about it, referencing other events, other people, and other interesting.

That’s essentially how I would do it. And I was thinking is there a specific topic? Probably each episode would, will have its own topic. I was thinking at one point maybe to avoid any controversy, we should narrow it down to probably one or two topics like, religion and politics. But I think we’ll cover

Kevin: And of

course economics.

Emanuel: We’ll cover more on that as well.

Kevin: Yeah.

The only thing I’d like to add to that is I’m a firm believer that it’s not possible to understand the way things are without an understanding of the history of how we got here. There’s very few things in human society that just spontaneously came into being.

People were faced with challenges, they made decisions, we moved forward from there.

So from a certain perspective, the, at the risk of using a ridiculous phrase, but the development of human society was much more evolution than it was intelligent design.

And this permeates like, I’m, tempted to say almost everything.

But I really don’t think it’s possible to like even understand how our money system works unless you understand the history of how it came to be.

For example.

Emanuel: You already,

Kevin: I already segued into money, right?

Emanuel: Yeah. And some controversy as well, right? As in, evolution and all those things. Yeah.

I think manifested is the word that you’re looking for. Things didn’t just manifested.

They come to be, and I relate to that because I’m an empiricist. I kind need to understand and need to try. I need to test first and taste it first, myself before I can delegate a task or ask something, someone else to do something for me.

I believe it’ll be best if we are to introduce ourselves and to let people know who we are essentially in this episode, and we’ll take it from there.

Before we hit record, Kevin, you had a very interesting question or approach and I don’t want to steal it, so I’m going to let you ask me.

Kevin: My idea, and this is for the listeners and for the viewers, is…

We live in a culture where there’s a question that we often ask in a derisive way, which is, who do you think you are?

And yet it’s a really important question, like who we think we are shapes the way we show up in the world and the way we interact with everybody. So the question I put to Emanuel is like, who the hell do we think we are to be doing this podcast?

Emanuel: I’ll start with myself first.

To tell you and our audience who do I think I am.

What I know for sure is that I’m Emanuel, or I’ve been Emanuel for the last 39 years.

In my day-to-day work. I’m an SEO digital marketing and AI integration consultant. Essentially, I help businesses make more money from their digital channels.

My background is in SEO Organic, but I own an agency.

I own an educational, component of the agency, How About Some Marketing, where I host webinars, where Kevin has been a guest prior. I’ve been, working exclusively in digital marketing for the past 10 years, since I came to Canada in 2015, late 2015, so it’s almost 10 years.

I’ve been doing ads, I’ve been doing social, I’ve been doing video, podcasts, webinars, and probably anything that’s digital marketing related. And then some, like some custom integrations dabbling into some code, some development, CRM integration, and you name it, probably I’ve done it.

Prior i’ve worked with, in agencies. I work in-house, I work independently. I work in a niche agency, so that’s why I’m, very versatile when it comes to the knowledge that, and that I have.

Prior to coming to Canada, I was born in Romania, east Europe, grew up in the last four years of the communist regime of Ceaușescu, one of the most horrific dictators.

But I don’t think, is there even a comparison between dictatorships? I don’t think so. I’m not sure about it. Probably that’s a topic for one episode, but I still remember and I have memories from that period.

And then transition to what it is now, a democratic, capitalist society or still, trying to be, that’s where I lived for my three years, the first three years of my life.

And, I’ve been doing many, things before that.

I would say that I had a corporate job. My first marketing job actually was, I like to say I was getting paid for watching television, so I was TV audience measurements.

That’s where I started off, back in the day. And for those younger, people that are watching us, television is that box that, you use nowadays, but before it was connected to the Internet, you had what is still now cable and you only get to see what, the TV stations were broadcasting. So very limited. And they made their money through advertising.

So that’s how I started off in marketing, but I did some accounting. I am, I did, what else did I do specifically?

For the most part of my teenage and young, let’s say my twenties, I own and operate my own recording studio and record label as well.

So that’s how I started like in marketing, obviously being independent, I was limited on the budget, so I had to learn to build a website, to kinda promote it myself, to write a press release, to keep keep a contact database updated, keeping communication with key people, but also how to promote my artists, how to create the craft, the presentation altogether, right? Because it’s not just the song, but also the entire package altogether when it comes to artists.

So that’s how I first interacted with digital marketing, and that’s how I decided to work exclusively right now in this space.

Prior to that, there’s not much to add.

School was fun. It was, I like to say that I was brought up, hard, doesn’t mean necessarily bad. So it was perhaps hard compared to how you might say somebody has grown up, let’s say in North America. It wasn’t bad because it, I’ve, enjoyed it and I learned a lot and that made me the person I am today.

And I like to think that I’m happy with the person I am today.

So, I reread recently, I think Nassim Taleb said it in a book, the Definition of Success. There’s a few things that define success, and at the top of the list is… Would you impress the 18-year-old you with where you are today? So I’m, I said 39.

Would I impress the 18-year-old Emanuel? I like to think that I do.

I dunno. We’ll, see about that.

So that’s in a medium description myself and because I’m doing too much. Marketing and digital marketing. I believe we as humans need, not necessarily a distraction, but we need to have something else going on.

If you read just business, if you read just marketing, if you read just, I don’t know, nonfiction, I think you’re limiting yourself with many, possibilities of where, how your life should be. So that’s why I recommend…

Kevin: If you just read nonfiction?

Emanuel: If you read just nonfiction or business or whatnot, because I experienced that myself recently.

I was reading a lot of business books, a lot of information about AI right now there’s tons of articles, blogs, guides, and so forth. I can neglect reading like a famous authors, journals, or some science fiction, or some stories like that. And I’ve noticed.

So I suppose this is one of those distractions that I need in my life, co-hosting this podcast alongside Kevin.

Now, Kevin.

Kevin: Mine’s gonna be much shorter, but before I get…

Emanuel: Oh, okay.

Kevin: I am happy to reveal details about myself over time, but, and I’ll get to a very brief summary right now. But before I do that, I want to comment on your comment about nonfiction.

Emanuel: Please.

Kevin: One of the things I’ve come to believe is that human beings are fundamentally wired to transfer information through stories.

So there’s actually, in my opinion, a lot of value in reading completely fictional stories. There’s actually things to learn in completely fictional stories because of the way the stories are unveiled.

Are you familiar with Joseph’s Campbell, Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey?

Emanuel: The Man with a Thousand Faces.

Kevin: Yeah, same. that’s part of the same genre, like that’s a different book that the same guy wrote. But his basic premise is that we’ve basically been telling just one story over and over and over again, and we just change all the details every time we tell it.

Like, Star Trek Voyager is Homer’s Odyssey. They’re the same story. They just changed all the details, right?

So there’s a lot of value in fiction. Now, having said that, I rarely read fiction because I mostly read nonfiction.

But to get back to who I am. So…

Emanuel: I haven’t asked you the question and to comment on your comment.

Again, we tend to do this a lot, but that’s the purpose of this podcast. Will Smith, I didn’t read his bio, but I listened to the audio book, was actually saying that, and I looked it up, Avatar, the movie 2009, James Cameron, is actually Dances with Wolves. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves.

Kevin: Yeah. And Star Wars was a Western. Like it just was.

Emanuel: Yeah.

Kevin: You know, they’re all the same, but everything, all the details are different.

Emanuel: And even more radical comparisons about Star Wars, but that’s a topic for another conversation.

Kevin, who do you think you are?

Kevin: I would say my defining characteristic is that I am curious about how things work.

And I was actually starting to mention something to you previously and you said, hold that for the podcast. And what it is that my mother was an elementary school teacher and I believe that she taught me to read at a very early age. And I can actually still remember showing up for kindergarten and the teacher testing us for reading capabilities and me coming to the realization that the other kids either couldn’t read or couldn’t read very well.

So she set me up to read books, and I’ve just been reading books ever since.

As a result of that, I’ve learned a little bit about a lot, and I do believe that’s allowed me to see patterns throughout history that for whatever reason, get diluted when we tell stories about how things work.

And I’ll elaborate with more specific details in the future, but in terms of who I am…

I’m not even sure where to start.

The defining characteristics of my life. I have three adult children. I don’t live near them, but we talk on a weekly basis. Well one of them, we talk on a monthly basis because he’s just hard to get ahold of.

The other two, we talk on a weekly basis.

Their mother and I had a tumultuous relationship from the beginning.

But we get along great now, right?

My parents were somewhat dysfunctional, but this is not uncommon, right?

My entire family is relatively small. There is a lot of, this is probably a defining characteristic of me, but there is a lot of religious dysfunction in my family, which caused me from an early age to adopt the attitude of, those ideas may be interesting to you, but I don’t want to hear about it.

Emanuel: And I don’t, I have a feeling it’s not just your family, Kevin.

Kevin: Oh no, it’s not. But my family is a part of two of humanities longest running religious strifes. And to be more specific, my father’s parents were born on opposite sides of the Irish sectarian divide. So his father is Catholic, was Catholic, his mother was Protestant.

My mother’s family is Eastern European Jews. and the history of, the issues of being Eastern European Jews is, I think everybody understands some of that.

The only thing I needed to make it more complete is if my mother’s parents were like one Jew and one Muslim. Like that would’ve made the picture a little more complete. In terms of dysfunction, not, dysfunction, but in terms of conflict.

But because religious references came in negative comments that my grandparents made about each other… it’s… okay, I understand that’s meaningful to you, right? But let’s move on.

So aside from that, small family, somewhat impacted by what I perceived as religious dysfunction, moved around a lot.

This is actually a defining characteristic and I’m surprised that I’m sharing it this early in the podcast, but my mother died when I was quite young, I was 11. So from that point on, I’ve moved around a lot for a variety of reasons, and I was reflecting on this just yesterday, I called it my gypsy phase.

And I’m not sure my gypsy phase has actually ended. I’ve only lived where I’m living here for four years. And before that I lived someplace else for five years. Before that I lived in Northern California for 30 years.

Emanuel: Where is that?

Kevin: That was like the exception.

Emanuel: Where is that where you’re living right now?

Not the city.

Kevin: Right now. I live in a relatively small metropolitan area in southwest Arkansas named Texarkana. Now, Texarkana is interesting because it’s two cities.

There’s a Texarkana Texas, there’s a Texarkana, Arkansas. They are two separate cities that happen to share a common name.

Now, why do I live here?

I had a business that went under during the great financial crisis, and I’ve been working on various rebuilding strategies ever since then. And if you’re rebuilding, it’s advantageous to live someplace that’s relatively inexpensive and it doesn’t get much more inexpensive than Texarkana, Arkansas.

For what it’s worth.

I lost my train of thought. Where was I?

Emanuel: You’re saying your history.

Kevin: And before that I lived near Austin, Texas, and before that I lived in Northern California. My three kids are distributed across Northern California. One lives in Santa Cruz, one lives in a city called Danville, which is in Contra Costa County and one lives in Sacramento.

Emanuel: What do you do in your daily lives and how we get to, to know each other essentially?

Kevin: My main thing is a venture, which you are well versed in, called Organic Growth, where we’re building a white hat link exchange to sell to SEO agencies.

And I could go on and on about that, but let me just briefly summarize it to say that link building has a bad name for a variety of good reasons, and I’m trying to make link building respectable by basically building a community of link builders who basically do it the way that Google tells us to do it.

Now I’m gonna segue a bit into the whole concept of search engine optimization, and Google is punishing my website and blah, blah, blah.

I know you’ve heard people say we were ranking really well until Google did an algorithm update, and now they’re punishing my website.

Every time you hear someone say that, I think it’s appropriate to translate that into, we did things in ways that Google told us not to do, and it worked until it didn’t.

So if you talk to people who do SEO, the way that Google says, which is publish good content and get legitimately topically relevant links…

They claim that their websites have never been punished, and I find that easy to believe.

So we’re basically trying to build a community of link builders who do it the way Google tells us to do it. Which is that topical relevance is much more important than the various vanity metrics like domain authority.

Emanuel: And we won’t be discussing, covering these topics in our podcast.

Kevin: Yeah, we’ll get that kind of stuff later, but it’s been a bit of a slog.

We’re at the phase now where I have to give it away for free in order to build an active community that I can charge people to join later. So that’s what I spend most of my time doing.

Other than that, I’m reading these books. Watching stupid videos on YouTube. No, They’re not all stupid.

But you get the point.

Emanuel: I consume a lot of YouTube and hey, yes, good news for everyone else.

There’s gonna be a lot more stupid videos on YouTube, including these ones as well. So make sure you sign up and subscribe and follow us over there as well.

I wanted to comment on the fact that we won’t be covering digital marketing and stuff in this podcast. There’s plenty of other places where Kevin and I will be talking about this.

The idea of this podcast is, something, More, journal. And I think that’s a nice segue, but not before, more of your background and what’s your training or if you wanna touch on that just briefly, because I found that very interesting, about you.

Essentially, you do have a background in something that people don’t. And you also have a name that’s quite familiar with, with Canadians right now because you do carry our prime current prime minister’s name, and I probably somehow you are related if you break it down into…

Kevin: Can I comment on that?

Emanuel: That’s the idea.

Kevin: Because he’s a public figure, I can look up where in Ireland his family is from and when they left, and it turns out his grandparents are from, like literally the middle of nowhere in county Mayo, which is on the west coast of Ireland. They were born and this is approximate, it’s not precise, but they were born in the nineteen zero zero decade.

They left and went to Canada in the decade of the 1920s.

Coincidentally, my grandfather is from a town called Ballana in county Mayo, the name Carney comes from the western part of Ireland, a town called Ballana in county Mayo. He was born in 1906 and he went to New York in the decade of the 1920s, 1924, 1925.

So the little farming community where his grandparents are from, and the town of Ballana are about 85 kilometers, about 50 miles distant.

So today that’s no big deal. That’s a relatively small distance. But in the time that they lived there, 85 kilometers was a significant difference. So the odds of those facets of the Carney clan ever meeting each other are relatively slim.

But if you go back enough generations, the odds of there being a common ancestor are pretty high. I just have no idea are we talking five generations, eight generations? Like I have no idea, but I just thought that was interesting.

Emanuel: Extremely interesting.

As I said, that probably is a nice segue into talking about our podcast. What it is and perhaps even what is not. Are you familiar with, via negativa the term via negative?

Kevin: Say that again?

Emanuel: Are you familiar with the term via negative?

Kevin: No.

Emanuel: I read it in I think another one of Nassim Taleb’s books and he’s one of my favorite authors. And we’ll probably get a chance to talk about him as well.

But I think from the top of my head, we can Google it of course, but I prefer to challenge my memory a little bit. It’s something, a term used from the Middle Ages to describe what God is not in the idea that God is so great and so powerful that is hard to comprehend and we as humans can’t, don’t have the words to describe it.

So it’s easier somehow to describe it by what, it is not.

So what do you think this podcast is not about? And I can tell you, right now that it’s not about digital marketing.

Kevin and I do digital marketing link building and all those things, and you’ll see us, in many other places talking about it, but rarely, I would think this would cover those specific topics, maybe just references.

Probably because AI spans beyond the [unknown word] digital marketing and it influences our daily lives. But I can tell you for sure that this podcast is not about digital marketing.

What do you think, Kevin? What is this podcast not about?

Kevin: What it’s not about?

That’s probably the only thing it’s not about.

You expressed a desire that we’re gonna go where we go, and we did agree that each episode is gonna have a topic, but I don’t know how to keep us from rambling around, around that topic.

Emanuel: That’s the idea. And I said there is a method to the madness.

Kevin: For what it’s worth, and this is for listeners and viewers. Emanuel is messaging me on the side and he wants me to mention the fact that I was in the military. Now this is, a little bit of a strange military experience because I am a native born American who served in the Canadian military.

So how did that happen? I mentioned earlier that my mother died when I was 11.

So my brother and I went to live with her parents down in Los Angeles, and then after two and a half years we went to live with our father, who at the time was in Vancouver, in British Columbia.

Now, back in those days, the process of becoming, what may still be called a land immigrant, and you would know because you went through the process like within the last 10 years.

But my brother and I literally became Canadian landed immigrants at the border as we drove in, and even at the age of, I guess I was 13 then, I was this seems like a little too easy for whatever reason, right?

This just seems weird that it’s so easy.

But we entered the country, entered the school system, and that basically started my gypsy phase because we lived in Vancouver for nine months, we lived in Ottawa for about a year.

In fact, we lived in a house that was only like maybe four blocks off the Rideau canal, which is somewhat world famous, so I literally did learn to ice skate on the Rideau canal, which was…

I don’t know. Have you ever had an experience of to go to Ottawa in the winter and skate the canal?

Emanuel: I haven’t. It’s on my list, but, I know about it.

Kevin: It might be done differently now, but I hope not. But basically they drop these huts right onto the ice. So you skate for a while, go in the hut, warm up, have a hot chocolate skate for a while, go in the next hut, warm up, have a hot chocolate. It’s like really cool.

And while I was a kid and never actually did this, you would see people in the morning skating north in their business suits, carrying their briefcases like they’re commuting to work by skating on the canal, which I always thought was cool, right?

So anyway, after that we moved to Newfoundland where I lived in two different parts of Newfoundland for two years, which was quite a, I’m looking for the right word here, but a significant experience in my life because Newfoundland is different from the rest of Canada in a lot of ways, many of which are incredibly positive.

And I’ll talk more about that later. But I have never met people who are more, I’m gonna call intrinsically hospitable than Newfoundlanders.

And then two years after that, I finished high school. Actually, I went to a trade school for a year as well. but then I joined the Canadian military and I was in the military for three years in a bit.

I, at that time the Canadian military was unified, so there were no separate Army, Navy Air Force, but I would’ve been in the Navy.

I was a radio operator on a destroyer escort based out of Halifax.

And then at some point that came to an end. I went to another trade school for a couple years, actually two years, moved to Calgary to get quote unquote a good job.

And then I learned of an obscure American law that could have cost me my American citizen, my American citizenship. And I thought, I don’t really wanna lose it. I may never like live in the States again, but I don’t wanna give up my citizenship.

The basic idea was because I had voluntarily become a citizen of a foreign nation before I became a adult, that at some point the US State Department could remove my citizenship at their discretion, but that would not be a problem if I was a resident of one of the 50 states on my 25th birthday.

So I moved back to California. Before I turned 24 with the idea of staying until after I turned 25, and I’m still here. I just never left. I’ve just moved around to other parts of the country, but basically I’m still here.

Emanuel: That was four years ago, right?

Kevin: No, that was quite a few years ago. Yeah.

Emanuel: Is that law still going on today or they changed?

Kevin: I have no idea.

1. A) I don’t know if the law applies today, but B), I don’t know that the Trump administration would care if it does or doesn’t.

Emanuel: Yeah. But, I’m thinking, past, beyond, that, right? Because what you describe yourself, is an experience that many actually have today, right?

Because traveling is easier, it’s cheaper. People travel for work more travel for whatever reasons, right? So it’s not uncommon to have these digital nomads, right? They have children as well, right? They live, all over the world, Asia, South America, US, Canada, Europe, and so forth.

Yeah, that’s, an important information that you probably didn’t, wouldn’t hear it anywhere else.

So first time hear it on the Curious Pundits podcast and coming back to our podcast, right?

So we describe what it’s not the only thing won’t be just about digital marketing, but it’s a little bit about everything. We’ll be covering, in my opinion, some topics that are hot, that, are newsworthy, that are happening right now.

Or will come to happen… will, I don’t think that we only be covering even science, even history, movies, music, essentially everything. That’s interesting because that’s why we’re curious about the interesting stuff and the pundits.

Will it have a structure? Yes. I believe it’ll, will it be the same? I believe not.

I was thinking to keep it somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes, which is like a big, difference, right? But some, topics do require a little bit more, more time.

It might be one episode that will spend over one hour. I don’t know, there’s no executive producer or, commercial break that will keep us from doing that.

But we’ll try to keep it somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes. Which believe it or not 40 minutes… it’s an average commute time for people in North America. I was seeing a study. I don’t remember exactly where, maybe it was, I know maybe longer before the pandemic, but I do remember think it and 40 minutes is an average, commuting time.

If I think about it, that was for the past 10 years, since I came to Canada for all my jobs. Even if I, except the ones working from home, even if I would drive there or take the transport systems, subway, buses, trams, or you name it, between 40 minutes to let’s say an hour. That was the average time. So I believe if we cap it at 40, that should be, should be great.

Back to you, Kevin. What do you think? What else you have to add about this podcast?

Kevin: As you know, I recommended we follow the TED format of 18 minute limit.

They, I don’t know who they are, but they’ve done some studies that show that after 18 minutes people start to tune out. So I’m like, yeah, for most topics, let’s keep it to 18 minutes, following their lead. But you’re right, there are some topics where it does justify longer.

Can I segue into another like digital marketing concept, but only skin deep?

Emanuel: Sure.

Kevin: So there’s a general, narrative that people will not watch long videos, from a digital marketing perspective. Keep it short, keep it punchy, keep it focused. But the reality is, if it’s a topic you are interested in, you’ll watch a long video, right?

So that’s like the key. if you make a long video about, I don’t know, backyard swimming pools and I just made that up, you can make a three minute video that talks about the benefits or you can make like a 20 minute video where the guy goes through all the details of the construction of a backyard swimming pool that was filmed over the duration of actually constructing a pool.

If you are thinking about having a backyard pool installed, you’ll watch the 30 minute video because it’s of interest to you. So the, rule of thumb, keep it short, it’s not universally, in my opinion, it’s not universally accepted, but there is some validity to the idea.

Does that make sense?

Emanuel: As Abe Lincoln said, don’t believe everything that you read on the Internet.

Kevin: I thought that was Dwight Eisenhower.

Emanuel: Might be.. Who knows? We went to the same school together.

I am taking a lot of notes. I usually do, so you’ll see me writing it down. It’s a good habit that I’ve seen.

Successful people do actually, to be honest. All the successful people can like, have their name badges, anybody in podcasts that I follow. And, I’ll get to that, later on because that’s a cool, that’s cool question. What podcasts do we listen to or do we follow?

But before we get to that. The reason why I thinking about 40 minutes is because we might have guests every now and then.

We might bring up a third or even four people who talk, who can talk about a certain topic. That they have some expertise, and given the fact that it’s online, they can join from anywhere around the world. So that’s where I would envision a 40 minutes or a one hour episode.

We’ll get to that. We’ll define, we’ll calibrate more, as we go because on the other podcast that I produce or webinars that I’ve worked on, the time is strict and, it’s obviously, it’s good to keep it like that in certain circumstances.

But the idea behind this podcast is to be general and to do what we feel like doing and to make sure that our message has been pulled out there to be received by whoever is interested in what we have to say because hey, we’re, upon this, right?

So we have an opinion that some people might be interested in. And speaking of people, the next question I had here is, who’s this podcast for?

Put you on the spot there.

Kevin: My initial thought is that, we’ll figure that out. I don’t know that we know that yet.

Emanuel: That’s a good answer. That’s a good answer. I think our audience is the most general audience that one might think.

When you had one coming back to the analogy of the TV station, TV broadcast, there was one at one point in time, there was just one single channel.

I’m not sure about how it was in North America, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t have as many options from the beginning.

Kevin: We had 3.

Emanuel: 3 is better than one. When I was born, there was just one channel, with, two or four hours of broadcast. And it wasn’t that, that back in time. So you can imagine, but that’s what comes in into dictatorship regime essentially.

A general audience. Everybody who’s curious about stuff. A little bit about a lot, because I’m the same thing.

Kevin: But as you know from a marketing background, in terms of what I’ll call audience capture, there’s no such thing as everybody, like that’s literally not a thing. So we’ll see how this pans out.

My expectation over time is that we will be able to define people who have an interest in what we’re doing in some way. It’s just too early to know what that definition is going to be.

Emanuel: Fair enough. But it’s safe to say that there’s something interesting for everyone. And that’s essentially… you know those guys, from Discovery Channel, right?

Jamie? And with the experiments, I forgot their names, Jamie and I forgot the other guy’s name. Will it break or how was it when they test up all kinds of theories about objects, certain objects, they drop a ball from a kilometer away to see if a car…

Kevin: Is this Mythbusters?

Emanuel: MythBusters. That was the name.

Kevin: I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t seen it.

Emanuel: Yeah. Yeah. So I think their audience, everybody can watch that and I think besides you, to be honest, I think everyone might have seen an episode or two or when they tune into it or found it on TV. Might have found something interesting in there at one point, or let’s you know that show how it’s made.

It was short episodes between, I know this because I work in TV right. Between different shows. I’ll tell you how a golf ball is made or how shoe laces are made or how, yeah, clothes are made.

All those things. So I believe, we’re falling in that.

Kevin: Yeah. We might be one of those. Yeah.

Emanuel: But, hey, even more and more interesting. We covered the most important things that, we, I

Kevin: Can I close with one potentially controversial idea?

Emanuel: I challenge you to do so.

Kevin: And it’s something that I’m going to bring up over and over…

Probably about 10 years ago now, I was listening to a lecture on YouTube by an anthropologist who wrote a book about the history of debt.

His name is David Graeber. The book is called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, I think. and he was giving a, the YouTube video was a talk at Google, by an author David Graeber about a book he had written. That being the book.

And in that video I had this moment of enlightenment, which is going to be an audacious statement, but almost everything we think we know about what money is and how it works, is wrong.

And that’s the controversial statement. So I’ve been on this initially it was like a curiosity, and then over time it became more of an obsession. But I am going to be sharing, details and evidence to basically support that statement as time goes by.

Emanuel: Maybe that’s some one episode soon enough that you’ll be leading and you’ll be doing given, a presentation.

Although it’ll be really hard for people who are listening to us. But no, definitely, something, I would be interested in listening to. And, yes, I agree with, that, statement.

Now, before we close in, we wouldn’t be much of a marketer if we didn’t tell people to follow us like us, like our posts, like our videos, like our audios and so forth.

Where would people find us?

Kevin: I’m not sure yet. YouTube, this is gonna go up on YouTube. This is our very first episode. So like the basic, technical infrastructure has been put in place. We haven’t used any of it yet, right? YouTube, obviously there’s going to be, or there is a website, it’s probably empty still.

Emanuel: By the time this episode will air, actually, it will be live.

Kevin: Okay. So curiouspundits.com.

Emanuel: Yeah, that’s it.

And over there you’ll find links to all of our channels, social, YouTube, Podbean, and whenever, wherever you might listen to your favorite podcasts. Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Is Google Podcast still around? I think they’re not, no.

Kevin: It went away. In fact, I use, Pocket Casts. That’s my preferred podcast listener. So presumably we’ll be on Pocket Casts as well, I hope.

Emanuel: But to make sure, just go to curiouspundits.com and follow us. Sign up for whatever popup notification you might see there just to make sure, you get the latest and greatest from myself, Emanuel, and from Kevin.

Kevin: Kevin.

Emanuel: That being said, see you or hear you in the next episode. Bye everyone.